Why did our ancestors leave the rainforest for the savannah? And how did they survive there? In this episode, we talk to psychologist and author Bill McKibben about his new book, "The Social Leap" and how the events that happened in our evolutionary history may explain why we are the way we are today. This episode is brought to you by the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum of American Indians in Washington, D.C. and the Smithsonian museums in New York and Los Angeles, as well as the National Park Service and the Department of Biology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Social Leap is a book written by Dr. William H. McReynolds, a psychologist and evolutionary biologist at the Field Museum of Biology, and published in 2017. It is the first book in a new series on the evolution of humans and chimps in the past 7 million years, and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcast listeners! If you like the podcast, please consider leaving us a rating and review in iTunes and reviewing the podcast on your podcast recommendations! Thanks again for listening to this episode! Timestamps: 4:00:00 - How did we become human? 6: 1:30 - Why did we became human? 7: What are our ancestors left the forest? 8: When did we leave the trees? 9:00 10: What is a social leap? 13:00 | How did chimps survive in Africa? 15:30 | What are we here? 16:30 17:40 - What do chimps need to survive on the savanna? 18:40 19:30 What is the difference between savannahs? 21: What does a chimp look like? 22: Why do we need to live in the open space? 25:00 What are chimps have a good life? 26: How do we live on the open spaces? 27: How does a chimpanzee like a savannah like that s better than a chimimp? 29:00 How do they like it? 30:00 Why do they need to stay near other chimps?
00:00:43.000So if you look back about 7 million years, our ancestors and chimps, we had a common ancestor at about that point in time, 6 or 7 million years ago.
00:00:51.000And that common ancestor, we don't know exactly what it looked like, but from all we can tell, it was awfully close to today's chimps.
00:00:58.000And so if you look at chimps today, you can get a pretty good sense of what life was like then.
00:01:02.000And chimps today are really interesting.
00:01:04.000They're basically at the top of the food chain in the rainforest.
00:01:08.000They're super fast up in the trees, super athletic, and because they travel in groups, even amazing tree climbers like leopards won't try to attack them in trees.
00:01:17.000It's just they're too dangerous too fast.
00:01:20.000But if you look at a chimp on the ground, it can't even lock its knees.
00:01:23.000It's this kind of cute little stumbling along thing.
00:01:26.000And then the question is, why would an animal that runs a show in the canopy leave the rainforest for the savannah?
00:01:31.000And then how would it survive once it did that?
00:01:33.000And that's the story of this book and then how that manifests itself to where we are today.
00:01:39.000So, really my goal, I'm a psychologist, I want to understand why we are the way we are.
00:01:43.000And so, in trying to figure that out, I said, well, let's take a look back all the way to our common ancestors and see some of the key events and how they might have had an influence on how we are today.
00:01:53.000So the first question is why would we leave the trees, right?
00:02:02.000And the basic story there is the Great African Rift Valley.
00:02:05.000I'm not sure if you're familiar with it at all, but basically it runs down from up at the Red Sea down to the coast of Mozambique.
00:02:12.000And you can think of it like a geographic zipper.
00:02:15.000You know, all the world sits on these tectonic plates, and sometimes they crash into each other, like how India is smashing into Asia and creates the Himalayas.
00:02:40.000But one of the consequences of that is that the East Africa is starting to rise up slowly bit by bit.
00:02:45.000And when it rises up, the rainforests dry out.
00:02:48.000And so basically what you have is a situation where our ancestors were on the east side of that Rift Valley and it started to dry out.
00:02:54.000And now they're in a situation where they've got this great lifestyle, their dominant position, but now they're pushed, they're forced out onto the ground increasingly more and more because there's more and more ground and less and less rainforest.
00:03:23.000So it's a super interesting question about why that happened as well.
00:03:26.000So basically, if you track us across the next three million years, how did our ancestors survive when they're basically chimpanzees on the open savanna?
00:03:34.000And you can get a hint of how they did it because there's one chimpanzee group that does live on the savanna in Senegal, and they show some differences between themselves and other chimps that travel in slightly larger groups.
00:03:46.000They share more nicely with each other, which is interesting.
00:03:50.000And they also avoid open space, like they're just kind of trying to stay near the trees as much as possible.
00:03:57.000And if you look at other primates that are on the savannah, like savannah baboons, they're only monkeys, so they're not as sharp as chimpanzees are, but they have a similar strategy.
00:04:07.000Large groups to try to protect themselves and lots of eyes to look out for predators.
00:04:13.000And so what I suspect happened is for the first few million years, basically what you've got is this chimp-like animal that's kind of skirting the edges of the savannah, nowhere near the top dominant position they used to be, and just kind of noodling around.
00:04:26.000And that takes, I suspect that takes us for about the first three, three and a half million years.
00:04:30.000And if you look at who we are then, We're Australopithecus afarensis.
00:04:35.000So if you looked at one of them, you'd think it belongs in a zoo.
00:05:36.000We have much more limber wrist, all that sort of thing.
00:05:38.000And a lot of that was in place by Australopithecus.
00:05:41.000So once they became bipedal, they gained a lot of these qualities.
00:05:46.000And then the question is, why do those qualities matter?
00:05:48.000Well, if you watch a chimpanzee throw, it's terrible at it.
00:05:52.000Even though they're stronger than you and I are, pound for pound by a sizable margin, when they throw, they're inept, they can't aim very well, and they typically use two hands, because they're not lined up well to throw.
00:06:02.000If you watch a really good thrower, like, you know, a gridiron, a football player, a baseball player, or a hunter-gatherer throw, you know, it's a full body motion.
00:06:09.000You step forward with the other leg, there's this rotation, and the very last minute you bring your wrist through.
00:06:14.000Well, what that does is it creates an enormous amount of elastic energy across your muscles, tendons, and ligaments.
00:06:20.000And the end of that throw for a human is like the snapping of a rubber band.
00:06:28.000But Australopithecus got to the point where they could probably do that pretty well.
00:06:34.000And that's purely a byproduct of bipedalism, because it stretched out their whole body, and they're not climbing as much anymore, so their musculature is more lateral, which would have helped them for throwing.
00:06:44.000So now you get to a point where they have access to the single most important military invention in history, which is the capacity to kill at a distance.
00:06:52.000So if you and I are running around the savannah and a lion attacks us and we got 50 of our best friends, we could kill it with our bare hands, but a lot of us are going to die in the process, right?
00:07:19.000And so the capacity to kill at a distance, though, allows a larger force of weaker individuals to easily defeat a stronger individual.
00:07:27.000And so once they gain this capacity to throw, if they were attacked by lions or something like that, whereas in the past they'd have just scattered for the trees, now they could throw stones at it and defend themselves.
00:07:37.000Now, an Australopithecus throwing rocks at a lion is going to be in the belly of a slightly annoyed lion in about three minutes, right?
00:07:44.000But 50 Australopithecines throwing rocks at lions is a totally different story.
00:07:48.000And so the idea here is the throwing hypothesis, that what changed everything was throwing.
00:07:54.000And the reason it changed everything is that it caused us, it was the first reason why we should have any effective collective action.
00:08:01.000Because it's not a good strategy when you're on your own, It's not a good strategy if I do it and the rest of the group heads for the trees, but it's a great strategy if we all do it together.
00:08:11.000And so for the first time in history, the group's goals in our history, in our line, the primate line, the group's goals aligned with the individual goals, which is let's cooperate and work together to try to drive away these predators.
00:08:44.000And so when the Portuguese went to the Canary Islands to try to subjugate it, they rock up with, you know, armor, guns, crossbows, and this is in the, like, 14-something, and all the locals were armed with was stones.
00:08:58.000And despite the fact that the Portuguese are there in army, trained, you know, ready to shoot, and in their armor, they were just decimated by the local stone rocks at them.
00:09:07.000And this story has happened over and over again.
00:09:08.000And when you read these accounts, they're extraordinary.
00:09:10.000I can read you some examples from here.
00:12:15.000Now, just recently there was a paper that came out maybe three months ago now on...
00:12:21.000A new brain expansion gene they found, or they think that's what it is, called Notch2NL.
00:12:25.000And it turns out, I don't know, 12, 15 million years ago, there was an accidental duplication of that gene on our genome.
00:12:31.000But it was ineffective, and it just sat there doing nothing.
00:12:34.000Now, that's a great way that evolution works, where it accidentally doubles a gene, because then you can mess with it, and the old gene's still doing the job, right?
00:12:41.000So it sat there for about 9 million years in our line until about 3 million years ago around Australopithecus, and then it duplicated itself and it came online again.
00:12:50.000And what that gene seems to do is it makes our brain remain as stem cells for longer, which means a lot more duplication before they run away and start becoming neurons.
00:13:32.000But all the kinds of things that came next probably were enabled by that process of us coming together and deciding to work together and cooperate.
00:13:40.000So if you look at chimpanzees, they don't cooperate very well.
00:13:44.000For example, one of the activities where they sort of cooperate is when they hunt monkeys.
00:13:48.000And so they'll all gather around and they'll see some monkeys in the trees and they come in from every angle.
00:14:12.000And you'll never establish effective groups if you can't reward those who participate compared to those who don't.
00:14:18.000Even little kids, four-year-old kids, when you give them games to play and they earn stickers, if you didn't play, when you come up and ask, you don't get any.
00:14:26.000You played, even if you didn't do your job right but you tried, boom, you can have a sticker.
00:14:30.000So humans immediately get that, that you get rewarded for your activities as part of the group.
00:14:50.000This couple, they kept a chimp as a pet for a long time, and then as it got older, it got a little violent, and they had to bring it to a sanctuary.
00:14:59.000And they brought it to a sanctuary and they would go to visit it and the chimp would remember them and they went to visit it and it was on his birthday so they brought him a cake and the other chimps in the sanctuary were furious that they didn't get the cake as well.
00:15:11.000They didn't think it was fair or they were angry so they figured out somebody had left a gate open and they got out and tore this guy apart.
00:16:18.000And so the question is, what does that mean?
00:16:20.000Why do they care about fairness in that way?
00:16:23.000And I think the answer to that question is sexual selection.
00:16:27.000And so the key to sexual selection is it doesn't matter what everybody's getting so long as I'm getting about as much as everybody else.
00:16:35.000But the second that you're starting to get more than I have, well then whatever female is in our group, she's going to pick you before she picks me.
00:17:04.000It's a really unfortunate fact because sometimes it matters a lot.
00:17:08.000Like, for example, imagine I invent a drug and I say, here, take a dose and it'll double your IQ. Instantly you're going to feel like a genius.
00:17:14.000But unbeknownst to you, I gave everybody two doses.
00:17:17.000You walk out of there, you're going to feel like a dumbass because people are saying stuff you can't understand, right?
00:17:23.000But the killer cases are things where it's only just a residue.
00:17:26.000So, for example, there's this amazing study where they showed that people who are making minimum, just above minimum wage, are the ones who don't want you to raise minimum wage.
00:17:38.000Well, right now they've got a slight advantage over people making minimum wage.
00:17:42.000The day minimum wage gets raised, now They're not any better off than anybody else.
00:17:47.000So even though they're the most likely to benefit from it because they may lose that job they have and have to take minimum wage, they're actually against it because it gives them a slight advantage over the guy next door.
00:18:06.000So the boss probably feels even the more negative of all.
00:18:09.000But if you look at people's income and their feelings about raising minimum wage, the people are making minimum wage want it to go up, the people one notch above do not, and then as the higher you go, they do again.
00:18:34.000I mean, so the thing is, and people argue like crazy about exactly what this means.
00:18:37.000I don't think the monkeys have a sense of fairness like you and I have, but I do think they have a sense of, hold on, you're getting more than I am.
00:18:59.000It depends on whether your mating system is going to be pair bonding or not.
00:19:04.000So if you're a frog, or lots of different frogs, not all of them, a laughing tree frog, or if you're an elephant seal or something, will all the females mate with the best male?
00:19:16.000And so every female can have the best one.
00:19:19.000Either in a situation where they've got no choice, like the elephant seals, he controls the rookery, or in a situation where they just listen to all the croaking and then they go, alright, you're the best croaker, you're the dad.
00:19:28.000But if you're pair bonding like humans or like lots of other animals, birds, etc., then what you need is you've got competition on both sides.
00:19:38.000So she's always competing to get the best male and he's always competing to get the best female.
00:19:43.000Now there's reasons why male-male competition is always a bit more intense than female-female competition, but both of them are there.
00:19:49.000And the more monogamous the system gets, the more both sides compete for each other.
00:21:29.000And so if you look at our mating system, we clearly evolved to be largely monogamous but not entirely.
00:21:34.000Our testicles are unnecessarily large for an entirely monogamous species.
00:21:38.000And so we're a little bit on the wash the guy out ahead of us.
00:21:42.000But there's many people that make arguments that our monogamy is socially reinforced and it's not natural.
00:21:48.000Look, if you look at hunter-gatherers, and so the best way that we get a sense of, well, what did we evolve to do is to look at the remaining hunter-gatherer societies, particularly if you look at what are called immediate return hunter-gatherers.
