The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 249. Primatologist Explains the 1% Difference Between Humans & Apes ｜ Richard Wrangham

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00:01:45.880 Welcome to episode 249 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. In this episode,

00:01:52.760 Dad spoke to Richard Wrangham about his time researching chimps with Jane Goodall,

00:01:57.620 what chimps can teach us about ourselves, and the role things like cooking played in the cognitive

00:02:02.740 development of humans, hint, we're meat eaters. Richard is a biological anthropologist at Harvard

00:02:09.220 specializing in the study of primates and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, and culture.

00:02:15.060 He's also a MacArthur Fellow, the so-called Genius Grant, and the author of books like The Goodness

00:02:21.420 Paradox and Demonic Males, Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. More specifically, they discussed

00:02:29.220 the impact fire had on human development, proactive versus reactive aggression, sleep darting elephants,

00:02:35.460 commonalities between chimps and ourselves, and different aspects of chimp behavior like hunting,

00:02:40.760 infanticide, friendship, and their mental checklist before attacking other chimps. We hope you enjoy 0.99

00:02:46.600 this episode.

00:03:02.740 Hello, everyone. I'm very pleased to have today as a guest on my YouTube channel and podcast,

00:03:11.920 Dr. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University. He's an anthropologist and primatologist,

00:03:17.500 and not only an anthropologist and primatologist, but one of the top, certainly one of the top people

00:03:24.360 in this field. I ran across Dr. Wrangham's work back in 1996. He wrote a book with Dale Peterson,

00:03:33.420 Demonic Males, very provocatively titled, A Study of Aggression in Primates, Including Human Beings,

00:03:41.300 and an analysis as well of sex differences. And I learned an awful lot from that book.

00:03:46.880 And since then, he's published two others, Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human.

00:03:54.000 Also, not a title that you would expect because it's not as if people popularly think about cooking

00:04:01.820 as something that made us human. So that was very interesting. It's a great book.

00:04:06.040 And then more recently, The Goodness Paradox, The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence

00:04:12.480 in Human Evolution, which was published in 2019. Dr. Wrangham began his career with Jane Goodall

00:04:21.200 studying chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, Tanzania, and began an association

00:04:29.020 there with Diane Fossey, another stellar primatologist who worked primarily with gorillas.

00:04:33.840 He was then a professor at the University of Michigan, and finally Ruth Moore Professor of

00:04:40.240 Biological Anthropology at Harvard, where he is now. He's also a MacArthur Fellow, which makes him

00:04:47.820 a recipient of the prestigious prize popularly known as the Genius Grant. And so we're going to talk

00:04:55.520 today about human evolution, primative evolution, aggression, the use of fire, and all those things.

00:05:02.600 And so welcome, Dr. Wrangham. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

00:05:07.980 Great to be here. Great to meet you. Yeah.

00:05:10.200 Thank you. Thank you. So I didn't know, or perhaps I'd forgotten until I looked into you

00:05:15.480 again this week, that you more or less began your career with Jane Goodall. And that's pretty

00:05:21.260 interesting. So do you want to walk us through your, how did your career develop? How did you

00:05:25.840 develop an interest in primatology and anthropology? And maybe you could also define those fields for

00:05:30.700 everyone. I love being in the wild. I love being in nature. As a kid, I liked birdwatching. And that

00:05:40.740 took me to more and more remote places. By the time I was 17, I spent nine months in Zambia in a national

00:05:50.280 park in which it was called Kafui National Park. It had something like 20 people living in it. And

00:05:57.160 together with its border areas, it was slightly larger than Switzerland. So it was a wonderful

00:06:04.440 opportunity to really get a sense of what it's like to live in the wild. And I went to Oxford University to

00:06:14.120 read zoology as an undergraduate. And after that, I wrote to Jane Goodall and said, is there any chance

00:06:23.640 of being able to work with her? And the reason was that I was just fascinated by animals that could serve

00:06:32.680 as some kind of entry into thinking about the way in which our ancestors had adapted their behavior

00:06:42.400 to their own problems of life in the wild. So I've got two questions that stem from that. So

00:06:49.640 what in the world were you doing living in that park when you were 17? And how did you manage that?

00:06:55.340 And how did that come about? And then the next question is, why were you convinced or are you

00:07:01.600 convinced now that the study of non-human animals is a useful means of shedding light on human behavior?

00:07:12.360 Two very different questions. So I told you, I just loved the wild. And I'd been on expeditions to

00:07:22.460 more remote parts of Britain in my adolescence. But I saw the opportunity to do more.

00:07:31.600 And I wrote, I don't know, a hundred letters to anyone whose address I could find saying,

00:07:38.320 could I become a research assistant joining you in your field of studies? And a guy called John

00:07:46.800 Hanks, who ended up as the chief conservation scientist for the World Wildlife Fund in South

00:07:51.280 Africa, was doing studies of elephants and other things in Zambia. And he took me on.

00:07:57.160 I was paid a shilling a day and just had the most incredible time.

00:08:04.360 So what were your living conditions like in that particular, at that particular time?

00:08:10.100 Well, they were very civilized. I mean, you know, I had a regular little cabin in a small

00:08:16.820 sort of camp that was ultimately destined to become a tourist venue. It wasn't really at that stage.

00:08:25.880 It was a remote area. You had to drive a couple hundred miles to get there. But of course,

00:08:33.260 we did go camping. And so that was a major thrill, you know, going camping in an area that was full of

00:08:40.660 really wild animals and no opportunity to call for help, as it were. You know, you're really living

00:08:49.400 on your own. So if you ran into wild animals, you had to know what to do. And in my first few

00:08:56.520 weeks there, I went for a walk on an inadvisable area and found myself catching up on a rhino

00:09:05.400 and was only stopped from bumping into it in thick vegetation by the arrival of, well, I was lost and

00:09:21.100 people were shooting rifles to tell me where to go. And so, you know, this is a little adventure

00:09:28.960 for a 17-year-old learning about self-sufficiency in the wild.

00:09:37.620 And you mentioned, were you studying elephants at that point?

00:09:39.940 I was participating. I wasn't studying anything myself, but I was assisting. And yes, so I mean,

00:09:47.320 this was very dramatic stuff because we were trying out a new drug, which has since become

00:09:53.300 a standard drug for immobilizing animals, mammals in the wild. Immobilon, it is now called. But at that

00:10:02.200 time, the delivery systems were poor and the doses were unknown. So we would walk up to elephants and

00:10:11.740 John would fire a crossbow dart into the elephant and would then hope that the elephant would fall

00:10:18.980 asleep so that we could take measurements, mark it, extract parasites and so on. And the amusing thing

00:10:29.580 in retrospect about this is that when an elephant falls asleep, it stands absolutely solid. It

00:10:35.980 doesn't necessarily fall over. You know, it's like a table, got four strong legs. And so then the

00:10:42.280 question is, is it asleep? Seems like an important question. Well, exactly. So instead of all of us

00:10:49.680 swarming up to it, one person, and I'm very happy to say that it wasn't me, was deputed to go up and

00:10:56.660 pull its tail. And since, you know, you didn't know whether or not this is asleep or awake, I think

00:11:04.120 this is very brave of John to do this, who took that upon himself. And so then it turned out that

00:11:11.800 he always got it right. It was asleep. And then what we had to do was to get the elephant onto its

00:11:17.360 side. And this involved four of us getting onto one side of it and pushing as hard as we could.

00:11:27.260 But this only affected a sway. So the elephant would totter over, as it were, to the right side if we

00:11:34.260 were pushing on the left, and then it would sway back towards us. So we had to run backwards and then

00:11:40.640 catch it again as it swayed further forwards and so on. Yeah. I mean, you can see what sort of thrill all

00:11:46.740 this was for a young aspiring naturalist. It sounds like a study that would be very difficult to get

00:11:53.920 through a research ethics committee. Yes. And rightly, actually, because in the previous years,

00:12:03.740 the person in my position had been killed by elephants. You know, so there were serious aspects

00:12:10.780 to this. And we did have to take what precautions we could. Right. Yeah. Well, I wasn't necessarily

00:12:17.740 saying that favorably. I mean, to gain knowledge requires a certain degree of risk. And I suspect

00:12:23.960 that's particularly true when you're out in the wild, observing wild animals. That's not something

00:12:29.060 you can make 100% safe. I mean, obviously, you don't want to be foolhardy. But there is the thrill

00:12:36.240 of the adventure that goes along with that. That's a necessary part of it, I think.

00:12:41.320 Although, by the way, when a woman called Nancy Howell had her son killed while she was doing

00:12:51.680 fieldwork in South Africa, or I think it might have been Botswana, she did an analysis of deaths

00:12:59.260 among anthropologists doing fieldwork and found that the major source of death was car accidents.

00:13:06.240 Right. Right.

00:13:08.600 So, you know, the roads are bad.

00:13:10.600 Right. Yes. Well, and car accidents are a major killer everywhere. So maybe that's a good rule

00:13:16.120 of thumb for danger. If it's safer, if it's no more dangerous than driving a car, which is something

00:13:21.480 almost everyone accepts, maybe that's safe enough. So, okay. So you got accustomed to this and you

00:13:26.980 found that you liked it. You went back to Oxford and studied zoology. And then you wrote to Jane Goodall.

00:13:34.620 Oh, I've got that timeline correct?

00:13:37.260 This was the late 1960s that I was studying zoology. And there were two writers whose work had sort of

00:13:46.580 really impinged on the public imagination at that time in relationship to human evolution.

00:13:51.320 There was Robert Audry, a playwright who wrote a book called African Genesis and another called

00:13:56.720 Territorial Imperative, in which he produced some bold sweeping ideas about how human competitiveness and

00:14:05.180 conflict had arisen from our time when our ancestors were in Africa. And there was Desmond Morris,

00:14:14.620 who wrote a book called Naked Ape, in which he emphasised in particular the sexual side of human

00:14:22.340 evolution. And what those books did for me was to say that there was a world out there waiting to be

00:14:30.420 explored of really understanding in a way that had not been attempted before where humans come from in terms of

00:14:40.080 our behaviour. Simultaneously, this was a time when the discovery of the social structure of all sorts of large mammals

00:14:51.120 was taking giant leaps forward. You know, the main study that I was doing with John Hanks in 1967 in Zambia was a study of the behavioural ecology of an antelope called waterbuck.

00:15:08.860 It's a very widespread antelope. Behavioural ecology means understanding the social behaviour in relationship to all the environmental pressures.

00:15:17.920 This was the first such study done on waterbuck. No particular surprise, because many of the first studies were being done at that time on animal animals, on lions and gorillas and many different things. So there was a sense of impending discovery.

