In this episode, Dr. Richard Wrangham talks about his time researching chimps with Jane Goodall, what chimps can teach us about ourselves, and the role things like cooking played in the cognitive development of humans. Guest: Biological Anthropologist, Professor of Biological Anthropology, Professor at Harvard University, Richard Wrengham Dr. Wranagham is a MacArthur Fellow, the so-called Genius Grant, and an author of books like The Goodness Paradox and Demonial Males, Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. He s also a recipient of the prestigious prize popularly known as the "Genius Grant" and is the author of The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, which was published in 2019. In addition to being an anthropologist and primatologist, he is also a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, and a postdoc at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he is a member of the Harvard Honors College and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Biology. He is a regular contributor to the Journal of Primatology and the Bulletin of Primates, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The New Scientist. and the New York Review of primatology, among many other publications. This episode is brought to you by Leaffilters, a company that specializes in protecting the environment and preventing climate change-related issues in the field of environmental stewardship and public policy. . Leaffilter is a high-performance, eco-friendly cleaning product that does a great job keeping our environment safe and healthy. Leaffilter's patented technology is designed to keep our homes and gutters free of bacteria and keeping them free of mold and soil free of all traces of bacteria. in the process of keeping our homes safe and free of disease and keeping our plants alive and thriving in the most efficient way possible. We hope you enjoy this episode of the JBP Podcast! Subscribe to JBP on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, Share, and Retweet us your thoughts on this episode! JBP is a production of Gimlet Media by Gimlet, a podcast that focuses on the intersection of culture and nature, technology, science, and culture. Subscribe, and social media. JBPodcasts, we re all things JBP. Get the latest updates from JBP, your host Michaela Peterson, and much more! Subscribe and share JBP with your fellow podcast listeners everywhere!
00:13:37.260This was the late 1960s that I was studying zoology. And there were two writers whose work had sort of
00:13:46.580really impinged on the public imagination at that time in relationship to human evolution.
00:13:51.320There was Robert Audry, a playwright who wrote a book called African Genesis and another called
00:13:56.720Territorial Imperative, in which he produced some bold sweeping ideas about how human competitiveness and
00:14:05.180conflict had arisen from our time when our ancestors were in Africa. And there was Desmond Morris,
00:14:14.620who wrote a book called Naked Ape, in which he emphasised in particular the sexual side of human
00:14:22.340evolution. And what those books did for me was to say that there was a world out there waiting to be
00:14:30.420explored of really understanding in a way that had not been attempted before where humans come from in terms of
00:14:40.080our behaviour. Simultaneously, this was a time when the discovery of the social structure of all sorts of large mammals
00:14:51.120was 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.
00:15:08.860It's a very widespread antelope. Behavioural ecology means understanding the social behaviour in relationship to all the environmental pressures.
00:15:17.920This 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.
00:15:26.860And 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.
00:15:44.860In 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.
00:16:08.860And 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.
00:16:32.860All sorts of fascinating differences were emerging and hints were coming through about how you could explain these.
00:16:42.860So 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
00:16:58.860very naive political science interpretations of human behavior. We could really embed it in the environment in which humans had evolved.
00:17:10.860So 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.
00:17:27.860And 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?
00:17:51.860And 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?
00:18:13.860Yeah, 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.
00:18:40.860It 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.
00:19:01.060There was the apes and there was humans. An enormous shock happened in 1984.
00:19:08.060In 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.
00:19:28.060And this technique was to assess the degree of similarity of DNA.
00:19:35.060So they'd worked out this DNA annealing system, and they applied it to apes and humans.
00:19:40.060And they claimed that chimpanzees and bonobos were the most closely related species.
00:19:48.060And then chimpanzees, bonobos and humans were more closely related to each other than any of them were to gorillas.
00:19:57.060So that kind of put us in the chimp category.
00:20:00.060Now, let me ask you, just there, I want to ask you a question about that DNA technique.
00:20:06.060Now, 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.
00:20:19.060And 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.
00:20:32.060And 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.
00:20:42.060That was the first way of doing DNA similarity analysis.
00:20:45.060That's been superseded, but was that the 1984 work?
00:20:56.060You know, unzip things and zip them together and see how tough they are to pull apart.
00:21:01.060And that crudeness meant that people could challenge the results.
00:21:07.060And it took maybe a decade for people to become, you know, the profession as a whole to become really convinced of these extraordinary results.
00:21:17.060And 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.
00:21:27.060They look so closely related because if you just imagine allowing a chimpanzee to just keep on growing, it basically turns into a gorilla.
00:21:37.060And many of the differences between gorillas and chimps can be understood just in terms of body size.
00:21:44.060So 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.