00:22:00.000So there are people who eat today what they killed today.
00:22:03.000You've got a lot of hunter-gatherers, once they left the equator, they could store food and everything changed for them.
00:22:09.000And they actually, in many of their behaviors, they look a lot like us.
00:22:11.000And we can come back to that if you'd like.
00:22:13.000But if you look at hunter-gatherers around the equator, they're typically immediate return, kill, eat.
00:22:18.000And so those guys tend to be, there's always, of course, human differences.
00:24:08.000She then starts to sleep with all the other males because she thinks her baby will gain the qualities of all the men that she sleeps with.
00:24:14.000So I'm not trying to claim that we're always monogamous because absolutely that's untrue.
00:24:18.000But I do think that the dominant system is one of serial monogamy.
00:24:22.000And the reason I think that that's the dominant system is this is kind of the deal that we made whereby the males go out and do the hunting.
00:24:40.000And he's happy to share resources and do his best to kinda sorta look out for her kids.
00:24:44.000I mean, human males aren't, we don't take as much care as human females do of our kids, but we're much better than the other great apes.
00:24:51.000And so that level of investment he's gonna make tends to be to the degree that he believes that he's the father of the kids.
00:24:57.000Now you have societies where he doesn't know that really all are polyamorous like that, by all means.
00:25:02.000I don't know what percentage they are, and it could even be they're more common than I believe.
00:25:07.000But when that happens, the systems tend to change a little bit, and he's a little bit less willing to look out, try to help out kids, other than to do her a favor unless the kid looks a lot like himself.
00:25:18.000Now, what about why having a system, a biological system, where jealousy What makes you think that somehow or another negates the idea of polyamorous relationships?
00:25:33.000Well, it does suggest that they're not our default.
00:25:36.000Doesn't it more likely suggest that it encourages competition, which is just natural?
00:25:42.000Well, now you think about envy instead of jealousy.
00:25:44.000And so if I'm jealous, I'm upset that my wife slept with somebody else last night.
00:26:03.000As well, you're not just jealous of her behavior.
00:26:06.000You're jealous of this other male that gets to have sex with your wife and could not possibly encourage competition and encourage men to be more aggressive or more ingenious or just create encourage creativity encourage Better hunting skills,
00:26:26.000I mean, all those things seem to be natural.
00:26:28.000I would agree with all that, but I'd phrase it a little bit differently.
00:26:30.000So there's this wonderful study out of the Philippines where they measured a huge number of men's testosterone when they were single.
00:26:37.000And then they waited a few years and measured it again after they were still single, or now they're married, or now they're married and they have kids.
00:26:44.000And I'm sure it wasn't a psychology study because we can't afford to do that.
00:26:49.000But they used it to answer this interesting psychological question, which was, who's most likely to get the girl by their original testosterone levels, and what happens when you do?
00:26:58.000Well, the guys who got married in the intervening few years had higher testosterone than the guys who didn't.
00:27:05.000We're out there competing with other males in order to get the girl.
00:27:09.000And there's lots and lots that goes on there, tons of really interesting things.
00:27:12.000But what's interesting is once we get the girl, our testosterone drops.
00:27:16.000And so once we partner up and if we're in a monogamous relationship, not polyamorous, but in a monogamous relationship, our testosterone drops and then it drops again if we have kids.
00:27:27.000And testosterone is a great hormone for getting out there and being competitive with other guys.
00:27:31.000It's not a great hormone for being nurturant for your children and it's not a great hormone for being faithful to your partner.
00:27:37.000And so I think that we evolved to compete with other males in order to get into the mating game.
00:27:42.000So if you look at our ancestral DNA, you know how you can track our male and female ancestry through mitochondrial DNA on the mother side and why?
00:27:49.000You'll see that we have far more female ancestors than male.
00:27:53.000Not quite two to one, but I think it's close to that.
00:27:56.000Well, lots of guys are getting left out of the mating game entirely, and lots of guys are inseminating lots of different women.
00:28:02.000So all those things that you said are absolutely true.
00:28:04.000And all that pushes us for competition.
00:28:06.000But part of what I believe goes on is part of that competition that we engaged in was in order to get the girl to get into that relationship in the first place.
00:28:35.000And it could well be that, you know, you always have to have a proximal mechanism whereby evolution plays its game, right?
00:28:41.000So the distal cause is, as an evolved species, Testosterone is super important to get us into the mating game, but it's less useful once we're in it.
00:28:50.000Well, all you have to do is have a system whereby those things tend to down-regulate testosterone, exactly like you said, because you know those things are going to happen once you get partnered up.
00:28:59.000But mind you, when our ancestors partnered up, they're still out hunting every day.
00:29:03.000Right, but we don't have studies on them.
00:29:07.000The issue that I'm having with this is we have studies on I'm sure you're right.
00:29:41.000To me, that's a symptom of poor health and fitness.
00:29:45.000Right, and it's not a symptom our ancestors ever experienced.
00:29:48.000Right, but this is not necessarily an indication of any sort of evolutionary benefit of having low testosterone, because we've demonstrated for sure that when people don't get sleep and when they don't get exercise, their testosterone drops.
00:30:02.000Well, those are two things that absolutely happen when you get married and have children.
00:30:13.000The thing about having this kind of a study and making these kind of conclusions based on, I mean, we know these mechanisms are in place.
00:30:22.000We already know that there's natural effects of sedentary lifestyle, lack of sleep, And the effects are your hormone production drops, your body suffers, you become less healthy.
00:31:53.000Yeah, and he spent some time with them and you see these people and the lifestyle they live, they're all barefoot wandering through the jungle.
00:32:00.000They have these crazy looking feet where their toes splay out because they're just constantly gripping the floor with their toes.
00:32:06.000I mean, they probably could choke you with their feet, you know?
00:32:08.000And these people just look so fit and healthy in their 50s and 60s and 70s and they have their shirt off and they're ripped.
00:32:17.000Same holds if you look at the Hadza in Tanzania, any of these groups.
00:32:20.000The Yanomama are interesting because they're hunter-horticulturalists, so they're actually doing a little bit of gardening as well.
00:32:25.000But they're ripped and strong and they don't have obesity problems.
00:32:29.000And so all I would say is that the same thing holds...
00:32:32.000The one thing that we found in humans in our modern culture where we have these data is if you're married and have kids, but you're still looking around, your T hasn't gone down as much.
00:32:41.000You're going to point out quite rightly that, well, maybe that's a different kind of person than the person who marries and isn't looking around.
00:32:57.000And it's not easy to collect these kind of data, but they're doing lots of genetic work with these people right now all over Africa because, you know, we've got tons of genetic data now on European descent and East Asian descent, but almost none on Africans.
00:33:10.000And so that's a huge project underway.
00:33:12.000And so for all I know, they're working on hormones and other things as well.
00:33:16.000Yeah, that's, I mean, the reason why I'm asking about this is you were so readily dismissing, you were so willing to dismiss the Sex of Dawn book.
00:33:28.000Well, a lot of the facts that are laid out as facts in the book don't really hold up, and I wish I'd read it more recently, and so I could go through the details with you.
00:33:36.000There's some really good reviews by anthropologists and by people who work in You know, sexual studies and stuff like that, going through the details.
00:33:44.000We read it as a, we have this evolutionary center, Center for Psychology and Evolution, and we read it and went through it, and we weren't convinced.
00:33:52.000I'm embarrassed to admit I can't remember the details of it anymore.
00:33:54.000Chris is a very smart guy, and he's a good friend of mine.
00:34:07.000So my colleague Rob Brooks is a wonderful evolutionary biologist in Australia, loves that book.
00:34:11.000So the fact that I think it's bullshit is obviously one person's opinion, where I dismiss that argument.
00:34:17.000Other people might say, well, look, there's a lot of cultures that do have much more, like the system I told you about, where they have sex with lots of men after they have their baby.
00:35:19.000They should be more concerned about things like his giving her resources to help her raise the kid and things like that.
00:35:26.000And so what Buss found is if you ask people this question, what would bother you more?
00:35:31.000Imagine your wife having sex with somebody that she just met for the first time, having this great time and doing all these different funky things with them, and then never doing it again.
00:35:39.000Or your wife develops this, you know, ongoing emotional connection with somebody.
00:35:44.000She never touches him, he never touches her, but they talk and share their feelings and stare deep in each other's eyes.
00:35:51.000And you ask men and women that question.
00:35:53.000So what would, in your case, what would bother you more?
00:35:55.000To have your wife to know she had this one-off affair, fling, sex only, didn't care about the guy, or she develops a sort of emotional bond with somebody, never touches him.
00:36:32.000On average, men are more bothered by sex, the one-off sex, and women are more bothered by the emotional connection because that's a bigger threat.
00:36:41.000Because emotional connection could lead to him leaving her.
00:36:44.000Well, also, it's him leaving her, directing his resources elsewhere.
00:37:40.000Like, if there's a guy, and he's married, and a gal, and she's married, but they meet at work, and they stare at each other's eyes all day, and...
00:37:46.000They go to lunch and maybe they even hold hands every now and then.
00:38:09.000If we evolved to basically partner for a while, Then there's always going to be the chance that that next person along is going to be the one who wedges yours away.
00:38:40.000Yeah, it is fascinating when you break it down that it really does become there's a biological reason for these behaviors and the motivation for the jealousy and all these things.
00:38:54.000There's a history, a biological history to all this stuff.
00:38:57.000And we don't know what Hunter Gathers, how they would answer that question.
00:39:01.000So we're only just assuming that the answer we're providing is general.
00:39:05.000But for me, those kinds of things suggest that we evolved in a lot of long-term monogamous circumstances that may have been serial and that was certainly fooling around.
00:39:14.000But if we were polyamorous, like the book says, we'd have bigger balls.
00:40:42.000Again, whenever I bring Chris's book up, and I have to defend it because this happened a couple times over the last year, I haven't read it in at least two years.
00:40:50.000I'd have to go back and go back over it.
00:40:53.000I read it probably five years ago when it came out.
00:40:54.000When my friend's wife got a hold of it, my friend got it, and my friend's wife got a hold of it, and she threw her right in the trash.
00:41:02.000She read like a paragraph or two, and she's like, fuck this book.
00:41:13.000So when these chimp-like creatures from millions of years ago slowly started walking upright and started moving into the grasslands and making experiments and traveling away from the jungle,
00:41:30.000and this coincided with the development of the throwing arm And this could be because they started walking upright.
00:41:39.000When did this, when did the cooked meat aspect come along?
00:41:47.000We're now about three and a half million years ago.
00:41:49.000You've got to now go forward to about a little less than two million years ago to get to Homo erectus.
00:41:54.000So once we get to Homo erectus, we now got an ancestor that literally, if it went to the zoo, you'd say, well, that's a kind of rough-hewn guy.
00:42:02.000But you'd think it's a person and not somebody who belongs behind the glass.
00:42:06.000So a chimp brain is 380, Australopithecus 450, and Homo erectus 960. Whoa.
00:42:13.000So you've got doubling your brain size.
00:42:14.000Now, mind you, it's a bigger being, so it's not quite as big and dramatic of a change as you think.
00:42:19.000But along with that comes all sorts of capabilities.
00:42:21.000Now, you write about this book, Catching Fire.
00:42:24.000Richard Wrangham argued that what enabled that...
00:42:27.000If you look at the gut of a gorilla or a chimpanzee in their brain, they got a lot of gut for a little bit of brain because it takes a lot of digestion to keep a little bit of brain going.
00:42:38.000And Rangham argues, and I think quite rightly, that the only way you can achieve that is by releasing more nutrients from your food, and the only way you can release more nutrients from your food is by cooking it.
00:42:46.000So when he made that argument, he thinks it goes back to the beginning of Homo erectus, and I suspect he's right.
00:42:51.000At this point, when he made the argument, it was only back to, I don't remember, half a million years, 300 years, 750,000.
00:42:58.000It's already back to a million years ago.
00:43:00.000We found in caves in South Africa evidence of control of fire.
00:43:03.000And so it'll probably keep getting pushed back because, you know, that crap's hard to find.
00:43:39.000It's this cognitive niche, although I think of it as a social cognitive niche, because it's the working together that gives you all these potential advantages to getting smarter.
00:43:47.000And so now when that gene's sitting in our head, if it kicks into gear and starts to work and leads to cranial expansion, those animals who have it will have an advantage because they can coordinate with each other better.
00:43:58.000And so they can remember, hey man, you helped me out last time, but you weren't so, yeah, I couldn't count on you, so I'm avoiding you and I'm sticking with you.
00:44:05.000They could do a lot of things with that brain power.
00:44:07.000And by the time you get to Homo erectus and the brain power is doubled, we see all sorts of super interesting things.
00:44:12.000So before Homo erectus, when you look at our tools, it's called an oldowan tool and it's basically a barely sharpened rock.
00:44:19.000And you never find an oldowan tool too very far away from where it was quarried and made.
00:44:24.000Like, you know, you look at the rock and the chips and not far away is where it's lying on the ground.