00:15:26.860 And what happened even in the late 60s, but particularly in the early 70s, was the discovery of a lot of difference in the different species, even quite closely related species might have not just differences in group size and flexibility, but differences in their social relations.

00:15:44.860 In what at first seemed totally mysterious ways, you know, one species would have a society in which females all lived in the same group as that they were born in, would never leave, and males would come in from outside and they would never leave.

00:16:08.860 And males would come in from outside around adolescence. Other species, the opposite would happen. Some species would have females that readily mated every different male in the group. Others would have a society in which females would only mate with one male.

00:16:32.860 All sorts of fascinating differences were emerging and hints were coming through about how you could explain these.

00:16:42.860 So this was a very exciting moment, because when you combine it with the opportunity to think about humans, then we could get, you know, a long way beyond the kind of

00:16:58.860 very naive political science interpretations of human behavior. We could really embed it in the environment in which humans had evolved.

00:17:10.860 So that's a tricky issue, you know, because one of the things your work highlights, and this has been the case with other primatologists, particularly more recently, is that, because you just mentioned that species that are even very closely related can have radical differences in their fundamental behaviors.

00:17:27.860 And you highlight the differences, for example, between bonobos and chimpanzees, which are very closely related, and so then you ask yourself, well, if bonobos and chimpanzees can be so biologically similar, structurally similar, let's say, but so behaviorally different, how is it that you decide what's reasonably generalized to the human case?

00:17:51.860 And why should you believe that anything could be given, right, because there's similarities and differences between all of the apes, and so how do you prioritize the similarities versus the differences, and how do you decide when you can draw conclusions that are more universal rather than local to that particular species?

00:18:13.860 Yeah, I mean, this is the kind of stuff that we grapple with all the time, of course. And I think it's quite a long story, working out what we can say about humans in relationship to call it the other apes or the great apes, you know, so we have a very strange position as humans.

00:18:40.860 It used to be thought, it used to be thought, when I started, for instance, in the 1970s, it was fascinating to go and study chimpanzees, but they were just one species of great ape among the other main three, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans, that all seemed sort of roughly equally important for understanding human evolution.

00:19:01.060 There was the apes and there was humans. An enormous shock happened in 1984.

00:19:08.060 In 1984. In 1984, two ornithologists at Yale, Cacone and Powell, published a paper in which they used techniques that they'd been applying to the study of the evolution of birds to the apes and humans.

00:19:28.060 And this technique was to assess the degree of similarity of DNA.

00:19:35.060 So they'd worked out this DNA annealing system, and they applied it to apes and humans.

00:19:40.060 And they claimed that chimpanzees and bonobos were the most closely related species.

00:19:48.060 And then chimpanzees, bonobos and humans were more closely related to each other than any of them were to gorillas.

00:19:57.060 So that kind of put us in the chimp category.

00:20:00.060 Now, let me ask you, just there, I want to ask you a question about that DNA technique.

00:20:06.060 Now, if I remember correctly, the way that was done to begin with was to take DNA from separate species and to heat it so that it split apart.

00:20:19.060 And then to have the DNA from the different species joined together and then to assess how tightly bonded the DNA was to the between species.

00:20:32.060 And the hypothesis was the more tightly bonded it was, so the harder it was to pull apart once it regrouped, the more closely related the species was.

00:20:42.060 That was the first way of doing DNA similarity analysis.

00:20:45.060 That's been superseded, but was that the 1984 work?

00:20:49.060 Very good. Yes, absolutely.

00:20:51.060 And the technique was a little crude.

00:20:56.060 You know, unzip things and zip them together and see how tough they are to pull apart.

00:21:01.060 And that crudeness meant that people could challenge the results.

00:21:07.060 And it took maybe a decade for people to become, you know, the profession as a whole to become really convinced of these extraordinary results.

00:21:17.060 And the reason they seemed so extraordinary was because if you take the difference between a chimpanzee and a gorilla, they look as if they're very closely related.

00:21:27.060 They look so closely related because if you just imagine allowing a chimpanzee to just keep on growing, it basically turns into a gorilla.

00:21:37.060 And many of the differences between gorillas and chimps can be understood just in terms of body size.

00:21:42.060 Gorillas being bigger than chimps.

00:21:44.060 So when the argument is made that or actually the argument, I mean, just absolutely clear right now that that chimpanzees and humans are more closely related to each other than either is to a gorilla.

00:22:00.060 What that means is that the common ancestor of chimps and humans is very likely in the mold of the chimpanzee gorilla.

00:22:13.060 Either they're the same, very similar kind of animal, which if it was very large would be like a gorilla.

00:22:19.060 If it was very small, it would be like a chimpanzee.

00:22:22.060 Either that or there's been a fantastic degree of evolutionary convergence between some mysterious ancestor which had become more gorilla-like and become more chimp-like.

00:22:34.060 But no one thinks that that is the case.

00:22:36.060 Right. So the idea is that, and this is what, how long ago did gorillas split from chimps, hypothetically?

00:22:43.060 Is that like 10 million years ago, that sort of thing?

00:22:46.060 So the common ancestor of chimps and gorillas and the chimps in this discussion include us, roughly speaking.

00:22:54.060 So that's 10 million years.

00:22:56.060 And then 7 million years ago, we split from chimps and the bonobos and the chimps split 2 million, something like that?

00:23:04.060 Or one or 2 million years ago.

00:23:06.060 Yes, right.

00:23:07.060 Maybe more like one nowadays.

00:23:09.060 We're still getting an increasingly confident assessment of that.

00:23:14.060 But anyway, much more recently, long after we had left the chimpanzee-bonobo line.

00:23:21.060 Right.

00:23:22.060 And we might just also throw out the finding, I suppose, the hypothesis that Homo sapiens, sapiens, that's us, that we're about 300,000 years old in our current configuration, something like that?

00:23:37.060 Yes. And in between, we got the genus Homo, so the genus to which we belong.

00:23:44.060 And that emerged about 2 million years ago.

00:23:48.060 So you've got the common ancestor with chimps 6 or 7 million years ago.

00:23:55.060 And then between then and 2 million years ago, we had these animals that are rather like chimpanzees standing upright.

00:24:03.060 Australopithecines.

00:24:05.060 And they gave rise to our genus, Homo, about 2 million years ago.

00:24:09.060 And ever since then, our ancestors have basically looked like us.

00:24:12.060 Basically, in the sense that you could take the earliest Homo, Homo, true Homo, Homo erectus, and they could walk into a clothing store on Main Street and pick clothes off the peg.

00:24:27.060 And they wouldn't, they'd fit reasonably well.

00:24:30.060 They'd be, you know, they'd need the big size, heavily muscled, but nevertheless.

00:24:36.060 Right, and we can estimate the difference, we can estimate when these different species split from one another by looking at the degree of genetic difference and inferring the split from such things as divergent mutations, because we know that mutations occur at a fairly standard rate.

00:25:00.180 Is that, is that, and then there's obviously fossil dating, but what other techniques are used to estimate the divergent states?

00:25:09.180 Yeah, the more recent times, obviously we've got the fossils.

00:25:14.180 So, you know, we have a very good fossil record back to more than 2 million years ago.

00:25:19.180 And we can be very confident that our ancestors were indeed Homo erectus, which, as I say, was the first thing that was fully bipedal in the human style, going back to 2 million years ago.

00:25:33.180 And then, then we got a pretty good record, but obviously the older you go, the more broken it is, but of the Australopithecines.

00:25:42.180 And by the time we get to 3, 4 million years ago, it's getting increasingly broken.

00:25:49.180 But nevertheless, there's half a dozen different species and more that have been recognized in the African habitats.

00:25:58.180 And then by the time you're asking the question about when it was that you have chimpanzees and humans as a common ancestor,

00:26:11.180 there you do have to rely on genetic data, as you say, the rate at which mutations accumulate,

00:26:18.180 because we do not have any good fossil evidence for that animal.

00:26:24.180 And the reason for that is partly just it's getting old and also probably because it would have lived in a forest.

00:26:33.180 And forests don't preserve bones well.

00:26:37.180 You know, they tend to be too acid and the bones just decay very quickly.

00:26:41.180 But I bet eventually someone will find a pretty good, you know, something close to the chimpanzee human common ancestor.

00:26:51.180 So, 10 million years. Okay, so let's go back to the biography.

00:26:55.180 Now, you came out of Africa, you studied zoology, you wrote to Jane Goodall,

00:27:00.180 and you told her about your experiences in Africa, so she knew that you could probably handle it.

00:27:05.180 And by that time you had an undergraduate degree?

00:27:08.180 I did, that's right.

00:27:10.180 So, you started working with her in Tanzania?

00:27:14.180 Tanzania?

00:27:15.180 Tanzania.

00:27:16.180 Tanzania.

00:27:17.180 Yes.

00:27:18.180 In 1970, yeah.

00:27:19.180 In 1970.

00:27:20.180 So, what was that like?

00:27:22.180 And what was it like to work for her?

00:27:24.180 And what were you doing during that period of time?

00:27:27.180 For my first year, I was a research assistant to her.

00:27:31.180 I was just learning the job.

00:27:33.180 And I would say that within about 20 minutes of seeing my first chimpanzee in the wild,

00:27:39.180 I recognized that there was a mind in that animal that was different from that of a waterbuck.

00:27:45.180 You know, this is not just an antelope.

00:27:49.180 And it's difficult to say exactly what's going on, you know, but there's something about the use of eyes

00:27:54.180 and something about, you know, the way that they're evidently concocting strategies

00:28:01.180 that very rapidly tells you that you're dealing with an animal that is like other animals,

00:28:08.180 but also is cognitively, you know, quite sophisticated.

00:28:13.180 And of course, that makes it incredibly interesting.

00:28:16.180 Now, this is 1970.

00:28:18.180 This is long before I had any kind of concept that we were looking at a good model of the human ancestor.

00:28:25.180 So this was just, you know, another A.

00:28:28.180 But here's what was so amazing.

00:28:31.180 You know, I happened to arrive there at a time when some very fundamental discoveries were being made.

00:28:39.180 Jane Goodall had already discovered that chimpanzees had very strong relationships among males, very, very brotherly, very fraternal relationships,

00:28:54.180 somewhat recalling the kind of thing that you can see in, I don't know, fraternities in contemporary humans.

00:29:06.180 She discovered that, amazingly, they would go hunting and would kill antelope, pigs, baboons, other monkeys, and eat them.

00:29:22.180 She discovered that they would share the meat.

00:29:25.180 They valued meat.

00:29:26.180 They valued meat.

00:29:27.180 They valued meat to eat.

00:29:29.180 But they would also share it a little bit.

00:29:32.180 And by the time you're racking up these male bondings, the meat eating, the meat sharing, this is looking extraordinarily human-like.

00:29:45.180 No other animal does these things.

