In this episode, Jordan speaks with Dr. Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. Throughout his career, Dr. De Waal has published numerous books about the complexity of animal behavior. His latest book, Different, published in 2022, looks at sex differences in humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Together, the two of them discuss the instinct for reciprocal cooperation, the necessity of play, and how we mismeasure animals, and more. Jordan was really excited to chat with Frans, because he's had a great influence on his thought. His work is revolutionary not only biologically, but philosophically, and that's something he has delved into in his work on play, gender, and the structure of hierarchies in primates. Dr. deWaal is a scientist who's, in many ways, in a league of his own. He's been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, as well as the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2007, Time declared him one of the world s most influential people today. He is also a signally important, in my estimation, among peacemaking among primates. I've read about 7 of his books, including "Chimpanzee Cultures," which he edited with Richard Wranzee, who was another guest on my show Another Great Idea: Another Great Nature, The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. I hope you enjoy this episode. Have you heard of anything more chilling than frozen beef? Until November 3rd, get an always fresh, never frozen Dave s single from Wendy's for only $4.99.99 at participating Wendy's until November 3, until then, $4, with no taxes or fees. Terms and conditions apply apply. Thanks, Jordan B. Peterson I'm Michaela P. Peterson, PhD, J. B. (Jordan B. P. (PhD, M.A., M.D., PhD, C.E., C.A.E. ) . Thank you for listening to this episode of The Jordan B Peterson Podcast! Subscribe to my show on the podcast on iTunes, Podchronicity and subscribe to my podcast on PodChronicle. . . . Subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices? Become a supporter of the show on iTunes and other podcast directories
00:00:15.280Welcome to episode 269 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.
00:00:21.180In this episode, Dad spoke with Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist and ethologist.
00:00:26.640Throughout his career, de Waal has published numerous books about the complexity of animal behavior.
00:00:32.940His latest book, Different, published in 2022, looks at sex differences in humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos.
00:00:40.220Dad was really excited to chat with Frans de Waal because he's had a great influence on his thought.
00:00:45.280Together, the two of them discussed the instinct for reciprocal cooperation, the necessity of play, reconciliation, how we mismeasure animals, and more.
00:00:54.220Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy this episode.
00:01:10.060Hello, everyone. I am really thrilled, even more than usual, because I'm usually thrilled with my guests,
00:01:22.160Dr. de Waal is a Dutch-American biologist and primatologist known for his work on the behavior and social intelligence of our closest biological relatives.
00:01:32.960He is C.H. Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University.
00:01:40.400His scientific work has been published in hundreds of technical articles in journals such as Science, Nature, Scientific American, and Outlets Specialized in Animal Behavior.
00:01:52.520And I should point out that, generally speaking, in a scientist's career, even a single publication in a journal such as Science or Nature can be the pinnacle of a career.
00:02:02.820And to do that multiple times is pretty rare.
00:02:06.960And so Dr. de Waal is a scientist who's, in many ways, in a league of his own.
00:02:12.380His popular books, translated into more than 20 languages, have made him one of the world's most visible primatologists and scientists, I would say.
00:02:19.780His latest two books of many, and I'll mention some others, are Mama's Last Hug, Norton 2019, and Different, Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist,
00:02:30.040which was published by Norton in 2022.
00:02:32.700He's been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, as well as the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
00:02:40.080In 2007, Time declared him one of the world's 100 most influential people today.
00:02:45.960Now, I would also say that I'm particularly thrilled to be talking to Dr. de Waal because his work has had a real influence on my thought.
00:02:55.100Now, I'm not so sure how happy he might be about that, but he is one of the world's deepest thinkers on a variety of important issues,
00:03:04.260perhaps most importantly on the biological basis of morality, the development of morality,
00:03:11.140and his work on the development of the moral sentiments, you might say, in chimpanzees and moral behavior.
00:03:17.660And his analysis of hierarchical behavior in chimpanzees and bonobos is, I think, revolutionary, not only biologically, but also philosophically.
00:03:26.680And that's something he has delved into.
00:03:28.920I would say, equally, that's the case for his work on play and his work on gender.
00:03:36.060However, de Waal is one of the few people who have made a really solid case for a specifically sophisticated view of the construction,
00:03:47.380let's say, of hierarchies in primates, which are often pilloried, say, with regards to chimpanzees,
00:03:53.440as predicated on something like brute force and power.
00:03:56.420And the fact that de Waal has indicated quite clearly that that is an insufficient, to say the least, view of the complexity of such hierarchical organization is work of tremendous importance,
00:04:09.020partly because it allows for the union, in some real sense, of is and ought, because that's an old philosophical conundrum.
00:04:19.460And the answer to that is not in any simple way, but the fact does remain that there are elements of social organization in our closest primate relatives
00:04:29.020that do shine some light on the biological foundations of ethics itself.
00:04:35.460His work on peacemaking among primates is also signally important, in my estimation.
00:04:41.020I've read about seven of his books, Peacemaking Among Primates.
00:06:30.140Your work has been of unbelievable interest to me, especially on the, as I said, especially on the front of the development of morality.
00:06:38.520So, maybe we could, do you want to start with just maybe a little bit of bio and just tell everyone what you do and how you developed what you do?
00:06:48.480You said, for example, that you were influenced by Nico Tinbergen, and maybe we could just go through the whole ethology background and make it personal,
00:06:56.720and then we'll get down to brass tacks after that.
00:06:59.740Well, Nico Tinbergen was a Dutch ethologist.
00:07:02.840Ethologists are biologists who study behavior of animals, mostly naturalistic behavior.
00:07:09.320So, that was a big difference with Skinner, let's say, and the psychology who put rats in a box and let them press levers.
00:07:16.100The ethologists wanted to have natural behavior that they looked at.
00:07:34.920I observed animals, observed chimpanzees, bonobos, other animals.
00:07:39.740And then later, when I moved to the U.S.
00:07:43.480in the 1980s, I moved first to Wisconsin and worked with monkeys there.
00:07:48.680And then I moved to Emory 10 years later.
00:07:52.580I started to do experiments, behavioral experiments, not invasive studies.
00:07:57.560Just a chimp would come out of a group into a room and do something on a touchscreen or with a tool or whatever the experiment was.
00:08:06.240And so, later, I started to do more experimental approaches and got interested in very different behaviors,
00:08:12.420such as reconciliation after fights or empathy, how they respond to the distress of others.
00:08:18.220And so, I developed ideas about cooperation and empathy in a time that people were still quite a bit focused on competition and aggression and violence,
00:08:30.420which was the early focus of ethology, really.