00:44:35.000When we teach modern anthropologists or grad students or whatever to make them, and you put them in an fMRI magnet where it can measure metabolism in your brain as you go, you see that it takes a lot of frontal lobe functioning in order to make one.
00:44:49.000How am I going to hit it next to make this thing just right?
00:44:51.000Compared to an older wand tool, to make those doesn't take much frontal function.
00:44:55.000Ah, just whack it there and it'll be sharp.
00:44:57.000And so, first of all, we know Homo erectus invented that tool, this Acheulean tool with this bifacial hand axe.
00:45:04.000Second of all, and one of the coolest findings, there's some interesting work in a 1.2 million year old site in India by Kerry Shipton where he finds that the production of these Acheulean tools is separated spatially about the place.
00:45:20.000So the first step is bashing loose a big piece of rock, and that's done here, and then 10 meters over there, somebody's doing the initial chipping on it, and 10 meters over there, somebody's sharpening up the final touches.
00:45:31.000Now, if you were making it by yourself, why would you systematically walk around the site as you made it?
00:45:37.000But if you've got division of labor, you're the big strong guy, you do the first thing, then you hand it to me and I do the finer sharpening, it makes sense that it would be spatially distributed about the site.
00:45:48.000There's that evidence for division of labor.
00:45:50.000There's the evidence that they're bringing down some pretty fast animals like horses and potentially even bringing down elephants, which in those days are like twice the size of an elephant.
00:47:37.000Now, the one thing is they can do that and then they fail some super simple tests.
00:47:41.000So it could be that their brain's tiny, though they are, dedicated to a particular way of solving a particular problem because especially these ones that live in New Caledonia do this in the wild.
00:47:51.000And so they fashion them out of palm fronds.
00:47:53.000They tear it off and they reshape it and then they hook insects out of the bark or trees and stuff.
00:47:57.000And so you could imagine that they've kind of learned a specific way of problem solving, but they can't do something that to you, because you would solve that using some pretty domain general mechanisms, to you looks the same, but to them is totally different.
00:48:09.000Did you find the thing with the orangutans?
00:48:32.000I had read something a few years back that said that they were agreeing that chimpanzees had officially moved into the Stone Age.
00:48:42.000Yeah, so chimpanzees will use stones as tools, so they'll crack nuts with them.
00:48:47.000But they've never been shown to modify stone tools.
00:48:51.000And so if you want to say the Stone Age is using stones, by all means.
00:48:54.000If you want to say it's modifying stones, the oldest evidence that we have of potentially modified is 3.3 million years ago, these lamequi tools.
00:49:02.000But there's argument about how legit those are.
00:49:04.000There's argument about a lot of those sites, too, where they believe that they find stone tools that are ancient because it could easily just been shale or things falling off.
00:49:43.000They're clever enough to have an anvil, basically, like a base stone, put a rock on it, smash.
00:49:49.000What they're not clever enough to do, so chimps have partial theory of mind.
00:49:54.000And theory of mind is this idea that I know that the contents of your mind differ from the contents of mine.
00:49:59.000And all humans get there when they're little, around age four.
00:50:03.000And you can see the penny drop because they just assume everybody knows the same things and everybody has the same preferences.
00:50:09.000And that's why when they're really little, their stories can be hard to follow because they assume what's in your head is the same as theirs.
00:51:06.000Second of all, it's easy to break your fingers and that kind of slows you down.
00:51:09.000But third of all, they'll occasionally make some very specific corrections when the offspring is doing it wrong, but they don't know what the problem is because they don't know what the kid doesn't know.
00:51:20.000And so when you don't know that, you can't teach.
00:51:22.000And that's why humans are stunningly effective teachers.
00:52:44.000There may be a reason why I can't see, but there may be a reason why he's poking at the top first.
00:52:48.000And so I better do everything that he does.
00:52:50.000I better have the highest fidelity copying that I possibly can because it may be valuable.
00:52:56.000And what you end up with is these systems around the world where people eat these amazing foods that you think, you know, how on earth could they have ever figured that out?
00:53:03.000Well, it's probably developed step by step, and everybody's always got this super high-fidelity imitation because they're over-imitating.
00:53:09.000So my favorite example is in New Guinea, they eat the sago palm.
00:53:13.000I'm not sure if you've ever seen a sago palm, but it does not look like an edible tree.
00:53:16.000It just looks like a freaking tree, right?
00:53:18.000And it turns out that if you chop the tree down, Take the bark off, take like an adze or something similar, grind up the sawdust, have all that sawdust, you then wash it off in warm water, because of course all the water in New Guinea will be nice and warm, and that causes, it's a super high starch tree,
00:53:33.000that causes the starch molecules to separate from the sawdust, because at that point it's inedible.
00:53:38.000So then they have these cloths, and the starch molecules have passed through the cloth, the sawdust won't.
00:53:42.000Now they collect this cloudy water, they put it in these traditional canoes, they let it sit overnight, and all the starch sinks to the bottom.
00:53:48.000Then they pour the water off the top, and now they've got this flour, but you have to dry it out in the sun really fast or it becomes toxic.
00:53:54.000So it's like this nine-step process that who on earth could ever come up with it, right?
00:53:58.000But once it's in place, once they slowly figured it out to make it work, everybody just does it the same way because even though they may understand it, but they don't need to.
00:54:13.000Yeah, that if you don't cook it correctly, it's literally cyanide, and they have water from it, and they have to take that water, and they have the buckets of these water that they're using to create this stuff, and they just leave it laying around.
00:54:29.000And kids are playing around it, and pigs and animals are around it, and if they drank it, they'd be dead.
00:54:58.000It's my friend Steve Rinella who went and spent some time with them down in the jungle.
00:55:03.000South America, it's really interesting stuff, just seeing how these people function, and they have this big vat, and they're cooking this stuff, and they're, you know, he's explaining, like, right now, if you ate it, you're dead.
00:56:34.000So your concept is that as these animals that used to be monkeys start evolving and trying out new things, one thing that they learn as they enter into this new climate is that there's a massive benefit to cooperation.
00:58:52.000I don't know the origin of the term monkey.
00:58:53.000Martin Robbins wrote a fun piece to the lay scientist the other day, the incorrect term of these monkeys describe apes.
00:59:00.000It triggered an article by Graham Smith for the Daily Mail in Martin's words, a great crime against pedantry is in progress and it's time for someone to draw a line.
00:59:59.000And so once we get to Homo erectus, they're basically like us, although our brains, they're around 960, we're around 1350. So we literally have a chimp brain added on top of theirs.
01:00:38.000Even chimps will eat, if they go through an area where there's a forest fire, you know, speaking of what's going on locally, they'll eat like the roasted nuts first.
01:01:14.000And so Wrangham talks about, he argues that you can't live on a diet of raw food unless you're eating these like super fruits and stuff like that that basically we've horticultured into existence.
01:01:24.000Because raw food just doesn't give you enough calories.
01:01:27.000So the example that he uses, which is a great one, is chimps literally spend something like six to eight hours a day chewing.
01:01:34.000Just to soften up the food enough so that they can swallow it and digest it.
01:01:37.000You know, if sushi, you hardly, you know, some of the things that we've cooked, and that's raw in that case, but, you know, a cooked steak, a really nice one, you barely chew it at all.
01:01:55.000And they've got the sagittal crest right here with the bones so that the muscles attach to it so that they can chew hard enough to get through all that stuff and make it digestible.
01:02:06.000The chimps have those enormous chewing muscles on their head.
01:02:09.000And so we lost, that's another example, where somebody along the way lost, I can't remember what that gene was, where our muscles weakened in our jaw, and that would have been a death knell if you're back before cooking.
01:02:19.000But post-cooking, all that does is free up space, get rid of some unnecessary muscle, free up more cranial space for brains, the inside, not the outside.
01:02:27.000So is it likely that there was a bunch of different factors, that there was natural selection in play and that there was also the throwing arm and then also cooking and also this cooperative effort that led to people being a little bit more ingenious,
01:02:44.000Smarter in how they hunted and how they tried to get food and then how they protected their fire, how they cultivated fire.
01:02:51.000And then all these things led to more clever behavior, which led to a natural selection of clever, more clever chimps with larger brains or apes rather with larger brains.
01:03:03.000And so anytime you got something major happening, it probably doesn't have a single cause.
01:03:07.000It probably has lots and lots of causes.
01:03:09.000And so in this case, all these kind of factors came together.
01:03:12.000Now, if you're standing at the outset, and you're playing God and saying, well, let's see what happens when I dry out the rainforest, I think nine times out of 10, the chimps all end up dead.
01:03:20.000But somehow we got really lucky and they went down this very particular road and once they got their social act together and they started cooperating, chimps are never going to be very effective in groups because they can't get along, they can't cooperate very well.
01:03:33.000But once these animals, probably at Australopithecus, but maybe not until later, of course we don't know.
01:03:39.000All we can look at is what they were capable of.
01:03:41.000But it fits the storyline that they would have been the ones who developed that.
01:03:44.000Once that happened, social becomes everything.
01:03:56.000But you have to remember that before modern travel was invented, everybody walked everywhere, which meant you spent your entire life basically in territory that you're familiar with.
01:04:05.000Or the kinds of animals that live there, the kinds of problems that you face.
01:04:08.000And so cognitively, the terrain is not really a challenge for you.
01:04:12.000And even making food in those really complicated ways is not a challenge for you once you've got theory of mind and you can learn how to do it.
01:04:18.000But what is a huge challenge for you is the social interactions with each other.
01:04:22.000Because as my group gets smarter, if I'm not smarter, first of all, remember we talked about sexual selection.
01:05:05.000And the theory was that what you're talking about, this climate change, that also coincided with the doubling of the human brain size.
01:05:15.000His theory was that one of the things that was in play was that these apes would experiment with different food sources as they moved into the grasslands.
01:05:23.000And there was a lot of undulates in these grasslands.
01:05:26.000And that psilocybin mushrooms, which we know existed back then, would grow in these grasslands.
01:05:31.000And that these monkeys, these apes rather, started consuming psilocybin mushrooms and it led them to be more creative.
01:05:39.000And it also led to specific traits like the development of language.
01:05:43.000That eating mushrooms in low doses increases visual acuity, which would lead them to be better hunters or more perceptive.
01:05:51.000It also leads them to be hornier, which would most likely involve more breeding, more sexual activity, and possibly select the ones that chose The mushrooms would maybe possibly breed more than the ones that didn't choose the mushrooms because they were more into it and were more social,
01:06:25.000His brother is an actual scientist and detailed it in terms of how psilocybin affects the brain and what areas of the brain, what actually takes place when you're under the influence of this and that it could very potentially have led to the development of language.
01:06:45.000And that all these things in play, the throwing arm, developing these new social networks where you need to communicate with each other, along with the harnessing of fire, along with the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms on a regular basis,
01:07:04.000because they were incredibly frequent and very edible.
01:07:10.000That's a really good example of some random thing.
01:07:12.000If it really did play that role, how random that is that these freaking things happen to be growing there and that they happen to be attracted to them and ate them.
01:07:19.000We know that animals like to get high.
01:07:22.000Elephants will eat these fruit that have...
01:07:24.000Well, the drunk, in this case, that have over-ripened and have become alcoholic.
01:07:42.000It's a way that these people in the rainforest developed untold thousands of years ago of developing an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine.
01:07:54.000Do you know what dimethyltryptamine is?
01:08:12.000These jaguars eat these plants, and these plants are...they have the ingredients of ayahuasca, and these jaguars are known to eat these things and then trip their fucking balls off.
01:08:24.000They eat them, and their pupils dilate, and they roll over on their back and stare at the sky.
01:09:11.000And the Egyptians called it the seed of the soul, and they think that this is one of the reasons why they have this obsession with this gland in Eastern mysticism is somehow or another they figured out that this is the gland that produces this incredibly potent psychedelic drug.
01:09:29.000This psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine also exists in thousands of different plants.
01:09:33.000The problem is when you consume it orally, your body produces something in your gut called monoamine oxidase.
01:09:42.000So what these indigenous people figured out is how to combine one plant which contains this psychedelic compound with another plant which contains a natural MAO inhibitor called harmine.
01:09:54.000So they brew this all together, much like they did with the cassava, which we have no idea how they figured that out.
01:09:59.000They brew this stuff up together and they create this psychedelic tea called ayahuasca.
01:10:03.000And ayahuasca now, they have all these trips where people go down to Peru and take this stuff and trip their fucking balls off.
01:10:10.000And the combination of these things leads to this incredibly potent, really transformative experience, which is impossible to describe.
01:10:28.000Well, we were talking about how maybe chimps or these early ancestors did something similar, which pushed them along this path of starting to communicate with each other.
01:10:36.000Right, but how did I get to DMT? How did I get to ayahuasca?
01:10:40.000There are a couple of links in that chain.
01:10:41.000Maybe it was because of animals that get high.
01:11:00.000So Robert Trivers is this wonderful biologist who started a lot of the kinds of work that we're talking about going in the 70s, calls these sorts of things a phenotypic indulgence, right?
