In this episode, Dad speaks with the American evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. In 1971, Trivers proposed the theory known as "Reciproc altruism," which is perhaps his most well-known theory. Since then, he has published numerous articles, essays, and books. He was awarded the 2007 Crawford Prize in Biosciences for his analysis and contributions to the theory of social evolution, conflict, and cooperation. Among his contributions is his explanation of self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, which is the focus of some of this episode. Dr. Trivers also served as the undergraduate advisor to Dr. Heather Haying and Dr. Brett Weinstein, who are both well known to the audience that frequents these dialogues. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone, and there s hope to feel better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.B. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety, where you can be a part of the team that helps others find a brighter future they deserve. (Daily Wire Plus). - Dr. Michaela Peterson, Ph. D., Ph.D. - The Folly of Fools (The Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist) - . , & Dr. Robert Tvers, PhD, and more. (Ph. D. ) ( ) is a podcast produced by Dr. John R. Thorsen, PhD ( ) . ( ). ( ) ( ) ( ), ( . , and so on, ) and more ... (and so on). (c) (.. ) is a postscript to this episode is And so on. (1) [2) (3) ... and more!
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.800Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:50.980Welcome to episode 270 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.
00:00:59.980In this episode, Dad spoke with the American evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers.
00:01:05.600In 1971, Trivers proposed the theory known as reciprocal altruism, which is perhaps his most well-known theory in a paper he published.
00:01:14.280Since that time, he's published numerous articles, essays, and books.
00:01:17.360He was awarded the 2007 Crawford Prize in Biosciences for his analysis and contributions to the theory of social evolution, conflict, and cooperation.
00:01:27.800Among his contributions is his explanation of self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, which is the focus of some of this episode, which is fun.
00:01:37.700Robert and Dad also talked about genuine victims and reducing vulnerability, reciprocal altruism, the danger of undermining a core belief, and more.
00:01:45.360Thank you for listening, and enjoy the episode.
00:02:01.380Hello, everyone. I'm pleased today to have with me Dr. Robert Trivers.
00:02:05.500Dr. Trivers is an evolutionary biologist who concentrates on social theory based on natural selection and on evolutionary genetics.
00:02:13.520These happen to be the backbones of all biology.
00:02:17.080His early work focused on reciprocal altruism, which we will talk about in some detail today,
00:02:22.860the evolution of sex differences in all species, the sex ratio at birth, parent-offspring conflict, kinship and sex ratio in social insects,
00:02:32.520and a theory outlining the nature of self-deception and its operation in the service of deceit,
00:02:38.820which in itself can confer, however temporarily, certain advantages.
00:02:44.020He then devoted 15 years of his life with Austin Burt to reviewing the vast topic of selfish genetic elements in all species,
00:04:01.140And so I'd like you to outline, well, first to define it, and then to outline your thoughts about it, if you would.
00:04:06.420Well, W.D. Hamilton, who I always regarded as the only greater social theorist, evolutionary social theorist than myself,
00:04:21.700had already laid out in 1964 in detail, the argument for altruistic behavior, so-called altruistic is something that lowers your own reproductive success called fitness.
00:04:41.580But I never liked the term fitness, because it had connotations that could get in the way of your understanding,
00:04:51.340whereas reproductive success directly described what we're talking about, the number of surviving offspring you left.
00:04:59.140So an altruistic act is one which lowers your production of surviving offspring and raises the production of surviving offspring of the recipient of your altruism.
00:05:15.720Now, if you're related, then the gene or genes involved may enjoy a net benefit.
00:05:24.600So, indeed, you're related to your children typically by a half, and yet you invest in them as a key vehicle to your reproductive success.
00:05:40.600But Hamilton extended the system laterally, so nephews and nieces might not be direct descendants of yours,
00:05:50.920but still, you could be related to them by a quarter, let's say, in which case the benefit would have to be greater than four times the cost for the behavior to be selected.
00:06:11.080Now, when I started becoming a biologist in 1967, I took a year as a special student at Harvard to make up for the complete lack of an undergraduate education in biology and was then accepted into graduate school.