00:29:46.180 And did they share for sexual favors, the chimps?

00:29:50.180 Did she discover that, that the males would give meat to the females?

00:29:54.180 I can't remember if I'm remembering that correctly.

00:29:56.180 Well, you may indeed remember what you read.

00:30:00.180 Some colleagues and I have published a paper saying we don't believe that for a minute, that it does not look to us as though any of the evidence that has been brought forward in favor of the idea that chimpanzees, that male chimpanzees will give meat to females in order to get them to mate.

00:30:19.180 None of that evidence is good.

00:30:21.180 Right.

00:30:22.180 That's pretty sophisticated behavior, and it would imply some knowledge of trading with future gain in mind, it would seem to me.

00:30:31.180 I don't think the problem of sophistication is difficult.

00:30:35.180 I think chimpanzees could easily handle that based on other kinds of interactions they have.

00:30:41.180 The thing is that among chimps, sexual system is very different from ours, and females really, really want to mate other males as much as possible.

00:30:52.180 I have seen female chimpanzee go into a tree containing 10 males, climb to the highest ranking male, present to him, hoping he will mate her, and he turns his nose up at her.

00:31:10.180 And she then goes rank by rank, down the ranks to the different males, and finally will get some juvenile male to mate with her. 0.99

00:31:19.180 That's just symbolic of the fact that she is desperate to get mated as much as possible.

00:31:25.180 And she's also, with the chimps, the females are, they have an estrus period that's not hidden, correct?

00:31:34.180 It's very visually striking, that's right.

00:31:39.180 So the labia increase under the influence of estrogen, so that you have quite a large swelling, very pink, very obvious from hundreds of yards away.

00:31:53.180 So males know when she has the swelling, but there is a little bit of subtlety to this.

00:31:59.180 So in the first, I mean, she has swelling for maybe 10 days at a time, once a month, during a period that she's trying to get pregnant.

00:32:07.180 And during the first week of the swelling, the males are not particularly interested in her.

00:32:12.180 They appear to know, as it were, that she is unlikely actually to have ovulated at that time.

00:32:19.180 They get much more interested towards the end of the period of swelling, and that's when the big males come in, the high ranking males, and exert their dominance to be able to compete for the female.

00:32:34.180 But she is interested in mating throughout this period, and she can mate sometimes 50 times a day.

00:32:42.180 And the reason is very clear.

00:32:46.180 The reason is that any male who has not mated her is dangerous to her subsequent infant.

00:32:53.180 Because a male who has failed to mate, the logic is that he cannot be the father. 0.87

00:33:02.180 And if he's not, then the infant is worthy of being killed.

00:33:09.180 How does he track that? 0.87

00:33:12.180 Let's not know.

00:33:13.180 It's almost certainly memory.

00:33:16.180 But we don't know for sure.

00:33:20.180 You know, there are animals in which it happens with mechanisms other than memory.

00:33:25.180 So, do you know the story about how it happens in mice?

00:33:30.180 No, no.

00:33:31.180 Well, there's a wonderful study of mice in which they assess the infanticidal tendency of males by seeing how desperate they are to get at infants.

00:33:45.180 And what they were able to show is that the tendency to be infanticidal happens 21 days, which is the length of gestation of a mouse, after a mating.

00:33:59.180 And the way they were able to show that it's a count of the number of days is they manipulated the length of the day-night cycle.

00:34:10.180 So that if you had day-night cycles eight hours long and eight hours of day and eight hours of night, then they would come in and try and commit infanticide after 21 of those.

00:34:24.180 cycles later.

00:34:39.180 So some animals can have just an internal clockwork, regardless of the actual time.

00:34:45.180 So if they hadn't mated 21 days earlier, they would assume that those infants aren't theirs.

00:34:51.180 That's right.

00:34:52.180 Hmm.

00:34:53.180 That's right.

00:34:54.180 So you get the inhibition.

00:34:56.180 I hope I said that right.

00:34:57.180 It's the inhibition that you can decide after 21 dark light cycles.

00:35:02.180 Hmm.

00:35:03.180 That's remarkable.

00:35:04.180 Now, it's very unlikely that such a sort of mechanical system applies to chimpanzees.

00:35:11.180 It's much more likely that that they actually have a memory of of when and how often and under what circumstances they made it a particular female.

00:35:24.180 So we don't know that exactly.

00:35:27.180 But at any rate, it it certainly fits with all that we know from other primates that where there is some direct experimental evidence about this,

00:35:39.180 that females risk the lives of their infants if they do not mate with all of the males in the group on a regular basis.

00:35:50.180 And is that also is that characteristic of the bonobos as well?

00:35:54.180 In the bonobos, the females famously have even more sex than in chimpanzees. 0.97

00:36:05.180 And no infanticide has been recorded.

00:36:09.180 And so all one can say is that if there is an infanticide threat, the females have overcome it by successfully persuading every male every time that he is a potential father.

00:36:21.180 Right. Right. So you can't see any exceptions to that.

00:36:24.180 That's right.

00:36:25.180 Well, so that's a marked, as you pointed out to begin with, that's a marked difference with human behavior.

00:36:30.180 All of that.

00:36:31.180 Nothing like it at all.

00:36:32.180 No, including the human females famously have concealed ovulation as well, which is also a massive difference.

00:36:39.180 So human males cannot tell with any degree of certainty when a female is most likely to be impregnated.

00:36:48.180 And it's that's an interesting evolutionary divergence.

00:36:52.180 And that's something have you thought about?

00:36:54.180 Is that something that you've that you've developed particular theory about or thought about in it to any great degree?

00:37:00.180 Is that something we could pursue?

00:37:01.180 Because it's a fascinating it is a fascinating difference.

00:37:05.180 Yeah, I mean, I would say that.

00:37:10.180 No, I haven't thought about it in detail.

00:37:12.180 And I would say nobody has a really convincing story.

00:37:15.180 But but the basic story is that with humans, we have shifted away from females mating all males in the group.

00:37:23.180 Females mate with one male at a time. 1.00

00:37:27.180 Essentially, there's a little bit of gene shopping.

00:37:29.180 But but basically females are bonded to a particular male.

00:37:32.180 And and I do see the the bonding as quite strongly associated with cooking.

00:37:42.180 OK, that's not an obvious connection.

00:37:44.180 So I would love to hear about that.

00:37:46.180 Well, why do you why do you why do you believe that?

00:37:52.180 If you look now at people living in open air societies, then what you see is a sexual division of labor in which females are cooking food for themselves and their children and for a male. 0.56

00:38:13.180 And they their big job in life is to produce food for the male from the point of view of their relationship with the male. 0.94

00:38:23.180 He absolutely needs to rely on having a meal when he comes back in the evening from whatever he's been doing, whether it's been hunting or politicking with people in a neighboring group or or searching for enemies or or whatever.

00:38:41.180 And the reason he needs it is because he needs cooked food, just like every other human, and he doesn't have time to cook the food himself.

00:38:49.180 So if his wife doesn't cook the food for him, then she's in trouble. 1.00

00:38:53.180 So the female is bonded to the male in the sense that the male needs her to provide food for him.

00:39:07.180 If if if if she is sexually promiscuous, then for obvious reasons, the the male is upset.

00:39:18.180 And so he will punish her. 0.99

00:39:22.180 He will he will beat her. 0.99

00:39:24.180 You know, he will maybe dispose of her and get another female if he can. 1.00

00:39:31.180 And she needs him to do the things that he's out doing, having been fed, like providing high quality protein, for example.

00:39:39.180 And that's the standard story is that that she needs him to produce meat and other good foods. 0.98

00:39:47.180 I think there's something else, though, that is critical once you get to cooking.

00:39:53.180 And the reason that she needs him once you have cooking is that cooking exposes the cook to theft. 1.00

00:40:04.180 So when you cook, you need a fire.

00:40:08.180 Fire produces smoke.

00:40:09.180 Everybody knows you're cooking from a long way away.

00:40:12.180 People can detect the fact that you are cooking.

00:40:14.180 They can smell the smoke. They can see the smoke.

00:40:17.180 Just it's just a very practical thing.

00:40:20.180 That means that for people who are lazy, people who don't want to cook their own food,

00:40:26.180 people who don't even want to find their own food, people who who maybe are sick.

00:40:33.180 A person who is cooking food is vulnerable to having their food stolen.

00:40:40.180 And a woman cooking the food is particularly vulnerable to men, such as a man who has not got his own wife. 0.55

00:40:51.180 So bachelors are a problem for a woman. 1.00

00:40:53.180 And and so might be the elder children of other females.

00:40:58.180 So might be another another woman. 0.99

00:41:00.180 You have all sorts of sources of of risk.

00:41:03.180 And this is where a woman's bond to a man is really important once cooking emerges, because he can be relied on as somebody who can protect her, not necessarily from actually being there at the time that a bachelor appears and tries to pinch some of the food on her fire.

00:41:25.180 But because she can go to the husband and say that lousy rat has taken some of my food. 1.00

00:41:33.180 And, you know, we're getting ahead of ourselves in terms of thinking about the nature of human society, because the thing I have to bring into this stage is that in all human societies, you have a collection of men who form an alliance among themselves.

00:41:48.180 So that the husband of the cook is not just a man who can stand up for his wife and and and threaten any bachelor who approaches her with theft in mind.

00:42:03.180 He's more than that, because he can go to the rest of the men and say, you know, guys, we've got a trouble.

00:42:10.180 We've got some guy who is not respecting the norms in the society.

00:42:15.180 And that's a much more potent threat than one guy standing up for a one on one fight.

00:42:21.180 Because all of a sudden you've got the whole society now led by those men ready to enforce some quite severe punishment.

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00:45:20.180 Yeah, you're starting to explore that idea and we'll go back to that pretty deeply in your last book

00:45:28.180 on what you described as the self-domestication of human beings,

00:45:33.180 that enforcement of moral norms and the control of, well, hyper-aggressive behavior,

00:45:39.180 but also behavior that's breaking rules.

00:45:42.180 Yes, so we'll come to that, but to come back to the question of what you asked about,

00:45:47.180 do male chimpanzees share food, share meat with estrus females, right?

00:45:53.180 Females who are available to mate.

00:45:57.180 One of the reasons, other than just the shortage of direct observations,

00:46:02.180 that you don't expect this is because a male does not need to produce meat

00:46:08.180 to persuade a female to mate with him.

00:46:10.180 In humans, that is necessary or, you know, under the appropriate circumstances.

00:46:14.180 But not in chimps.

00:46:16.180 That's not the way it works.

00:46:17.180 In fact, it's more likely that a female would have to pay a male to mate her. 1.00

00:46:21.180 I mean, not that really needs to happen, but anyway, this is an example to me of a behavior

00:46:31.180 that was written up quite early in the study of chimpanzees in the 1970s on,

00:46:38.180 I think, too optimistic assumption that something that you saw that was reminiscent of human behavior

00:46:44.180 might easily be interpreted as being equivalent.