00:22:00.060What that means is that the common ancestor of chimps and humans is very likely in the mold of the chimpanzee gorilla.
00:22:13.060Either they're the same, very similar kind of animal, which if it was very large would be like a gorilla.
00:22:19.060If it was very small, it would be like a chimpanzee.
00:22:22.060Either 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.
00:22:34.060But no one thinks that that is the case.
00:22:36.060Right. So the idea is that, and this is what, how long ago did gorillas split from chimps, hypothetically?
00:22:43.060Is that like 10 million years ago, that sort of thing?
00:22:46.060So the common ancestor of chimps and gorillas and the chimps in this discussion include us, roughly speaking.
00:23:22.060And 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?
00:23:37.060Yes. And in between, we got the genus Homo, so the genus to which we belong.
00:23:44.060And that emerged about 2 million years ago.
00:23:48.060So you've got the common ancestor with chimps 6 or 7 million years ago.
00:23:55.060And then between then and 2 million years ago, we had these animals that are rather like chimpanzees standing upright.
00:24:05.060And they gave rise to our genus, Homo, about 2 million years ago.
00:24:09.060And ever since then, our ancestors have basically looked like us.
00:24:12.060Basically, 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.
00:24:27.060And they wouldn't, they'd fit reasonably well.
00:24:30.060They'd be, you know, they'd need the big size, heavily muscled, but nevertheless.
00:24:36.060Right, 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.
00:25:00.180Is that, is that, and then there's obviously fossil dating, but what other techniques are used to estimate the divergent states?
00:25:09.180Yeah, the more recent times, obviously we've got the fossils.
00:25:14.180So, you know, we have a very good fossil record back to more than 2 million years ago.
00:25:19.180And 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.
00:25:33.180And then, then we got a pretty good record, but obviously the older you go, the more broken it is, but of the Australopithecines.
00:25:42.180And by the time we get to 3, 4 million years ago, it's getting increasingly broken.
00:25:49.180But nevertheless, there's half a dozen different species and more that have been recognized in the African habitats.
00:25:58.180And then by the time you're asking the question about when it was that you have chimpanzees and humans as a common ancestor,
00:26:11.180there you do have to rely on genetic data, as you say, the rate at which mutations accumulate,
00:26:18.180because we do not have any good fossil evidence for that animal.
00:26:24.180And the reason for that is partly just it's getting old and also probably because it would have lived in a forest.
00:28:31.180You know, I happened to arrive there at a time when some very fundamental discoveries were being made.
00:28:39.180Jane Goodall had already discovered that chimpanzees had very strong relationships among males, very, very brotherly, very fraternal relationships,
00:28:54.180somewhat recalling the kind of thing that you can see in, I don't know, fraternities in contemporary humans.
00:29:06.180She discovered that, amazingly, they would go hunting and would kill antelope, pigs, baboons, other monkeys, and eat them.
00:29:22.180She discovered that they would share the meat.
00:29:46.180And did they share for sexual favors, the chimps?
00:29:50.180Did she discover that, that the males would give meat to the females?
00:29:54.180I can't remember if I'm remembering that correctly.
00:29:56.180Well, you may indeed remember what you read.
00:30:00.180Some 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.
00:30:22.180That's pretty sophisticated behavior, and it would imply some knowledge of trading with future gain in mind, it would seem to me.
00:30:31.180I don't think the problem of sophistication is difficult.
00:30:35.180I think chimpanzees could easily handle that based on other kinds of interactions they have.
00:30:41.180The 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.
00:30:52.180I 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.
00:31:10.180And she then goes rank by rank, down the ranks to the different males, and finally will get some juvenile male to mate with her.
00:31:19.180That's just symbolic of the fact that she is desperate to get mated as much as possible.
00:31:25.180And she's also, with the chimps, the females are, they have an estrus period that's not hidden, correct?
00:31:34.180It's very visually striking, that's right.
00:31:39.180So 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.
00:31:53.180So males know when she has the swelling, but there is a little bit of subtlety to this.
00:31:59.180So 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.
00:32:07.180And during the first week of the swelling, the males are not particularly interested in her.
00:32:12.180They appear to know, as it were, that she is unlikely actually to have ovulated at that time.
00:32:19.180They 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.
00:32:34.180But she is interested in mating throughout this period, and she can mate sometimes 50 times a day.
00:33:31.180Well, 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.
00:33:45.180And 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.
00:33:59.180And 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.
00:34:10.180So 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.
00:35:04.180Now, it's very unlikely that such a sort of mechanical system applies to chimpanzees.
00:35:11.180It'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.
00:35:27.180But 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,
00:35:39.180that females risk the lives of their infants if they do not mate with all of the males in the group on a regular basis.