01:11:09.000So evolution gave you these pleasure centers in your brain so that you do what's in your genes' best interests and kill the animal or get the girl or whatever, and that makes you feel good.
01:11:18.000And so we tend to like the things that are good for us and dislike the things that are bad for us.
01:11:26.000There's cases like this where it short-circuits that.
01:11:28.000It goes right to the pleasure center, even though what it's doing is kind of irrelevant.
01:11:31.000But this is a case where maybe it wasn't irrelevant.
01:11:34.000Maybe it actually caused these animals to then change the way that they behave to become more sociable.
01:11:38.000It's very possible something like that played a role along the way, which is why if you replay the sequence of the vanishing rainforest ten times, only one time does it maybe lead to anything good, and the other nine times it leads to a bunch of dead chimps.
01:12:04.000And then I think for three and a half million years, literally, they're just gulking around the edges and they figured nothing out.
01:12:10.000But there was a pressure on them to walk upright.
01:12:13.000And nobody knows for sure what that pressure is.
01:12:16.000One hypothesis that has some – well, there's probably a lot of reasons, right?
01:12:19.000Any time something big happens, there's probably a lot of causes.
01:12:22.000So some people have said that you can cover ground more efficiently when you walk upright with fewer calories, and especially this idea of slowly running down animals.
01:12:33.000We talked about that yesterday, actually.
01:12:37.000But another reason is, so ask yourself, so why would an animal, so if we back up a little bit, remember I talked about how oldowan tools, which are made even later than when we first started walking upright, so they're even after that, oldowan tools are never carried at any great distance from where they're acquired and made.
01:12:55.000And so what you have is an animal, just like today's chimps, they can't plan for tomorrow.
01:12:59.000So a chimp can plan for needs that it currently feels.
01:13:02.000It can say, oh, I want to go get termites out of that mound.
01:13:07.000I'll break the stick off, I'll strip the leaves, and then I'll go over there and undo that.
01:13:10.000But it can't plan for the fact that it might have that need again tomorrow.
01:13:13.000If it doesn't feel the need, it can't plan for it.
01:13:18.000And the best example of that is the notion of taking a tool with you that you've now used and saying, well, I'll want to use it again tomorrow, right?
01:13:25.000So, whichever Australopithecus was the first one to start walking upright was almost assuredly incapable of planning for the future, for unfelt needs.
01:13:34.000But it could plan for felt needs, because a chimp can do that too.
01:13:37.000And if you think about how would you feel if you're about to walk across the open savanna and you're kind of small and leopards and lions are way faster than you, I think the primary thing you'd feel is fear.
01:15:43.000Certain really ancient evidence of cannibalism too because of the scrape marks inside of skulls and they think they were scooping out brain matter.
01:15:52.000I haven't seen those data but absolutely you can see where they've used those tools on like the legs of animals and things like that so you'd see it inside a skull as well, a human skull.
01:16:00.000I'm sure you're aware of that little person that was discovered just a few years ago.
01:16:06.000I think it was like a decade or so ago.
01:16:24.000Homo erectus leaves Africa, but they also stay.
01:16:26.000So you've got Homo erectus basically colonizing all of Africa, and you've got Homo erectus colonizing almost all of Europe, all of Southern Asia.
01:16:33.000And so they don't go beyond that, at least not to our knowledge.
01:16:38.000But they certainly covered all that ground.
01:16:41.000And outside of, so now you've got Homo erectus in Africa and Homo erectus outside of Africa.
01:16:46.000And of course, then over time, both of them are going to evolve and change.
01:16:49.000The ones outside of Africa end up as Neanderthals.
01:16:52.000Those are the most recent instantiation of them.
01:16:54.000The ones inside of Africa end up as us.
01:16:56.000And so when we leave Africa, the first thing we encounter is Neanderthals in Arabia, because that's the first point of entry out of Africa.
01:17:03.000And so we probably started copulating with them there.
01:17:05.000We know we started copulating with them soon afterward.
01:17:07.000So as we left, they had evolved somewhere else.
01:17:16.000So our great uncle left and our great grandpa stayed, right?
01:17:19.000And so the ones who left, some of them evolved into those people on Flores, into those tiny little people.
01:17:25.000Some of them, we know this Denisovan from a pinky bone, you know, in a cave in Siberia.
01:17:29.000And we have got, we know that we interbred with Neanderthals and that's where a lot of our genes that we currently have for light skin and blue eyes and things like that come from.
01:17:39.000And they think we interbred with Denisovans as well, right?
01:18:24.000Remember, so 65,000 years ago, it would have still been ice age, and so we would have had a lot less water.
01:18:29.000And so if you look at topographical maps, then when you look at what the Pacific Islanders did and stuff, it seems ballsy as hell, but it's a little less ballsy when you can keep seeing the next piece of land not as far away compared to now where the sea is much higher and you can't see the land.
01:19:12.000We're like little rats with the way we've scattered across this globe.
01:19:16.000Yeah, and if you think about it, it seems like it's all ballsy exploration, but I actually suspect a bigger part of it is running away from the guy behind you who's causing problems.
01:19:26.000And so my favorite example of that is if you look at the cliff dwellings, like in the American Southwest, and you go there and you're thinking, who the hell would live like this?
01:19:33.000I mean, you know, when Junior walks out, phew!
01:19:45.000Remember we talked about sexual selection as a source of people don't like unfairness.
01:19:49.000Well, people also don't like unfairness between groups.
01:19:52.000Because if you and I make a deal, and I'm from Ohio and you're from California, and the Californians benefit more than the Ohioans, even though I benefit, you benefit more, and now I'm at risk.
01:20:02.000Because maybe your group, ancestrally, is going to cause my group problems.
01:20:07.000So when you're studying all this stuff, how does that make you feel as a person?
01:20:12.000Do you ever internalize all this stuff when you're thinking about all the weird ape-like creatures that turned into people and all the thousands and thousands of years of evolution and how it could have gone left and it did go right?
01:20:29.000Does that freak you out when you really get deep into the study of all this stuff?
01:20:32.000First of all, I do this all the time, right?
01:20:34.000So it does freak me out, but it's what I like.
01:20:36.000And it also, we can talk about all the ways that you can predict things about our modern selves based on knowing these things in the past, right?
01:20:42.000But secondarily, what freaks me out the most probably is the enormous role of random chance in all this, right?
01:20:48.000And so if you think about the, I mean, just think about our own backgrounds.
01:20:51.000The random chance that our mom and dad got amorous the night that they did that made you and me.
01:22:11.000And what they find over and over again, and this is what's so disconcerting, is first of all, on average, most things are about 50% genetic.
01:22:18.000But the bummer is that the other half isn't what's happening in your house and the way you're brought up by your folks.
01:22:43.000And that could be a factor in how you were raised and how you were taught to deal with stress, how you were taught to deal with situations and character development.
01:22:54.000It suggests parents just don't matter.
01:22:56.000How you were taught doesn't seem to play a role because when we parse up all the different traits about you, there's a few that your parents actually have a big influence on.
01:23:03.000What religion you're in, for example, but not how religious you are.
01:23:07.000So the biggest role that your parents play seems to be when sperm met egg.
01:23:11.000So a friend of mine, the analogy they made when I had my first kid, he says, here's what you're going to find out.
01:23:16.000That you're handed, when the baby's born, you're handed a negative.
01:23:21.000You can screw it up by being in the darkroom a little bit wrong, or you can help it a little bit by being in the darkroom a little bit right, but the photograph is already there.
01:23:29.000And my son and my daughter are wildly different in some ways.
01:24:55.000We can't find any evidence that you and I made any difference.
01:24:58.000All we can find is evidence that other things in their life made a difference.
01:25:01.000Now, to say that means what we really don't know is, well, what is that unshared environment?
01:25:05.000All we know is it's not something about your household, because that would cause fraternal and identical twins to both be more similar to each other, and it doesn't.
01:25:13.000Well, and obviously there's not a lot of data in terms of when you're measuring someone's entire life from birth to death, but there's enough that people are starting to draw conclusions.
01:25:25.000One of the more interesting ones is when you see identical twins that were raised in different households without any knowledge of each other, and then they run into each other 30 years later, and they find out they have disturbing similarities.
01:25:40.000And what's also interesting about it, which Plowman talks about in Blueprint, is that your genes become more powerful as you age.
01:25:47.000So the heritability of things like IQ goes up as you get older.
01:25:51.000And so the argument is that your genes seem to be causing you to select out environments.
01:25:55.000So you gave the example, well, maybe the way that you discipline them or tell them to be resilient or whatever you do as a parent causes them to shape their environment.
01:26:04.000Doesn't seem to be the case, but it does seem to be the case that the genes that you give them cause them to select their environments in certain ways.
01:26:10.000Because remember, kids choose their friends, right?
01:26:13.000You want them to play with Timmy, but they want to play with Johnny.
01:26:31.000Now, when you say that your genes become more powerful as you get older, what do you mean by that, though?
01:26:36.000Well, they are more predictive of the outcome.
01:26:38.000And so if you look at the heritability of IQ, when you're a kid, it's lower than when you're an adult, and it's lower still than when you're an older adult.
01:26:45.000And so what seems to be happening to a lot of our traits, probably almost...
01:26:49.000Are you saying that, like, if you have children as an older person, it's more heritable?
01:26:56.000So if you look at the heritability of IQ when kids are 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, 60, you find that identical twins come more and more together as they age, whether they're aging in the same household or not.
01:27:09.000And so it's something about selecting your environment.
01:27:12.000So like here's one kid who loves to think and do puzzles and his identical twin loves to do the same and they kind of get smarter their whole lives.
01:27:18.000Here's another kid who's not interested in that.
01:27:20.000They have other interests and they go in a different direction.
01:27:22.000But when you're the parent, you can be busily pushing them to do the things you want them to do.
01:27:27.000And so their heritability is less strong.
01:27:31.000It's like when totalitarian governments are eliminated and the school system becomes more fair, heritability of intelligence goes up in those societies.
01:27:38.000Because kids are now more capable of selecting the schools they want to go to, the environments that they want to be part of.
01:27:55.000So when a lot of people hear about this, it sounds like genetic determinism, that your genes are forcing you to be a certain way.
01:28:02.000But for me, it's not genetic determinism.
01:28:05.000You can think of about it as a genetic nudge.
01:28:06.000Part of your nudge is going to come from the DNA you inherited, but part of it's going to come from the environment, and part of it's going to come from your own personal decisions.
01:28:48.000It has to be because human beings have to learn how to survive in every environment on this planet.
01:28:52.000If we were meerkats or something, well, we got a certain way of doing things and your genes can basically tell you what to do.
01:28:57.000And with meerkats, there's some really interesting experiments where you can show your genes cause you to listen to one signal and just follow that.
01:29:03.000But as human beings, your genes had no choice but to give up control once we went down this cognitive pathway that emphasizes learning over inborn instincts.
01:29:12.000You know, you've had little ones, you know they're worthless when they're babies, right?
01:29:15.000Baby wildebeest gets up and off it can go.
01:29:19.000It's just so fantastically complicated, the developmental process from birth to adulthood, and that this is taking place simultaneously amongst hundreds and hundreds of millions of people, and with varying results and all sorts of different...
01:29:37.000Levels of creativity and ingenuity and mathematical prowess and literature and all these different things that are being created by all these different weird little ape creatures everywhere.
01:29:48.000And there's so many different factors that determine what this ape creature becomes.
01:29:52.000Right, and that's one of the best things in my mind about being a person.
01:29:56.000So if you're a dung beetle, you've got one job in life, push a ball of poo.
01:30:00.000And if you can't push a ball of poo that's three times your body weight, well that's the end of the line for you, right?
01:30:05.000But if you're a human, maybe you're big and strong, maybe you're not.
01:30:36.000Because one of the things that we know, and you'll see this if you look at Blueprint, is that you have a gazillion genes underlie every trait.
01:30:45.000And furthermore, each one of them only accounts for a tiny, tiny bit, and they do lots of other things too.
01:30:50.000So you can't make a designer baby that has all these qualities because all you do is noodle around with five or six genes.
01:30:56.000There's a couple of disorders that work that way.
01:30:58.000But our personalities, our abilities, our proclivities are all heavily determined by large numbers of genes that do lots and lots of different things.
01:31:05.000But we're talking about our understanding of genetics currently, right?
01:31:09.000And when you talk about things like genetic manipulation or the use of CRISPR or any of these maybe new tools that they're working on right now, they've already updated CRISPR. They were CRISPR.2, right?
01:31:20.000When this continues to evolve and more and more innovation takes place in that world, don't you think they're going to get to a point where they're going to understand all the various factors in genetics and they're going to be able to create...
01:31:48.000All we can do is noodle around with the ones that aren't.
01:31:51.000What makes it complicated is that most of the ones that differ between people are actually in what we now call the regulatory region we used to think of as junk DNA. But now we know, well, think about a company.
01:32:02.000A company that makes widgets doesn't just make widgets.