00:08:34.260So, there was this assumption that was held long, I would say, across animal species that who organized themselves into a social community,
00:08:44.420that the social hierarchy, which is almost an inevitable consequence of a community, was predicated on something like dominance.
00:08:52.140Hence, hence the word dominance hierarchy.
00:08:54.380And I had a graduate student, or he's a colleague of mine now, but about seven years ago, he told me that I should stop using the word dominance hierarchy.
00:09:03.000And I asked him why, because I used that phrase a lot.
00:09:05.860And he said, well, dominance is when you put a chain around someone's neck and they're naked and you can lead them around and you can get them to do anything you want.
00:09:13.440And our hierarchies, our functional hierarchies, are not based on dominance.
00:09:19.660And then he said, and I think that that idea is a consequence of the invasion of Marxist-derived ideas implicitly into the biological domain.
00:09:31.720And, like, it really took me aback, because I had used that term a lot.
00:09:34.800And I thought, oh, he's really on to something there, because I think our hierarchies, when they're functional, are predicated on competence and reciprocity.
00:09:44.700And it's only when they become pathological that they're based on power.
00:09:47.940And then I came across your work, which, well, it was before that, too.
00:09:51.640And you, well, and I would like you to talk about that.
00:09:54.240So let's talk about the hierarchical, the social organization of chimpanzees on the male and female side and what you've observed.
00:10:01.460Yeah, so the dominance relationship is a two-way street, you know.
00:10:05.600So it's very hard to dominate a bunch of people who don't want to be dominated or don't want to be led.
00:10:12.900So it's always you have the followers and the ones who are dominant.
00:10:18.480But the idea that dominance is purely based on coercion and power is, I think, simplistic.
00:10:25.120You need a party who wants to be dominated.
00:10:27.720And in order to be dominated, you need to give them certain things also.
00:10:33.520So the dominant is not purely coercive.
00:12:42.480So you know that he showed that if you repeatedly put juvenile males together to play, that the larger rat can dominate the smaller rat with no problem.
00:12:52.560But if the larger rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time across repeated play bouts, then the little rat will stop playing.
00:13:02.960Well, it's so cool, you know, to see that alongside your work because it's one of these indications, as far as I'm concerned, that the rules that govern a single interaction, which might be that I can win by dominance, are not the same rules that govern repeated interactions within a social context.
00:13:21.260And your work has done a lovely job of fleshing out the sophisticated complexity of behavior and attitude necessary even at the chimpanzee level so that the troop remains stable.
00:13:33.280Because you also described how when there's violence between two males, say, vying for status shift and a better position, that the entire troop gets agitated and that part of the regulation of that male violence that can spiral out of control is actually distributed into the social community.
00:14:16.360And as a result, also, I need to be nice to my supporters because if I'm not nice to them, they will stop supporting me and my position is based on them.
00:14:24.780As a result, you can also get the smallest male can be the alpha male.
00:14:29.140That happens sometimes in a chimpanzee group is the smallest male, is the dominant male.
00:14:34.100And you wonder how that happens, but that's because he has supporters.
00:14:37.940It also means that a female can be very powerful.
00:14:42.140Like I described in my previous book, Mama's Last Hug, Mama, the alpha female who was alpha for 40 years.
00:14:49.560And so she saw a lot of males come and go.
00:14:52.400And she was crucial in the alpha male business.
00:14:55.480And so if a male wanted to be the dominant male, he needed her support because he had the support of all the females.
00:15:01.420And so it's almost like a democratic system in that sense, is that you need the support of others and you need to keep your supporters happy.
00:15:23.120And it applies maybe to these baboons, but certainly not to chimps and bonobos.
00:15:26.820Yeah, well, your work also highlights the crucial importance and multi-species importance of something like the principle of reciprocity, right?
00:15:37.820And you use words like nice and empathic, and then you justify that.
00:15:43.140We can talk about that so-called anthropomorphism as we go along.
00:15:47.140But the idea that a stable society and also the idea that the individuals that make up that society are psychologically stable, and that would be not too stressed, let's say, that that depends intrinsically on a degree of mutuality and reciprocity.
00:16:08.300That's really a revolutionary idea to ground that in biology.
00:16:11.620Yeah, reciprocity is very important because the alpha male, if he has a supporter who keeps him in that position, then he needs to give that supporter a lot of things.
00:16:22.240Otherwise, what would be in it for the supporter, you know?
00:16:25.460Well, what kind of things do you see the alpha doing in this more reciprocal sense?
00:16:30.680Well, the typical situation is that the alpha male is dependent on another male.
00:16:34.400He will let the other male mate with females, which is what dominance is really all about among the males, is that access to females.
00:16:43.280And so he may be intolerant to every other male and keep them away from females, but his buddy who made him alpha, he let them mate with females.
00:16:53.280Because if he doesn't, and I've seen this happen, if he doesn't, then his buddy will revolt and will stop supporting him.
00:17:00.020Right, so that also indicates, so, you know, you might ask yourself why the instinct to allow for reciprocal dominance exists in human beings,
00:17:12.340given that access to mating privilege is such a crucial element of reproduction.
00:17:20.180But if part of that is, is that if we can make coalitions with our superordinates, say, make coalitions, even though we're not dominant,
00:17:29.600and that ability to form coalitions upward is associated with sexual access,
00:17:36.520because the dominant male chimps, they chase other males away from the females, right?
00:18:30.100Would you say, okay, so let me update myself in relationship to that.
00:18:35.140I understood, my understanding of the primatology literature,
00:18:38.460and insofar as it extended to humans, was that human females were in some sense unique in the degree to which they exercised sexual choice with concealed ovulation and so forth.
00:18:52.020And that that was part of perhaps what drove our rapid departure away from chimpanzees, let's say, on the cognitive front.
00:18:58.020But you're saying as well that choice in chimpanzee females, female choices, plays a more important role than might have originally been predicted.
00:19:08.540I think it started with the birds, you know, we have monogamous birds, songbirds, male, female, and they have a nest with eggs.
00:19:17.160And we've always assumed that the male was the father of all these fertilized older eggs.
00:19:22.580But now since paternity testing, this started in the 1970s, we know that if you look at the eggs, you very often find extra pair males in there.
00:19:34.720So different males who have met it with the female.
00:19:37.900Initially, the biologists assumed very Victorian type of assumption.
00:19:42.260They assumed that, of course, the female was probably raped by other males or something like that.
00:19:48.160But now we know that the females actively look for sex with other males.
00:19:54.100And so in the birth literature, it's very well known.
00:19:56.460And we distinguish social monogamy from genetic monogamy.
00:20:02.040And most of the monogamy that we see is social.