00:35:50.180And is that also is that characteristic of the bonobos as well?
00:35:54.180In the bonobos, the females famously have even more sex than in chimpanzees.
00:36:09.180And 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.
00:36:21.180Right. Right. So you can't see any exceptions to that.
00:37:46.180Well, why do you why do you why do you believe that?
00:37:52.180If 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.
00:38:13.180And they their big job in life is to produce food for the male from the point of view of their relationship with the male.
00:38:23.180He 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.
00:38:41.180And 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.
00:38:49.180So if his wife doesn't cook the food for him, then she's in trouble.
00:38:53.180So the female is bonded to the male in the sense that the male needs her to provide food for him.
00:39:07.180If if if if she is sexually promiscuous, then for obvious reasons, the the male is upset.
00:41:00.180You have all sorts of sources of of risk.
00:41:03.180And 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.
00:41:25.180But because she can go to the husband and say that lousy rat has taken some of my food.
00:41:33.180And, 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.
00:41:48.180So 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.
00:42:03.180He's more than that, because he can go to the rest of the men and say, you know, guys, we've got a trouble.
00:42:10.180We've got some guy who is not respecting the norms in the society.
00:42:15.180And that's a much more potent threat than one guy standing up for a one on one fight.
00:42:21.180Because all of a sudden you've got the whole society now led by those men ready to enforce some quite severe punishment.
00:42:32.180Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:42:38.180Most of the time you'll probably be fine.
00:42:40.180But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:42:46.180In our hyperconnected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:42:51.180Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know how to intercept it.
00:43:00.180And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:43:04.180With some off the shelf hardware, even a tech savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins and credit card details.
00:43:11.180Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:46:17.180In fact, it's more likely that a female would have to pay a male to mate her.
00:46:21.180I mean, not that really needs to happen, but anyway, this is an example to me of a behavior
00:46:31.180that was written up quite early in the study of chimpanzees in the 1970s on,
00:46:38.180I think, too optimistic assumption that something that you saw that was reminiscent of human behavior
00:46:44.180might easily be interpreted as being equivalent.
00:46:47.180So, you know, occasionally a male might allow an estrus female to take some meat
00:46:54.180and everyone leaps on it and says, hey, look just like humans.
00:46:57.180As it turns out, females who are not estrus are more likely to get meat than a female who is estrus.
00:47:05.180As it turns out, when you have females with estrus, with sexual swellings,
00:47:10.180then there is less hunting going on than when those females are absent.
00:47:15.180There's all sorts of evidence now that, you know, this is not a confident relationship at all.
00:47:21.180So I think it's an object lesson in the care you need for thinking about similarities between humans and primates and chimpanzees.
00:47:32.180Right. 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,
00:47:43.180you 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.
00:48:02.180And 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,
00:48:15.180which actually really happened while I was there. And that is the discovery of something even more shocking than
00:48:23.180than hunting, meat sharing and tool use, the famous tool use.
00:48:28.180You know, all these things that were very similar between chimpanzees and humans.
00:48:32.180Well, then it turned out that chimpanzees were holding territories against other chimpanzees and would sometimes go to the territorial boundaries,
00:48:45.180look for opportunities to stalk and hunt and kill members of neighboring groups.
00:48:52.180And those members of neighboring groups would be almost entirely adult males.
00:48:57.180So now we had for the first time something that looked like a primitive kind of war.
00:49:03.180Yes. And that the importance of that can hardly be overstated.
00:49:07.180I mean, when I first read that, it just shocked me to the core because I thought, well, you know,
00:49:12.180if you're an optimist in some sense, you might assume that the human proclivity for war is a consequence of,
00:49:19.180let's say, maladaptive socialization or something like that, that could hypothetically be easily controlled.
00:49:25.180But to see an analog of that so striking in chimpanzees was, well,
00:49:32.180was an indication of just exactly how deep that proclivity is, that, that proclivity to dehumanize,
00:49:39.180let's say, so to speak, out group members and to treat them as prey.
00:49:46.180Yeah, I mean, it's an indication, but, but, you know, as my great advisor, Robert Hind, the superb animal behaviorist endlessly emphasized to me,
00:49:57.180you know, you've got to be really, really cautious about thinking how to understand what this chimpanzee behavior means for, for humans.
00:50:07.180And I think, you know, we have been, as a profession, pretty cautious about it.
00:50:14.180But, 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,
00:50:24.180males in neighboring groups, is something to do with disturbance to that particular population.
00:50:32.180And it won't turn, it'll turn out not to happen in other populations.
00:50:36.180And it took, gosh, 30 years to develop enough confidence in what was happening in all of the other populations,
00:50:48.180to be able to say, you know what, this is a characteristic feature of chimpanzees.
