In this episode, we speak with evolutionary biologists Brett Weinstein and Heather Hanington about their new book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: How To Lead a Better Life in a Post-Darwinian World, and the unintended consequences of progress, such as hyper-novelty, science and modern values, niche switching, and more. This episode is sponsored by Helix Sleep, GQ, Wired, and Wired's and Michaela Peterson s Mattress of 2022, also recommended by leading chiropractors and somnologists. Do not go with any other mattress company, I'm serious. I cannot tell you how much I love these guys. I've had my Helix for years, and recently when I escaped Canada and moved to Nashville, got another one. Being back on this mattress got rid of all the pain in my neck. It makes such a difference, it s like sleeping on a cloud. No topper necessary. And then you get a 10-year warranty and 100 days to decide if you like it or not to decide it, or they'll come get it free of charge. And they'll even give you a 10 year warranty and a 100 days worth of free pillows, no topping necessary. I'm looking forward to seeing you in Nashville on the 20th, January 20th. Come say hi. for tickets to my Q&A show at Zanies, go to Zanies. Tickets are available online for tickets, online for ticket purchase, buy them online for $200 + 2 free of course, no add-on necessary. Thanks for listening to the show! JBP Podcast, Season 4, Episode 73: Season 4: Episode 73, "The Dark Horse Podcast" by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Brett and Heather Weinstein of the Darkhorse Podcast, featuring the Weinsteins, "A Hunter- GQ Podcast by Brett Weinstein & Heather Hangingdon, A Guide To The 21st- Century" by Brett and Brett Weinstein. . Subscribe to our new podcast The Darkhorsepod on Apple Podcasts, wherever you re listening to podcasts. Subscribe to JBP. Subscribe on iTunes and leave us a rating and review on Podchaser, wherever else you get your podcast recommendations are available. JBP is a podcast recommendation, please be sure to rate and review JBP, and we'll be giving you a review on iTunes. Thank you!
00:00:01.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:00:52.000Welcome to the JBP Podcast, Season 4, Episode 73.
00:01:28.000You probably know our guests, the Dark Horse Podcast hosts and intellectual power couple, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hanging.
00:01:36.000Dad talked to them about A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, their popular new book that, Using Evolutionary Biology, explores why the most prosperous age in history finds so many of us more lost, divided, and miserable than ever.
00:01:52.000Brett and Heather are both evolutionary biologists and former Evergreen College professors.
00:01:57.000They resigned in the aftermath of the 2017 Evergreen protests.
00:02:02.000Brett has been on the Joe Rogan and Sam Harris podcast several times.
00:02:05.000He also moderated two debates between Sam and Dad.
00:02:08.000In this episode, Dad asked the Weinsteins about hyper-novelty, science and modern values, Darwin's mistakes, niche switching, the unintended consequences of progress, parenthood, Twitter, and more.
00:03:23.000Anyway, right now Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixsleep.com slash Jordan.
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00:03:33.000That's helixsleep.com slash Jordan for $200 off plus two free pillows.
00:04:10.000I'm pleased today to have some friends of mine on Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein.
00:04:16.000They're evolutionary biologists who've been invited to address the US Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education.
00:04:24.000And they've spoken to audiences across the globe.
00:04:27.000They both earned PhDs in biology from the University of Michigan, where their research on evolution and adaptation earned awards for its quality and innovation.
00:04:37.000They have been visiting fellows at Princeton University and before that were professors at the Evergreen State College for 15 years.
00:04:46.000They resigned from Evergreen in the wake of the 2017 campus riots that focused in part on their opposition to a day of racial segregation and another college equity proposal.
00:04:58.000They co-host weekly live streams of the dark horse podcast and are both quite well known to many people in my audience.
00:05:07.000It's a pleasure to have you guys here today.
00:05:38.000Well, in the many years that we were teaching at Evergreen, we were deploying what we call the evolutionary toolkit, which was a set of concepts that allowed people to understand the nature of biological creatures and the nature of they themselves.
00:05:56.000And many of our students asked us if there was not some way, some form in which we could provide them the toolkit so that they could hand it off to people who weren't in our classes.
00:06:07.000And events have conspired so as to allow us to write that book.
00:06:13.000We're very excited to finally have the toolkit in the world.
00:06:16.000So there was a broad question that was popping around in my mind while I was reading this.
00:06:22.000I mean, you do state in the book that it's very difficult to derive shoulds.
00:06:27.000So pathways for behavior from scientific facts and scientific data.
00:06:32.000But in some sense, the book is an attempt to, what would you say, extract out from biological knowledge certain guidelines for behavior, guidelines for thinking.
00:06:40.000And so it looks like it's in part an attempt to bridge the ought, the is ought gap to speak philosophically.
00:06:47.000And did you did you think about that explicitly when you were writing the book?
00:06:51.000Well, it is, you know, we do, we point out that the naturalistic fallacy is something to be avoided exactly as you just alluded to.
00:06:58.240You know, we, what we know to be true does not necessarily mean that that's what ought to be true or we ought to aspire to.
00:07:05.860But I think what we, what we do consistently in the book and in our teaching and in our lives is try to understand what we've been, who we are, and not just what we are evolutionarily from an anatomical and physiological perspective, but from a behavioral perspective and a cultural perspective, and thus make the most meaning that we can from what we've been to what we can be.
00:07:30.700Yeah, well, you talk about human universals, for example, and, and you speak about them biologically, sets of emotions we have, language, the use of shelter, the fact that we all live in groups that we imitate, that status is part of our, what would you say, psychological concern, existential concern, the division of labor, artistic production.
00:07:52.520And, and so, and so, and so, you know, you could, you could think in some sense that if that's what human beings have always done, that there's some, and, and that's what we are, in some sense, that there's some utility in having some respect for that.
00:08:04.940And that seems to be at least a tentative bridge between the is ought chasm.
00:08:10.020For what it's worth, I don't think there's really any conflict between what we've tried to do here and the obvious difficulty of extracting, extracting an ought from an is.
00:08:26.000Ultimately, they may not be defensible from a scientific perspective.
00:08:30.600In fact, if you take it to an extreme, it's difficult to establish a reason that existing is better than not existing.
00:08:37.860In some sense, that's a subjective preference.
00:08:41.460And it's one that it's not surprising we all share because we are the descendants of many creatures who have preferred it.
00:08:46.960But in an absolute sense, it may not be defensible.
00:08:50.080So what we do in the book is we inform the question of what ought to be with a scientific understanding.
00:08:58.540And we believe that any credible ought needs to be informed in this way, at least in modern times.
00:09:04.080And where we arrive is at the conclusion that we cannot, in fact, go back.
00:09:10.020There is no place for us to return to that would be sensible from the point of view of modern people.
00:09:15.300And we cannot go forward in a chaotic way.
00:09:18.300We have to recognize that there are many things about what we were that need to be preserved and updated.
00:09:24.520There are other things that need to be jettisoned and that it is that renegotiation of our relationship with each other and with the planet that is the focus of where we must go.
00:09:37.200And you talk at the beginning about the new landscape that sits in front of us.
00:09:43.420And you also discuss that in relationship to the human niche.
00:09:47.400And so one of the issues you confront very early in the book is this notion of hyper novelty.
00:09:52.300And I mean, I've been very ill for a long time.
00:09:55.620And so I've sort of woken back up and I have all this new electronic stuff around me that I don't know how to use.
00:10:03.800And but it's very, very hard to figure out how to make it work.
00:10:08.360And I know perfectly well that that problem is not going away, like it's going to be twice as bad in a year and twice as bad again a year after that.
00:10:16.000And so what what's this idea of hyper novelty in more detail?
00:10:21.560Well, at one level, and I'll let Brett finish continue on after I answer.
00:10:26.060But at one level, the book is an invitation to consider tradeoffs in all things,
00:10:30.460to recognize that so much of modernity has been amazing for humanity and has given us the level of comfort and productivity and connection that we have.