01:32:07.000And now we know, well, sure enough, a lot of the DNA that's not coding for proteins is working with the other DNA to turn things on and turn things off.
01:32:23.000And what we now know from these studies, GWAS studies, genome-wide association studies, is that you can look at all the base pairs that vary, and you can say, all right, which one of these things are correlated with my outcome of interest?
01:32:38.000And they create what's called a polygenic score.
01:32:40.000And you say, let's predict how many years of education you're going to get.
01:32:43.000And sure enough, The richer you are, on average, the higher your polygenic score is.
01:32:49.000If you're born into a rich family, you probably have a higher polygenic score.
01:32:51.000But if your polygenic score for education is lower than the average for your thing, you probably get poorer across your life.
01:32:58.000If it's higher, you probably get richer.
01:33:00.000Is it a gene for being smart, for sitting there and doing what you're told, for self-control, like it could be...
01:33:06.000And there's a thousand things in there, and each one of them accounts for one-tenth of one percent of the variance.
01:33:11.000But what makes it complicated is that whole set of genes also predicts how artistic you are, but in a different combination.
01:33:17.000And it predicts how friendly you are in a different combination.
01:33:19.000And so the genes that do one set of things almost always do lots of things, and we have very few traits that don't have lots and lots of genes that each play a tiny role underneath them.
01:33:30.000The example Plowman gives in his book, which I think is great, is he says, we started out looking for gold nuggets, and we now realize we're looking for gold dust.
01:33:37.000It's just lots of tiny stuff out there.
01:33:40.000So in many ways, when you talk about the human genome and our genetic code, we're really similar to computer programs in that there's millions and millions of lines of code in computer programs.
01:33:55.000But we know how to make computer programs.
01:34:00.000But somebody smarter than both of us knows how to make these incredible codes that lead to operating systems and But now we're writing codes that we don't understand.
01:34:09.000So if you look at neural networks, there'll be input levels and there'll be output levels, and the freaking computer decides how to mix those things together, and we don't even know what all it's done.
01:34:17.000And two of them that are learning the same thing might get there via different mechanisms.
01:34:20.000So by that idea, or through that idea, wouldn't you think that artificial intelligence could lead to the mapping out of the human genome, or rather the altering of the human genome and mapping out a different type of human?
01:35:18.000I suspect we're not going to noodle around with our smarts and our personality because every single change we make is going to have a commensurate change somewhere else.
01:35:25.000Oh, I can make him smarter, but then he's going to be depressed.
01:36:26.000Choose partners who are similar to themselves.
01:36:28.000If they value education, the other person does too.
01:36:30.000If they value athletics, the other person does too.
01:36:32.000That works so much better than anything that we're capable of doing right now.
01:36:36.000And when you do these GWAS studies with these polygenic scores, and you say, oh, look, You're born into a social class that's suggested it would probably be high, and yours is kind of low, and sure enough, you get poorer across your life.
01:36:46.000You're literally accounting for 3% of the variance.
01:36:49.000You're barely explaining anything, because even though when we look at the behavioral genetic studies, we can say, wow, intelligence is 50% genetic.
01:36:57.000We can't come close to finding the genes that actually do that.
01:37:00.000And part of the reason we don't know But part of the reason may be that, first of all, its course is 50% environmental, and what those random things are, we don't know.
01:37:08.000And second, think about how you, with three billion base pairs, how many things, maybe when those two are in place and that one isn't, and the third, you know, there could be interactions at really, really complicated levels where you're almost at infinite.
01:37:19.000And so that's why I don't think it happens when you and I are around to see it.
01:37:23.000I think you're probably right, but then I just realized that things like CRISPR, which were invented by accident, came out of nowhere less than a decade ago.
01:37:32.000I believe it was less than a decade ago, right?
01:37:45.000And then, you know, checking your genetics was preposterously expensive.
01:37:50.000Now you just spit into a little tube and send it to 23andMe and they tell you, hey, bro, you know, someone in your family is from Europe and this guy's from Asia.
01:38:00.000And so I could easily be wrong that you and I will see it and it's only 10 years away because computationally it seems so hard right now, but things that were computationally impossible when I was in grad school, you know, the simple analyses we did with our data in grad school, it's just like a phone could do that so easily now and we waited 24 hours for the mainframe to give it back to us.
01:38:17.000Well, Kurzweil talks about that, that we really don't see things in terms of the exponential increase in technology.
01:38:25.000You know, Kurzweil believes all this is going to happen plus more.
01:38:28.000He thinks you're going to be able to download your brain into a computer and, you know, and he's smarter.
01:39:00.000This movie, in this movie, this is a whole room full of computers, just like the Apollo missions used a room full of computers that can't fuck with your phone.
01:39:32.000And this is only from 2005, from a Netflix special I did in 2005. Which, you know, it's 13 years ago, but it doesn't seem like that long ago.
01:39:41.000But I was making fun of people texting.
01:40:41.000Dude, I follow quite a few people on Facebook that are nuts.
01:40:45.000And I go to their pages just to see what kind of arguments they're getting into, like as a sociological experiment.
01:40:53.000And there are people that are on Facebook arguing about Trump or abortion or Islam or, you know, fill in the blank, environmental concerns, fracking.
01:41:18.000And you just picture this sweaty person sitting in front of a computer arguing with the world.
01:41:24.000I never would have thought that, that there would be people sitting in front of their desk arguing with people that they can't see all throughout the world.
01:42:46.000And the reason he doesn't give a shit about the octopus, of course, but if the octopus goes to get it and doesn't get it, it's going to come out and the groupers got it.
01:42:53.000Cooperation always works better than working on your own, right?
01:43:58.000I didn't know that they could do this until my friend Remy Warren came on the podcast and he had a television show called Apex Predator and on the show they would study the various ways these animals would hunt and the way they would, you know,
01:44:14.000all their different adaptations to their environment, all the different ways that they would use the environment and he would try to mimic those different ways and one of the things they studied was Octopus and what's that other fish that's like it?
01:44:52.000There's a BBC Blue Planet where it shows the octopus picking up all that random shrapnel when there's a shark coming after it and it covers itself like a big ball and the shark keeps going.
01:45:08.000This aquarium was having an issue where sharks were disappearing.
01:45:11.000They couldn't figure out what was going on.
01:45:12.000And they put a camera inside the aquarium, and it turned out that the octopus was waiting, just chilling on the rocks until the sharks came by, and they would snatch them and eat them.
01:48:34.000But as ours evolved to an eye, we just had to find ways around the problem that all the fancy structures that we now need in front of it are in the way.
01:48:40.000Does anything have an eye like an octopus that lives on land?
01:49:09.000Because I know that there's a lot of stuff in there that didn't used to be in there before, but I also know it's like random people that I should remember that I don't remember.
01:49:18.000Yeah, well, the funny thing about brains is we may never forget anything, but we just lose our capacity to access it.
01:49:27.000And so every single experience you ever had may still be in there, and it guides your behavior, but it's annoying for you to recall it because it gets in the way of what you want.
01:49:34.000And so when we talk about forgetting, what we're actually talking about is being able to actually retrieve it and talk about it, not to have it guide our action.
01:49:41.000Well, also, I can retrieve things far better if I get access to the file by someone else's memory.
01:49:49.000So like if you and I had an experience like 10 years ago, we went on a camping trip or something like that, and I forgot something that happened, and you said, do you remember what happened by the creek when Mike hurt his foot?
01:50:32.000And likely significant lessons are important because they're seared in your memory of this is a significant point where you figured something out that you didn't know before and it changed the way you looked at the world.
01:50:45.000And so when emotions get involved, it's much more easily retrieved later on because your brain is saying, yeah, evolution or whatever you want to call it, is telling you that's important.
01:51:00.000That's one of the reasons why epidemiology studies on diet are so difficult because people don't remember what the fuck they ate unless they eat the same thing every day.
01:51:09.000The human mind is so fascinating and it varies so much and there's so many different factors involved in whatever it becomes.
01:51:49.000And so we started with this sort of argument about, well, was it monogamy or not, right?
01:51:53.000And I'm arguing that by and large it was monogamy because you've got these systems in place that our testicles aren't big enough.
01:52:00.000We've got cryptic ovulation, which means that we can't tell when she's fertile, which means that we have to be sexually interested and available all the time so we can make sure we're the father.
01:52:10.000And so that allows her to pair bond with us.
01:52:12.000And there's some evidence that orgasm is a pair bonding experience, certainly for females, probably for males.
01:52:18.000It works in lots of animals via oxytocin and some vasopressin, all that kind of stuff, right?
01:52:22.000So all that suggests that probably on average that we evolved to do it this way.
01:52:27.000But we're so super duper flexible that when another society says, well, hey, this works for us, off we go and we find a way to make that work.
01:52:33.000Are there studies that compare testicle size of different civilizations and different cultures?
01:52:39.000Yeah, so there's a lot of argument about this.
01:52:47.000So the thing is that the genetics that explain why one animal or one species would have large testicles and another would have small testicles are not the genetics that would explain why two different individuals in the same species would be that way.
01:53:01.000Because the only way to make that latter one work is you have to inherit a constellation of traits.
01:53:05.000So if I'm going to inherit the genes for big balls and for impulsiveness and for having lots of kids and not caring much about them and all the things that supposedly go with that, that do when you look between species, there's no way for that constellation of traits to be inherited together.
01:53:20.000Because remember I was talking about how polygenic everything is.
01:53:23.000And so they'd all literally need to sit next to each other on the chromosome if they've got any chance of being passed on as a package, and they don't.
01:53:30.000And you also get all this shifting around during meiosis.
01:53:33.000I can't even remember the term for it off the top of my head, but where the pieces of genetic material move around.
01:53:39.000And that virtually guarantees that you're not going to inherit this huge constellation of traits within a species.
01:53:46.000You know, your species inherits big testicles, it inherits impulsiveness, it inherits, you know, whatever, in our strategy, just reproduce a ton and ignore them.
01:53:54.000You know, all that kind of stuff is dead easy.
01:53:56.000And so chimp fathers don't pay any attention to chimp babies to speak of, because, well, that's their mating system, right?
01:54:02.000Whereas you've got pair-bonded gibbons and things, and now parents start to play a much bigger, even male parents start to play a bigger role.
01:54:09.000But there's no studies that show that human beings with larger testicles tend to ignore their children.
01:54:21.000And it's called life history strategies, where you say, well, you're going to develop one life history strategy in these circumstances and another in these other circumstances.
01:54:28.000The problem is that you end up with ethnic differences in testicle size, which we know exist.
01:54:33.000And you also have ethnic differences in the kinds of lives that people currently lead.
01:54:38.000The difficult thing is it's super easy to look at the world we are in right now.
01:54:42.000And this is what tripped me up earlier as well.
01:54:43.000You look at the world that we are in right now and assume, well, that's the way things have always been.
01:54:56.000And so if you don't know that past, you'd say, well, look, people in the Arabic world aren't as good at mathematics, and they have these qualities, and then you'd make an inference.
01:55:04.000Right now, the ethnic differences in testicles, I believe, but I can't promise you that some different West African groups happen to have the largest testicle size.
01:55:15.000Those West African groups tend to be poorer right now.
01:55:18.000There's lots of things about life that go with being poorer that look like an R strategy, having lots of kids and paying less attention to them.
01:55:25.000But what you're probably looking at is a coincidental association between some biology and some Some way that your people happen to live that didn't exist a while ago and that won't exist a while from now.
01:55:37.000And so it's really easy to try to use this research, which people have, to say, well, you've got some primitive people who have big testicles and low parental effort, and you've got some more sophisticated people with smaller testicles and high parental effort.
01:56:20.000That if you had a large penis, that large penises were a symbol of barbaric behavior, and that these were cruder people, and that to be thought to be a sophisticated person, you wanted a smaller penis.
01:56:36.000So they actually accentuated smaller penises in their gods and smaller penises in their statues.
01:56:43.000I mean, you can see these kinds of things all the time.
01:56:45.000So early pre-Western contact, if you look at Japanese women, they're painted with their eyes as narrow of a slit as possible.
01:56:52.000Post-Western contact, now the women want more almond-shaped eyes, and so they start painting them with the beautiful women have bigger eyes.
01:56:58.000These things can change all over the map.
01:57:00.000I personally suspect that large penis size is also a product of sexual selection.
01:57:56.000Yeah, it is fascinating when you think about all these different things that lead to natural selection and the fact that there's so many variables that are in place and that we're trying to find out what is better and what is not.
01:58:09.000And if you have a study and the study finds genetic differences and ethnic genetic differences, there's a lot of blowback and a lot of pushback against that.
01:58:18.000And one of the interesting things that we do know is if you think about how Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, And a small percentage of us left, which means the majority of us didn't, right?
01:58:29.000I mean, there's few randoms who lived up in the top right-hand corner were available to go, which means that all the rest of the earth comes out of a few small percentage of the population that could have left.
01:58:38.000And so we now know there's enormous...