00:50:53.180And by the time we had those data coming in, we could also say what it was associated with.
00:51:01.180And the answer is, it was associated with high population density, and large numbers of males in the aggressive community.
00:51:10.180So you get lots of males together, and they will look for opportunities to kill members of neighboring groups.
00:51:19.180And what is it not associated with? It's not associated with measures of human disturbance,
00:51:26.180whether or not the forest had been subject to a bit of logging, or how many people live nearby, that sort of thing.
00:51:36.180The chimpanzees, you know, don't care about that sort of stuff.
00:51:39.180They're living their own lives, and their social dynamics are concerned with what's going on in their own species' lives.
00:51:50.180So 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?
00:51:57.180Outnumbering looks the important thing, yes.
00:52:00.180Right, because they won't attack, the chimps generally don't attack outside their boundaries,
00:52:05.180unless they clearly outnumber those that they are targeting, correct?
00:52:11.180And that explanation for that, they have a rudimentary sense of number or amount, something like that.
00:52:21.180Is it number or amount? They have a rudimentary sense of that, at least.
00:52:24.180Yeah, I mean, you know, they're very smart.
00:52:27.180And 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.
00:52:39.180And what this comes down to is eight males attacking one.
00:53:33.180And so a chimpanzee fighting for its life could, in theory, impose immense damage on its attackers.
00:53:42.180But 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.
00:54:02.180And 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.
00:54:28.180You have variation which exposes occasional victims to occasional large groups.
00:54:36.180And just the fact of having a lot of males in your group means that you have safety when attacking.
00:54:45.180Imbalance of power is enough to induce attack.
00:54:49.180So, you know, for me, this is this is classic Lord Acton.
00:54:53.180Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts.
00:55:21.180But what they do gain is increased confidence in moving in an area that was previously more evenly used between the two communities.
00:55:32.180So they decrease the probability that they're going to be someone who's one against eight.
00:55:38.180It's partly the safety problem like that, but also it gets it just gets them access to more resources in that area in general.
00:55:48.180So, 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.
00:55:57.180And 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.
00:56:10.180And in one case, beautiful, showing all of the expected consequences for the quality of the diet.
00:56:19.180So 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.
00:56:38.180So the females are feeding better, the males are feeding better and even increased survival of the offspring in that community as a whole.
00:56:49.180And how much killing does it take to produce such effects?
00:56:53.180I mean, is it is the elimination of one or two individuals from a neighboring troop sufficient to do that?
00:57:00.180Like what scale does this have to occur at before those consequences emerged?
00:57:48.180I 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.
00:58:02.180So 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.
00:58:21.180But not enough was known about the neighbors to be sure what proportion that meant or that was of the neighbors.
00:58:31.180It's unlikely that any neighboring communities were completely eliminated, though.
00:58:35.180Those 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.
00:58:54.180And 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.
00:59:05.180So you you were working with Goodall when that initial rating behavior was documented?
00:59:12.180I mean, I saw some of the first raids.
00:59:15.180And 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.
00:59:25.180I mean, that must have really I mean, that that's quite a bombshell that that discovery.
00:59:29.180And 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.
00:59:38.180Is it is that have I got that right or was she just being cautious or what what's the story there?
01:00:29.180Well, I wasn't I wasn't I was certainly wasn't suggesting that.
01:00:32.180I 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.
01:00:43.180Yes. And I mean, she's I think she's been appropriately cautious.
01:00:49.180You know, she described what was seen.
01:00:52.180I think I probably did go a bit beyond her in in inferring the more general tendencies.
01:01:02.180And 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.
01:01:12.180And then, as I said, you know, another 30 years later, the data were really coming in very, very solidly.
01:01:18.180And 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.
01:01:27.180I wanted to make is that it is very extraordinary because we only know two species on Earth or that stage.
01:01:35.180We 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.
01:01:45.180And those were chimpanzees and humans.
01:01:48.180Yeah. Well, when I picked up the book, I mean, I was very interested in the scientific study of aggression at the time.
01:01:55.180And when I picked up the book, I thought the same thing about the title, I thought.
01:01:59.180But the book itself is a very scholarly examination of this proclivity.
01:02:04.180And so so so for people who are listening, who are interested, it's a very, very solid book.
01:02:29.180So 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.
01:02:35.180You 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?
01:03:07.180You 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.
01:03:23.180You know, they're spending six hours a day just sitting in trees eating.
01:03:27.180Yeah, well, I think it was in your in the book Catching Fire, maybe.
01:03:33.180Is 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?
01:03:44.180They have to do that because their diet is not particularly rich.