00:46:47.180 So, you know, occasionally a male might allow an estrus female to take some meat 0.92

00:46:54.180 and everyone leaps on it and says, hey, look just like humans.

00:46:57.180 As it turns out, females who are not estrus are more likely to get meat than a female who is estrus.

00:47:05.180 As it turns out, when you have females with estrus, with sexual swellings,

00:47:10.180 then there is less hunting going on than when those females are absent.

00:47:15.180 There's all sorts of evidence now that, you know, this is not a confident relationship at all.

00:47:21.180 So I think it's an object lesson in the care you need for thinking about similarities between humans and primates and chimpanzees.

00:47:32.180 Right. Well, and one of the ways you kind of check yourself against such things as a scientist is that before you generate any theory, you know, of spectacular originality,

00:47:43.180 you might want to ensure that multiple lines of evidence suggest it and that those lines of evidence have been drawn from divergent and non-overlapping sources.

00:47:54.180 A true Darwinian. Yeah, that's right. Exactly.

00:47:57.180 It checks you against your own projections.

00:48:00.180 Yeah, that's right.

00:48:02.180 And that kind of caution applied particularly to one of the additional features that was emerging as I was joining the chimpanzee study in the 1970s,

00:48:15.180 which actually really happened while I was there. And that is the discovery of something even more shocking than

00:48:23.180 than hunting, meat sharing and tool use, the famous tool use.

00:48:28.180 You know, all these things that were very similar between chimpanzees and humans.

00:48:32.180 Well, then it turned out that chimpanzees were holding territories against other chimpanzees and would sometimes go to the territorial boundaries,

00:48:45.180 look for opportunities to stalk and hunt and kill members of neighboring groups.

00:48:52.180 And those members of neighboring groups would be almost entirely adult males.

00:48:57.180 So now we had for the first time something that looked like a primitive kind of war.

00:49:03.180 Yes. And that the importance of that can hardly be overstated.

00:49:07.180 I mean, when I first read that, it just shocked me to the core because I thought, well, you know,

00:49:12.180 if you're an optimist in some sense, you might assume that the human proclivity for war is a consequence of,

00:49:19.180 let's say, maladaptive socialization or something like that, that could hypothetically be easily controlled.

00:49:25.180 But to see an analog of that so striking in chimpanzees was, well,

00:49:32.180 was an indication of just exactly how deep that proclivity is, that, that proclivity to dehumanize,

00:49:39.180 let's say, so to speak, out group members and to treat them as prey.

00:49:46.180 Yeah, I mean, it's an indication, but, but, you know, as my great advisor, Robert Hind, the superb animal behaviorist endlessly emphasized to me,

00:49:57.180 you know, you've got to be really, really cautious about thinking how to understand what this chimpanzee behavior means for, for humans.

00:50:07.180 And I think, you know, we have been, as a profession, pretty cautious about it.

00:50:14.180 But, you know, so, so one of the first things that happened was people said, well, it's very likely that this pattern of chimpanzees killing members of neighboring groups,

00:50:24.180 males in neighboring groups, is something to do with disturbance to that particular population.

00:50:32.180 And it won't turn, it'll turn out not to happen in other populations.

00:50:36.180 And it took, gosh, 30 years to develop enough confidence in what was happening in all of the other populations,

00:50:48.180 to be able to say, you know what, this is a characteristic feature of chimpanzees.

00:50:53.180 And by the time we had those data coming in, we could also say what it was associated with.

00:51:01.180 And the answer is, it was associated with high population density, and large numbers of males in the aggressive community.

00:51:10.180 So you get lots of males together, and they will look for opportunities to kill members of neighboring groups.

00:51:19.180 And what is it not associated with? It's not associated with measures of human disturbance,

00:51:26.180 whether or not the forest had been subject to a bit of logging, or how many people live nearby, that sort of thing.

00:51:36.180 The chimpanzees, you know, don't care about that sort of stuff.

00:51:39.180 They're living their own lives, and their social dynamics are concerned with what's going on in their own species' lives.

00:51:50.180 So why is a preponderance of males in the attacking, is that just a matter of outnumbering the enemy, or are there other factors at play?

00:51:57.180 Outnumbering looks the important thing, yes. 0.65

00:52:00.180 Right, because they won't attack, the chimps generally don't attack outside their boundaries,

00:52:05.180 unless they clearly outnumber those that they are targeting, correct?

00:52:11.180 And that explanation for that, they have a rudimentary sense of number or amount, something like that.

00:52:21.180 Is it number or amount? They have a rudimentary sense of that, at least.

00:52:24.180 Yeah, I mean, you know, they're very smart.

00:52:27.180 And it turns out that the average ratio of the number of males in an attacking group to the number of males in the victim group is eight to one.

00:52:39.180 And what this comes down to is eight males attacking one.

00:52:45.180 It's not 16 males attacking two.

00:52:48.180 And so in this average system, when eight males attack one, here's what can happen.

00:52:54.180 Each of four males grab one limb.

00:52:57.180 And then you have a helpless victim, and the remaining four can do what they like to that victim.

00:53:06.180 And they do. And, you know, they can tear out his thorax and pull his testes off and twist the arms until the bones break.

00:53:16.180 And blood is coming out from everywhere and so on.

00:53:20.180 It's a really nasty business.

00:53:22.180 And, you know, chimpanzees are.

00:53:25.180 Depends on exactly what measure you like, but it's maybe a three or four times stronger than humans.

00:53:30.180 They are immensely strong.

00:53:33.180 And so a chimpanzee fighting for its life could, in theory, impose immense damage on its attackers.

00:53:42.180 But the chimps that attack are so smart and figured out exactly how to do this, that there is not a single case out of some 50 attacks that have been reasonably well documented of any of the aggressors being damaged beyond a scratch. 0.98

00:53:59.180 So they know what they're doing.

00:54:02.180 And this is the, you know, the imbalance of power hypothesis that what has happened in chimpanzee social evolution is that because you have variation in the number of companions that individuals have within their communities as they walk about looking for opportunities to eat as well as possible and find females and all that sort of stuff.

00:54:28.180 You have variation which exposes occasional victims to occasional large groups.

00:54:36.180 And just the fact of having a lot of males in your group means that you have safety when attacking.

00:54:45.180 Imbalance of power is enough to induce attack.

00:54:49.180 So, you know, for me, this is this is classic Lord Acton.

00:54:53.180 Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts.

00:54:55.180 Absolutely.

00:54:56.180 And so what's in it for the attacking chimps?

00:54:59.180 What is it that they gain?

00:55:00.180 They don't gain immediate food.

00:55:03.180 They don't gain immediate females. 0.98

00:55:06.180 You know, they don't walk back to the communities with a kidnapped female or anything like that.

00:55:12.180 They don't show in the next few days increased acquisition of fruit from a tree on the boundary.

00:55:19.180 Nothing like that.

00:55:20.180 Nothing like that.

00:55:21.180 But what they do gain is increased confidence in moving in an area that was previously more evenly used between the two communities.

00:55:32.180 So they decrease the probability that they're going to be someone who's one against eight.

00:55:38.180 It's partly the safety problem like that, but also it gets it just gets them access to more resources in that area in general.

00:55:48.180 So, you know, during the months and years to come, they're able to spend more time in such and such a valley where they have killed.

00:55:57.180 And we now have nice data from from two different studies, one in Tanzania, one in Uganda, showing that you get occupation of the area where the killings have occurred.

00:56:10.180 And in one case, beautiful, showing all of the expected consequences for the quality of the diet.

00:56:19.180 So better food, increased body mass even known of the individuals that are able to occupy a larger area reduction in the time between births for those females.

00:56:38.180 So the females are feeding better, the males are feeding better and even increased survival of the offspring in that community as a whole.

00:56:49.180 And how much killing does it take to produce such effects?

00:56:53.180 I mean, is it is the elimination of one or two individuals from a neighboring troop sufficient to do that?

00:57:00.180 Like what scale does this have to occur at before those consequences emerged?

00:57:04.180 Anyone know?

00:57:05.180 In those two best known cases, in one case, all of the males in the neighboring community were killed.

00:57:10.180 I see.

00:57:11.180 So it was complete obliteration of the competitors.

00:57:15.180 It was initially a small community.

00:57:17.180 There were only seven males in it.

00:57:19.180 And they were all killed.

00:57:21.180 I shouldn't say they were all killed.

00:57:24.180 I should say they all died.

00:57:25.180 And in four, maybe five cases, they were known to be attacked and killed.

00:57:35.180 So.

00:57:36.180 So is that typical?

00:57:37.180 Is the typical behavior to move in those situations towards complete elimination?

00:57:43.180 Do we do?

00:57:44.180 Do we do?

00:57:45.180 It's typical.

00:57:46.180 And it may well not be.

00:57:48.180 I mean, you know, if you've got a very large community neighboring, then I could well imagine that they kill several and it just means they are able to dominate an area that was previously more evenly shared.

00:58:02.180 So in the case of the Ugandan story at Ngogo in Kibali National Park, you had something over 20 kills that were made in various different parts of the boundary of the killer community. 0.90

00:58:21.180 But not enough was known about the neighbors to be sure what proportion that meant or that was of the neighbors.

00:58:31.180 It's unlikely that any neighboring communities were completely eliminated, though.

00:58:35.180 Those are those are immense communities that that killer community at that time had 25 fully adult and over, I think, 35 adult and adolescent males.

00:58:51.180 You know, this is an immense power.

00:58:54.180 And they were living in an area with just tremendous fruit productivity and a number of communities that had a large number of males, but they were probably the biggest boss on the block.

00:59:05.180 So you you were working with Goodall when that initial rating behavior was documented?

00:59:11.180 Yes.

00:59:12.180 I mean, I saw some of the first raids.

00:59:15.180 And that's no wonder you wrote your first book that were inspired to do the work to write your first book, which was demonic males.

00:59:25.180 I mean, that must have really I mean, that that's quite a bombshell that that discovery.

00:59:29.180 And like Goodall was if I remember correctly and informed him correctly, Goodall was quite hesitant about sharing those results for some period of time, I believe.

00:59:38.180 Is it is that have I got that right or was she just being cautious or what what's the story there?

00:59:44.180 Well, I don't think that's right.

00:59:45.180 Oh, OK.

00:59:46.180 You know, it's funny.

00:59:48.180 William Boyd wrote a book called Brazzaville Beach, which was obviously inspired by what happened in Gombe.

00:59:57.180 And in that case, the protagonist, the Jane Goodall figure was very reluctant to share the results.