01:58:41.000Genetic variation within Africa, way more genetic variation within Africa than outside of Africa or than between any two people, like a Chinese person and a Norwegian person, are much more closely related to each other genetically than an African guy who lives in the next village over.
01:58:57.000Because most of the genetic variability never left the continent.
01:59:00.000And so we have this idea of race as if it has genetic meaning and it doesn't.
01:59:05.000But ethnicity does have genetic meaning, right?
01:59:08.000So an ethnic group evolved in a very certain spot to deal with very certain problems.
01:59:31.000And lots of that's adaptation, and a lot of that's just random genetic drift to founder population, other causes that aren't evolved, but nonetheless have a big impact on what the population ends up looking like.
01:59:41.000It's just so amazing to consider that this entire species, essentially, except for the times that we interacted with, interbred with Neanderthals, came from one part of Africa.
01:59:51.000You know, that's one of the reasons why racism is so preposterous, because we're essentially all African.
01:59:57.000All of us who are out have a little bit of other stuff in us, but just a tiny bit.
02:01:16.000And, you know, the fact that we're the only one that comes out of that could mean, well, we got lucky, or we're mean as shit, and we took care of all of our cousins who didn't, you know, we wanted what they had.
02:01:34.000And what's so interesting is, you know, this is something that coming back to the point I was making earlier about us cooperating.
02:01:39.000So we evolved to cooperate with each other.
02:01:41.000But the key is we did not evolve to cooperate across different groups.
02:01:44.000So once you get to Homo erectus, and now you've got division of labor, and you've got the capacity to plan for unfelt needs, right, where they're carrying these Acheulean tools with them over great distances, etc.
02:01:54.000Well, now, who's your most effective predator?
02:01:57.000You know, the occasional mammoth or saber-toothed tiger will have killed the occasional one of us.
02:02:01.000But they can't possibly take us on in the same way we can take them on.
02:02:04.000There's only one other thing on the planet that can take us on, and that's ourselves.
02:02:07.000So other groups of Homo erectus would have probably been a major threat.
02:02:12.000Certainly by the time we're Homo sapiens, other groups would have been our only major threat.
02:02:16.000And so we evolved to be kind to each other within our group, but we did not evolve to be kind outside our group.
02:02:21.000That doesn't mean we evolved to be mean.
02:02:47.000Richard Wrangham, same catching fire guy, shows that if you look at the rates of violence within human groups compared to chimps, they're like 500 times more violent, physically aggressive than we are.
02:02:57.000You look at the rates between human groups, equal.
02:03:03.000So we tend to think about, well, how could it be that we're both so nice and so mean?
02:03:06.000But we have to remember that we evolved to cooperate and to be nice to each other to be more effective killers.
02:03:11.000It wasn't because let's make a hippie paradise.
02:03:14.000It's like, shit, these lions are going to eat us.
02:03:16.000You and I got to have to get together to sort out these guys.
02:03:19.000And so our cooperative nature is literally the flip side of the coin of our competitive, violent, killing nature.
02:03:25.000Also, the undeniable history of unbelievably ruthless tribal warfare would indicate that we have a long history of fighting against others that are like us that we don't know.
02:03:36.000When hunter-gatherers meet each other and they do come into conflict, which is a huge percentage of the time, they literally fight to the death.
02:03:43.000Because if you capture me, you're going to torture me to death.
02:03:46.000If I'm female, you're going to incorporate me into your system and then it's going to be okay.
02:03:58.000And there's tons and tons of bodies that are healthily perforated that are clearly the consequences of this kind of warfare.
02:04:05.000It's crazy that that is thought to be, even in 2018, an inevitable part of being a human being.
02:04:12.000I mean, warfare, even to this day, is thought to be inevitable because there's no – I mean, we would all love that one day there would be no warfare, but there's no indication whatsoever that We're not almost there.
02:04:23.000And I actually, I think Pinker's got the best answer to this question, which is basically, well, what structures do you need to put in place to make the world a safer and less violent place?
02:04:32.000And I don't know if you've talked to him about his book, Better Angels of Our Nature.
02:04:36.000I know you've talked to him about more recent ones.
02:04:41.000It's a great example of how we become less and less violent, and even over our lifetimes.
02:04:45.000And part of that is undoubtedly better governance structure and all that.
02:04:49.000But part of that, I think, is cycles on itself.
02:04:52.000So when I was a little kid, and this kind of thing probably happened to you, when I was in kindergarten, the guy who drove our carpool was a cop.
02:05:00.000So this cop is driving me home in the back of his car.
02:05:02.000Now he's got no seatbelts because this is 1969 and cars don't have seatbelts, right?
02:05:06.000Big bench seat in a Buick or something.
02:05:08.000And we come around a corner and they all slide up against me to the edge of the car seat.
02:05:12.000And I'm trying to push back, but I'm this little guy, right?
02:05:14.000And I can't and I must have hit the elbow against the door and it flies open and I roll out of the car.
02:05:38.000Can you imagine if somebody brought your kid home and said, hey man, really sorry Joe, your daughter fell out of the car and bounced across the freaking street?
02:05:45.000You'd a-throttle them and be freaked out.
02:06:05.000Where the safer it gets, the safer we need it to be.
02:06:07.000Because every little thing that goes wrong stands out in sharper relief.
02:06:10.000Ah, that's a very fascinating way of looking at it.
02:06:14.000You know, what's interesting to me about Pinker's work is how much pushback he gets, and particularly about the world being a safer place.
02:06:21.000Like, people want to keep pointing towards violent episodes and racism and crime and all these different things, different factors, as if it's some sort of evidence against what he's saying.
02:06:34.000When he's incorporating those current events into this large...
02:06:41.000And he's saying, yes, we don't live in utopia, but the world is vastly safer and better now than it was a thousand years ago or 10,000 years ago or even a hundred years ago.
02:06:51.000But why is there so much pushback against this?
02:06:54.000Well, so the thing is, I think what's going on is that people worry that it doesn't look like a problem to be solved anymore.
02:06:59.000So when you and I were kids, we both had lots of gay friends, but we didn't know it because they're not telling anybody because someone's going to kick their ass if they knew that they were gay.
02:07:08.000Now, yes, gay people are still discriminated against, but it's so much better than it was then.
02:07:12.000What I think people or advocates don't want to say is, well, there's no problem anymore.
02:07:16.000Because then you can allow them to still run into troubles in various circumstances, even though the trouble they run into today is a thousand times less than the trouble they ran into in very little.
02:07:35.000If you set rape and homicide to, you call it both of them, whatever level they are in 1972, 100. And then you track them through to the early 2000s.
02:07:44.000Homicide is in the U.S. Homicides drop down to like 50. Rapes drop down to like 25. But if you listen to women's advocacy groups about campus sexual assault and stuff, you'd never know that.
02:07:55.000And the reason you wouldn't know it is because people worry, well, if you think the problem's getting better on its own, then you won't keep doing anything to help fix it.
02:08:03.000And that's a really unfortunate part of our psychology because it makes people feel like there's been no progress.
02:08:08.000And when you feel like there's no progress, then you think, well, maybe we need to completely overturn the whole system and try something new.
02:08:13.000And that's, of course, the point of Pinker's newest book, Enlightenment Now.
02:08:18.000Anarchy and all those things are really bad ideas.
02:08:21.000Voting for somebody like Trump is a really bad idea because things are actually running along really nicely.
02:08:25.000It's just that we tend to forget it because every advocacy group who's all worried about whatever their particular issue is doesn't want the word to get out that things are a lot better than they used to be because I think at some fundamental level they think, well...
02:08:38.000We better say that there's 100. I'm not saying they do this consciously.
02:08:42.000But of course, 25 rapes a year, whatever the number is, is bad enough, right?
02:08:45.000It doesn't have to be the numbers that it used to be when I was a child to be a problem.
02:08:50.000It all has to be is a number above zero.
02:08:53.000Well, people develop this vested interest in promoting an idea, and they want to exaggerate that idea, whatever it is, whether it's the idea that the world is a safer place than it actually is, or whether it's the world is an idea of a more dangerous place than it really is.
02:09:08.000And for whatever reason, once we have it in our mind, That this is the thing we're married to.
02:09:14.000We're married to this concept of polyamorous life and that this is a natural way to live.
02:09:19.000Or that violence is inevitable and this is just a part of who we are.
02:09:22.000We tend to promote that and we tend to have massive confirmation bias.
02:09:28.000I think it's because we personally associate ourselves with ideas.
02:09:33.000We don't look at ideas as being a thing.
02:09:35.000Like, if you think that something is one way and then you're pointed towards evidence that you're incorrect, you feel like personally you've been slighted or somehow you're being diminished by your lack of being correct,
02:09:50.000by your incorrect assumptions and notions.
02:09:54.000That is a weird part of being a person.
02:09:56.000It's a very weird part of being a person.
02:09:57.000It's the hardest part about being a scientist because every good scientist is wrong all the time.
02:10:02.000I've been wrong already on your show, right?
02:10:04.000And so it's super hard to admit it because by human nature, you just want my immediate reaction to fight against it and not say, well, hold on.
02:10:23.000Our brain actually, we evolved our logical processing abilities not to find out the truth of the world, but to convince you of my point of view.
02:10:31.000And so our logical abilities evolved in service of persuasion, not in service of seeking out the truth.
02:10:37.000Because, of course, if I can persuade you that the world is the way it would, in a way that benefits Bill, That the world is, you know, something about the way Bill wants the world to be is true, then the world's going to be a little kinder to me, it'll fit my worldview, and others will give me the things I want.
02:10:52.000And so I go through life trying to persuade you of my worldview rather than trying to find out what's actually out there.
02:10:57.000And so that's why you think, oh, well, smart people aren't going to fall for that.
02:11:00.000No, smart, it doesn't matter how smart you are.
02:11:02.000You're using whatever brainpower you have not to find the truth, but rather to find evidence for your particular point of view.
02:11:08.000Well, I think it's also a byproduct of ignorance because for the longest time you could tell me something and there was very little way that I could find out whether or not you're right or not.
02:11:18.000I really couldn't know you're correct unless I went and started doing research and read some books.
02:11:23.000Whereas now I could just pull up my phone and say, hey, Bill just said this.
02:11:59.000So that's one of the very first things that happens when you have theory of mind.
02:12:03.000Because as soon as I realize the contents of your mind differ from the contents of my own, I say, oh, I can plant something in Joe's mind that'll help me that ain't true, but if he believes it is, life will be better for me.
02:12:13.000And so as soon as kids learn theory of mind at age four, they start to lie.
02:12:17.000And prior to theory of mind, they tell the truth when it's like, where are you?
02:13:04.000And all the other little girls roll their eyes and they know she's a liar and it's sad.
02:13:09.000But the ability to be deceptive, I feel like that, you know, there's some sort of idea that we cling to that if you can deceive someone about certain particular aspects of your mind or your past or what you've accomplished or what you're capable of doing,
02:13:27.000that you will have a better place in the social chain.
02:13:32.000And so the way I think about it is think about the difference between conspecific conflicts, conflicts between members of the same species, and conflicts between predator and prey.
02:13:41.000So every time predator and prey interact, eventually one of them is going to die.
02:13:45.000Predator is going to starve, prey is going to get eaten, right?
02:13:47.000But when conspecifics, members of the same species, interact and we're competing over something, even if it's a very subtle level of competition, we don't want to come to blows.
02:13:55.000Because if I'm trying to size you up, be it physical blows or mental blows, there's suffering on both sides if we have to duke it out.
02:14:02.000And so I want to sell myself as being a little more than I really am.
02:14:07.000And you want to sell yourself as a little more than you really are because we know that we're not fully going to test each other because there's negative consequences for testing.
02:14:15.000And whenever there's negative consequences, even for the winter, for testing, there's a lot of posturing that's going to go on.
02:14:20.000And that posturing is something that's literally built into our psyche.
02:14:23.000And we go through life trying to self-inflate, on average, not everybody does this, but on average, trying to self-inflate as much as we can in order to gain the things in life that we might not get if we're brutally honest about what our capabilities actually are.
02:14:36.000That is so fascinating that we cling to all of these ancient structures that are in place when it comes to the way we interact with each other and how important it is, like the social exchanges that we have.
02:14:47.000And I think this is one of the reasons why we cling to ideas so much, that these ideas, if you can push an idea through, you've got some sort of points on the board.
02:14:56.000You've got points on the board and probably your ideas on average are going to benefit you and my ideas on average are going to benefit me.
02:15:03.000And so if I'm happily married in a monogamous relationship and I'm not looking around, well then monogamy is a great thing and sleeping around is a sin.
02:15:11.000But if I'm single and I've got opportunities, well then I probably hold alternative views.
02:15:16.000So on average our views, not perfectly, but on average our views serve as well.
02:15:20.000And if I can plant my views in your mind, then I've benefited.
02:15:25.000I mean, God, you see that a lot with everything.
02:15:28.000But I guess when we're talking about people that don't want to admit, like when it comes to like Pinker's data, about the world being a better place because they have almost a vested interest in stirring up fear.