01:03:47.180And so they don't have time for much else.
01:03:49.180And with chimps as well, like it takes a lot of calories to keep the chimp going.
01:03:53.180And 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.
01:04:01.180It's very difficult to get beyond hand to mouth living.
01:04:04.180Yeah, I just think it's a really helpful sort of embedding of of the reality of animals lives.
01:04:15.180And it's not something that necessarily comes across when you you read about their social behavior.
01:04:20.180But they are spending most of their time strategizing about how to get as much food as possible.
01:04:29.180And I found that immensely helpful. But on the other hand, it took me a long time before the penny dropped.
01:04:38.180You know, I actually tried to to to live like a chimpanzee a little bit in the sense of eating what chimpanzees at.
01:04:46.180You know, I have everything chimpanzees at and I discovered very rapidly that I got extremely hungry if I did that.
01:04:54.180The penny finally dropped in the 90s when I realized that there is a huge difference between chimpanzee and human diets.
01:05:04.180And that is that humans cook our food and that developed a whole new story.
01:05:11.180So but I mentioned the importance of seeing chimpanzees feeding and spending time thinking about the attitude to.
01:05:20.180To using their environment to maximize the amount of food they can get, because.
01:05:27.180It's it's a big problem for humans, too.
01:05:30.180And, you know, this is this is nature in the raw.
01:05:33.180How on earth do you get enough to satisfy those endless pangs of hunger?
01:05:38.180I think you've got to think of these animals being hungry all the time.
01:05:42.180And it's difficult for us to get into that mentality because we are never hungry.
01:05:47.180We can satisfy our food needs all the time.
01:05:52.180Right. So we underestimate how relevant that is by a massive degree.
01:05:57.180I 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.
01:06:06.180I 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.
01:06:15.180Well, in some sense, it's longer than I had longer than many suppositions.
01:06:21.180And you also make a very strong case that our proclivity to use fire and cook has radically altered.
01:06:28.180Well, 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.
01:06:43.180More resources on brain power, more resources on brain power.
01:06:45.180Have I got that right? I hope I'm not doing your book any justice.
01:06:58.180To free it free us up to because to do nothing long enough to think about something other than immediate food, food acquisition.
01:07:06.180So 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.
01:07:17.180You know, so if we were eating our food raw, we would be spending probably more than six hours a day chewing our food.
01:07:23.180And as it is, we spend less than an hour a day chewing our food.
01:07:29.180And gosh, you know, that is important.
01:07:31.180It's it has different importance for females and for males in terms of how females and males actually spend their time now.
01:07:39.180And the irony is that females do a lot of food preparation.
01:07:43.180I mean, this is worldwide. The only exceptions to it are in modern urban society.
01:07:49.180But 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.
01:08:03.180For 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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01:08:54.180Hey, everyone. Real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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01:09:48.180And the contribution to cultural production, artistic production, aesthetic production, bead making, all of that, that's all.
01:09:57.180Exactly. That's right. I mean, you know, all of a sudden you have a totally different attitude to time from other people.
01:10:06.180Right. You have some of it. Exactly. Right. Right. And so, so two million years ago.
01:10:12.180So 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?
01:10:21.180Well, one of the things that's really interesting about fire, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's, it's archetypally interesting.
01:10:27.180You 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.
01:10:39.180They'll look at infants and little kids, like intently watch them nonstop as if they're in eternally interesting.
01:10:46.180They don't habituate to that. But we also don't seem to habituate to fire.
01:10:51.180And 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.
01:11:09.180So it was endlessly fascinating. So I don't know what you think about that idea, but...
01:11:14.180No, there were probably various kinds of adaptations, psychological and physiological adaptations to, to being near fire, to being drawn to fire and so on.
01:11:25.180But 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.
01:11:36.180I don't know. I mean, you know, my, my, my personal fantasy goes along these lines that you've got Australopithecine.
01:11:44.180So that's, you know, like a chimpanzee standing upright, it's got a big jaw and eating raw foods, big teeth.
01:11:57.180And it's clear that there was increasing evidence in the fossil record of, of meat eating.
01:12:09.180And 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.
01:12:23.180If you, if you just, you know, do a steak tartare on it.
01:12:26.180And so my fantasy is that they were eating more meat.
01:12:30.180They were using rocks to pound the meat sometimes.
01:12:34.180Sometimes they use wood, but when they use rocks, sparks would come out and sparks would sometimes start little fires.
01:12:41.180And so they repeatedly be exposed to fires in relationship to their activity.
01:12:47.180And 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.
01:13:01.180You know, how, how often are animals, edible animal animals trapped in grass fires in Africa?