01:00:06.180 And I think that that may have infected the popular understanding.

01:00:10.180 But no, Jane, I mean, in 1979, she published a paper that was describing some of these results.

01:00:18.180 And I think she's always had a very faithful and honest approach to presenting this.

01:00:27.180 She didn't hide it.

01:00:28.180 Yeah.

01:00:29.180 Well, I wasn't I wasn't I was certainly wasn't suggesting that.

01:00:32.180 I mean, I can imagine, though, that a scientist in her position would want what would you call to be damn sure of the proposition before releasing it on the world.

01:00:42.180 Well, fair enough.

01:00:43.180 Yes. And I mean, she's I think she's been appropriately cautious.

01:00:49.180 You know, she described what was seen.

01:00:52.180 I think I probably did go a bit beyond her in in inferring the more general tendencies.

01:01:02.180 And so but but, you know, by 20 years later, 96, when I published Demonic Males with Dale Peterson, I think it was pretty clear what was going on.

01:01:12.180 And then, as I said, you know, another 30 years later, the data were really coming in very, very solidly.

01:01:18.180 And I mean, in some ways, I wasn't too keen on the title of Demonic Males because it's a little bit in your face.

01:01:27.180 I wanted to make is that it is very extraordinary because we only know two species on Earth or that stage.

01:01:35.180 We only knew two species on Earth in which males live in groups often with their relatives and go out on raids to kill members of neighboring communities.

01:01:45.180 And those were chimpanzees and humans.

01:01:48.180 Yeah. Well, when I picked up the book, I mean, I was very interested in the scientific study of aggression at the time.

01:01:55.180 And when I picked up the book, I thought the same thing about the title, I thought.

01:01:59.180 But the book itself is a very scholarly examination of this proclivity.

01:02:04.180 And so so so for people who are listening, who are interested, it's a very, very solid book.

01:02:10.180 And it isn't it isn't.

01:02:15.180 But it's accessible. Let's say accessible.

01:02:17.180 Yes. Well, it's accessible, but it's also it's also careful.

01:02:20.180 It's not sensationalistic at all. Yeah.

01:02:23.180 And and that's the case with all of your work.

01:02:25.180 It's very serious work.

01:02:26.180 And so so walk us through Demonic Males.

01:02:28.180 You've done some of that.

01:02:29.180 So we're going to jump ahead a bit because you've done a lot of things and I want to cover a lot of it before we close.

01:02:35.180 You anything else you want to say about the first your work with with with Jane Goodall and and and that that setting you up for for the long term study of chimpanzees?

01:02:46.180 Sure.

01:02:47.180 Well, I mean, I actually studied feeding behavior when I was working with chimpanzees.

01:02:53.180 And I think it's a great thing to study because it emphasizes the most important aspect of an ordinary animals life.

01:03:03.180 The just the daily search for food.

01:03:07.180 You know, people when they come to film chimpanzees, they often are expecting to see tool use or dramatic sexual behavior or something exotic in the first day or two.

01:03:21.180 And they say, this is so boring.

01:03:23.180 You know, they're spending six hours a day just sitting in trees eating.

01:03:27.180 Yeah, well, I think it was in your in the book Catching Fire, maybe.

01:03:33.180 Is it in that book? Do you document is it is is it in that book that gorillas that the documentation of gorillas spending up to eight hours a day doing nothing but chewing leaves?

01:03:43.180 That's right.

01:03:44.180 They have to do that because their diet is not particularly rich.

01:03:47.180 And so they don't have time for much else.

01:03:49.180 And with chimps as well, like it takes a lot of calories to keep the chimp going. 0.93

01:03:53.180 And so there's and that's also perhaps offer some insight into why it took human culture so long to explode in the way it does.

01:04:01.180 It's very difficult to get beyond hand to mouth living.

01:04:04.180 Yeah, I just think it's a really helpful sort of embedding of of the reality of animals lives.

01:04:15.180 And it's not something that necessarily comes across when you you read about their social behavior.

01:04:20.180 But they are spending most of their time strategizing about how to get as much food as possible.

01:04:29.180 And I found that immensely helpful. But on the other hand, it took me a long time before the penny dropped.

01:04:38.180 You know, I actually tried to to to live like a chimpanzee a little bit in the sense of eating what chimpanzees at. 0.96

01:04:46.180 You know, I have everything chimpanzees at and I discovered very rapidly that I got extremely hungry if I did that.

01:04:54.180 The penny finally dropped in the 90s when I realized that there is a huge difference between chimpanzee and human diets.

01:05:04.180 And that is that humans cook our food and that developed a whole new story.

01:05:11.180 So but I mentioned the importance of seeing chimpanzees feeding and spending time thinking about the attitude to.

01:05:20.180 To using their environment to maximize the amount of food they can get, because.

01:05:27.180 It's it's a big problem for humans, too.

01:05:30.180 And, you know, this is this is nature in the raw.

01:05:33.180 How on earth do you get enough to satisfy those endless pangs of hunger?

01:05:38.180 I think you've got to think of these animals being hungry all the time.

01:05:42.180 And it's difficult for us to get into that mentality because we are never hungry.

01:05:47.180 We can satisfy our food needs all the time.

01:05:52.180 Right. So we underestimate how relevant that is by a massive degree.

01:05:57.180 I mean, your book Catching Fire was struck striking to me, I suppose, in almost the same way that my encounter with the data showing that chimpanzees went on raids.

01:06:06.180 I mean, you you made the claim, for example, that you think human beings have been using fire for two million years, which is an awful long time.

01:06:15.180 Well, in some sense, it's longer than I had longer than many suppositions.

01:06:21.180 And you also make a very strong case that our proclivity to use fire and cook has radically altered.

01:06:28.180 Well, our whole morphology, our whole physiology, our our intestinal system, our digestive system, and that that's provided us with the additional calories necessary to expend some resources on on brain power.

01:06:43.180 More resources on brain power, more resources on brain power.

01:06:45.180 Have I got that right? I hope I'm not doing your book any justice.

01:06:48.180 Absolutely. No, that's all right.

01:06:50.180 And the other big thing that it did is to hugely increase the amount of time we can spend on things other than chewing.

01:06:57.180 Right. Right. Exactly.

01:06:58.180 To free it free us up to because to do nothing long enough to think about something other than immediate food, food acquisition.

01:07:06.180 So cooking softens food and and it softens it so much that we can spend just a fraction of time chewing compared to any of our eight relatives.

01:07:17.180 You know, so if we were eating our food raw, we would be spending probably more than six hours a day chewing our food.

01:07:23.180 And as it is, we spend less than an hour a day chewing our food.

01:07:27.180 So that saves us five hours a day.

01:07:29.180 And gosh, you know, that is important.

01:07:31.180 It's it has different importance for females and for males in terms of how females and males actually spend their time now. 0.99

01:07:39.180 And the irony is that females do a lot of food preparation. 1.00

01:07:43.180 I mean, this is worldwide. The only exceptions to it are in modern urban society.

01:07:49.180 But I worldwide much of the saving of chewing time is translated into females for females into gathering food, preparing it and cooking it for males. 1.00

01:08:03.180 For males, there's much more freedom given by that saving of time to go off and do high risk, high gain activities like like hunting, but also politicking, visiting people in the neighboring camp, chasing women in the neighboring camp and so on.

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01:09:48.180 And the contribution to cultural production, artistic production, aesthetic production, bead making, all of that, that's all.

01:09:57.180 Exactly. That's right. I mean, you know, all of a sudden you have a totally different attitude to time from other people.

01:10:06.180 Right. You have some of it. Exactly. Right. Right. And so, so two million years ago.

01:10:12.180 So what were our ancestors like two million years ago when they discovered fire and how it, you know, I'm thinking, how has that come about?

01:10:21.180 Well, one of the things that's really interesting about fire, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's, it's archetypally interesting.

01:10:27.180 You know, if I spend time at my parents' cottage and I used to bring my little kids up there and, you know, adults, human adults will sit in a circle and look at two things.

01:10:39.180 They'll look at infants and little kids, like intently watch them nonstop as if they're in eternally interesting.

01:10:46.180 They don't habituate to that. But we also don't seem to habituate to fire.

01:10:51.180 And I'm wondering if, you know, two million years ago, there was a mutation that, that occurred that made someone, some, some ancestor absolutely unable to stay away from fire because it was no longer, he was no longer able to habituate to it.

01:11:09.180 So it was endlessly fascinating. So I don't know what you think about that idea, but...

01:11:14.180 No, there were probably various kinds of adaptations, psychological and physiological adaptations to, to being near fire, to being drawn to fire and so on.

01:11:25.180 But I think they would follow the discovery of, of being able to control it and just how useful it was and exactly how that happened.

01:11:36.180 I don't know. I mean, you know, my, my, my personal fantasy goes along these lines that you've got Australopithecine.

01:11:44.180 So that's, you know, like a chimpanzee standing upright, it's got a big jaw and eating raw foods, big teeth.

01:11:53.180 It's about the size of a chimpanzee.

01:11:57.180 And it's clear that there was increasing evidence in the fossil record of, of meat eating.

01:12:09.180 And how that comes about, who knows, but, but if they're eating more meat, then meat is not that easy to eat if it's raw, but it's a lot easier to eat if you pound it.

01:12:23.180 If you, if you just, you know, do a steak tartare on it.

01:12:26.180 And so my fantasy is that they were eating more meat.

01:12:30.180 They were using rocks to pound the meat sometimes.

01:12:34.180 Sometimes they use wood, but when they use rocks, sparks would come out and sparks would sometimes start little fires.

01:12:41.180 And so they repeatedly be exposed to fires in relationship to their activity.

01:12:47.180 And this would happen often enough that out of this would learn, they'd learn the opportunity to leave meat near a fire and taste the value.

01:13:01.180 You know, how, how often are animals, edible animal animals trapped in grass fires in Africa?

01:13:09.180 You know, people often refer to that idea, but I don't think it happens very often at all.

01:13:17.180 I, I've, I've not, I don't believe there's any studies in which people have actually, you know, documented a number.

01:13:25.180 Most animals are able to escape by borrowing underground or running away from the fire.

01:13:31.180 You know, it's conceivable that, that, that is the way it happened, that it happened often enough that people, you know, figured it out.

01:13:39.180 The Australopithecines figured out what was going on. 0.88

01:13:42.180 You know, it's, it's all speculation as to how fire was first controlled.

01:13:47.180 But, but I think what is clear is that once it was first controlled, it would have had huge effects.

01:13:56.180 You know, we know that all animals like their food cooked compared to like eating it raw or all that have been tested.

01:14:04.180 So, you know, not just our domestic animals, but wild animals too.

01:14:08.180 All the apes, for instance, prefer it cooked.

01:14:10.180 They just haven't figured out how to cook it.