02:15:41.000They're committed, in their mind, they're committed to constantly studying the wrongs of the world and the evil of the world, and that any sort of diminishing of that is actually going to...
02:15:55.000I think they have a good – in their mind, there's good intention.
02:16:01.000And the data are consistent with their strategies because on average, fear appeals and anger appeals work a whole lot better than, hey, man, things are great.
02:16:08.000Donate to this cause and we'll keep them great.
02:16:11.000And so when Viagra was invented in 1989, my little brother and I were chatting about it and we thought, you know, this will save some animals because there's a lot of animals that are consumed for their presumed potency effects by like traditional Chinese medicine consumers and things like that.
02:16:27.000And so we thought, boy, Viagra actually works.
02:16:29.000Prior to Viagra, nothing is out there that works.
02:16:32.000And so we wrote this little letter off, sent it to a journal, and said, you know, that this is going to save certain animals like seals, which they could be harvested to eat their penises.
02:17:56.000Okay, this must be a plan was brought to the government.
02:18:00.000This must not be the worst way of looking at that headline is that the government's thinking, man, we got to fucking revive these penis sales.
02:18:08.000Well, they may because they actually may be thinking that because you've got some relatively impoverished people who are hunting for them and no one's buying them anymore.
02:18:18.000The report drafted by the Fur Institute of Canada is aimed at creating new markets to support an earlier proposal to kill 140,000 gray seals over five years in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence.
02:18:33.00070% of gray seals that frequent the area.
02:18:36.000So what they want to do is they want to diminish the...
02:18:40.000They have long complained that the growing population of gray seals is to blame for eating too many commercially viable fish, which has resulted in repeated calls for a cull.
02:18:49.000Okay, so they want to kill the seals...
02:18:51.000To save the fish market, so they're going to get people to buy dicks.
02:18:54.000Right, so they make it financially viable.
02:20:08.000So we actually, because we got attacked by the World Wildlife Fund, we sent one of my, I had a graduate student from Hong Kong, we had to send him to go back to Hong Kong for the holidays.
02:22:56.000But it's so weird that in the face of new evidence that people haven't adopted, you know, this new evidence and they still cling, at least some people cling to those old ideas.
02:24:30.000You know, just the human animal itself is just such a strange thing.
02:24:34.000And the more you study it, the more you go deeper and deeper into the layers of weirdness that we are.
02:24:39.000Yeah, and psychology is pretty good about finding out our average weirdnesses.
02:24:43.000We're not so good at finding out the really unusual weirdnesses because we can't predict that one out of a thousand behavior very well.
02:24:48.000We can predict what people tend to do when the bell curves tend to split.
02:24:52.000We can't say what some random psycho or genius or artist or whatever will do under those circumstances because that's not what our models are designed for.
02:25:00.000It's so interesting when you think about our interactions also with all the various animals that we've come across all throughout our life as human beings and that people have chosen some to cherish and some to...
02:25:20.000Some to take on as food sources and some to worship.
02:25:26.000Like, so dogs are great because we have great vision, but our noses and ears don't work very well.
02:25:30.000If we could have somebody around who could hear and smell well and is on our side, that's a huge plus, right?
02:25:35.000It's worth feeding that thing or at least tolerating it and it eats the scraps.
02:25:38.000And some of them, cats, you know, they're annoying.
02:25:40.000They don't like you, but they're good at killing rats and other vermin that would have, once we were agriculturalists, those kind of vermin would have been a real problem.
02:25:47.000They'd have been largely irrelevant when we're still hunter-gatherers.
02:25:51.000We domesticated those while we were hunter-gatherers.
02:25:53.000But cats, the best I know, is like ancient Egypt and these societies that are now storing grain and things like that.
02:25:59.000So those ancient systems make good sense.
02:26:01.000You're making a deal with an animal that can achieve something that you can't achieve.
02:26:05.000And, of course, you're living in a world without chemicals and machines and all that kind of stuff.
02:26:09.000But tons of them are just totally random.
02:26:11.000And in this culture, that thing is worshipped.
02:26:13.000And in this culture, it's eaten and, you know.
02:26:15.000And that sort of stuff is super hard to predict.
02:26:18.000Now, in studying all this stuff and writing this book, how much has this changed the way you just see humans, like as you're just going to the mall?
02:26:41.000And the little boy says, I got a Spider-Man lunchbox.
02:26:44.000And my son is like four, four and a half, and he looks at the kid, and he doesn't know who Spider-Man is because he hasn't seen the show yet.
02:27:58.000And then also cattle worshipping is very fascinating, too.
02:28:03.000Like the Hindus and all these different tribes and different cultures that worshipped cattle where other people just thought of them as food sources.
02:28:11.000And so, again, I don't know the origins of that, but you can imagine a system whereby, well, if you keep cattle and you benefit from them rather than eating them, you're going to get some gains from that.
02:28:20.000And we do know when you shift from being a hunter-gatherer to basically killing and eating stuff to being a pastoralist, so you have cattle or sheep or whatever, or to being a A farmer, you suddenly have to start taking on the long game.
02:28:31.000So humans are perfectly capable of envisioning unfelt needs no matter what kind of society they're in.
02:28:36.000But hunter-gatherers are living for today.
02:28:38.000And so it's kill it, hunt it, share it out amongst all of us, and then we eat it, and then we'll worry about tomorrow when it comes along.
02:28:45.000Well, once you shift to having herds or having land, that psychology doesn't work anymore.
02:28:51.000And so what's super interesting is it took literally like 10 or 20,000 years.
02:28:55.000We've got the implements in place to be agriculturalists, but we're not planting.
02:28:59.000And we're just grinding stuff that we gather.
02:29:05.000But part of it is you have to shift your psychology over and say, all right, I've got to stop thinking about eating, killing it, eating it today.
02:29:11.000I've got to say, well, all right, well...
02:29:13.000Would it be beneficial to me to keep this beast around and have it for tomorrow and drink its blood or its milk or whatever?
02:29:19.000And one way to get there might have been, well, let's create a religion that says we can't eat them today because that will solve it immediately, right?
02:29:26.000That's one way to look at it, but have you ever looked into some of the other hypothesis on the origin of cattle worship?
02:29:32.000I think it, again, has to do with psilocybin because the- Oh, that could be too.
02:30:25.000And that's a good thing for your society because you can drink its blood or its milk or whichever.
02:30:30.000You're lactose tolerant, whatever you do.
02:30:32.000And then that allows your society to grow.
02:30:34.000Was there anything surprising to you in writing this book and researching it and putting it together?
02:30:40.000Was there anything that really just had made you step back and go, wow, I didn't see that one coming?
02:30:46.000Look, there's a lot of things that I didn't see coming and a lot of times where I thought I had an idea of how it all worked and then I thought I would read a lot of more papers and I go, oh, that's not even possible.
02:30:54.000They didn't have that capability or whatever.
02:30:56.000What surprised me was that a big part of where this book comes from is that then colleagues would say, they would know I'm working on this, and they'd say, well, come give a talk at my conference on leadership.
02:31:06.000And I'd say, well, I don't know anything about leadership.
02:31:08.000And they'd go, well, surely it must have implications for that.
02:31:11.000And every time they asked me to do that, I'd say, okay, I'll give it a try.
02:31:15.000And then literally you sit down and you think about it, and you realize, wow, there are important implications for leadership or innovation or happiness or sociality, and I never saw them coming.
02:31:23.000And so it was literally friends of mine kind of forced...
02:31:25.000I had one goal, which is to just understand social intelligence and how do we become so socially intelligent.
02:31:34.000And friends just kept asking me to look at other things.
02:31:36.000And every time I did, there was an answer.
02:31:38.000Sometimes there was an answer that was easier to find and sometimes harder to find, but it was always there.
02:31:42.000And what that tells me is that there's really a lot of value in taking the anthropology and the biology and putting them together and saying, all right, where do we come from?
02:31:50.000And now what can that tell us about who we are today?
02:31:52.000That's an interesting sort of intellectual exercise too, right?
02:31:57.000A different perspective on the material that you're going over is somebody forces you into a little box.
02:32:03.000Like, tell me, you know, what's the influence on or the impact on creativity?
02:32:18.000And that's what's so fun about science is you can say, all right, well, let's see if it tells us anything that either we already know is true and now we could get new things that we would know about it, or if it tells us something that we don't even know but that might explain the way the world is.
02:32:29.000And both of those are valuable because then you can run off and try to test them and a lot of dead ends.
02:32:34.000I mean, that's what science is all about.
02:32:35.000But some of them will hopefully not be dead ends and you'll run off and test them and say, holy shit, now I understand innovation.
02:32:41.000What's interesting about this kind of material is that it gives you, me, as an individual, gives me insight in my own behavior.
02:32:49.000And I think it would do a lot of people, do all of us, some real good if we had a better understanding of what our motivations are and how we got to this point in civilization, what we actually are.
02:33:03.000You know, I mean, maybe it will or won't change your behavior, but at least it'll give you some insight into...
02:33:09.000And the thing is that when I find myself getting upset because you disagree with me about something trivial or even important like politics or something, and it takes a second you've got to stop and say, hold on, I don't have any privilege access to the right way to do things, right?
02:33:22.000And so the fact that you care more about X and I care more about Y doesn't mean that you're like an evil person and must be overcome.
02:33:28.000It means that probably we ought to be talking to each other and trying to find a compromise solution that makes things work best.
02:33:34.000But there's this automatic instinct to think that you are evil because you disagree with me.
02:33:39.000And so the beauty of this kind of, the more you know about this stuff in the past and our evolutionary origins, the more you know that literally we've evolved to do that because if we didn't do that, we were screwed.
02:33:50.000I'm a lefty and you're, you know, in my example, you're a righty and we disagree about this particular president, but fine.
02:33:56.000Let's see if we can both agree on a goal that will make both of us happy rather than, no, you're evil and all I have to do is overcome you.
02:34:02.000One of the things that I've really tried very hard from doing this podcast is to not be attached to ideas and to do that as an exercise.
02:34:10.000And I think over the course of the years I've been doing this, I've gotten way, way better at that.
02:34:14.000But it's just so fascinating when I encounter it in the raw form.
02:34:19.000Like when I go to a party and I just run into some guy who's a dad and he brings something up and I tell him, well, that's not totally true because of this.
02:34:26.000And then you see this, like, the blood starts pumping.
02:34:29.000And the heart starts beating and they're trying to look at some way you're wrong.
02:35:01.000And so now, even though I love the give and take of academics and I love to argue about stuff, I try really, really hard to keep in my mind, well, what if what you're saying right now is right?
02:35:10.000Rather than trying to just attack it, which is my automatic instinct.
02:35:13.000To say, well, what if it that you're saying now might be a value that I should actually be incorporating and not trying to stomp on?
02:35:19.000Yeah, and also just the ideas aren't you.
02:35:23.000You're you, and these ideas are just something that you're tossing around like a beach ball.
02:35:27.000Yeah, exactly right, and that's super hard to keep in mind because everything that we come to own, we get attached to.
02:35:33.000And if I tend to have my ideas because they tend to make the world a more hospitable place to build, then in a way I kind of do need to defend them.
02:35:41.000Because if you convince me, no, the way the world should work is whoever's strongest gets everything, well, I'm stuffed.
02:35:46.000And so I need to try to fight against a lot of alternative views.
02:35:49.000And I have to overcome that in my effort to find what the right answer is as well.
02:35:53.000So it makes good sense that our ideas are like possessions, that we have attitudes toward our ideas just like we have toward the objects that we own that mean something to us, to our family, to our group, etc.
02:36:04.000And the other side of that coin is if we, talking about the way things used to be, in a pre-medical world, the chances of you carrying different pathogens than I carry is reasonably high.
02:36:16.000Now if you do things differently than I do things, so you eat this food and I eat that food, Well, different could actually be wrong from my perspective because if I do what you've done, I might get myself sick because you've adapted to that thing.
02:36:29.000And so we literally, probably for good evolutionary reasons, came to view cultural ways of doing things that are different as if they're wrong because that saved us.
02:36:37.000That protected us from the kind of pathogen vectors that you've gotten adapted to but that I haven't.
02:36:50.000Do you think that with the access to information that we're currently enjoying, that because there's so much information now and it's so easy to get to, that perhaps there'll be more instances of people not becoming attached to their ideas and recognizing that they are separate.
02:37:08.000That you are just a thinking organism and what the facts are and what reality is, is just something that's happening.
02:37:14.000And you don't have to be personally attached to it.
02:37:29.000We could still be friends and all that.
02:37:31.000And then we could, when there's something that mattered, and no, this political strategy will make everyone poorer or sicker or whatever, then we could be willing to change our minds.
02:37:40.000Because in the end, I think we've got this evolved desire to latch on to these things, these ideas and values and...
02:38:32.000There's some weird motivation to stick to your initial statements.
02:38:37.000Yeah, so I think it's like Oliver Wendell Holmes or someone who said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin to small minds, right?
02:38:43.000But we all have these foolish consistencies because part of the problem is if I move around with the wind, you look at me as I'm a nothing.