00:20:04.740It's not necessarily genetic in the sense that the male is the father of all the offspring.
00:20:09.820And since then, we have now lots of studies on other animals, including the primates that we know.
00:20:15.080For example, a female chimpanzee, she mates with many more males than would be necessary to be fertilized.
00:20:43.060So I looked at human studies and the correlation between sexual success and socioeconomic status for men in relationship to sexual success with women is about somewhere between 0.6 and 0.7, which is an unbelievably, stunningly high correlation.
00:20:59.900It's like it's higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic performance, for example, which is maybe the second highest correlation of that sort we know.
00:21:07.180And so, but that shows in human beings that the female preference and the male hierarchy are pretty tightly aligned.
00:21:18.420And if they're not aligned, what are the females looking for that isn't signaled by the hierarchical structure of the males?
00:21:25.560In humans, of course, the female preference has also to do with status and income in the sense of resources, which is not so much the case in chimpanzees, I would say, because they don't have a nuclear family structure.
00:21:43.340Well, and they don't obviously gather resources to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:21:47.820So we humans, we humans have a nuclear family structure.
00:21:51.400So the males are involved in the family and in caring for offspring, which is not really the case in bonobos and chimpanzees.
00:21:58.540And so the human female has a more complex picture in front of her, which includes maybe sexual preference, which may be based on the body or the appearance and so on.
00:22:11.120But it also is based on she also looks for resources.
00:22:15.360So I think it's a more complex picture, probably.
00:22:17.700So I'm curious about that, too, because tell me what you think of this.
00:22:21.220It seems to me that although socioeconomic status and mating success in human males is very tightly associated, that human females aren't looking so much for status or even socioeconomic position.
00:22:34.860They're using those as markers for the ability to generate resources and social status.
00:22:41.140And so because really what they want, and I think this is tied with your work on reciprocity and social skill in chimpanzees, what the human females really want is competence and generosity.
00:22:55.820And they use social status and resource acquisition as a marker for that.
00:23:33.520And in my book on gender, I talk quite a bit about female sexuality and the size of the clitoris and so on, which is related to that, seeking pleasure and so on.
00:23:42.720And I think it's highly significant that we see that female chimpanzees and certainly female bonobos, they have quite a bit more sex than is necessary strictly for reproduction.
00:23:54.740So they are very adventurous and the female bonobos has a big clitoris, bigger than the human female.
00:24:02.480And the biggest one is in the dolphin, which is also a sexually adventurous species.
00:24:07.020So people are not paying attention to that.
00:24:09.760Whereas we went through a long period where female sexuality was basically ignored, was irrelevant.
00:24:15.500Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:24:22.380Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:24:24.420But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:24:30.120In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:24:35.240Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel or airport,
00:24:39.160you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:24:44.560And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:24:47.760With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:24:55.140Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:25:52.060So in the Bonobos, particularly, the social organization differs from that of the chimp quite markedly, despite the close genetic association between the species.
00:26:06.140And the Bonobos have often been portrayed as, well, let's say, hippie chimps, because it's free love, sex, and in some sense, a more matriarchal social structure.
00:26:17.000So why do you think those differences emerged between those two subspecies?
00:26:23.000And I know you've drawn lessons from both.
00:26:36.300The Bonobos are female-dominated, and the female dominance is a collective dominance.
00:26:41.300A single female cannot dominate a single male.
00:26:44.400If you see at zoos that happens sometimes, that you see one male and one female Bonobo, which is, of course, very atypical, but then the male is dominant.
00:26:55.560As soon as you add a second female, the females become dominant.
00:26:59.000It's a collective dominance that they have, high level of female solidarity, serviced by a lot of sex and grooming between the females.
00:27:07.700And why they have this different society, I think it's made possible by the fact that the females can travel together.
00:27:15.000There is enough food in their forest, and they don't have competition from gorillas.
00:27:20.060They don't live together with gorillas in the forest, that they have more food available that allows the females to travel together.
00:27:27.240Actually, you mentioned Richard Wrangham.
00:27:29.380Some of these ideas, ecological ideas, come from Richard Wrangham.
00:27:32.760It's that the female Bonobo, they can stay together as a group, and that allows them to have this very powerful sisterhood.
00:27:39.860Whereas the female chimpanzees, in their forest, they need to spread out in order to find enough food.
00:27:46.460And so that kind of bonding that happens in the Bonobo is not really possible for them.
00:27:54.780And in captivity, because I've worked, of course, mostly in captivity, in large chimpanzee colonies in zoo settings, then the female chimps, they are actually very powerful.
00:28:06.900Because then they're all together, they're forced to live together, of course, and then they develop some sort of sisterhood.
00:28:13.380It's not as well developed as in the Bonobo, but the power difference between males and females becomes very different in captivity.
00:28:21.620Well, this is a good segue into the sex and gender discussion.
00:28:24.940So in your book, The Difference, your new book, you distinguish, as do the more radical political types now, sex and gender.
00:28:35.860And I was interested in that for a variety of reasons.
00:28:38.280So when I look at that issue, I look at it from the perspective of a personality psychologist.
00:28:43.240So the notion that sex itself is binary is fine with me, but the notion that there is something that might be conceptualized as gender, although I think that's a bad term, is also, I think, reasonable.
00:28:57.240Because human beings vary substantially from individual to individual in terms of personality on the five cardinal dimensions of personality.
00:29:06.560And there are plenty of men who have a typical female personality structure, and plenty of females that have a typical male personality structure.
00:29:17.120And then if you add to that variation in creativity, which gives you a kind of fluidity of identity, it's sort of a hallmark of creativity, then the notion that there's a gender that's separate from sex starts to take on some validity.
00:29:30.780But I like to approach it from the personality dimension.
00:29:33.980I mean, men and women overlap quite a lot in their personality.
00:30:00.780Gender is divided, better divided in masculine and feminine than in male and female.
00:30:10.520So I would say gender is masculine and feminine.
00:30:13.580And everything in between, all sorts of combinations are possible.
00:30:18.020And gender is a much more flexible concept that was introduced.
00:30:21.980The origin of gender is John Monty, the sexologist, who introduced the term because he had noticed that there were people who were born with one sex, but in the course of their life felt they belonged to another sex.
00:30:38.960And so he felt he needed to have a term for that.
00:30:41.780And at the time, they only had negative labels for these people, like weird and queer and abnormal and whatever.
00:30:48.660And he wanted to have a more scientific and a friendly label for them.
00:30:52.840And that's why he came up with the word gender.
00:30:55.160He was also the first one to to set up a gender clinic.
00:30:58.480So the word gender relates more to the cultural side, how we expect men and women to behave, the social norms that we have, the education that we give them.