00:10:43.220And that is we do not forget that when we also point out that the amazing rate of change that we ourselves have created is itself deranging us and making it very difficult to understand how to be human and how to remember how to be human.
00:10:57.300So I would add that the the fact of novel technology, of course, exists in obvious forms in the types of devices that you're referring to.
00:11:08.680But it also fits well with many other things, novel molecules that we encounter, novel ways of socially interacting.
00:11:17.860And the problem is that although we are the most flexible creature that selection has ever produced, our level of flexibility is not up to a rate of change where we literally do not mature into the same world in which we were born.
00:11:33.620By the time we become adults, we live in some different context.
00:11:37.180And what this means at an intuitive level is that we do not know what to do.
00:11:43.300Our intuitions are badly tuned for the kinds of things that we encounter.
00:11:47.880And this is made particularly bad in the context of markets where our our intuitions can be hijacked to get us to engage in behavior that benefits the people producing the content, but at some cost to us.
00:12:02.940So we have to become aware of this hazard and we have to learn to apply the brakes to it.
00:12:09.700It's not that progress is bad. Progress is often tremendous, but it almost always comes with important unintended consequences and being aware of them is an important feature.
00:12:20.920Right, right. So so that's a permanent part in some sense of the proper political debate.
00:12:25.460Right. And so you think we face a horizon of of genuinely and truly unpredictable change.
00:12:32.420No one knows what's going to happen in the next 10 years at all.
00:12:35.820And so the the liberal types who think more, would you say loosely and with more associations and more creatively.
00:12:46.280They're going to produce solutions hypothetically to those unpredictable problems, but the conservative types are always saying, yeah, but be careful, guys, because your damn solutions might be worse than the problem.
00:12:56.740And so and so and you can never say that one side of that argument has the floor properly.
00:13:01.860You never know, because it really is unpredictable.
00:13:03.920And so if that debate between the liberals and the conservatives isn't allowed to exist in an untrammeled manner, we actually interfere with our fundamental problem solving.
00:13:13.840What would you problem solving ability, both individually and collectively?
00:13:17.360You know, when you talked about our our niche being niche switching, you know, that we and that's I mean, part of the reason that I thought that the hero story in some sense is at the top of the value hierarchy is because the hero story is about niche niche switching.
00:13:34.480It's about the transformation of viewpoints.
00:13:37.420And so, well, what should all viewpoints be subject to the transformation of viewpoints when necessary?
00:13:44.340And I thought that dovetailed with this idea of niche switching being one of human beings prime.
00:13:48.980So maybe you could explain that niche switching idea and the niche idea, too, because lots of people don't know what that is.
00:13:54.520Yeah, well, so in ecology, the idea of a niche is that part of the environment to which an organism is best adapted.
00:14:02.360And most organisms have a relatively narrow set of environmental conditions, which includes both the plants around them, the soil, the, you know, the climate and the weather, all of these things, the geology to which they are best able to exist.
00:14:18.400And as they extend towards the borders of that of that niche, they do less and less well.
00:14:24.160And there's some area outside of it that they don't do well.
00:14:26.380And humans, of course, as is widely understood, have managed to excel on every continent of the planet that has plants, right?
00:14:35.680You know, we have explored everything successfully.
00:14:39.060And so we argue in the book that while it is well understood in ecology and evolution that every organism has a niche, the human niche is, in fact, niche switching.
00:14:48.140That that is what we do, that we are able to move from, you know, hunting marine mammals on the coast, inland to hunting salmon, inland further to hunting large, large terrestrial mammals.
00:15:00.320And that's just an example from a pre-industrial, pre-agricultural moment, right?
00:15:04.260We can imagine any number of transformations that humans have have been involved with.
00:15:09.940And this implies that we have a mechanism for swapping out our programming, which we clearly do.
00:15:18.260If you think about what happens as a population moves through time and changes what it does for a living, there's a mechanism for getting there.
00:15:27.720And we argue that this process will have unfolded very frequently around campfires as individuals come to consciousness of a collective kind.
00:15:37.140And what they do is they pool their cognitive resources.
00:15:40.200They do a kind of parallel processing, asymmetric parallel processing, where they share ideas and individuals with very different strengths and blind spots engage the same question.
00:15:53.020And the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
00:15:56.340That process allows human beings to literally bootstrap a new software program for their population.
00:16:05.800Okay, so when I was reading Jung's thoughts, so his conception of the self was an underlying mechanism that allowed ego frames to be transformed.
00:16:18.160So imagine at any point, and it's like this niche idea, at any point you're identified with your adaptation to a certain niche.
00:16:25.700But now and then the niche transforms, and so you have to transform or die.
00:16:30.360And so, but you're identified as you with that adaptation.
00:16:35.040And so that's experienced in some sense as an ego death.
00:16:37.560And then the question is, well, when that ego death occurs, what does it collapse into?
00:16:43.660And Jung's idea was there's an underlying structure that he called the self that is there stably across transformations of proximate identity.
00:16:51.460He also associated that, at least in part, with the voice of conscience, which was a voice that was telling you that your current adaptation, despite your identification with it, wasn't optimized.
00:17:07.780And many moderns, especially those of us who are spending so much of our time on screens and in social media now, too often conflate those two things, right?
00:17:16.860Conflate the ego identity with the self, if I'm remembering your use of Jung's terms correctly.
00:17:22.380And, you know, this is exactly the problem.
00:17:28.960Jung wrote an essay called Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious, which is one of the most brilliant things he ever wrote that is exactly discussing that problem and its catastrophic danger.
00:17:40.440It's brilliant, but it's very hard to figure out what it's about if you don't have this initial conception.
00:17:45.100And so it's exactly the problem for individuals and also for one individual assessing another.
00:17:50.600And so, you know, the way that we would we used to frame it in our classrooms without the Jungian framing was we're not going to conflate a person's idea that you may find objectionable with a dislike of the person themself.
00:18:02.300The person's idea is skating on top or skating on top of what their actual self is.
00:18:09.300But it's it's very easy to fall prey to that conflation.
00:18:13.440So the parallel you point out is actually reflective of an overarching similarity, an analogy between developmental progress and evolutionary process.
00:18:29.300And so what Jung is focused on there is a developmental analog of what we talk about with respect to lineages transforming what they do.
00:18:38.160An individual coming to do something different than they did before is involved in a process that looks very much like that and will have many of the same features as they update.
00:18:47.620Well, OK, so while you could think about that, too, is, you know, the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex.
00:18:54.360And so what that means is the prefrontal cortex is basically evolved to abstract out patterns of action in abstraction so that they can be assessed and killed, dispensed with with before being instantiated in behavior.
00:19:09.520And so that is that is, in fact, a replication of the evolutionary process in abstraction so that we can have our ideas die instead of us.
00:19:17.380And we do that in the political landscape if we're smart, right, because part of the debate is, well, here's a bunch of good ideas.
00:19:22.780We should act them out. It's like, wait a minute. Some of those might kill you.
00:19:26.720And you do a lot of that kind of warning in this book, right, because you talk about the necessity of creative adaptation.
00:19:32.120But the book is full of cautions about unintended consequences.
00:19:35.680And so, for example, you talk about and I hate this, all these gadgets we have around us.
00:19:41.060It's engineers. They're all autistic and obsessed with blinking light.
00:19:44.640So every damn thing you have has to have a light on it.
00:19:47.340And I finally bought a router where you could shut off the lights.
00:19:50.460It's like more power to them. But it's not trivial.
00:19:53.320You point out, for example, that we're not well adapted to sleep if there's any blue light around.
00:19:58.000And so we have these gadgets. We're very sensitive to even dim light.
00:20:01.820And so we have these gadgets around that are polluting the darkness.
00:20:04.660And, well, that's not nothing. And that's a good, really good example of an unintended consequence.