02:39:51.000He does this work and he's one of the first people who pushed these ideas.
02:39:54.000And you can predict them by people's politics and stuff like that.
02:39:57.000And so if we all agree they all matter, but the problem is then we get into an argument where you tell me loyalty is more important than I tell you fairness or harm is more important.
02:40:06.000And then we're never going to see eye to eye in all probability.
02:40:10.000You know, with two humans that are healthy, that's an interesting discussion because why do you think fairness is more important and why do I think Discipline is more important than fairness, or education is more, or whatever it is.
02:40:21.000I think that when someone clings to this idea that this is the most significant aspect of human civilization, that's always weird, too.
02:40:29.000Yeah, and it's hard when they can't acknowledge other possibilities, right?
02:40:32.000And again, all these things are, I hate to say it, but they're like 50% genetic, right?
02:40:36.000Some of us are more open-minded, and some of us are more closed-minded.
02:40:40.000And there's probably good reasons to be that way that made your That made you successful under one set of circumstances versus another because, you know, extroversion, for example, almost all people prefer extroverts over introverts.
02:40:52.000But extroverts are all sorts of risk for disease because they're constantly up in everyone's face.
02:40:56.000And so in ancestral environments, it was probably pretty costly to be extroverted and you paid a price that introverts didn't have to pay when you got sick.
02:41:03.000But it's also like we gained so much creativity and insight from introverts.
02:41:25.000So I know little about it, very little about it.
02:41:28.000My behavioral genetics colleague insists that there's no good evidence among humans for multi-generational epigenetic effects.
02:41:35.000We know that they exist now in some animals.
02:41:37.000You can do the experiments pretty easily to get these multi-generational epigenetic effects.
02:41:42.000Can you explain to people what we're talking about?
02:41:44.000Yeah, so epigenetics is basically you can turn genes on and off in the simplest sense.
02:41:49.000And so environmental factors will matter.
02:41:51.000Like maybe when you're in utero, there's a famine.
02:41:53.000And that's a common thing that's looked at.
02:41:55.000We'll look at that in rats, for example.
02:41:57.000We'll underfeed the mother when the baby's in there.
02:42:00.000And that causes the baby's Methylation of some of the genes, I don't understand the science of it at all, but it turns some genes on and some genes off, and so a baby of a mother rat who was raised, who was in utero when the mother was underfed, will mature more rapidly,
02:42:16.000it'll eat everything that's not nailed down, and it'll have sex with lots more rats than a regular, than a rat that didn't have its mother starved.
02:42:23.000And the key thing is, that makes good sense because it's a way to respond to times of famine.
02:42:27.000Grow as fast as you can, reproduce as quickly as you can, because, you know, reproduction is a currency of evolution.
02:42:32.000The fact that you exist and live is trivial.
02:42:34.000The fact that you passed on your genes, that's what evolution works with.
02:42:39.000It's a great way to change with the local environment.
02:42:42.000And there's some very interesting evidence that then those effects are even in the next generation.
02:42:45.000So the child of a rat that was in a mother who was underfed will also have some of these strategies.
02:42:52.000I don't believe they find that in humans as well, people that have suffered from famine.
02:43:22.000So we know, for example, that if you're in utero during famine, males are more likely to be aborted than females when it gets really bad.
02:43:31.000Female fetuses are probably more robust.
02:43:33.000But if you ignore that gender effect, in all probability, those fetuses that could survive in a mother during famine might just be the more robust specimens, right?
02:43:41.000And so you might just be calling out the people who wouldn't have lived as long.
02:43:46.000You know, you don't do experiments on these things in humans.
02:43:48.000You can do experiments on mice and rats and try to find these things out.
02:43:52.000The downside is, you know, if you've read about a million cancer drugs that are really going to help us and they disappear, it's because it works in a mouse and it doesn't work in us.
02:44:01.000And the downside of these things is even mice and rats differ from each other.
02:44:04.000And we're a long way from either of them.
02:44:07.000And so the epigenetic effects that they show, there may be good reason why we don't.
02:44:53.000That, you know, Steve Simpson argued in the early 90s that if you – he started with locusts – that animals are motivated to eat as a function of how much protein that they've consumed.
02:45:02.000And so the Atkins diet was the right idea but a misunderstanding of the cause.
02:45:06.000It's just that protein – we evolved to feel full when you get protein.
02:45:09.000We didn't evolve to feel full from carbohydrates.
02:45:11.000And there's a host of reasons for that.
02:45:12.000And there's a host of other effects that are going on at the same time.
02:45:15.000But the consequence of that is then when people's diets move around, you say, oh, look, this diet has this effect and that one doesn't.
02:45:21.000But you don't actually know what they've been doing because some diets are harder to maintain and they're cheating more or whatever.
02:45:26.000Someday we'll have much better evidence than all that.
02:45:55.000But at an ethnic level, it makes perfect sense because the people who've been eating different foods for a long period of time have to adapt to that, right?
02:46:01.000And of course, agriculture is only 12,000 years old total, although we've been eating cereals before that.
02:46:08.000And lots of societies didn't have it at all or only had it very recently.
02:46:11.000And so it's super hard for some people to eat grains compared to other people to eat grains because they haven't adapted either diabetes-wise or all the other kinds of things that can cause it to go wrong.
02:46:22.000Certainly with alcohol, that's a giant factor.
02:46:24.000And alcohol gets invented every time someone invents agriculture because all you do is you accidentally leave it there too long and it ferments, right?
02:46:30.000And there's an argument that we actually evolved to have a tolerance for beer rather than a distaste for it because once we're in early agricultural settlements, for the first time ever, we're crapping where we're drinking.
02:46:49.000And so what the data said What people argue is that we evolved to actually have a taste for it but a tolerance to it rather than a distaste for it, which makes sense evolutionarily because getting drunk with hippos running around can't be a good idea.
02:47:02.000Also, if you think about wine or any booze, the first time you drink it, it's disgusting.
02:47:12.000Tabasco, you know, lots of these spices have antibacterial effects.
02:47:15.000And so the mothers are giving it to the kids where, like, my mouth would be on fire if I ate what some six-year-old can eat in India or something like that.
02:47:20.000Wasn't that initially why they added wasabi to sushi?
02:48:25.000Now we live in a world where it makes it much, much more difficult.
02:48:27.000And you don't necessarily, at least in our blessed industrialized democracies where we've got good medicines, at least for now, they still work.
02:48:47.000I remember when I first found that out, that most of the major flus, like avian flu, swine flu, I didn't know why they were calling it the swine flu.
02:48:55.000And then I found out, no, it's from domesticated pigs, and it somehow morphs and jumps to humans.
02:49:37.000And so now scientists have to work double time to keep inventing new drugs to stay ahead of the game.
02:49:42.000With the exception of some things that just, for whatever reason, bacteria don't seem to be able to evolve resistances to them.
02:49:48.000Well, what's fascinating to me is not just scientists creating these vaccines and all these different medicines to deal with these diseases, but the potential of shutting off genes, the potential of altering the human genome and using things like whatever the future version of CRISPR is going to be.
02:50:05.000I mean, they've already figured out a way to stop certain diseases.
02:50:29.000We'll know how my gut's going to respond to it and how your gut will respond to it.
02:50:32.000Well, that's one of the things that 23andMe actually does.
02:50:35.000They do show what foods you'd be more likely to be allergic to and what things you'd be most likely to be attracted to.
02:50:42.000And that's a great start, but what we really need is the polygenic scores that tell you how do you process leafy vegetables, how do you process fats, how do you process all that stuff.
02:51:01.000So what those genes really are is genes to sensitivity to something changing in our environment, either activity levels or the foods we're eating or how processed they are.
02:51:11.000But that's what we're actually genetically sensitive to.
02:51:14.000Because all of us have the same underlying problem that evolution didn't really worry about obesity because the problem was the opposite, starving.
02:51:20.000And so we're not really good at telling when we're full.
02:51:23.000And there's interesting evidence that suggests some really lovely studies that show that really one of the key guides of appetite was variety.
02:51:30.000When you eat a lot less variety, that's when your stomach tells you you're full, really, much more reliably.
02:51:35.000But as you add variety to your diet, which everybody on Earth can do now, well, everybody who's got any money on Earth can do now, that actually you short-circuit the best mechanism we had to tell us to stop eating.
02:51:44.000Yeah, that's interesting, and that was an argument that people who are experts on nutrition are making about one of the more recent diet plans that people are using, the carnivore diet, is that just eating only meat.
02:51:59.000And there's a lot of people that are doing that, and they're finding that they're having all of these...
02:52:04.000Really rapid decreases in autoimmune diseases and rapid recoveries from eczema and seborrhea and psoriasis.
02:52:15.000A lot of people are saying, oh, it's the meat.
02:52:21.000Some nutrition experts are saying, more likely you're at a calorie deficit.
02:52:29.000And by putting your body into a calorie deficit, you're almost in a state of fasting.
02:52:34.000And you're decreasing your body weight, because almost universally all these people that are talking about the positive benefits of these diets, these elimination diets, and just eating one thing, one of the things that they're showing is they lose a shitload of weight.
02:52:46.000And so the thing is that I suspect you're right, that either they're cutting out what for them is the perpetrator and who would ever know out of the 4,000 things you eat, right?
02:52:53.000Or it's literally the losing weight and then hopefully they're taking multivitamins to make up for all the stuff that they're not getting, right?
02:53:03.000I've been following it pretty closely and I've had quite a few people on the podcast including really intelligent guys like Jordan Peterson is on this and all he does is eat meat.
02:53:44.000So some people really have, their tongue says no broccoli is really nasty.
02:53:47.000It's called the being a little baby gene.
02:53:49.000But the one thing I would say, there's this really lovely study done with amnesics, and what they did is they fed people a couple different foods, and you try a few, and then you eat one until you're full.
02:53:59.000And then when you come back to, I don't know if you know this work like Paul Rosen started with amnesics.
02:54:29.000And so what's amazing about these studies is then this follow-up study, what they did is they served amnesics or control people, foods that they sampled and food that they ate till they're full.
02:54:38.000So you sample potato chips and then you eat a tuna sandwich.
02:54:41.000And now I come back to you and say, if you're a normal and I say, do you want to eat a potato chip?
02:55:16.000Actually, yeah, that does sound good, right?
02:55:18.000Because now you're shifting and you're eating something else.
02:55:20.000And so I suspect that what guided our ancestors was the fact they had no variety.
02:55:25.000What's for dinner was not a question you ever asked when whatever dad killed and whatever mom dug up.
02:55:29.000Like, there's two things there, right?
02:55:30.000And so you're going to gorge on the meat.
02:55:32.000There's not a vegetarian hunt to gather on the planet.
02:55:34.000When you're hungry every day, everybody loves meat.
02:55:37.000It's not only eat whatever you can, everybody loves it.
02:55:39.000In every hunter-gatherer society, meat is a big deal.
02:55:42.000Someone comes home with a big kill, it's a big deal.
02:55:45.000When you can afford to be very well fed, suddenly you can start to think differently and even have different preferences, but you don't if you're a hunter-gatherer.
02:55:51.000And so literally, if dad killed a giraffe, you're just stuffing as much giraffe meat down the pipe as you can.
02:55:56.000And it makes sense that you would have then evolved, okay, you're going to get nothing new out of the giraffe you eat other than you're going to poo it out the back end.
02:56:03.000It's time to shut this dinner down, right?
02:56:04.000But if you told me, oh, look, we've got this other thing, that's all.
02:56:08.000Well, there's nutrients in that I don't already have.
02:56:10.000And so you could imagine getting hungry again.
02:56:13.000Well, it's interesting because that's kind of the argument that these carnivore diet people use is that that is the most beneficial food because that's the food that you look forward to the most.
02:56:46.000There's a jiu-jitsu family called the Gracie's that started the UFC and world-famous Brazilian jiu-jitsu family, but just a family full of killers.
02:56:55.000And one of the founders, I believe it was Carlos Gracie, invented this.
02:57:00.000He invented a diet that was basically, you shouldn't mix foods together.
02:57:04.000If you're eating fruits, you should eat fruits by themselves.
02:57:07.000If you eat meat, you should eat that by itself.
02:57:09.000And that in combining all these things together, your body produces a variety of different enzymes so you don't get as much nutritional absorption.
02:57:18.000I don't understand the underlying bioscience, but what I do know, the psychology suggests that you'll stop eating sooner if within any one meal you have less variety.
02:57:27.000So purely at a psychological level, we appear to have evolved to not want that anymore when we've had enough of that, be it a tarot root our mom dug up or a giraffe our dad shot.
02:57:37.000So these sort of evolutionary traits that are inside of our bodies, they would sort of encourage us to eat much more if we have a variety of different foods.
02:57:49.000Like if you're eating at a buffet in Vegas versus if you're just eating chicken.
02:58:08.000And the other side of that coin, so what Steve Simpson did, this guy who did the early study on protein in locusts, he took his biology students on field trips and he would doctor the food to increase the protein in the food or decrease it in the food.