00:31:26.160I mean, I'm not unsure about it either, because culture obviously matters.
00:31:29.420But, you know, a lot of the differences that you see from individual to individual are at least 60 percent biologically determined.
00:31:39.040So variation. So if you're born, let's say, as a male with a female temperament, so you're high in agreeableness, empathy, and you're low in negative emotion, because that's the typical female pattern.
00:31:50.080About 60 percent of the variance in that is attributable to genetic factors.
00:31:53.820So we could have a sex and gender split as as the as the political types insist.
00:32:00.400That's also grounded in biological differences without making a categorical distinction.
00:32:27.420I think if we were a cloning species, so we have no sexual reproduction where we would all be identical, no one would have come up with the concept of gender.
00:32:38.080So the concept of gender is related to sex.
00:32:40.200There is a certain independence between them, but they also remain joined at some point.
00:34:37.280And what they love to do is roughhousing, mock fighting.
00:34:40.120That's what they do the whole day, basically.
00:34:41.960They like to mock fight with each other, sometimes with adolescent males to just to test their strengths on them.
00:34:49.020And so rough and tumble play also in human children, much more typical of boys and of girls.
00:34:56.140And the segregation that we see in the playground between boys playing together and girls playing together probably comes to a large degree from the fact that the girls don't like all this roughhousing that the boys are doing.
00:39:08.380And so this also relates very much to the gender relationship, is that because we have a lot of trouble, of course, with men abusing women,
00:39:16.900men need to learn about their strengths, need to learn how to control it, need to learn when to hold back and when to use it.
00:39:24.220And play is an important factor in that.
00:39:27.960And so when I now hear, I hear sometimes from people who have children that at schools there is less recess time
00:39:35.900and there is less opportunity for physical contact because the teachers say that you shouldn't be touching each other.
00:39:43.480At my school, my kids' school, the boys and the girls were forbidden to even pick up snow on the off chance that they would make a snowball.
00:39:53.400And so they just stopped the rough and tumble play of the males 100%.
00:39:58.640And Panksep showed if you deprive male rats of play, juveniles, they would play hyperactively when you gave them the chance
00:40:07.460and that you could use methylphenidate to suppress that.
00:40:31.220And they, well, I think they also learn, I think through rough and tumble play, kids also learn what hurts and what is, what hurts them really.
00:40:40.320And so, because when you rough and tumble, I've rough and tumble played with my kids a lot.
00:40:44.340I set up kind of a little wrestling ring made out of two couches pushed together.
00:40:47.900And one of the, and they love it, right?
00:40:51.200But you tend to push the kids to their physical limits, right?
00:40:54.220Because you twist their arms and you sort of toss them in the air.
00:40:57.020And you're engaged in this dance that's an exploration of physical limitation.
00:41:02.900And so, I think one of the things that play does, and Panksepp showed, there was a student of his, Tiffany Fields, who massaged premature infants in the incubator.
00:41:14.320It showed that she could rapidly, radically facilitate their development.
00:41:17.560I think play also regulates emotion because it's soothing and it shows you, it allows you to make a clear distinction between real threats and false threats and between physical situations that actually hurt and those that don't.
00:41:33.260And that has to be done in an embodied sense.
00:41:35.900So, the sort of funny thing that happened to me is that I, when I was a student, I worked with two young chimpanzees who loved to play with me.
00:41:45.120So, they were only five years old, but they were already much stronger than I was.
00:41:51.220You know, a chimps develops much, physically much stronger than, even though they're smaller, they're physically stronger than I.
00:41:57.840And so, I would rough and tumble play with them.
00:42:01.300And it was, you know, I would always lose because they have four hands and they can put you in a knot in a way that is impossible for me to get out of.
00:42:10.100And each time I would protest, I would say, oh, oh, oh, and let them know that this was, they were going too far with me.
00:42:20.440They would come around and they would look at my face and they would be looking very worried and a sort of like surprised that this big fellow was so weak in their opinion, you know.
00:42:31.620So, and then they would slow down their play and it would be very gentle for 10 minutes or so.
00:42:58.280Well, and that's, well, so, you know, Piaget, who wrote a great, Jean Piaget wrote an absolutely stellar book on the development of morality out of the spirit of play.
00:43:09.860And, you know, he showed, so he also, and this is germane to your work, he made a technical case that any organization that's based on the spirit of voluntary reciprocity will, over a reasonable period of time, outcompete any organization based on the spirit of compulsion.
00:43:29.560Because if you use force and compulsion, you have to waste energy and resources on the compulsion, plus you don't optimally motivate.
00:43:38.340And so, that's another pointer to an intrinsic ethic of reciprocal cooperation.
00:43:43.380And I think that best, so one of the things I've been thinking about lately is the best rejoinder to the sort of postmodern and neo-Marxist insistence that it's power and dominance above all is that, no, it's not.
00:43:55.660Is that's an aberration from the spirit of play.
00:43:58.080Because if a society and any social interaction is optimally structured, then it moves out of, it moves into the domain of voluntary play.
00:44:08.340This is mutually enjoyable, stays on the side of positive emotion, and it also involves this continual mutual collaboration, which children start to seriously negotiate between the ages of two and four.
00:44:22.640And so, what you mentioned is that socialization is mostly done by children, by the peers.
00:44:28.080You know, that's a very interesting thought, because in my discussion of gender, I noticed that many people think that socialization is a one-way street.
00:45:08.780And so, the children socialize themselves.
00:45:11.300And then, in addition, they have all the peer influences on them.
00:45:14.720And so, I think parents totally overestimate their effect on the children.
00:45:18.080Yeah, our research at Montreal basically indicated that the proper...
00:45:23.080So, imagine that the averaged parent, which would be sort of the consequence of a monogamous relationship, right?
00:45:31.600So, two half-insane people unite and produce one moderately sane person.
00:45:36.360And then, that sane person is an analog of the general social environment.
00:45:42.260And then, the purpose of that sane person on the socialization front is to help the child manage his or her behavior so that they become optimally socially acceptable by the age of four when their peers take over.
00:46:24.760And so, there is a dynamic dance there right from the beginning that the child and the – I think this is also why, by the way, you know, there's all these studies showing that there's a fair genetic influence on temperament and there's a pretty decent influence of non-shared environment.
00:46:41.700But there's hardly any influence of shared environment.
00:46:43.960And I think the reason for that isn't so much that parents are irrelevant, but that good parents particularize the environment so much in response to their child's temperament that there isn't a lot of overlap.
01:02:02.160But when women are embroiled in a conflict, well, they can't fight physically.
01:02:07.400And so they do get caught in this conundrum.