00:06:36.680In any case, I thought it was obvious that there was a second kind of altruism in which I did something nice for you, and at a certain point in the future, you did something nice back to me.
00:06:56.280And as long as benefits were greater than cost, which one assumes they would be, otherwise you wouldn't be selected under any regime for them, then there could be a net benefit of this transfer.
00:07:15.340The problem with reciprocal altruism was what happens with the so-called cheater.
00:07:23.720That is, the system automatically selects for someone that receives the benefit, but doesn't bother reciprocate.
00:07:33.600Well, if they don't reciprocate at all, you cut off any future altruism toward them.
00:07:40.480And so each act of failure on their part results in a source of altruism being cut off.
00:07:50.100So the more interesting phenomenon is where you cheat.
00:07:55.060That is, you give back less than you got, but you're still giving back a benefit.
00:08:07.760They just don't receive the benefit that they, quote, ought to or would if the system was egalitarian and fair.
00:08:20.900And those words, fair and just and so on, I felt, actually emerged from reciprocal altruism precisely because they evaluated the costs inflicted versus the benefits received.
00:08:44.340And so you had subtle cheaters, which reciprocated to a degree and enough so that you enjoyed a net benefit, but not as much as you, quote, deserved.
00:08:59.640And so that was a dynamic of reciprocal altruism was the cheater detector detection of the so wasn't so difficult, but how to interact with the individual.
00:09:21.320So as to change his or her behavior, that was a more interesting problem.
00:09:29.920So a colleague, I think a graduate student at Harvard, had happened to write a paper reviewing the emotions associated with altruistic behavior.
00:09:47.820He didn't have any particular theoretical orientation or evolutionary, but he reviewed the subject.
00:10:03.160I took a class on morality, something like that, specifically in order to learn enough about human behavior related to reciprocity to flesh out my.
00:10:17.820Paper, but their first class, I saw that the graduate student who was a teaching assistant had already written a paper doing exactly what I hope to learn by sitting in on a class.
00:10:36.300So I went to him and asked if I could sit and read his paper, let's say, in his office and take notes.
00:10:48.020And he said, hell, I'll give you a copy.
00:10:51.020And I thought, almighty God, that's an act of altruism that I can surely benefit from.
00:11:02.540I promptly dropped out of the course and actually molded the second half, i.e., the content of my paper in the different categories were just drawn straight out of his work and reorganized a bit so as to fit the logic I was pushing for.
00:11:32.540I hope that's not too complicated or too much detail.
00:11:39.220So why concentrate specifically on reciprocal altruism?
00:11:45.360I mean, obviously tied up in that is cooperation, mutual benefit.
00:11:51.060And then also you discuss the problem of cheating and cheating deception or detecting cheating.
00:11:58.080And deception, of course, is a way of making cheating difficult to detect.
00:12:03.080And so you're focusing your biological inquiry on what we would intuit as moral issues.
00:12:10.340Moral issue associated with cooperation, the moral issue associated with deviation from that cooperation.
00:12:17.560Is that a reasonable way of looking at what you've been doing?
00:12:21.300Well, what I did when you say what I've been doing, I actually did write a paper called reciprocal altruism 30 years later and tried to bring the subject up to date.
00:12:42.160But in general, I didn't do that on any of my papers.
00:12:46.640That is, I wrote the paper and that was it.
00:12:50.720I wrote a paper on parent-offspring conflict.
00:12:54.000I don't think I've ever written a second one.
00:12:56.180I wrote a paper on haplodiploidy and the evolution of social insects, where I took kinship theory, Hamilton's kinship theory, and applied it rigorously to the unusual situation of ants, bees, and wasps, where males only have one set of chromosomes, they're haploid, and females have two, they're diploid.
00:13:23.560And that leads to unusual degrees of relatedness.
00:13:27.400Indeed, it's the only case in nature, other than identical twinning, where you're more related to someone other than your own offspring, namely, full sisters.