01:13:09.180You know, people often refer to that idea, but I don't think it happens very often at all.
01:13:17.180I, I've, I've not, I don't believe there's any studies in which people have actually, you know, documented a number.
01:13:25.180Most animals are able to escape by borrowing underground or running away from the fire.
01:13:31.180You know, it's conceivable that, that, that is the way it happened, that it happened often enough that people, you know, figured it out.
01:13:39.180The Australopithecines figured out what was going on.
01:13:42.180You know, it's, it's all speculation as to how fire was first controlled.
01:13:47.180But, but I think what is clear is that once it was first controlled, it would have had huge effects.
01:13:56.180You know, we know that all animals like their food cooked compared to like eating it raw or all that have been tested.
01:14:04.180So, you know, not just our domestic animals, but wild animals too.
01:14:08.180All the apes, for instance, prefer it cooked.
01:14:10.180They just haven't figured out how to cook it.
01:14:14.180That seems very strange that, that, that, that, how is it that that could possibly be the case?
01:14:22.180Like, why do animals prefer cooked food?
01:14:24.180It's because what cooking does is essentially pre-digest food.
01:14:27.180And, 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.
01:14:59.180So, 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.
01:15:09.180There's a texture issue and probably the taste, you know, as you say, a little bit of decomposition.
01:15:18.180So if proteins have been partly denatured, then you have more exposure to the amino acids that have a bit of sweetness to them.
01:15:29.180Uh, 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.
01:16:01.180Well, it's certainly a striking characteristic of human response to especially caramelized meat, which has a particularly distinctive and delicious odor.
01:16:11.180Um, so, so the, you know, this is still an early, uh, an early science.
01:16:15.180You 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.
01:16:25.180You know, when they're naive and that once you are eating cooked food, you are getting more calories.
01:16:33.180Uh, 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.
01:16:41.180So 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.
01:16:54.180I mean, this is huge, you know, for five percent more milk out of their cows, you know, they're a millionaire.
01:17:00.180And now we're talking, you know, some tens of percent.
01:17:09.180And, 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.
01:17:22.180And, 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.
01:17:32.180One is that everything fits at that point.
01:17:35.180So 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.
01:17:43.180And 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.
01:18:00.180Ah, ah, so that made it possible for us to not have to climb trees.
01:18:06.180That, that's the idea, at least in part.
01:18:09.180And the Australopithecines could climb trees, so they surely would have slept in trees.
01:18:12.180But 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.
01:18:22.180So they'd have to sleep on the ground often.
01:18:25.180Well, you have to be nuts to sleep on the ground if you don't have fire to protect you.
01:18:29.180So 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.
01:18:44.180And 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.
01:18:59.180So, 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.
01:19:07.180You know, you get a steady increase in brain size.
01:19:10.180You get a variation in tooth size, but generally it's declining.
01:19:17.180Okay, so, so we've, we've, we've touched on autobiographical issues.
01:19:22.180We talked about your work with Goodall.
01:19:24.180Goodall, we, we touched on demonic males and the raiding, and now we've, we've touched on cooking and fire use.
01:19:31.180So 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.
01:19:43.180And it's, and it's, and it's, and the particular forms it takes in human beings and our close relatives.
01:19:48.180But 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.
01:20:19.180So 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.
01:20:31.180So 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.
01:20:51.180And in a way that horrifies us in retrospect often and makes us drop, drop, drop, drop our jaws at our own behavioral possibilities.
01:21:01.180Yeah, I mean, you know, we're still living in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust.
01:21:08.180And 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?
01:21:20.180So, you know, there's that angle on humans.
01:21:25.180But the other angle, which makes human behavior so paradoxical, is that we are the kindest and most tolerant and most gentle of animals.
01:21:34.180And people since the ancient Greeks have said we're like a domesticated animal.
01:21:38.180You know, we meet strangers, we're so nice to each other, we don't have automatic aggression, we're nothing like wild animals.
01:21:45.180We share food and make that the basis of many of our social interactions.
01:21:51.180And 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.
01:22:09.180And 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.
01:22:24.180I 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.
01:22:34.180So, 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.
01:22:47.180I 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.
01:23:02.180And equally, it is very clear that people grow up to be spontaneously, thoroughly moral and kind and tolerant with each other.
01:23:14.180We have these two tendencies. And you mentioned this division between two types of aggression, proactive and reactive.
01:23:21.180It's a division that that as you as a psychologist said, it's a familiar distinction.
01:23:27.180That'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.
01:23:39.180Well, 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.
01:23:53.180Because all of the war and the Holocaust, the stuff you're talking about, that's all proactive.
01:23:59.180Right. That's planned. That's that's multi-party. That's organized. It's social. It's it's one group against another.