01:02:10.880So one of the problems that our society really wrestles with at the moment is that it's very difficult to control untrammeled female pattern aggression.
01:02:22.300And so I think it is causing a tremendous amount of trouble.
01:02:26.300And that reputation damaging, that a huge, you just see that constantly on social media platforms.
01:02:34.800And so I don't know if that was your thought, or if it was a thought that you were summarizing.
01:02:38.840But I'm kind of curious about your thoughts about that.
01:02:41.980So I make a distinction in my book between two ways of keeping the peace.
01:02:48.260One is peacemaking, the other one is peacekeeping.
01:02:52.720The males in chimpanzees, the males are very good at peacemaking.
01:02:56.320They have a fight and then they get together and they kiss and embrace and then they groom each other.
01:03:01.360And they cycle through this all the time.
01:03:04.160It's a very, very easy process for them.
01:03:08.360And they have more fights than females.
01:03:10.340And I think what the females do, the females reconcile less when they have a fight, less often than the males, because they have more trouble with that, I think.
01:03:20.660And what the females do is stay away from your rivals, stay away from fights, stay away from individuals that you're likely to will have a fight.
01:03:27.780I call that peacekeeping is that they suppress aggression and they stay away from those.
01:03:53.160So agreeable people are conflict avoidant.
01:03:56.900Now, agreeableness is empathy and that's supposed to be a cardinal virtue.
01:04:00.900But the downside of agreeableness and empathy is conflict avoidance.
01:04:06.300And so and you if you add that conflict avoidance is emotionally taxing.
01:04:11.320So so I think it's also practically a problem because it means that if someone pushes on you that you have to negotiate with, you have to avoid and or you won't push back.
01:04:20.560And what the hell are you going to do on the negotiating front?
01:04:23.060If that's the case, say at your workplace, you can't avoid your boss.
01:04:26.580But the interesting thing is that both strategies are actually quite successful.
01:04:32.240We did a study of human behavior in the hospitals.
01:04:35.180We looked at operating rooms and we looked at how how well men and women work together.
01:04:41.080And female cooperation is really highly developed.
01:04:44.220So female teams and not all female teams, but but females on the team works very well.
01:04:50.760And so I think both sexes have a good strategy.
01:04:57.180The other one is to reconcile very easily.
01:04:59.660So they're both good strategies and they're both quite effective, but they're totally different.
01:05:04.460So let me let me push you on that just for a sec then.
01:05:07.160So let's take an optimal female cooperating group.
01:05:11.040See, the conundrum I think they run into.
01:05:13.680And I think this is the conundrum of compassion in general is that that's just fine until you throw a predator in.
01:05:19.420And so a group like that that's actually made out of pure cooperators can work just fine.
01:05:24.800But if you throw in a woman who has antisocial personality, which would be manifested, say, as borderline personality disorder, which looks like the clinical equivalent of ASP in females.
01:05:34.580Or if you throw in a real predator, like what if the cooperators can't avoid and they can't oppose, all they have left is to fall victim to the predator.
01:05:45.240And that's why I think that women are in this weird evolutionary conundrum because they have to find men who are disagreeable enough to stave off the real predators, but agreeable enough to be generous with their productive competence.
01:06:03.000And so it's this knife edge, you know, because a little too far in either direction is not good.
01:06:08.240So is there a flaw in my reasoning there is with regards to the to the to the Achilles heel, let's say, of female cooperative groups?
01:06:18.780No, I think it is true that that we have always underestimated female competitiveness.
01:06:24.580So, so, so, you know, in the psychological literature, males were always called hierarchical and competitive and not females.
01:06:35.860And now we know that that, you know, there's plenty of female competition and there's plenty of female hierarchies.
01:06:42.440Actually, the word pecking order comes from hens, not from roosters.
01:06:46.220And in the animal kingdom, lots of females have hierarchies, have also females and so on.
01:06:51.760So I think it's important to point out always that female competition is maybe less physical, but it's not, it's not absent.
01:06:59.620Well, it's probably also not competition about exactly the same things.
01:07:03.740In your work on animal cognition, you use this term umwelt, which is like the implicit motivational environment in some sense that an animal might inhabit.
01:07:14.920And I'd like to talk about that in a bit, but men and women don't compete within their own sexes for status in the same way.
01:07:24.940And so it's easy for men to look at women and think, well, they're not that competitive.
01:07:28.960It's well, they're not engaged in rough and tumble play or violent confrontation.
01:07:33.380But that doesn't mean that the competition isn't there.
01:07:37.200And it also may be that men aren't subtle enough in some sense to see it.
01:07:41.080Now, let me, let me tell you a funny story on that.
01:07:43.460This, this was a scientist, a woman scientist in Finland who studied children at play and in the, in the playground.
01:07:50.920And she said, if you watch these children at the end of the day, you say that the boys had five times as many or six times as many fights as the girls.
01:08:28.340No, the boys are not, boys are not maybe even astute enough in some sense to notice that.
01:08:33.420You know, the, the, the thing that the thing an antisocial girl will do is she'll like a, an unfamiliar girl or even a familiar girl will approach a play group.
01:08:44.020That's already in formation, say, and the, the alpha female of the play group will say, we don't have to play with you.
01:08:51.400And then, and that's devastating, right?
01:08:53.700Because it's a real like cardinal inclusion, but there's no physical aggression associated with it.
01:08:58.760And the girl who's rejected will walk away crushed because she's been put down as unacceptable socially.
01:09:05.780And that all can happen, especially if the girl bully is sophisticated, you know, because then an adult can come in there and, and call her on it.
01:09:14.480And she'll say, oh, well, she's just oversensitive.
01:09:19.060And, and with a perfect facade of angelic innocence as well, which the antisocial female types are very good at mimicking.
01:09:27.180The, these differences are so interesting.
01:09:29.380These, these sex differences that we see in human behavior, but they're not well documented.
01:09:34.360So recently I received a handbook on, I think it's developmental psychology or something like that.
01:09:39.560And I looked for gender in there because I was writing on gender and there was almost nothing on gender.
01:09:45.660So the, the play differences between boys and girls were not mentioned, but also the, the conflict differences that you now mentioned were not mentioned.
01:09:53.980And it's as if the psychologists have decided that that's a too, too sensitive as a topic to get into the sex differences of.
01:10:01.840I think part of it is, is that they actually don't like the facts.
01:10:07.540So for example, when I've been looking at personality differences between men and women, and we did some of the cardinal work on that with the big five aspect scale.
01:10:16.000So the truth of the matter is, is that temperamental differences between men and women as, so gender differences as measured by personality scales, which is the right way to measure it.