00:20:09.700Yeah, it's really it's it's not nothing at all.
00:20:11.920And I think, you know, we see we have been lucky enough to live in a space for many decades now where we could make a totally dark and mostly silent nightscape for ourselves.
00:20:22.020But whenever we travel, the the presence of at least one blue LED blinking somewhere in the room in which you're supposed to sleep is almost ubiquitous in pretty much every other room that we have been exposed to.
00:20:34.840And that suggests that right there, we have a likely explanation for at least part of the derangement of moderns right there.
00:20:44.420Sleep disruption. We know we need sleep.
00:20:46.480You know, we argue in the book where aliens to land here with the technology to have gotten here.
00:20:51.020They would not be confused by the fact that we spend a third of our lives in apparent dormancy because they, too, would sleep.
00:20:59.260Right. Well, one of the first things you do as a clinician to treat people with depression is to try to regulate their sleeping, because it's such a basic bio rhythm that if it's fouled up, then your entire your your emotional regulation deteriorates tremendously.
00:21:13.620And so these small, hypothetically small changes.
00:21:17.520And of course, light at night is not a small change.
00:21:23.300And and we didn't have light except fire.
00:21:25.940And you point out in the book that, you know, and this is Rangham's work, a lot of it, which you cite, you know, that we've probably been messing about with fire for something approximating two million years.
00:21:35.500And so nighttime fire, that's a whole different thing.
00:21:39.220But and well, you know, one of the things that's interesting about your book and the way you think is that you're using biology in some sense also to point out what we should be wary of, because it's going to disrupt us, our biological function in ways that that that might not be so good for us.
00:21:57.440And so it's health advice in some sense, even though a lot of it seems to be behavioral.
00:22:01.500Well, it's health advice in the sense that we are unhealthy because of all of this hyper novelty at virtually every scale.
00:22:10.700And so when you say that light in the middle of the night is not a small matter, we point to the possibility in the book that in some sense, wavelengths of light that tend towards day that include a lot of blue misinform us about when we are active.
00:22:27.660And for many of us, we may be able to tolerate that if we can get past the simple sleep disruption.
00:22:34.060But for some of us, it may be activating the dream state while awake and that the degree to which simply activating the dream state while awake would mirror the kinds of symptoms that come along with schizophrenia is conspicuous.
00:22:52.600Also, there's a question about given that we have these cycles of sleep and that we wake very differently under natural circumstances than we do under modern circumstances.
00:23:05.500It is an open question as to how much cost there is to awaking arbitrarily as a result of your alarm suddenly triggering your ability to interrupt these cycles immediately if there's an emergency, right?
00:23:32.400No, that's so interesting that so many of those technological innovations, well, this is the conservative speaking again.
00:23:39.100It's like you think you know what that thing is, but don't be thinking you do that.
00:23:43.900The existentialists called that alienation, taking a page to some degree from the Marxists and part, but in a much broader conception, which was, well, you're alienated from your creation in some sense because it has a life of its own.
00:23:58.460Because it contains way more possibility than you thought you packed into it.
00:24:03.240And that damn possibility is going to unfold across time in ways that you can't possibly predict.
00:24:08.420And so that's wonderful because everything is so deep and mysterious because of that.
00:24:11.880But it's also, it's like, that's a genie and you can't put the genie back in the bottle and you don't even know where the damn things are.
00:24:18.520We've actually managed to survive all this technological revolution, you know, and it's really something that we've been able to adapt to it so far.
00:24:26.820I mean, God only knows what Twitter is doing to us, for example.
00:24:30.140And it points to the hubris that we have, right?
00:24:32.880The arrogance of, of all of us, not just creating, but accepting all of the hyper novelty into our world, as if we already have a complete understanding of what humans are and what we need.
00:24:43.500And, you know, we point, as you know, in the book, to many past examples that now look laughable, you know, to doctors at, in the early 1900s, deciding that not only was the appendix unnecessary, but so was the large intestine.
00:24:55.440Let's just cut those out of people, right?
00:24:57.520There'll be a lot more space in there.
00:25:04.300It's easy with hindsight of a hundred years, but we have to ask, are we so certain that we've attained God-like knowledge now that we're not making any of these mistakes?
00:25:15.480And, you know, the fact that we're so damn powerful means we better be better because we're a lookout, you know, and this, we just have no idea what's coming.
00:25:23.680I was talking to a good friend of mine who's a brilliant computer engineer.
00:25:27.240And he's working on this damn thing that he thinks is more revolutionary than the internet.
00:25:31.820And he isn't someone who just says that.
00:25:34.080And he's already done this like five times.
00:25:36.040It's like, and I thought, oh my God, do we really need something more revolutionary?
00:25:40.040And then I thought, he is a wise person and he's careful, thank God.
00:25:43.840And, you know, no doubt there's 10 things coming that are more revolutionary than the internet.
00:25:48.880You know, I heard about like about three of them this week and it's really something.
00:25:53.620And I hope we're bloody well up to it.
00:25:55.840And, you know, one of the things I hate to like ramble on about Jung, but one of the things he did say back in the 1950s, which really, this was in relationship to thermonuclear weapons.
00:26:05.360He said, the most serious crisis facing us in the future will be mass psychosis, essentially mass delusions.
00:26:13.660It'll be psychological instability because we can't, we can't afford that and be this powerful.
00:26:19.760So you, you were talking about your friend and his idea and you said something akin to, I hope he's up to it.
00:26:27.400He's at least, you know, capable of seeing the hazards.
00:26:31.300But the problem is there's no level of wise that covers this.
00:26:39.360We don't really know it's full effects, but I think we can be pretty sure it's not making us nicer or better informed, even if that seemed like it might be a consequence.
00:26:48.280But if you imagine, I mean, I remember, you know, it wasn't so long ago that Twitter was a novel idea.
00:26:56.180And can you imagine saying, well, what will be the effect if suddenly everybody can, you know, say 140 characters at a time, anything they want at everybody?
00:27:07.240The idea is, well, what's the harm in that?
00:27:10.300Well, so we could talk about that a bit.
00:27:12.100I mean, because we don't know much about our linguistic function, we have no idea what the combination of 140 character limit, no censorship or social scrutiny at the moment does to the emotions we're likely to manifest when we communicate in that manner.
00:27:34.100Right. And add to that, add to that the the fact that we're not engaging with whole human beings, right, that that it's entirely behind a facade.
00:27:44.480Some of those facades are real people.
00:27:46.700You know, I know when I see a tweet from you that it's actually you who is behind that.
00:27:50.960There are other people whom I know entirely online.
00:27:53.440And I think I think they are who they say they are.
00:27:55.900There's other accounts that are actually anonymous and they're consistent.
00:27:58.780And I think they're going to be consistent.
00:28:27.120You know, so you're driving around in your car and it's a shell.
00:28:29.960It sort of looks like a beetle because the engineers hide the complexity from you because that's what you want.
00:28:34.420And then you see these other people in their in their shell beetle shells and you curse and swear at them like you never would if they were right in front of you.
00:28:42.000And that means that just putting that facade on them dehumanizes them to the point where you're much more aggressive than you would otherwise be.
00:28:48.940And so we have no idea how that works out in the social sphere, even even conversing like this, which seems like the real thing, you know, and maybe is close enough.
00:28:57.380That we don't know what that does to the to the likely emotional tone of our interactions.
00:29:07.940Your your example of cars is a great one.
00:29:10.400But one thing that we can be pretty sure is that if people treated each other in person the way they treat each other on Twitter, they would get beaten up with some regularity, which would stop them from doing it.
00:29:25.260And so the net effect might be that, you know, we would be nicer.
00:29:28.720And so the the suspension of the actual violence may cause us to become much more dangerous as we are trying to problem solve and navigate.
00:29:44.360But one of the things that you do see in interactions between men is that there is an underlying threat of physical violence that's always there.