01:14:12.180 And how do you account for that?

01:14:14.180 That seems very strange that, that, that, that, how is it that that could possibly be the case?

01:14:22.180 Like, why do animals prefer cooked food?

01:14:24.180 It's because what cooking does is essentially pre-digest food.

01:14:27.180 And, and animals like their food as much digested as possible, because the more digestion you can have done for you, then the less you have to do it yourself.

01:14:39.180 The, there's a major cost.

01:14:41.180 Right.

01:14:42.180 Well, I can see, I can see that it makes sense.

01:14:44.180 I just can't see how they would have possibly developed the taste for it or the, the odor preference or any of that.

01:14:49.180 I mean, do you, you don't come to come, I mean, is it, is it in some sense like partially decomposed food?

01:14:57.180 Yeah, maybe with that a little bit.

01:14:59.180 So, you know, softness, I mean, in general animals like their food soft because harder food is tougher and it's, you've got to do more chewing.

01:15:07.180 And so there's a texture issue.

01:15:09.180 There's a texture issue and probably the taste, you know, as you say, a little bit of decomposition.

01:15:18.180 So if proteins have been partly denatured, then you have more exposure to the amino acids that have a bit of sweetness to them.

01:15:29.180 Uh, have a bit of umami flavor, uh, and, um, and all of those are indicators to, uh, even to an ape that the food is, uh, relatively, uh, going to be relatively easy to digest.

01:15:42.180 Right.

01:15:43.180 It's bioavailable and ready for use.

01:15:45.180 Yup.

01:15:46.180 Right, right, right.

01:15:47.180 Right, right, right.

01:15:48.180 But, but actually no one has, uh, tested, um, the spontaneous interest in the, the odor of cooked food.

01:15:55.180 And that's something that would be really fun to do.

01:15:57.180 Mm hmm.

01:15:58.180 Mm hmm.

01:15:59.180 Well, it's certainly a striking character.

01:16:00.180 Right.

01:16:01.180 Well, it's certainly a striking characteristic of human response to especially caramelized meat, which has a particularly distinctive and delicious odor.

01:16:08.180 Yeah.

01:16:09.180 Right.

01:16:10.180 Right.

01:16:11.180 Um, so, so the, you know, this is still an early, uh, an early science.

01:16:15.180 You know, we don't know that much about it, but what we do know is that animals, uh, including the great apes, prefer their food cooked, even when they haven't had any exposure to it.

01:16:25.180 You know, when they're naive and that once you are eating cooked food, you are getting more calories.

01:16:33.180 Uh, you're saving yourself the cost of digestion and you're actually increasing the amount of the food that you are able to digest as well.

01:16:41.180 So the net result, uh, in experiments that, uh, uh, that I and my colleagues have done, uh, you get, uh, indications of 30, 50% increase in the number of calories.

01:16:54.180 I mean, this is huge, you know, for five percent more milk out of their cows, you know, they're a millionaire.

01:17:00.180 And now we're talking, you know, some tens of percent.

01:17:04.180 Right, right.

01:17:05.180 Oh, essential, a doubling of, of available calories.

01:17:08.180 Yeah.

01:17:09.180 And, and you also pointed out not only the, the, the caloric improvement, but the radical decrease in the amount of time it takes to do the processing, like the chewing.

01:17:17.180 Right.

01:17:18.180 So, yes.

01:17:19.180 So, so, so this would be really big.

01:17:22.180 And, um, and I think, uh, what it, uh, I mean, the, the reason, the argument that I make about why this happened surely at 2 million years ago is kind of twofold.

01:17:32.180 One is that everything fits at that point.

01:17:35.180 So that's the point at which you see smaller mouths, smaller teeth, evidence of smaller guts to judge from the shape of the ribs and the pelvis.

01:17:43.180 And by the way, um, for the first time, a commitment to sleeping on the ground, because, uh, for the first time you have a construction of the, of the organism, you know, the, the human, um, in a way that is not easy to climb trees.

01:18:00.180 Ah, ah, so that made it possible for us to not have to climb trees.

01:18:06.180 That, that's the idea, at least in part.

01:18:08.180 Yeah.

01:18:09.180 And the Australopithecines could climb trees, so they surely would have slept in trees.

01:18:12.180 But humans nowadays, you know, you can't imagine them being able to regularly climb up into trees and always be able to make a nest in the way that a chimpanzee or an Australopithecine could.

01:18:22.180 So they'd have to sleep on the ground often.

01:18:25.180 Well, you have to be nuts to sleep on the ground if you don't have fire to protect you.

01:18:29.180 So I think, you know, that all points to, um, to why it makes sense that fire was first controlled around 2 million years ago, literally about 1.9.

01:18:40.180 And, um, the 1.9 million years ago.

01:18:44.180 And then the other reason is that subsequently to that point, no dramatic events happen in human evolution, which could be consistent with the acquisition of something so important as the control of fire.

01:18:59.180 So, you know, there is no subsequent time that makes sense in terms of, oh, yeah, they must have got fire and therefore, therefore what? Nothing happens.

01:19:07.180 You know, you get a steady increase in brain size.

01:19:10.180 You get a variation in tooth size, but generally it's declining.

01:19:14.180 But, but no big things.

01:19:17.180 Okay, so, so we've, we've, we've touched on autobiographical issues.

01:19:22.180 We talked about your work with Goodall.

01:19:24.180 Goodall, we, we touched on demonic males and the raiding, and now we've, we've touched on cooking and fire use.

01:19:31.180 So maybe, because I want to get to your third book before we run out of time too, you, you got really, really interested in aggression, particularly aggression among males.

01:19:43.180 And it's, and it's, and it's, and the particular forms it takes in human beings and our close relatives.

01:19:48.180 But then in your last book, The Goodness Paradox, you really turned your attention to how that proclivity for extreme aggression came under some degree of social control.

01:20:02.180 Yeah.

01:20:03.180 And that's a fascinating issue in and of itself.

01:20:04.180 So maybe, maybe we could talk about that.

01:20:06.180 You, you distinguish first between two kinds of aggression, proactive and reactive, a classic distinction.

01:20:12.180 So do you want to start there and then elaborate out the thesis?

01:20:15.180 Is that, is that a reasonable way of approaching it?

01:20:17.180 Yeah, it is.

01:20:18.180 So yes, absolutely.

01:20:19.180 So The Goodness Paradox is the title of this book, and it refers as a paradox to the fact that humans are so extreme with regard to aggression and non-aggression.

01:20:31.180 So we're extremely aggressive in the sense that, like chimpanzees, we have these demonic tendencies to go off and kill members of neighboring groups using our overwhelming power when we can get a big group attacking a small group and so on, in a way that no other species, no other mammals do.

01:20:51.180 And in a way that horrifies us in retrospect often and makes us drop, drop, drop, drop our jaws at our own behavioral possibilities.

01:21:01.180 Yeah, I mean, you know, we're still living in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust.

01:21:08.180 And so, you know, for so many, I mean, almost everybody who writes about human behavior is affected by that and still thinking about how did that come to be and how do we avoid it in the future?

01:21:20.180 So, you know, there's that angle on humans.

01:21:25.180 But the other angle, which makes human behavior so paradoxical, is that we are the kindest and most tolerant and most gentle of animals.

01:21:34.180 And people since the ancient Greeks have said we're like a domesticated animal.

01:21:38.180 You know, we meet strangers, we're so nice to each other, we don't have automatic aggression, we're nothing like wild animals.

01:21:45.180 We share food and make that the basis of many of our social interactions.

01:21:50.180 Yeah.

01:21:51.180 And so, you know, for decades, well, for centuries, people have tended to solve this paradox by saying either that we are naturally aggressive and we learn culturally to be nice to each other or vice versa.

01:22:09.180 And so, you know, the famous debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, as people put it now, you know, Hobbes takes the naturally aggressive perspective and Rousseau takes the naturally kind perspective.

01:22:23.180 And this goes on.

01:22:24.180 I mean, there was a book recently published by a Dutch historian called Ronald Bregman, who's called Human Kindness, saying, well, actually, humans are spontaneously naturally kind.

01:22:34.180 So, you know, it's absurd in retrospect to think that people are trying to to arbitrate between these two views, that one is correct or the other is correct because they're both right.

01:22:47.180 I think it's very, very clear that humans have got tendencies for appalling violence, which will be elicited under the appropriate circumstances, regardless of what ethnicity or culture or religion you come from.

01:23:02.180 And equally, it is very clear that people grow up to be spontaneously, thoroughly moral and kind and tolerant with each other.

01:23:14.180 We have these two tendencies. And you mentioned this division between two types of aggression, proactive and reactive.

01:23:21.180 It's a division that that as you as a psychologist said, it's a familiar distinction.

01:23:27.180 That's fine. But I will take credit for bringing it into biological anthropology because people thinking about the evolution of human behavior for some reason did not apply it.

01:23:39.180 Well, the short story is this. The way to think about human aggression and non-aggression is that we are relatively elevated for the propensity for proactive aggression.

01:23:53.180 Because all of the war and the Holocaust, the stuff you're talking about, that's all proactive. 0.98

01:23:59.180 Right. That's planned. That's that's multi-party. That's organized. It's social. It's it's one group against another.

01:24:06.980 Yeah. And and it follows exactly the chimpanzee principle of imbalance of power.

01:24:11.980 You only do it if you can get away with it and feel very comfortable that you're not going to get hurt in the process.

01:24:18.980 So, you know, the killers of the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals in the Holocaust very, very rarely got any pushback. 0.95

01:24:29.980 They were butchers. And that's the nature of proactive aggression. 0.90

01:24:34.980 So humans are elevated for that in the sense that we have a very high propensity to do it if we the circumstances are right, which is right.

01:24:43.980 And part of that circumstance is that we're defining the the entities upon which that aggression is afflicted as outside what constitutes human.

01:24:53.980 Human because within the human definition, all the standard rules of morality apply.

01:24:58.980 And that's sort of equivalent. Correct me if you think I'm making an error here.

01:25:03.980 That's sort of equivalent to the chimp distinction between the chimps that are in their own group and the chimps that are from another group altogether. 0.92

01:25:10.980 You're right. And by the way, in a shocking addition to that, if you take the ethnographies of people living in small scale societies, including hunters and gatherers and small scale farmers, you find the same thing.

01:25:25.980 Mm hmm. You find that within the ethno linguistic society, in other words, the people who speak the same language, we are humans and the other people are not humans. 0.58

01:25:32.980 Right. Right. And that's very that's a very common. Well, and it's I guess it's also partly because you can rely on those who are like you.

01:25:42.980 It's almost the definition of them being like you, that they accept your definitions of right and wrong so that you can predict their behavior.