01:10:30.640So the more egalitarian in the country, the bigger the gender differences, which is exactly the opposite of what the social constructionists would have predicted.
01:10:38.460Now, some gender differences decrease, so men and women are more likely to be in the workplace now than 40 years ago.
01:10:45.220But if you make an egalitarian society, you actually maximize gender differences, which is, no one expected that.
01:10:51.840And it just flies in the face of this sort of Margaret Mead, early Margaret Mead-like social constructionism.
01:10:58.320And then you add to that a couple, so that accounts, that plus the difference in interest, which is relevant to your work.
01:11:04.920So girls are reliably more interested in people, and boys reliably more interested in things.
01:11:10.980So that's, say, dolls and cars, or toy cars.
01:11:14.500And that also maximizes in the Scandinavian countries.
01:11:17.920It's one standard deviation, the difference.
01:11:20.880It's the biggest personality difference between men and women that we know.
01:11:24.600And it accounts for a huge amount of the variance in occupational choice, like between, say, engineering and nursing, which would be the cardinal examples.
01:11:33.140And so the psychologists look at that, and they think, oh, my God, that isn't how we want it to be.
01:11:38.240And so they don't talk about your work, and they don't talk about toy preference differences, and they don't talk about temperamental differences.
01:11:45.020It's all, like, shunted under the carpet.
01:11:47.420So you mentioned Margaret Mead, who is often mentioned in the context of cultural construction of gender differences.
01:11:55.580But I reread her book, her book, Male and Female.
01:11:59.560And she has a whole section in there about what she calls universal differences between men and women.
01:12:06.260So she, and in a later edition of her book, she said, if she had to write it today, this was in the 1960s.
01:12:13.460Her book was, I think, published in the 50s.
01:12:15.800She said, if I would write it today, I would bring in more biology, the biology of the differences between men and women.
01:12:22.580And so one of the differences that she mentions is that men always want to accomplish something.
01:12:29.720They want to be better at something than other men or women.
01:12:33.780They feel that's their goal in life, so to speak.
01:12:37.400And she mentioned that as a universal thing in men.
01:12:40.760She mentions also, of course, the childbearing capacities of women and the interest in children of women and the interest of women in the well-being of others and of themselves and their family.
01:12:55.060And so she mentions in that chapter quite a few things that I think are universal sex differences.
01:13:01.300So she was more open-minded, I would say, than her followers in that regard.
01:13:09.000Well, so this desire to be better at something.
01:13:12.220So let's take that apart a bit in light of our discussion.
01:13:15.440If you're cynical about that, you can say, well, that desire to be better at something is nothing but a manifestation of that power and dominance drive, right?
01:13:24.360And so it's competitive urges to be discouraged because it's a zero-sum game and one person always gains at the expense of another.
01:13:31.740But if you look at even the animal literature in a sophisticated way, you think, wait a minute, competence is associated with hierarchical status.
01:13:41.440It's a competition for competence, even among animals and even more so among human beings.
01:13:46.780And so that ambition that young boys manifest can easily be manifested in the service of social goods.
01:13:56.540And furthermore, and this is the thing that's so awful about it for me, is that that's actually the primary thing that male humans have to offer females, which is, well, look, of course I want to be better at something because I want to be differentiated economically.
01:14:09.540And to be paid for something, you have to be better at it than others.
01:14:17.440And so what I see happening to boys in our culture, and I've seen this with thousands of people, is that their ambition is being quelled because it's associated unthinkingly with power.
01:14:27.880And that undermines their entire commitment to the social and the sexual and interpersonal enterprise.
01:15:09.500And I would like, if you would as well, this point that our perceptions and our thoughts are shaped by our morphology in some fundamental way.
01:15:21.820You make a nice example of gibbons, for example, and the fact that octopi and elephants and primates can be intelligent in a particular way because they have manipulable appendages, unlike, say, dolphins.
01:15:33.060Yeah, so let me give an example of how we mismeasured the animals.
01:15:40.920So elephants, there was the question, do elephants use tools?
01:15:44.920So what people did is they take an elephant at the zoo, they put some food outside of the cage, they give the elephant sticks, and the elephant doesn't do anything with the sticks.
01:15:56.960If you do the same experiment with a chimp, of course, he takes the stick and reaches the food and brings it close to him and then eats the food.
01:16:03.480So the chimp will use the stick to get the food.
01:16:08.800And the conclusion of that study was that elephants are not tool users.
01:16:13.420Then a couple of years later, another research team, they did a smart thing.
01:16:17.760They hung some food very high so that the elephant couldn't reach it.
01:16:23.740And they put in his enclosure a bunch of boxes, wooden boxes.
01:16:29.000And what the elephant did is he would grab a box, bring it close to under the food, put it under the food, and then stand on top of the box and reach the food.
01:16:38.740The conclusion of that research team was that an elephant, the trunk, we think it's like a hand, but the trunk is also a nose, of course.
01:16:48.680And if the trunk reaches for food, it needs to close itself when it grabs the food, and the elephant was not ready to close his nose while he was grabbing food.
01:16:59.180But if he could stand on boxes, that would work for him.
01:17:02.920And so we need to think in terms of the animal and its physical features, and that a trunk is not an arm, it's not the same thing.
01:17:13.340We need to start thinking like the animals, and then we can solve a lot of these problems of their intelligence.
01:17:19.000Our appendages, in some sense, are primary tools.
01:17:22.700And so if you don't give an animal a problem that it can solve with its primary set of tools, it's obviously not going to be able to solve it.
01:17:30.940And so that also brings us into the issue of embodied perception, you know, because I read a great book called Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which J.J. Gibson, which is, man, that's a classic book, something brilliant.
01:17:45.260And, you know, his premise, fundamentally, is that we see with our hands, in some real sense, is that when we look at the world, we basically construe it as a set of grippable objects.
01:18:00.800Now, it's more complex, because we see walkable surfaces and climbable, you know, what would you call, climbable slopes and so forth.
01:18:09.060So it's not just hands, but that our eyes function to map our hands onto the world.
01:19:30.840And so when they tested tool use on the gibbon, the gibbons were not using tools at all.
01:19:36.040They never did anything until a smart investigator lifted the tools up a little because the gibbon cannot pick up something from the ground.
01:19:44.180And since the gibbon doesn't live on the ground, he lives up in the trees, it doesn't matter for the gibbon that he cannot do that.
01:19:51.600But in the experimental situations, they couldn't pick up the tools.
01:19:55.860So, yeah, you always have to test animals and that becomes ever more complex.
01:20:00.480For example, the elephant has 100 times better smell, olfaction, than the dog.
01:20:07.260And the dog probably 100 times better than us.