01:24:06.980Yeah. And and it follows exactly the chimpanzee principle of imbalance of power.
01:24:11.980You 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.
01:24:18.980So, you know, the killers of the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals in the Holocaust very, very rarely got any pushback.
01:24:29.980They were butchers. And that's the nature of proactive aggression.
01:24:34.980So 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.
01:24:43.980And part of that circumstance is that we're defining the the entities upon which that aggression is afflicted as outside what constitutes human.
01:24:53.980Human because within the human definition, all the standard rules of morality apply.
01:24:58.980And that's sort of equivalent. Correct me if you think I'm making an error here.
01:25:03.980That'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.
01:25:10.980You'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.
01:25:25.980Mm 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.
01:25:32.980Right. 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.
01:25:42.980It'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.
01:25:50.980You can enter into a social contract with them with implicit understanding, whereas with an outsider.
01:25:57.980You 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.
01:26:10.980And maybe that's what, you know, underlies the definition of human in some sense for us.
01:26:15.980Yeah, I mean, that seems like a reasonable explanation.
01:26:18.980But 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.
01:26:37.980So, 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.
01:26:58.980And you can argue very strongly against that.
01:27:01.980So let me ask you a question that just popped into my mind about that.
01:27:05.980I mean, it's a compelling idea. I know that in the in the in the in the.
01:27:12.980I think it's in Genesis and the Abrahamic stories.
01:27:16.980There is tremendous emphasis on the hospitality that has to be shown to a stranger.
01:27:24.980And so that seems to be an ex that seems to be an exception to that general principle.
01:27:30.980And so I think it's a definition of the stranger.
01:27:34.980You 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.
01:27:47.980Right, right. So still in still encapsulated within the idea of what constitutes the central people.
01:27:54.980Yeah. Yeah. OK, OK, OK, OK. Well, that could well be.
01:27:57.980I 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.
01:28:16.980And yeah, well, and maybe we've got some more or one world.
01:28:20.980Right, right, right. Well, at least we can.
01:28:34.980The proactive aggression, the use of power to to damage anyone outside your group.
01:28:42.980And then the reactive aggression that you describe is also characteristic of other of many, many other animals who engage in male to male conflict.
01:28:51.980So that's not unique to human beings. And and that's that involves emotional reactivity.
01:29:02.980So 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.
01:29:12.980And even though there's very important cultural elements to it, it's part of our biology.
01:29:17.980But reactive aggression is what people if you look up aggression in a textbook or animal behavior.
01:29:22.980It's almost all about reactive aggression, often exclusively about it.
01:29:27.980So reactive aggression is testosterone fueled.
01:29:36.980Not not only by anger, but anger is a anger, frustration, shame associated with emotions.
01:29:43.980That'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.
01:29:57.980So 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.
01:30:12.980Is 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.
01:30:24.980But nevertheless, bonobos are not nearly as peaceful as humans.
01:30:29.980So we have, you know, we're way down the scale and reactive aggression.
01:30:34.980And at the same time, we're way up the scale on proactive aggression.
01:30:38.980And the goodness paradox is a story of how do we get this astonishing mixture?
01:30:43.980And I think, you know, we actually have a really good story for it now, a really good understanding.
01:30:50.980Yeah, 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.
01:31:10.980So, you know, we talked about the study showing that, you know, a small percentage of two year olds are spontaneously aggressive.
01:31:17.980If 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.
01:31:28.980And they tend to be lifetime aggressors.
01:31:30.980And those are the ones that, well, you have a story about them, I think.
01:31:35.980Well, 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.
01:31:46.980You know, all our babies would have been highly aggressive and would have retained that aggressiveness throughout life.
01:31:54.980And the reason we can say that is good to two main points.
01:32:01.980First of all, our anatomy compared to our earlier ancestors looks like the anatomy of a domesticated animal compared to a wild animal.
01:32:12.980And when I'm saying our earlier ancestors, I'm thinking very specifically of what happened around 300,000 years ago.
01:32:21.980So this is when we get the first glimmerings of our species moving into sapienization.
01:32:30.980Sapienization process of becoming Homo sapiens.
01:32:34.980People now say it started about 300,000 years ago, that thanks to fossil discoveries in Morocco.
01:32:43.980And that's when you first start getting smaller teeth and smaller mouths, indicative of a trend that will get increasingly strong.
01:32:55.980By 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.
01:33:09.980The four characteristics they use are smaller teeth and jaws, reduced differences between males and females, reduced sexual dimorphism, a reduction in body size.
01:33:24.980And those three things all happened fairly early in Homo sapiens.
01:33:28.980And then the fourth thing is reduced brain size.