01:25:50.980 You can enter into a social contract with them with implicit understanding, whereas with an outsider.

01:25:57.980 You don't know what rules apply. And so their behavior isn't predictable and and they don't obviously fall within the the the the overarching definition of of moral.

01:26:10.980 And maybe that's what, you know, underlies the definition of human in some sense for us.

01:26:15.980 Yeah, I mean, that seems like a reasonable explanation.

01:26:18.980 But the net result is that even a total stranger in a completely weak state, the the first thing that that you do, you're living in a small scale society when you encounter such a person is not to say, here, have a cup of tea and let's find out your morals.

01:26:34.980 It's a killing. Right, right, right.

01:26:37.980 So, you know, I say this because there's a romantic view that among small scale people, particularly hunters and gatherers, there is this extension of generosity of spirit to people of different languages.

01:26:58.980 And you can argue very strongly against that.

01:27:01.980 So let me ask you a question that just popped into my mind about that.

01:27:05.980 I mean, it's a compelling idea. I know that in the in the in the in the.

01:27:12.980 I think it's in Genesis and the Abrahamic stories.

01:27:16.980 There is tremendous emphasis on the hospitality that has to be shown to a stranger.

01:27:24.980 And so that seems to be an ex that seems to be an exception to that general principle.

01:27:30.980 And so I think it's a definition of the stranger.

01:27:33.980 That's that's the issue.

01:27:34.980 You know, to me, what you're talking about would typically be a stranger who you do not know personally, but who speaks the same language as you, who's part of the larger series of Judaic tribes.

01:27:47.980 Right, right. So still in still encapsulated within the idea of what constitutes the central people.

01:27:54.980 Yeah. Yeah. OK, OK, OK, OK. Well, that could well be.

01:27:57.980 I mean, obviously, that's going to be the case from a historical perspective, because the idea of everyone who's morphologically similar being human, that idea obviously must have moved out from tribe to slightly larger group to larger group still and so forth as our groups got bigger and bigger.

01:28:16.980 And yeah, well, and maybe we've got some more or one world.

01:28:20.980 Right, right, right. Well, at least we can.

01:28:22.980 We do that to some degree.

01:28:24.980 The automatic enemy is horrendous.

01:28:26.980 Right.

01:28:27.980 You really have to think yourself back into a very different past to understand this.

01:28:32.980 So that's all proactive aggression.

01:28:34.980 The proactive aggression, the use of power to to damage anyone outside your group.

01:28:42.980 And then the reactive aggression that you describe is also characteristic of other of many, many other animals who engage in male to male conflict.

01:28:51.980 So that's not unique to human beings. And and that's that involves emotional reactivity.

01:28:56.980 It's impulsive. It's immediate.

01:28:59.980 All this defensive. That's right.

01:29:01.980 It's all those things.

01:29:02.980 So it's what we ordinarily think of as aggression, because so many people think of proactive aggression as something that is sort of just cultural and just human taught and that sort of thing.

01:29:12.980 And even though there's very important cultural elements to it, it's part of our biology.

01:29:17.980 But reactive aggression is what people if you look up aggression in a textbook or animal behavior.

01:29:22.980 It's almost all about reactive aggression, often exclusively about it.

01:29:27.980 So reactive aggression is testosterone fueled.

01:29:30.980 It's losing your temper.

01:29:32.980 As you say, it's impulsive.

01:29:34.980 It's motivated by anger.

01:29:36.980 Not not only by anger, but anger is a anger, frustration, shame associated with emotions.

01:29:43.980 That's right. And what's what's striking about humans is that we are very down regulated for reactive aggression compared to our close relatives.

01:29:57.980 So and the way that you can see this manifest is that the rate at which you get actual physical aggression happening in a small scale society in humans compared to in a group of wild chimpanzees.

01:30:12.980 Is two to three orders of magnitude difference, that is to say, hundreds to thousands of times less frequent in humans than in chimpanzees or in bonobos to the famously peaceful bonobos.

01:30:24.980 But nevertheless, bonobos are not nearly as peaceful as humans.

01:30:29.980 So we have, you know, we're way down the scale and reactive aggression.

01:30:34.980 And at the same time, we're way up the scale on proactive aggression.

01:30:38.980 And the goodness paradox is a story of how do we get this astonishing mixture?

01:30:43.980 And I think, you know, we actually have a really good story for it now, a really good understanding.

01:30:49.980 And and it.

01:30:50.980 Yeah, well, some of it in the book, some of it you outline intense attempts by people within human social groups everywhere to socialize children into controlling their reactive aggression.

01:31:01.980 Yeah.

01:31:02.980 And I know there's literature.

01:31:04.980 I interviewed Richard Trombley on this YouTube chat.

01:31:07.980 I saw the podcast.

01:31:08.980 Yeah.

01:31:09.980 Oh, OK.

01:31:10.980 So, you know, we talked about the study showing that, you know, a small percentage of two year olds are spontaneously aggressive.

01:31:17.980 If you put them in groups of other two year olds, it's only about five percent and virtually all of them are male and virtually all of them are socialized out of that by the time they're four.

01:31:26.980 But a small proportion aren't.

01:31:28.980 And they tend to be lifetime aggressors.

01:31:30.980 And those are the ones that, well, you have a story about them, I think.

01:31:35.980 Well, I mean, I think that's the the residue of a population that would have been 100 percent like that if you go back 300,000 years ago.

01:31:46.980 You know, all our babies would have been highly aggressive and would have retained that aggressiveness throughout life.

01:31:54.980 And the reason we can say that is good to two main points.

01:32:01.980 First of all, our anatomy compared to our earlier ancestors looks like the anatomy of a domesticated animal compared to a wild animal.

01:32:12.980 And when I'm saying our earlier ancestors, I'm thinking very specifically of what happened around 300,000 years ago.

01:32:21.980 So this is when we get the first glimmerings of our species moving into sapienization.

01:32:30.980 Sapienization process of becoming Homo sapiens.

01:32:34.980 People now say it started about 300,000 years ago, that thanks to fossil discoveries in Morocco.

01:32:43.980 And that's when you first start getting smaller teeth and smaller mouths, indicative of a trend that will get increasingly strong.

01:32:55.980 By the time you have Homo sapiens as a recognizable species, you have several of the characteristics that archaeologists use to mark a domesticated animal compared to its wild ancestors.

01:33:09.980 The four characteristics they use are smaller teeth and jaws, reduced differences between males and females, reduced sexual dimorphism, a reduction in body size.

01:33:24.980 And those three things all happened fairly early in Homo sapiens.

01:33:28.980 And then the fourth thing is reduced brain size.

01:33:33.980 And astonishingly, there is evidence for reduced brain size in Homo sapiens compared to our earlier phases.

01:33:43.980 Right, but no, not necessarily any loss of cognitive power.

01:33:48.980 Just like in domesticated animals.

01:33:50.980 There's no evidence of a loss of cognitive power in domesticated animals compared to their wild ancestors, even though they have smaller brains.

01:33:57.980 And I think you posited that that was a consequence of decreased size of the brain areas associated with reactive emotions.

01:34:04.980 That's part of it anyways.

01:34:06.980 Yes, you may be extending slightly beyond what I said, but I actually do think that that's right.

01:34:12.980 It seems to me that there's quite a bit of evidence that part of the contribution to brain size is associated with reactive aggression.

01:34:23.980 And so, you know, bonobos are less reactively aggressive than chimpanzees.

01:34:28.980 They have smaller brains than chimpanzees.

01:34:30.980 Females are less reactively aggressive than males.

01:34:33.980 Females and a whole bunch of species have smaller brains. 1.00

01:34:36.980 Domesticated animals all have smaller brains than their wild ancestors.

01:34:40.980 And there's even some very provocative evidence that if you give testosterone to humans,

01:34:50.980 then it increases the size of the brain, even to adult humans.

01:34:57.980 Hmm.

01:34:58.980 So now you mentioned in The Goodness Paradox some early hypotheses about how human beings might have become domesticated,

01:35:05.980 because obviously we domesticated domesticate animals.

01:35:08.980 And there were wild hypotheses like some sort of super race that had domesticated this all and then disappeared.

01:35:15.980 And these were very early speculations.

01:35:17.980 But you have a hypothesis about how this might have come about that doesn't involve such, what would you call, extreme speculation.

01:35:26.980 Yeah, and it comes originally from Christopher Bowen, who was an anthropologist who went to look at chimpanzees,

01:35:32.980 and he was really struck by the huge difference between humans and chimpanzees in the existence of an alpha male bully.

01:35:39.980 In chimpanzees, you have an alpha male bully who gets what he wants by using his personal physical power.

01:35:46.980 In humans, you don't have that.

01:35:48.980 And we often talk informally about humans having alpha males, but it's not an alpha male in the primate sense,

01:35:56.980 because the human supposed alpha does not get that status or achieve what he wants by using his personal physical power.

01:36:05.980 It's all through coalitions. But in chimps and bonobos and baboons and every other primate, it's not by coalitions.

01:36:13.980 It's by his personal physical ability to defeat everybody else.

01:36:17.980 Now, you sometimes get in humans, in small scale societies, you sometimes get a man who tries to do that,

01:36:26.980 who tries to kick sand in the face of every other male and take their wives and take their resources,

01:36:34.980 make them feel small and thoroughly mean to them just by being the bully on the block.

01:36:42.980 And when that happens, there is a consistent solution.

01:36:47.980 Because you have to think about societies in which there's no police.

01:36:51.980 There's no no one to help you. You're just on your own in your society.

01:36:55.980 And here is this guy who is being incredibly objectionable and may actually kill other people. 0.87

01:37:03.980 But even if he doesn't kill them, he's trying to he's taking their wives. 0.96

01:37:07.980 He's pushing them around. 0.96

01:37:10.980 So there's various kinds of social responses.

01:37:14.980 People can try pleading with him to behave better.

01:37:17.980 They can laugh in his face. They can ostracize him.

01:37:20.980 They can ignore him.

01:37:22.980 They can try and move away and exile him just by going away.

01:37:26.980 But none of those mechanisms will work in the face of a really determined desperate.

01:37:33.980 So in the end, he gets killed.

01:37:38.980 Now, that's what happens nowadays.

01:37:40.980 And weapons, weapons would have contributed to that, too, I suspect, because it's it's easier to be a bully when you're huge and everyone else is small and they don't have weapons.

01:37:50.980 But once weapons emerge, the advantage of physical strength is decreased substantially, at least in principle.

01:37:57.980 Is that?

01:37:59.980 Well, yeah, I mean, weapons play a funny role.

01:38:01.980 And it's almost certain that the kinds of weapons that would be needed for a bully to use them existed long before 300,000 years ago.

01:38:09.980 You know, there are very nicely preserved spears from 400,000.