01:20:10.960So you can imagine the elephant, you need to test them probably on olfaction.
01:20:15.300So recently, Josh Plotnick, a former student of mine, he did an experiment with elephants in Thailand where he would give them two buckets.
01:20:24.780In one bucket, he would feed sunflower seeds and the other one was empty.
01:20:28.700And then the elephant, of course, with his trunk would, he could not look into it, but with the trunk would smell and would pick the bucket with the sunflower seeds.
01:20:39.320Then he started to vary the quantities and he found that elephants can distinguish a bucket with 120 seeds from a bucket with 100 seeds.
01:20:49.920So they can count with their nose, so to speak.
01:20:52.740They're so sensitive, no animal can do that, I think, but the elephant can do that.
01:20:57.260So they can estimate quantity olfactorily.
01:21:28.320The rest of the animal kingdom, it's almost all smell.
01:21:31.380And we can hardly even imagine what a world like that is like.
01:21:34.520So the brain business is interesting because at some point, five years, six years ago, people said, we should not look at brain size, not even a brain size relative to the body.
01:21:44.420We should just count the number of neurons, and that will give us an index of the intelligence of an animal.
01:21:51.760And, of course, everyone was convinced at that time that humans have the most neurons.
01:21:56.480We have 85 billion neurons or something like that.
01:22:00.420Until a couple of years later, it was found that the elephant has three times more neurons than the human.
01:22:06.560And then that theory was abandoned because humans need to stay on top.
01:22:12.500Yeah, well, you know, we radically underestimate the relationship between intelligence and morphology.
01:22:19.400You know, I thought about this in particular with regards to dolphins who have quite a remarkably large brain and a large brain in relation to their body size.
01:22:27.320And they, well, dolphins are intelligent.
01:22:29.300It's like, well, it's possible that they're intelligent in some way we don't really understand, but they don't have hands.
01:24:22.760So that could be a huge part of what their cognitive processes is devoted towards.
01:24:27.620And you not only know what they're doing linguistically.
01:24:29.760So let's locate, let's talk about, um, one of the things I liked about the, your book on animal, uh, cognition was because I've thought this for a long time, especially in relationship to rat studies.
01:24:42.880So there's this idea that was drummed into my head as an undergraduate is that you shouldn't anthropomorphize animals.
01:24:48.760And then as I got to be a more sophisticated viewer of the animal literature, I thought, no, no, no, that's exactly backwards.
01:24:56.860What you should do is presume continuity of all function unless there's compelling reason to not.
01:25:03.220And so that made me interested in the issue of animal consciousness because conscious.
01:25:09.280And so you touch on consciousness in that book.
01:25:12.540And so when, when first, so I'd like to ask you, what do you make of consciousness?
01:25:37.580Homologies are similarities between species that come from a common ancestor.
01:25:42.040So my hand is homologous with the hand of a chimpanzee.
01:25:47.160And so what the chimpanzee has, we don't call a paw or a claw, or no, we call it a hand because we use the same terminology for homologous traits.
01:26:07.340When I was younger, people would say, why don't you call it vocalized panting?
01:26:11.720They wanted us to get away from the anthropomorphism, but I think anthropomorphism is useful, especially for species that have homologous traits.
01:26:41.380And so that's a hell of a fast gesture, that forward movement back.
01:26:45.660And so I nailed the wasp with my finger and I knocked it probably 15 feet, which is a hell of a G-force blow for an insect.
01:26:53.920And that bloody thing righted itself an inch from the ground and dove directly at my face.
01:27:00.480And I thought, oh my God, like I don't.
01:27:03.560And then, so I watched that and I thought, wow, that's something, man, that to do that is something.
01:27:07.980Then I read also about these wolf spiders who are predatory.
01:27:12.060And if they're on a plant here and they see a prey animal or insect over here, they will walk down the plant across the ground and jump on it from behind.
01:27:22.100It's like, okay, okay, that's a spider and it has like no brain.
01:27:27.440And yet that is so unbelievably complicated.
01:27:45.980It's like, and you can take, you know, if you take the whole cortex, the cortex and the limbic system off a cat and you leave it with nothing but its hypothalamus and its spinal cord, that cat is hyper exploratory.
01:28:14.580So let me give you my take on consciousness because no one has a good definition of it.
01:28:21.140And if we have no definition, how am I going to measure it?
01:28:24.220But there are certain things that we humans cannot do without being conscious.
01:28:32.600So, for example, you cannot plan a party for tomorrow without thinking about what you should buy, what kind of music you're going to have, which friends you're going to invite, what time it's going to start.
01:28:44.080But you have to be conscious of the process before you organize your party.
01:28:52.600We have very good evidence nowadays of planning in animals.
01:28:56.080So, for example, chimpanzees in the wild, they will pick up tools and they're going to walk two miles with these tools and then they're going to use them on a termite hill or whatever, which means that 20 minutes before they started the activity, they were already planning the activity.
01:29:14.600And so we also have experiments now, they have all sorts of experiments where you can give tools to animals that they can use only the next day, so to speak.
01:29:23.120So we have good evidence for planning now in animals.
01:29:27.660Now, if we cannot plan, if we cannot plan without being conscious, it would be unlikely that these animals can plan without being conscious.
01:29:38.340Because, of course, the process is going to be very similar to what we do.
01:29:41.860Okay, so I talked to Dr. Roger Penrose about consciousness, and he believes it's non-computational and non-algorithmic.
01:29:49.180And the reason he believes that in part is because the horizon of the future differs unpredictably from the past.
01:30:50.440So maybe as soon as you get a nervous system that can represent embodied movement, you get something akin to the emotions of approach and avoidance, and then maybe something akin to sentience at that point?
01:31:09.640And then experimenters, they found that if you shock fish or crabs, you know, in a laboratory, you bring them in a situation where they can hide themselves in crevices, and you shock them in these places, they're going to avoid the places where they were shocked.
01:31:54.140And consciousness, I never know exactly what it is because philosophers talk a lot about consciousness, but they never tell me how to measure it.
01:32:04.060Well, you said that, you know, you associated sentience with the capacity to experience.
01:32:09.660And then I think, well, there's no difference between the capacity to experience and experience.
01:32:15.780And there's actually no difference between experience and being, because it's very, very difficult to understand being itself in the absence of any experience of being.
01:32:26.800I mean, what is it that, there's not even nothing, right?
01:32:30.740Because nothing is only a concept that something that's capable of apprehending something could ever come up with.
01:32:37.080So I don't see consciousness and being as being separable concepts in some sense.
01:34:13.680I think anything that isn't cuddly is probably a little low on the love end of things, you know?