00:29:52.860And you think, well, that's a terrible thing.
00:29:57.540But but by the same token, you can signal a tiny increase in the potential for that violence in a variety of ways by frowning, by changing your voice tone.
00:30:09.200So you just have to hint at it if it's a civilized discussion and it keeps it within bounds.
00:30:13.760And that's one of the things that I don't see so characteristic of linguistic interactions between women, for example.
00:30:23.820And I would just add to pick up on a point that you made earlier.
00:30:26.700You said the prefrontal cortex is borrowing from the motor cortex.
00:30:31.140Well, it's also specifically in mammals.
00:30:33.260The cerebral cortex is borrowing from what used to do our smell processing.
00:30:38.020And, you know, so as as primates, we're much more visual than the rest of mammals, which are much more focused on smell with it, with this increase in the size of the telencephalon.
00:30:48.340But what you know, what all are we missing when we're doing something that feels very much in person, like what what you and we are doing right now?
00:31:09.040But we know that we're in person with one another.
00:31:11.300There's little things about body language, about movements, about little gestures and facial movements that don't convey even over screens and certainly don't convey otherwise.
00:31:22.060When I was in college, I lived with like six ne'er-do-wells and a couple of pretty decent women.
00:31:29.760She had her moods, you know, and I swore that I could tell if she was in a frozen mood when I walked into the house.
00:31:36.900I thought, I know something's up here.
00:31:39.420And that happened like six or seven times.
00:31:41.920And maybe it's, you know, superstition or whatever.
00:31:43.700But I really think it had something to do with smell.
00:31:46.640And I also had this very strange experience when there was someone in my house that was pretty much homicidal and ready to go off that night in a very not good way.
00:32:34.400But it also, you know, one of the things about human beings is that we have really no idea what most of our minds are up to.
00:32:42.260And so you don't know what you're tracking.
00:32:44.480You could be tracking that when somebody is in a mood that they walk across the floor in a particular way where that floorboard doesn't squeak or it does squeak or something about their pattern of behavior has just been recorded as a precursor to something bad.
00:32:58.600And so it might as well be smell or that might be a metaphor.
00:34:59.660And to your point about small talk, I, too, have dismissed small talk in the past as something, you know, not not worth my time.
00:35:07.160And I think I've come around, as you have, it sounds like, to the idea that it's actually much like you maybe could smell or you heard the floorboards or something with your friend who was in an apparently homicidal mood that night.
00:35:19.040Small talk allows you to take the temperature metaphorically, literally, maybe of of the mood, of the interaction and get a sense for, OK, how am I as we go deeper?
00:35:29.860How should I play this? Like, you know, do I do I go in guns blazing?
00:35:33.200Do I take a little easy? You know, what what kinds of things is the person that I'm interacting with likely to be able to engage, able and willing to engage right now?
00:35:43.660So when kids get together on the say two kids of roughly the same age, get together on the playground and decide if they're going to play, they start with little and play that's below their developmental level.
00:35:55.300And then they both ratchet it up to their own developmental level.
00:35:59.280And if they're if they match, then they're good play partners.
00:36:02.260But they start, you know, with something that's actually quite quite beneath them.
00:36:06.560And then they also tend to evaluate, you know, if they're dealing with someone who is developmentally much delayed in comparison to them, they'll tend to find another play partner.
00:36:16.600And of course, we do that as adults as we as we make our progress through the social interactions.
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00:42:02.120So let's also talk about objections to evolutionary theory, you know, you biological essentialist types, you know.
00:42:09.560So how do you respond to those sorts of, and there is a danger, right?
00:42:14.300Look, there's a real danger that we should address here.
00:42:17.720We here follow the science a lot, and we hear these unthinking claims that, well, the science will just tell us what to do without any intermediation of such pesky things as politics.
00:42:29.360And so when people are criticizing evolutionary theory as psychology, they are to give the devil his due.
00:42:37.600They're also going after what might be a too facile tendency to say, well, this is, and since it is, I can make it should, and it's science that's allowing me to do that.
00:43:35.200One, I think there's a perception in certain camps.
00:43:39.060Very frequently, they are non-academic camps in which there's a recognition that there's something missing from evolutionary theory.
00:43:47.620And what I would say is we agree there's something missing from evolutionary theory.
00:43:51.740What we tend to disagree about is what is there.
00:43:55.240And from our perspective, there is a missing layer of Darwinism.
00:44:01.260In other words, the Darwinian story we tell about how a creature like a human being arises through this process is an incomplete story.
00:44:08.740And many people detect that incompleteness.
00:44:10.980The question, though, is, is that an indicator of some divine force, a force outside of physics, something like that?
00:44:20.100Or is it an indicator that there is a Darwinian process that has yet to be described?
00:44:25.840So I really want to ask you guys about your opinion about this, because that's a real crucial issue as far as I'm concerned.
00:44:31.520So as far as I know, Darwin outlined both natural selection and sexual selection, and he put a fair emphasis on sexual selection.
00:44:41.480But when biologists started to unpack Darwin's ideas for about seven decades, eight decades after he wrote his great books, most of the emphasis was on this like blind natural selection.
00:44:53.520And the thing that's so interesting about sexual selection, and I think this is true as organisms become more complex, is that it implies in a very non-trivial manner that consciousness is directing selection through mate choice.
00:45:07.920And so, you know, this idea that we have that spirit compels matter to emerge towards complexity has something going for it that seems to me to be deeply rooted in Darwinian theories of sexual selection.
00:45:22.940It's like, and you see this emerging in very weird ways.
00:45:26.440So I'll give you one example that you may know of.
00:45:28.540I don't know if you've seen that YouTube video.
00:45:30.420I think it's from a BBC Nature documentary of that damn pufferfish making a Mandela sculpture at the bottom of the ocean.
00:45:36.420It's like, it's like 20 feet across this thing.
00:45:42.840He spends four days making this incredible sculpture, and this is a bloody pufferfish.
00:45:48.000And then the females come and take a look at his sculpture and think, you know, well, he's kind of a creative artsy type of pufferfish, and he's pretty practical from an engineering perspective.
00:45:56.140And so, you know, he might make a good mate.
00:47:08.980So, anyway, we could parse the details of that.
00:47:11.400But the basic thing is, look, we are not dealing with Darwinism 1.0.
00:47:16.440We're dealing with Darwinism 10.0 or something like that, where the original crude haphazard process has built refinements that allow it to function much more effectively than it otherwise would, which is exactly why we say there's a missing layer.
00:47:30.820And as a placeholder for that, the terminology which I've used, which has gotten me in a ton of hot water, is explorer mode, right?
00:47:39.640The idea is, how does evolution 10.0 explore design space in something other than a haphazard fashion?
00:47:48.020Because, of course, a lineage that explores in a haphazard fashion is at a terrible disadvantage.
00:47:57.680Okay, so, and I first saw that the fundamental role of the patriarchal spirit in a household was something like the provision of a safe place for play.
00:48:09.440And then I could see children as experimenting with different manifestations of their physical being.
00:48:16.360That's in play, and that's relevant epigenetically, as far as I'm concerned.
00:48:20.040Because what they're doing is modeling potential ways of being in their play, and then they instantiate those physically.
00:48:26.540And I don't know how deep into the biology that goes, but it's not trivial.
00:48:31.500Because they are playing with alternate forms of being in play.
00:48:34.840And, of course, we are neotenous adult human beings, and we play a lot.
00:48:40.480And so, we've retained that ability into adulthood.
00:48:43.840So, take what you just said about play and epigenetics and extrapolate it to birth order effects, right?
00:48:54.200Birth order effects, which are either a failure of selection, because if there's some best way to be, then where you are in the birth order shouldn't affect it.
00:49:01.920But there's another way of interpreting it, a much better way of interpreting it, that says, depending upon what has come before you, what you should be will have been changed.