01:38:13.980 Right.

01:38:14.980 I'm thinking more about weapons used against the bully.

01:38:17.980 Well, yes.

01:38:20.980 But, you know, animals without weapons can kill others quite safely.

01:38:27.980 Even nowadays, you have descriptions of humans killing without weapons.

01:38:30.980 So how much weapons really mattered is unclear.

01:38:34.980 You can kind of argue it both ways.

01:38:36.980 But but either way, the what you see in the present is the argument that is taken back into the past.

01:38:47.980 And I like this argument a lot because I think it is a really tidy explanation for the fact that beginning around 300,000 years ago, we had this reduction in reactive aggression.

01:39:02.980 And there is no other explanation other than a communal effort at executing that can account for the removal of this would be desperate.

01:39:15.980 This bully who uses his physical strength.

01:39:17.980 That's why no other primate has escaped having an alpha male bully.

01:39:24.980 Only humans have converted an alpha male bully into an alliance of males among whom there is a sort of formal level of equality.

01:39:39.980 And if anybody in that alliance tries to throw their weight around, they know what will happen.

01:39:46.980 They will get taken out as as the bully originally did.

01:39:50.980 Right.

01:39:51.980 So you paused in in the goodness paradox that there's been enough of that in human societies over the last very long period of time to have markedly decreased the propensity for reactive aggression to such a degree that it's also transformed our morphology and our and our psychology.

01:40:10.980 Absolutely.

01:40:11.980 At the biological level.

01:40:12.980 Right.

01:40:13.980 Right.

01:40:14.980 Right.

01:40:15.980 And, you know, it probably accelerated over time, the the loss of reactive aggression, the move towards this domestication like species that we are now.

01:40:24.980 And people sometimes want to suggest that other forces like female choice would have come in females choosing to mate with the kinder, gentler, more domesticated male.

01:40:35.980 The problem with that is that as long as you had a bully who was capable of exerting his physical force, it wouldn't matter if a female was exerting female choice. 0.99

01:40:44.980 You know, she would come along and say, I don't want to mate with you and he would say too bad and punch her chosen male in the face and grab, take her off and make with her and rape her. 0.97

01:40:59.980 And, you know, it's a brutal vision, but this seems to me to conform to what we know about primates and to be the only explanation for how humans escaped what other primates have in terms of alpha males. 0.83

01:41:18.980 And there is an obvious reason for what it was that enabled humans to make that escape.

01:41:25.980 And that is language, because what language enabled the the beta males, the coalition of the subordinated males to do is to make a plan.

01:41:37.980 And now all of a sudden they could convert their individual tendencies for proactive aggression, which are not enough.

01:41:45.980 Not enough into an alliance.

01:41:49.980 And of course, it's very difficult.

01:41:51.980 You know, it's not just simple language because they've got to be able to work out how to approach someone and suggest this idea, you know, to float the possibility of killing the offender without themselves being exposed to the possibility of being shopped to the offender and themselves being killed.

01:42:12.980 So it's a complicated business.

01:42:15.980 And I say that to emphasize that other species of humans like Neanderthals probably had pretty good language themselves.

01:42:23.980 But I think the ancestors of sapiens must have been the ones whose linguistic ability, for whatever reason, got to the point of being so sophisticated that they could dare develop the sort of plan that would enable them consistently to get rid of the supreme bullies.

01:42:44.640 There was a movie, I unfortunately don't remember its name, but it was released in the 1980s, and maybe one of the viewers of this can supply us with the name.

01:42:56.380 It documented the lives of villagers in a very isolated and archaic Japanese village.

01:43:05.600 And there was a group of villagers, a family of villagers in there that consistently broke the rules and pilfered food.

01:43:11.560 And all of the villagers conspired together as a consequence of that, and in the night crept into their house and killed all of them.

01:43:24.000 It's exactly the scenario you describe.

01:43:26.060 It's an unbelievably striking movie.

01:43:28.400 I saw it in a repertory theater.

01:43:30.640 I'd really like to know the name of it.

01:43:35.720 At the end of it, two men carry their aged parents off to a mountain to abandon them, which is the typical way of dealing with elders in this particular village.

01:43:46.600 And one woman goes voluntarily, and the other fights and struggles, and it's a horrific scene.

01:43:51.620 So that's another part of the movie.

01:43:52.620 But I would like to find it, given this conversation, because it's an exact representation of the process that you described.

01:44:02.140 It's the only thing I've ever seen like that.

01:44:03.680 Yeah, I mean, I haven't heard of that movie, but I can cite you a number of cases nowadays, even in Texas, where similar sorts of things happen, where you get isolated communities, where the police are inadequate, and people just take it on themselves.

01:44:19.420 But the case you mentioned is not quite like the one I was mentioning, because it involves people being punished for pilfering food.

01:44:27.460 But it...

01:44:28.200 Yeah, that's right.

01:44:29.260 It's more, it's breaking the moral code.

01:44:32.200 Exactly.

01:44:32.440 So be a variant of that, yes.

01:44:33.680 And I think, you know, it's very significant what you just said, because I think that once you have the ability to safely execute using the absolute power of an alliance against a victim, you also have the ability to control society through social norms.

01:44:54.300 So do you think, is what you're claiming, the transformation of proactive aggression into use within the group to control reactive aggression within the group?

01:45:08.220 So is what happens that the conspiratorial parties define the bully, as a consequence of his behavior, as non-human, and are then able to use their intrinsic proclivity for proactive aggression to target him?

01:45:28.060 Yeah.

01:45:29.020 Yeah, I mean, whether they define him as non-human, that's...

01:45:32.220 Yeah, I'm just wondering if he fits it, if he starts to slip into that category, because that category obviously exists in some sense, because it enables these acts of proactive aggression to take place, right?

01:45:43.780 There has to be some psychological mechanism that is sufficiently profound to allow the perception of a morphologically human being as not human, so that you can attack them without, you know, without violating your moral code.

01:46:00.360 Well, I have seen some accounts which are that they say it's time to send Bert, whoever, back to the witches, because he looks like a witch.

01:46:12.840 Right, right, right, right, right, right. And you talk about witches and sorcery to some degree in your book, too, and that's also a topic of gossip.

01:46:23.940 Mm-hmm. Right.

01:46:25.240 So there will be psychological mechanisms that allow people to justify to themselves, but what they're basically doing is making themselves safe from, you know, someone who is a tyrant.

01:46:34.980 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

01:46:36.480 And, but my, you know, I really want to come back to this point that I think there are two processes that go on once humans have this ability to kill in this predictable, safe way.

01:46:48.360 And the first is the loss of alpha male, and therefore the loss of alpha male genes, and therefore the loss of reactive aggression, and therefore the self-domestication that actually ends up defining our species in terms of our morphology, as well as our behavior.

01:47:06.540 We are the domesticated version of a species that lived 300,000 years ago.

01:47:11.840 But the other process that happens is that because this group of males who have now acquired the power of life and death over an alpha male, they have acquired the power of life and death over everybody in the group.

01:47:28.640 So they are the supreme dictators as a group of what is okay.

01:47:38.480 They now, therefore, have created a world in which they can specify what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong.

01:47:46.440 They have created a moral system.

01:47:48.840 And from then on, I think you see an intensification of the degree to which males are ruling the society.

01:48:00.340 Very often the rules that they impose will be good for everybody, such as there shall be no murder, except when we say it's a good thing.

01:48:10.600 But sometimes the rules will not be good for everyone in society, such as when we tell females that we want them to have sex with a stranger, then they're darn well going to do it. 0.96

01:48:25.840 Or the bachelors will not be allowed anywhere near the women or our choice pieces of food. 0.92

01:48:33.180 In other words, there are selfish aspects to the male, what has become now something like a patriarchy, which go alongside the aspects that are good for the group as a whole.

01:48:47.500 And I think that this is a concept that is useful for thinking about the origins of many of the major political institutions or the major social institutions, I should say.

01:48:58.380 And the obvious ones are the system of justice, the system of religion, the systems of politics, the systems of law, ultimately going back to alliances among males who have agreed among themselves not to have any kind of alpha male and who then have the power that they can impose throughout society.

01:49:23.140 That is a really good place to bring this discussion to a close.

01:49:27.440 We covered a tremendous amount of material today in the last 90 minutes or so and touched on your three books.

01:49:37.300 I'm going to repeat their titles for everyone so that people who are interested can read them, which I would highly recommend.

01:49:45.580 Maybe I'll let you do that because I've lost my notes here.

01:49:47.840 I want to get the titles right.

01:49:49.320 So the first one was Demonic Males.

01:49:52.380 Demonic Males, Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, 1996.

01:49:56.240 1996, yeah.

01:49:57.260 And then Catching Fire.

01:49:59.140 Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human, 2009.

01:50:02.900 And then The Goodness Paradox.

01:50:06.100 Strange Relationship Between Violence and Virtue in Human Evolution, published in 2019.

01:50:10.800 Well, thank you very much for talking to me today and for walking me through that and the audience that I have no doubt will appreciate this through it as well.

01:50:22.180 And there's lots of other things I would have liked to have talked to you about.

01:50:25.200 And that really flew by as far as I was concerned.

01:50:27.320 So I hope everyone else feels that way as well.

01:50:29.220 And maybe we can get a chance to talk through some of these things.

01:50:33.100 I'd be interested in hearing more from you about your ideas about how more complex political structures might have emerged from this initial, say, consensus against violence, something like that.

01:50:47.040 Yeah, that's a very interesting developmental, historical idea, I suppose.

01:50:53.100 So anything else you'd like to add to close things off?

01:50:57.400 Do you want me to have another hour and a half?

01:51:00.480 Yeah, well, that would be nice.

01:51:02.100 And we'll do it again.

01:51:03.240 I'd like to do that again.

01:51:04.560 Maybe we can talk together with Franz de Waal if I can convince him to do that.

01:51:08.160 That might be fun.

01:51:09.360 That would be interesting.

01:51:10.360 Yeah, all right.

01:51:11.700 All right.

01:51:12.240 Well, thank you very much.

01:51:13.960 Thank you so much.

01:51:16.600 My pleasure.

01:51:17.440 It was it was.

01:51:18.160 And thanks again for agreeing to do this.

01:51:20.100 It was a pleasure talking to you.

01:51:21.220 Pleasure meeting you.

01:51:21.860 And thank you for for your books.

01:51:23.500 I've learned a tremendous amount reading them and enjoyed it very much, too.

01:51:27.980 So.

01:51:29.560 Till we meet again.

01:51:31.240 OK.

01:51:31.740 All right.

01:51:32.360 All right.

01:51:32.960 Bye bye.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 02, 2022

249. Primatologist Explains the 1% Difference Between Humans & Apes ｜ Richard Wrangham

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