01:33:33.980And astonishingly, there is evidence for reduced brain size in Homo sapiens compared to our earlier phases.
01:33:43.980Right, but no, not necessarily any loss of cognitive power.
01:33:50.980There's no evidence of a loss of cognitive power in domesticated animals compared to their wild ancestors, even though they have smaller brains.
01:33:57.980And I think you posited that that was a consequence of decreased size of the brain areas associated with reactive emotions.
01:37:40.980And 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.
01:37:50.980But once weapons emerge, the advantage of physical strength is decreased substantially, at least in principle.
01:38:36.980But but either way, the what you see in the present is the argument that is taken back into the past.
01:38:47.980And 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.
01:39:02.980And there is no other explanation other than a communal effort at executing that can account for the removal of this would be desperate.
01:39:15.980This bully who uses his physical strength.
01:39:17.980That's why no other primate has escaped having an alpha male bully.
01:39:24.980Only humans have converted an alpha male bully into an alliance of males among whom there is a sort of formal level of equality.
01:39:39.980And if anybody in that alliance tries to throw their weight around, they know what will happen.
01:39:46.980They will get taken out as as the bully originally did.
01:39:51.980So 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.
01:40:15.980And, you know, it probably accelerated over time, the the loss of reactive aggression, the move towards this domestication like species that we are now.
01:40:24.980And 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.
01:40:35.980The 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.
01:40:44.980You 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.
01:40:59.980And, 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.
01:41:18.980And there is an obvious reason for what it was that enabled humans to make that escape.
01:41:25.980And that is language, because what language enabled the the beta males, the coalition of the subordinated males to do is to make a plan.
01:41:37.980And now all of a sudden they could convert their individual tendencies for proactive aggression, which are not enough.
01:41:51.980You 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.
01:42:15.980And I say that to emphasize that other species of humans like Neanderthals probably had pretty good language themselves.
01:42:23.980But 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.
01:42:44.640There 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.
01:42:56.380It documented the lives of villagers in a very isolated and archaic Japanese village.
01:43:05.600And there was a group of villagers, a family of villagers in there that consistently broke the rules and pilfered food.
01:43:11.560And all of the villagers conspired together as a consequence of that, and in the night crept into their house and killed all of them.
01:43:24.000It's exactly the scenario you describe.
01:43:30.640I'd really like to know the name of it.
01:43:35.720At 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.
01:43:46.600And one woman goes voluntarily, and the other fights and struggles, and it's a horrific scene.
01:43:52.620But I would like to find it, given this conversation, because it's an exact representation of the process that you described.
01:44:02.140It's the only thing I've ever seen like that.
01:44:03.680Yeah, 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.
01:44:19.420But the case you mentioned is not quite like the one I was mentioning, because it involves people being punished for pilfering food.
01:44:33.680And 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.
01:44:54.300So 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?
01:45:08.220So 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?
01:45:29.020Yeah, I mean, whether they define him as non-human, that's...
01:45:32.220Yeah, 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?
01:45:43.780There 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.
01:46:00.360Well, 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.
01:46:12.840Right, 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.
01:46:25.240So 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.
01:46:36.480And, 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.
01:46:48.360And 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.
01:47:06.540We are the domesticated version of a species that lived 300,000 years ago.
01:47:11.840But 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.
01:47:28.640So they are the supreme dictators as a group of what is okay.
01:47:38.480They 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.
01:47:48.840And from then on, I think you see an intensification of the degree to which males are ruling the society.
01:48:00.340Very 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.
01:48:10.600But 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.
01:48:25.840Or the bachelors will not be allowed anywhere near the women or our choice pieces of food.
01:48:33.180In 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.
01:48:47.500And 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.
01:48:58.380And 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.
01:49:23.140That is a really good place to bring this discussion to a close.
01:49:27.440We covered a tremendous amount of material today in the last 90 minutes or so and touched on your three books.
01:49:37.300I'm going to repeat their titles for everyone so that people who are interested can read them, which I would highly recommend.
01:49:45.580Maybe I'll let you do that because I've lost my notes here.
01:50:06.100Strange Relationship Between Violence and Virtue in Human Evolution, published in 2019.
01:50:10.800Well, 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.
01:50:22.180And there's lots of other things I would have liked to have talked to you about.
01:50:25.200And that really flew by as far as I was concerned.
01:50:27.320So I hope everyone else feels that way as well.
01:50:29.220And maybe we can get a chance to talk through some of these things.
01:50:33.100I'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.
01:50:47.040Yeah, that's a very interesting developmental, historical idea, I suppose.
01:50:53.100So anything else you'd like to add to close things off?
01:50:57.400Do you want me to have another hour and a half?