00:49:11.220And there may be predictable patterns in the way it will have been changed.
00:49:14.000And so, your point about a child exploring, your child is effectively exploring developmental niche space, which is altered by the siblings that came before.
00:49:24.840Yes, okay. And so, now you have built into your genetics, this is maybe a discussion of something like human potential.
00:49:31.140So, you know, when you go into a new environment, new proteins are coded for by genetic structure.
00:49:38.600So, partly you think up new ideas in a new place, but that isn't all that happens, is that when you go into a new place, there is new biochemical potential that's being unlocked within you.
00:49:48.200And that's part of the reason why going many places makes you, you know, more than you were.
00:49:53.360And so, that's deeply coded all the way down to the molecular level by the looks of things.
00:49:58.820That's right. And that's to your earlier question about, doesn't an evolutionary interpretation of what we are fake us to a preordained conclusion?
00:50:09.120Well, no, it doesn't. And part of the answer to why is this concept of reaction norms, where you can start from a very similar starting point, you and someone else, and end up in a very different place because of the environment to which you were exposed.
00:50:22.100And so, some of the examples from non-human space of this would be tadpoles of some species that, if they are raised among kin, they become sort of docile vegetarians with small mouths.
00:50:33.080And if they are raised among non-kin, they become carnivorous cannibals.
00:50:38.840So, I've got to tell you a story about that, if you don't mind.
00:50:42.360And so, when my daughter was very little, we went to a pool, a swamp, you know, on someone's farmland, and she collected about 50 tadpoles and brought them home, put them in an aquarium.
00:50:52.020And one tadpole lived, and it ate all the others.
00:50:55.620And then it turned into a frog, which she had for about three years.
00:50:58.480But I had no idea tadpoles were carnivorous.
00:51:00.800But apparently, if you adjust the niche properly, then there you go.
00:51:04.920So, I didn't know it was only non-kin.
00:51:07.560Well, it's different in different species, but it's a density-dependent response to the environment, density-dependent and kin-dependent response to the environment.
00:51:16.660And this suggests that, you know, just to say that we are evolutionary beings does not fate us to one particular thing.
00:51:23.340We have to be paying really close attention to what our environment is.
00:51:27.000And just one more story that's a bit similar here with regard to the bowerbirds that you brought up and play and explore modes,
00:51:35.000is that in one species of bowerbirds, where the males build these beautiful bowers, you know, much like palaces for the females to come by and assess,
00:51:42.420the males know as they build them, which direction the females are going to come through.
00:51:47.420And in fact, they, in some cases, sort of build the pathway.
00:51:49.980So, the females always come from a particular direction, and they actually build forced perspective, just like human artists,
00:51:56.260forced perspective into their bowers, such that from the place that the females will first view them,
00:52:01.660they look bigger and grander than they actually are.
00:52:04.920And, you know, this, again, is the way that males can modify what females will think of them and enhance their chances.
00:52:11.960So, let's think about that really seriously.
00:53:31.900But the problem is, what does good genes mean?
00:53:37.140Does it mean some general good genes, or does it mean good genes that will be good for her offspring where her offspring will exist?
00:53:43.720And so, if a male has gotten well-fed in a remote location, and then flies in and demonstrates that he is well-fed, it may indicate nothing at all, or it may even be counterproductive from the point of view of her searching for genes that will be well-matched to her own in the environment in which her chicks will grow up.
00:54:02.420So, one thing she may want to assess is, did you get well-fed here?
00:54:08.320And the thing about bowerbirds, we could go on for hours about this, but the thing about these bowers, which have no function whatsoever, they are not nests, they don't provide shelter, they just simply are these structures that demonstrate something, is that males will steal from each other.
00:54:26.280So, a male who is not present will lose materials, and his bower will degrade as a result of theft from neighboring males.
00:54:34.160He will also typically have a behavior like a dance, right, in which he will perfect in the exact location, he will dance around the objects of his bower.
00:54:44.500And so, if a female, let's say that a male does the worst thing.
00:54:50.660But let's say that a male flies in, right, or a well-fed male flies in from somewhere where food is abundant, and then he, because he's a big brute, evicts a local male who's built a beautiful bower, right?
00:55:02.500And then a female comes, and she assesses the bower, looks great.
00:55:06.560Then she assesses the dance, won't look great, because he hasn't practiced it there, right?
00:55:20.980Now, let's say that he flies in, and he gets the bower, but he has to stick around long enough to learn to dance around this bower that he didn't build.
00:55:30.200Well, he's going to have to spend a lot of time foraging away from the bower, right?
00:55:35.040And so, he may look well, but the bower may be degraded, even if his dance looks good, also a no-go.
00:55:41.620How about a male who's, again, done the worst thing, and he's evicted the local resident, and he flies in, he evicts the local resident, he manages to feed himself, but spend enough time at the bower that he can defend it and practice his dance.
00:55:57.160Well, then even though he's stolen the bower, the female is getting a proper indication that his genes are well-suited to the local environment.
00:56:06.020He's been here long enough that he's learned the dance.
00:56:08.340He's defended his bower, probably a good bet.
00:56:11.600So, even in the case that the bower isn't his construction, it might be an honest indicator of his genetic quality.
00:56:18.180So, one of the things, when I was reading evolutionary psychology and trying to parcel out, you know, differences in sexual attraction markers between men and women, I'll tell you a brief story as an intro to this.
00:56:30.280So, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, I had, you know, I had some success with women, but not much.
00:56:37.560And then I went to McGill and I was a graduate student and nothing changed really in the couple of months between when I was a, you know, senior undergraduate in Alberta and when I was a low-level graduate student in Montreal.
00:56:51.460But how attractive women were to me changed a lot.
00:56:59.800And I already knew that evolutionary theory there and, you know, that women are more affected by, let's say, social status in relationship to sexual attractiveness than men are.
00:57:11.200But then I thought that through too and I thought, no, no, women use status as a marker for the ability to gain status in novel environments.
00:57:20.540And so, like an expensive watch or something like that or a nice suit shows that you have acquired resources and hints that you still could even if things fell apart.
00:57:30.240So, it's not mere power or even resources, which it's often parodied at and sometimes understood as.
00:57:40.060It's a proximal marker for something much deeper, which is somewhat akin, I think, to what you're talking about with regards to the male Bauerberg.
00:57:51.880And I'll let you continue after, Brett.
00:57:53.400But status is exactly an honest indicator of the ability to have and presumably the ability to continue to procure resources.
00:58:02.980And, frankly, this is a part of the sexual selection literature of how, you know, most evolutionary biologists would have us discussing this that is quite unnerving and rather actually disrespectful because it imagines that female choice, that the females doing the choosing in all of these species, including usually humans, are just being frivolous.
00:58:24.160Or it's simply about status and what does status matter anyway, whereas exactly what you've done here is tying it to the reality of how good a potential mate is this going to be.
00:58:35.100And the answer to that is going to depend on whether or not your potential mate is going to be an active father or just, you know, provide gametes and then disappear.
00:58:42.800You know, what quality of mate, what the qualities are that you're looking for will vary depending on what kind of creature you are.
00:58:48.740But the idea that females are just being frivolous.
00:58:51.380Well, we could talk about status for a minute, too.
00:58:54.020And so, like, if you look at human social hierarchies, and this is true across the animal kingdom, and then you rank order individuals in terms of their relative status, even in relatively non-social creatures that have to occupy the same territory, those that have the best local niches have offspring that are much more likely to survive.
00:59:14.300And then there's something else, too, that psychologists have figured out that I think is right, that has a biological underpinning, which is that your serotonin system is more effective at modulating your negative emotion, given a certain level of stress, the higher you are up in a social hierarchy, because you're actually safer.