01:34:21.140So, okay, so let's talk about self-consciousness then because that's the consciousness.
01:34:27.740That's a sentience that involves at least a reflexive distinction between self and other, broadly speaking.
01:34:34.900And I've been interested in but also skeptical of the animal self-conscious experiments because mirror recognition isn't nothing, but humans have an unbelievably elaborated self-consciousness.
01:34:48.160I mean, we're fully aware of our span of life.
01:35:43.140Because, yeah, well, it also sees that you view yourself as a modifiable entity in the eyes of others, in all likelihood.
01:35:51.440Yeah, so we also have evidence from behavior that female apes, female chimpanzees and female bonobos, they do more self-adornment and self-embellishment than the males.
01:36:04.440So the females, they will hang things around themselves, put things on their head, walk around with them, much more so than the males.
01:36:11.800The males also use tools to enhance themselves, but that's more to be more intimidating.
01:36:18.220Right, right, like beating on a garbage man or something.
01:37:56.560Now, we know from human women that in the time of ovulation, they adorn themselves more.
01:38:03.300So there are studies on that is that women dress differently at the time of ovulation and they expose more skin and they have fancier clothes on usually at that time.
01:38:15.400That's also when they prefer the same photos of men with a square jaw than a narrower jaw at the peak of ovulation.
01:38:25.200Because in that study, what they did is they photographed women in their regular clothes and then they asked them about their menstrual cycle.
01:38:34.280And that's how they figured out how they were dressed relative to their cycle.
01:39:10.760Men shaking hands of men, men shaking hands of women, and the other way around.
01:39:14.860And what they found is that people bring their hand to their nose, so they touch their face, they bring their hand close to their nose, when they have shaken hands with same-sex partners.
01:39:31.940And they think it has to do with testing anxiety or testing dominance or testing rivalry.
01:39:38.500Well, God only knows what sort of information we're picking up on the olfactory front.
01:39:43.580Like, a lot of that could be unconscious.
01:39:45.620I mean, I know, for example, that if you give women t-shirts, laundered t-shirts have been worn one day by men, and you ask them to rate the odor preference, the women prefer symmetrical, the t-shirts that's symmetrical, men wore.
01:40:02.660So, and that's obviously not, in any sense, a conscious olfactory preference for, like, the concept of symmetry.
01:40:10.500It's just built right into the olfaction.
01:40:12.940So we have seen now, during the COVID crisis, that now that we're coming out of the crisis, everyone is very happy that we have physical interaction with others.
01:40:21.780And I think one of the things we have missed is probably smell.
01:40:26.240So you can talk with your grandparents over Zoom, but that's not the same as visiting them and seeing them and smelling them.
01:42:29.400But, you know, I just recently saw that on Twitter, there's far fewer women than men.
01:42:34.860It's mostly men who do this Twittering and Facebook and so on.
01:42:38.840Yeah, well, I think that what's happened on Twitter, you know, I might be accused of tormenting my theory past its justification.
01:42:46.480I think that the fact that there is no direct face-to-face confrontation between men on social media platforms facilitates a female style of antisocial behavior between men on social media platforms.
01:43:01.300Yeah, yeah, because you see this reputation savaging, and it's like, well, you don't do that in face-to-face contact with a man, because if I've seen people repeatedly, hundreds of times, not the same person, but say something on Twitter, that no one would ever say face-to-face to another adult male, even once in their life.
01:43:22.720Because it would immediately cause, well, a movement towards physical aggression, if not an immediate punch, but that's not there.
01:43:31.600And so then you think, well, the fact that that's not there, what does that do to the communication pattern?
01:43:41.920So maybe I could close with a couple of general questions, unless there's something else that you would like to...
01:43:47.720Okay, okay, so I'm always curious about people's intellectual heroes.
01:43:53.300Like, I mentioned some of the people who've been really influential to me, my viewers know Freud, Jung, Piaget, Panksepp, Jeffrey Gray, like a handful of, well, you, a handful of animal experimentalists, some philosophers like Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn.
01:44:12.500And for you, like, who's been signal in your intellectual development and really shaped your thinking?
01:44:18.420Well, the founders of Itology, which were Nico Tinberger and Conrad Lorenz, they were very important.
01:44:24.680I think they're very different characters, but they were very important for my intellectual development.
01:44:32.060Ed Wilson, I think, was very important.
01:44:34.340Yeah, I think Wilson, and, you know, I was also influenced in the beginning by Desmond Morris' book, The Naked Ape.
01:44:47.940Even though now, if I can easily mention quite a few things that are not correct in that book in terms of theories, but the way he wrote it and sort of irreverent way of writing about the human species and sort of also making fun.
01:45:04.960Just the idea that this comparison between species was interesting ethically and morally and emotionally, that was kind of revolutionary.
01:45:14.100Yeah, his book was extremely successful, and partly because he had this tone of mocking humans a little bit, you know, and I think he did a real good job at that.
01:45:25.100So, yeah, those were my early influences, I think, you know.
01:45:28.760Yeah, one of the things that's so interesting about your writing, I think, is, apart from its remarkable approachability, which I really think is a gift,
01:45:36.640is that it's also non-naively positive and optimistic, which is so cool to see, because that combination doesn't occur that often.
01:45:50.220Often people who are optimistic are kind of naive, but you're a hardcore biologist, sort of in the scientific trenches in a real sense,
01:45:57.920and yet I always come away from your books with a positive, with a fundamentally positive, they have positive consequences on me.
01:46:07.200And, you know, the fact that you, I think your work on the biological basis of moral development is, I think it's an, of what would you say,
01:46:17.180it's kind of epoch-level philosophical significance.
01:46:20.960Yeah, well, I'm an optimist by nature, and even though I started studying violence and aggression,
01:46:28.920because that was the topic at the time, everyone was studying aggressive behavior,
01:46:33.280I very soon switched to conflict resolution, because I found it actually more interesting than the aggression itself.
01:46:40.940Well, that's also extremely cool, you know, that you got in through the darkness, so to speak,
01:46:45.700but the consequence of that was that you actually learned that aggression and violence weren't the fundamental basis of social interaction,
01:46:53.200and that reconciliation and competence and empathy and long-term planning,
01:46:58.220all of that actually turns out to be more fundamental and important.
01:47:02.020Yeah, that's so optimistic that that could possibly be true.
01:47:05.720And I must say, I don't enjoy violence.
01:47:08.200So I have colleagues who will tell you a horrible story about two chimps killing each other,
01:47:15.060or people who watch sports games where there's a lot of violence, and I, you know,
01:47:21.300I've seen a lot of violence among the primates, I can tell you.