00:59:37.080And so, part of what that implies, and this just blew me away when I sorted it out, was that when you go after someone's beliefs, and they've used their beliefs to stake a claim to a position in a hierarchy, you're attacking the structure that modulates their sensitivity to negative emotion.
00:59:56.400And, you know, if you're hypersensitive to negative emotion, you hyper-prepare physiologically so much that you die way earlier.
01:00:16.540You have a set of beliefs that gives you a stake to a claim in a status hierarchy.
01:00:21.580And so, that's what we do as professors, right?
01:00:23.920We say, well, look, we have this knowledge, and that's why we get this niche.
01:00:28.460Well, then you attack, I attack the validity of your knowledge, then I make you out to be one of those fly-in bowerbirds that just ripped off the status hierarchy.
01:00:36.740And, well, and then that interferes with your emotional regulation.
01:00:40.800That's like, well, that's worth thinking about for about 10 years, that, I think.
01:00:46.680Yeah, well, I think one thing that is true is that our modern environment and our mismatch, our evolutionary mismatch with it obscures all of the elaborate logic that undergirds the relationship of a normal creature and its environment or would have characterized our ancestors in any of the environments from which they came.
01:01:10.360And so, it's very easy to look, for example, at modern human females and see that there's a preoccupation with the level of wealth and status of potential mates and to read something superficial into it.
01:01:29.000But the point is, no, this is about deadly serious stuff, and it may not be deadly serious stuff in the modern environment, but the point is the sensitivity to those things has everything to do with females in a past environment sussing out small differences that had large evolutionary implications for their lineage going forward.
01:01:48.760Well, I think that your notion of niche transformation, niche switching there, so imagine that partly what the woman is trying to do is use markers of proximal success as an indicator of niche switching capacity.
01:02:04.280Now, they're inadequate markers, and that's partly why they can be criticized, you know, and they're no more accurate than the claim that just because you're rich, you're good.
01:02:14.180But it doesn't, but status is not exactly wealth, although wealth is a proxy for status, status is more subtle, and, but symbols of wealth are pretty good instantaneous proxies for status.
01:02:29.140Like, they're subject to all sorts of flaws, and they're not sufficient, but, you know, you have to screen most people out, so you need simple markers to begin with.
01:02:39.240So, Heather, let me ask you, how do you view, as both as someone who's female and as someone who's an evolutionary biologist, how do you conceptualize the difference in status hierarchies in human females and human males?
01:02:53.120I'd really be interested to hear that.
01:02:54.940Yeah, well, this too could go on for 10 years.
01:02:57.460We are one of very few species that has hierarchies in females and hierarchies in males.
01:03:04.180Other species tend to have one or the other.
01:03:06.680There may be a couple, maybe Japanese macaques, if memory serves, that have both.
01:03:12.380But in those few species that have both and in all of the species that have one or the other, the hierarchies are created and maintained via different means.
01:03:21.100And, you know, there's variation, of course, but in general, the hierarchy in males in other species and men in humans is through overt means, through fairly direct claims.
01:03:35.360Sometimes it's physical, but usually the physicality is under the surface, right?
01:03:39.360It's, you know, it's there as a possibility.
01:03:41.320Maybe you want to call it a threat, but usually things don't get physical as men are deciding what the hierarchy actually is.
01:03:48.980But there's direct confrontation of a linguistic sort, of a gestural sort, of a, oh, you're doing that?
01:04:02.340And so maybe that could be seen as sort of an end run around the direct provocation.
01:04:07.360But there's very rarely with men, and, you know, maybe this is changing in modern times.
01:04:12.920But if man A is interested in critiquing man B, he's very unlikely to say, I'm going to take this to man C first.
01:04:22.760I'm going to go talk to our joint friend before I take it directly to the guy with whom I have an issue.
01:04:31.260Whereas, so that's, you know, that tends to be overt, and female hierarchies tend to be covert in nature.
01:04:37.400And, you know, this probably originates in part through the fact that even though we seem to be moving more and more towards a monogamous mating system,
01:04:47.040and we are therefore losing our sexual dimorphism in humans, we still are sexually dimorphic and are still, on average, smaller and less muscular and less powerful.
01:04:56.780And so, you know, the ability to back up disagreement with the threat of physicality would have been less successful, certainly engaging with men.
01:05:08.840And so we're more likely, women are more likely to use social signals and covert signals and less direct signals to assess and to change what the hierarchy is.
01:05:20.440And there's a ton more to say, but maybe I'll leave it at that for the moment.
01:05:25.360You have a chapter on sex and gender, and that would be fun to talk about.
01:05:29.040So, first of all, I'm really curious about if you think those terms are importantly different, and if they are, why, and what they both mean if they're different.
01:05:43.700They are different, but the way in which they relate, actually, you can deduce from the Omega principle, which we haven't talked about yet.
01:05:54.500But essentially, the way of conceptualizing it is, Heather and I say this slightly differently, but I would say that gender is the software of sex.
01:06:06.040And I tend to say that gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex.
01:06:09.280And what this means is that these things are housed at a different level.
01:06:15.520What it does not mean is that they are pointed towards different objectives.
01:06:19.100So the Omega principle, which is one of the important principles that undergirds the logic of the book, is that epigenetic phenomena, including culture and all of the software layer, is more flexible than genes and therefore more rapidly adapting.
01:06:36.600But it is also subordinate to the genes in terms of objective, because genes are in a perfect position to shut down anything behavioral or cognitive that does not serve their interests, which it won't do instantaneously, but over generations it will.
01:06:53.560So what we find is gender has to be serving the interests of the genes, and therefore sex and gender should be pointed in the same direction.
01:07:01.360Now, there's a lot of variation in the gender layer, but it is not a completely independent phenomenon.
01:07:08.240It is not superior to the underlying genetics.
01:07:13.140So let me ask you about that in terms of personality then, because I've been thinking a lot about the sex and gender issue, you know, the idea that there's an infinite number of genders.
01:07:21.320You know, I like to give the devil his due as much as I possibly can, and one of the things you do see in the personality literature in psychology, which is reasonably well developed, right?
01:07:31.960I mean, we have a pretty good model of human personality, five basic personality traits, maybe they're subdivisable into two sub-traits each, so that's ten.
01:07:43.500Reality only has four dimensions of variability.
01:07:45.600So what you see is that there are reliable differences between men and women in aggregate in personality, and one of the big differences is that women are about half a standard deviation more sensitive to negative emotion, and they're about half a standard deviation more agreeable, so more compassionate and polite.
01:08:07.440And you can, it's not that hard to point out that, well, that might be a logical consequence of sexual dimorphism, so women should be a bit more sensitive to threat because they're a bit smaller, but also that they have to, I don't think human adult female personality is adapted to human adult females.
01:08:26.640I think it's adapted to female infant dyads, and a female infant, because here's why, you don't see those personality differences emerge till puberty.
01:08:37.180Now, that's also when you get sexual dimorphism, but boys and girls under 12, 11, they're not different in terms of sensitivity to negative emotion, but then puberty hits and the transformation seems permanent.
01:08:49.540And so, it makes sense to me that a creature that has an infant is going to be more sensitive to negative emotion, and also what has to be more agreeable, more compassionate, because, well, it's an infant, right, and compassion is the right emotion for someone under nine months of age.
01:09:06.780It's just compassion, because, well, they're born so young, right, we have a very short gestation period, and so they're completely helpless, so of course it's compassion.
01:09:16.560Okay, so now, having said those differences exist, and there's some other ones, but they're more trivial, there are lots of women who have male personality patterns.
01:09:27.400So, you find women who are low in negative emotion and low in agreeableness.
01:09:32.340They're quite masculine that way, and there are men who are quite feminine in their personality characteristics.
01:09:38.420And then you could also say, well, insofar as personality is associated with gender, well, there is tremendous 10-dimensional variation.
01:09:47.480And so, the idea that gender is fluid in some sense, and that it's, you know, not exactly tied to the underlying sexual structure, there's some, when it's not pushed too far, when it's not political in its intent, there's some validity to the claim.
01:10:03.000So, what do you think about that biologically?
01:10:05.200Yeah, no, I think this is exactly right.
01:10:07.320I would, before I answer that, though, I would say that no woman who had ever brought a child to term would claim that gestation was short in humans.
01:10:30.640We have, you know, we are a binarily sexually reproducing species with two and only two types of gametes.
01:10:36.420The intermediate type of gamete, which has a little bit of cytoplasm and kind of moves around a little bit, you know, a little bit eggy and a little bit spermy, doesn't work.
01:10:44.020There's lots of good reasons for this.
01:10:45.580But the evolution of anisogamy, the two different types of gametes, is well understood from both a theoretical perspective and it just manifests, right, in plants and animals, right?
01:11:10.440But, you know, we see the same kinds of sort of, I don't know, cultural behavioral manifestation of sex, even in plants, even with regard to eggs being more choosy than pollen in plants with regard to who to mate with.
01:11:24.120So, of course, there will be a greater manifestation of ways to engage the world when you're talking about, say, the behavioral manifestation of what your underlying sex is, than there will be for what your actual sex is.
01:11:38.780And, you know, I say that as someone who is gender non-conforming and who was never confused about whether or not I was a girl.
01:11:45.280You know, this is the conflation these days, right?
01:12:03.140I thought that gender was fluid and that it isn't binary.
01:12:06.940It's like, how come it's linked to sex so tightly all of a sudden when we're talking about, you know, non-stereotypical manifestations of behavior?
01:12:16.860I mean, the idea, you know, growing up in the 70s, I was a girl who didn't like dresses, and the idea that that made me a boy would have been considered completely anathema to the second wave feminists among whom I was growing up, right?
01:12:29.760I was just a girl who liked to get myself dirty and play in the dirt and go look for salamanders.
01:12:38.660So, you know, being interested in things that are maybe more likely to be things that boys are interested in is awesome, and it is a hallmark of modernity that we can embrace such children.
01:12:49.960And same thing for boys who are interested in things that have traditionally been more likely to be things that girls were either natively interested in or encouraged to be interested in.
01:12:58.000But it doesn't change the underlying sex at all.
01:13:01.000When my son was young, three years old, that about that, my daughter, who's about four and a half, and her friends used to get together, and they'd dress him up as a princess or a fairy, and then he'd prance around the house.
01:13:11.820And he's quite a masculine boy, by the way, and this actually bothered me, you know?
01:13:15.860And so I sat down and thought about it for a long time because, well, I didn't know why it bothered me exactly.
01:13:21.600And then I came to the conclusion that, well, wait a second, you know, because I didn't want him to get confused.
01:13:28.720And some of it was probably, like, arbitrary northern Alberta prejudice or who the hell knows.
01:13:33.380But what I realized was that if I interfered with this in any way, that's raised eyebrows or any of that nonverbal stuff, I would be sending a message to my son that playing at being a girl is wrong.
01:13:46.940And what that meant was that I was telling him that embodying and understanding what it meant to be female was unethical.
01:13:55.380And so when you see that sort of gender crossing play take place with kids, especially at that age, you should, you know, take somewhat of a hands-off approach and understand that they are, one of the ways I know who you are is to act you out, to play you out, and to imitate you.
01:14:14.360And then you get the kind of divisions between the genders, let's say, or the sexes that aren't good.
01:14:21.560You can interfere with that very young.
01:14:23.220So it goes to your earlier point about children effectively exploring epigenetic space and discovering who they are.
01:14:32.860And the fact is, you can start with a perfectly random approach to that, right?
01:14:37.780I'm going to try being anything at all.
01:14:40.080And the point is certain things land somewhere where there's something useful to be done, and other things don't land at all.
01:14:45.840And some things are fun for five minutes.
01:14:47.640And, you know, Heather points out, I think it's a lovely point that, you know, we don't rush to get the child who declares themselves a dinosaur to the transition clinic, right?
01:15:01.460And the fact is, we know enough, or at least, you know, as Douglas Murray might say, we knew until five minutes ago that kids should be allowed to try out different gender stuff.
01:15:16.520My granddaughter, she watched Pocahontas a lot, and she had a Pocahontas doll.
01:15:23.620And she insisted for about a year and a half, when she was, I think, three, that she was Pocahontas.
01:15:29.700If you asked her if she was Pocahontas or Ellie, she has two names, Ellie or Scarlett, she would insist that she was Pocahontas for a long time.
01:15:38.180And I thought that was remarkable, you know, that she'd caught something out of that movie that attracted her so much that she was trying to embody that spirit.
01:15:46.080And, well, that is the point of these sorts of animated movies, is to put that spirit forward.
01:17:19.920But this actually goes to a point that you and I have been dancing around forever, Jordan, which is the point about to which level, to what level are these very ancient things effectively timeless?
01:17:35.660And to what level are these things in need of change because we now face an environment for which they were not built?
01:17:43.840And so the hero's journey, I would argue, just painting with a broad brush.
01:17:50.020What does the hero's journey look like?
01:17:52.160Well, it can look like Odysseus or it can look like the Fellowship of the Ring, right?
01:17:57.860Those are very different versions of the hero's journey.
01:18:01.180And in fact, at the moment, one of the things that we need are stories that are not built by the market to fill some need, but that actually reflect the transition in what males and females do in the world.
01:18:17.080That in some sense, one of the positive things that has flown from birth control is that women, because they can now engage in family planning that works, are free to compete with men in every realm that isn't physical.
01:19:04.280So a student once asked me in one of my classes at Harvard, it's like, well, if these stories are archetypal, why don't we just tell the same story over and over?
01:19:39.240And so I'm speaking psychologically about the story, not religiously.
01:19:43.580So to bridge that gap between the ideal image, which is archetypal and universal, and the particularity, the way the Christian imagination solved that problem, was to say, well, that ideal was embodied in a particular time and place, which seems extremely arbitrary.
01:20:14.380You need new storytellers and you need effectively a process of selection.
01:20:19.760It may or may not be affecting the storytellers, but it affects which stories resonate.
01:20:24.360And so a perfect example of what we do instead of telling the same story over and over again is we tell a story in a way that is relevant to the current moment.
01:20:41.420The Matrix is the allegory of the cave.
01:20:43.900Arguably, the Truman Show is the allegory of the cave.
01:20:46.940And the point is, there are ways in which this needs to be, you know, we probably need an updated version of 1984 because we're living it again.
01:20:55.140And apparently 1984 isn't good enough to get us to recognize that at a level that will stop.
01:21:00.600So in any case, there is a sort of need.
01:21:04.180And actually, maybe this is the way this intersects with the book is hyper novelty is the out of control process by which the acceleration of change outstrips the capacity to adapt.
01:21:18.200That suggests that the pace at which the stories that we need must be updated is accelerating and probably too fast for us to get those stories.
01:21:28.140Well, you know, it's it's something here's something that's worth thinking about, too, in that regard.
01:21:32.700OK, so what drives innovation in computer hardware?
01:21:39.100It's the attempt to tell stories in to portray stories realistically, because that's the most technically demanding.
01:21:47.380I've talked to people who've designed these chips.
01:21:49.520Why do we need more and more powerful chips, given that our computers are already too fast for us?
01:21:53.460It's like, well, we keep building these virtual worlds and we build them because narratives think about the game market are so unbelievably compelling.
01:22:00.700And that provides the economic rationale for making our machines more and more intelligent.
01:22:04.280And so we are hyper motivated to solve that problem in some real sense.
01:22:10.480Now, how successful that is, that's a whole different issue.
01:22:13.200But, you know, it's just it's worth taking seriously.
01:22:16.260After all, we've all been told that politics is downstream from culture.
01:22:19.800So I certainly like your your point about it's the desire for the realism of the narratives that's actually driving technological process.
01:22:28.920Although if you complete that story at the moment, it may be alchemy, right?
01:22:35.760It's the mining of digital gold that is actually driving the hardware.
01:24:56.740Anyway, it describes basically niches and opportunities as peaks and the obstacles to moving from one opportunity to the next as valleys.
01:25:04.940This metaphor doesn't work as it was initially instantiated because we didn't really know enough about genes and epigenetics for it to work, but it can be easily updated.
01:25:14.040And the basic idea is, well, I would argue it has to be updated again.
01:25:19.480To think about a mountain range with valleys between peaks doesn't quite get it because if you're really in a mountain range with peaks, you can see where the other peaks are.
01:25:27.900But that's not how selection works, right?
01:25:30.140You cross into a valley because your opportunity is no longer good enough.
01:25:34.300You guys have to talk to Jonathan Pajot about the symbol, the religious symbolism of mountains, because it's dead relevant to your to your biological theorizing.
01:25:43.560Well, it wouldn't be because the perceptual landscape in some sense is predicated on the symbolic notion of a divine mountain.
01:25:50.260So you imagine at the center, it's like the fovea of the vision, right?
01:26:15.200It could be it could be convergence or it could be that Sewell, right?
01:26:18.780Somewhere lurking in his mind had religious stories that hinted at this and, you know, basically preconditioned him to see that metaphor is particularly resonant.
01:26:29.100Well, I mean, Brett has Brett actually is being too modest here.
01:26:32.520You have actually updated the model in your dissertation to shifting landscapes of dunes, ridges and plateaus where, you know, the selective pressures can yield lines along which you might be a most adapted form or, you know, an area that can fill.
01:26:48.740You know, and also volumetric and understanding where you can fill a space where in late comers may be less adapted, not because they themselves are any different, but because they're late to the game.
01:26:59.220So, you know, there's a lot to be explained.
01:27:04.180Yeah, because Pajot has been mapping out the relationship between the mountain symbolism in religious thinking and also the relationship between that and perceptual categories and cognitive categories.
01:27:13.800He's the only person I know that's done that.
01:27:15.360And he did that partly because he spent a lot of time talking to John Verveke, who's an expert in the cognition of perception and also interested in religious ideas.
01:27:25.080So then back to the knee switching idea.
01:27:27.880So imagine these mountains and valleys in the adaptive landscape in some sense.
01:27:32.960Well, you want someone who is at the top of the mountain.
01:27:35.280But more importantly, you want someone who can travel from one mountain peak to another.
01:27:39.000And even more than that, you want someone to travel from a lower mountain peak to a higher one.
01:27:44.400Well, so, boy, there's a whole lot here.
01:27:47.500One thing is that the skills that allow you to ascend a mountain tend to be in a tradeoff relationship, an important tradeoff relationship with the skills that allow you to cross these valleys.
01:27:58.140Right. And so, in some sense, those who are good at starting up businesses aren't necessarily the people who should manage them.
01:28:38.420It's related very much to the idea that you just put for different skill set in some sense.
01:28:42.580Yeah. I mean, he wasn't David most fundamentally, but yes, yes.
01:28:45.720Well, but let's just say that if all creatures are caught in this adaptive landscape issue where you can't see the other peaks and crossing happens,
01:28:55.300as a result of some process, human beings are in a special condition.
01:28:59.740And this is exactly what we talk about in the second to last chapter of our book, which is the consciousness, the collective consciousness process actually allows us to effectively debate and discover the probable location of future peaks without having been there.
01:32:28.940Sometimes something intervenes from the outside to disrupt it.
01:32:32.000And I guess I fear more and more that there is so much at stake in the sensemaking that goes on in these forums that something is intervening for economic reasons or reasons of power.
01:32:47.260That, in other words, it doesn't take it.
01:33:54.640It's so wonderful to be able to do this.
01:33:56.420And, and then you also think you just, you want to have someone you actually disagree with to talk to because you can actually play with them more deeply if they're being honest, partly because they're way more unexpected than someone you already agree with.
01:34:10.320And that also means that flow state can be deepened because you get farther, right?
01:34:15.340You get more novelty that gets incorporated and understood.
01:34:19.060And so that's really, that's, that's fun too.
01:34:22.240What you just said reminds me actually of advice that we got from Bob Trivers, who's one of the greatest living evolutionary biologists and who was our undergraduate advisor.
01:34:29.800When we were looking to go to grad school, he said, if you end up going on to being academics, going on to being professors somewhere, you should find a place where you will be regularly exposed to undergraduates because it's by engaging with the minds of people who do not already think they know something about your field where you will learn the most.
01:34:51.020And for him, although he didn't say it as part of what he was telling us, it was also part of the sense of play.
01:34:57.220You know, he was just an extraordinary lecturer.
01:34:58.940He had a ton of fun up there and, you know, we first met him as undergraduates and, you know, watching, watching him play indeed with questions that came at him from people who were engaging in good faith, but didn't know what they were supposed to ask was extraordinary.
01:35:15.380And that, of course, that's where we learn the most and where we can also have the most fun.
01:35:18.920Yeah, it's really interesting to hear that Trevers was like that because I know of his reputation.
01:35:24.760I mean, I know that he's very well regarded by psychologists as well, particularly for work on self-deception, among other things.
01:35:32.600So I guess I knew that you guys were his students, but it didn't quite sink in.
01:36:20.020But he asked us the day before he was to marry us up in the mountains of California in the Sierra Nevada, some questions, just like a clergy person would.
01:36:30.720You know, he really took this role on very seriously.
01:36:32.680This isn't something he'd ever done before, nor I think since.
01:36:36.360But he specifically wanted to know if we intended to have children.
01:36:39.780We were in our late 20s at the point we got married.
01:36:41.860We'd been together for a long time, and we'd never said anything to him about our intentions or not.
01:36:47.200And he knew that he would be giving a different wedding for us if we said no.
01:37:00.620I've seen very many couples that decided not to have children, and, you know, I thought you could have had some remarkable kids, and you would have been remarkable parents, and it's really too bad that that happened.
01:37:29.240They have a sense of humor like at seven months, and I don't understand that, and that's so funny.
01:37:35.440And they're always playing weird tricks.
01:37:36.960And then the other thing that's cool, and I think this is part of the theory of mind issue, is that, so you look at the world through a layer of latent inhibition, right?
01:37:50.580You don't actually see what's there, because your brain wants to take visual shortcuts, because it's so goddamn complicated to look at things.
01:37:55.920And so, you know, by the time you're 50, you've seen a million houses, so you don't see any anymore.
01:38:00.720But then you go for a walk with a two-year-old, and because you can adopt that frame of reference, the world re-novelizes.
01:38:07.240It's like a little mini psychedelic trip, and that's something that the infants and children can, you know, that's part of the reward they bring you for having to take care of them.
01:38:28.620It is a unique relationship, because, I mean, obviously, parenthood is very, very ancient and has nothing to do inherently with human beings.
01:38:38.020But the degree of what it is to be a human being that is transmitted after you are born through interaction, and, you know, not even explicit analytical interaction, but by modeling what it is to be a human being,
01:38:57.080and them extrapolating and them throwing out the stuff that maybe is no longer relevant or wasn't that useful as a mechanism for you and replacing it with something else,
01:39:09.120it's really an amazing privilege to be part of an ongoing transmission of adaptive information down past the generations.
01:39:20.460Spoken like a true evolutionary biologist.
01:39:23.620I think it's really funny that you got married by Robert Trivers.
01:41:33.200I think, and to concentrate on this issue of the sacred mountain, that would be unbelievably, I just saw a talk he did to the Union Society in Montreal that was just bloody brilliant.
01:41:41.760I'm going to put it on my YouTube channel.
01:41:43.300And so, I think that could be a killer discussion, the mountain idea and its role in biology.