00:13:48.960In a haploidyploid system, you're related to them by three quarters, but you're only related to your brothers by one quarter.
00:14:02.560And that's how people thought about it for a couple of years.
00:14:08.820But it's obvious to me that you don't average them.
00:14:13.840If one is three quarters and the other is a quarter, then you're selected to invest much more heavily in those that you're related by three quarters, and much less than those that you're related to by one quarter.
00:14:30.160How do you envision the relationship between reciprocal altruism and the structures of society and the moral structures that guide society?
00:14:43.920I mean, I would almost be thinking off the top of my head.
00:14:49.360It's been quite some time since I've thought about it.
00:14:53.920You mentioned in your introduction that I peeled off 15 years of my life or whatever it was to master selfish genetic elements.
00:15:06.140That's that's selection below the level of the individual.
00:15:12.620Hamilton was conscious of it, but it was Austin Birch, my co-author, who was the first to see really deeply into the literature and start to reorganize it.
00:15:28.520So the entire subject of genetics, evolutionary genetics, was reorganized around the concept of selfish genes and the conflict they have with others, both between closely related individuals and within individuals.
00:15:51.020So now you're asking me the relationship between reciprocal altruism and sort of society wide phenomenon and so on.
00:16:03.920And I can't I can't boil it down to a simple argument.
00:16:30.380Generally, for selected or collected papers, people would write a short introduction to how they happen to write the paper and then you would get the paper and then there would be a short introduction for your next paper and then the paper.
00:16:47.380What I added was what you're asking for, which is I would write a short introduction, then the paper, then there would be a short section on progress since then, since the paper is published.
00:17:12.120Um, and, uh, I can't remember what I said about, uh, reciprocal autism.
00:17:21.260Now I, I would have to go get the book to, uh, to check it out.
00:17:29.120But I'm afraid I don't have, I'm afraid I can't reason for you at the level you would like in terms of reciprocal autism and societal organization and so on.
00:17:46.900I think it's obvious that societies are not, I mean, they're, they may be partly based on kinship, but, uh, uh, only partly and, and often much more on patterns of cooperation that, uh, evolve or are generated and sustain themselves.
00:18:12.900Why would you stress cooperation as a basis for social organization, say, rather than competition or kinship for that matter?
00:18:24.220Well, I mean, I mean, it's, it's partly just, you know, what was available at the time when I wrote on reciprocal altruism, if you want to, if you want to bring it all the way back to the evolution of reciprocal altruism, which was my first paper published.
00:18:44.260Uh, and indeed Harvard broke their usual rule and they allowed me, uh, I just had, uh, a thesis that consisted of three chapters.
00:20:05.220Well, there's really eight, uh, in Jamaica.
00:20:08.120Uh, so I had to go back down to Jamaica at regular intervals.
00:20:14.720I would come back to Harvard and, and, and work for three months during the semester of teaching and so on.
00:20:21.580Then you'd get a month between semesters and I would fly down to Jamaica and that set up a lifelong bond between me and Jamaica,
00:20:31.440where I've lived, uh, at least 20 years of my life, uh, married onto the island or stole a woman off the island is another Jamaican expression and, uh, have four children by her.
00:20:49.720Dr. Trivers, how did you get interested in deception?
00:20:52.960And how did you get interested in deception and then in self-deception and the relationship between the two?
00:21:11.400I mean, you competition even applies between different cooperative enterprises.
00:21:18.860They cooperate within their entity, but they compete with other similarly structured entities, uh, so as to maximize their reproductive success.
00:21:37.640I mean, it was the basis of life where we're out there competing all the time.
00:21:43.200Uh, cooperation was, um, a subtler problem with which you had to figure out what the competitive natural selection advantage was.
00:21:57.600So now you just asked about deceit and self-deception, but sir, I'm afraid, uh, blame it on, uh, 78 years of, uh, mentation, if you will.
00:22:10.060So, uh, I, I do know that by 76, in other words, reciprocal autism was 71, parental investment was 72, uh, Trivers and Willard, uh, which was an interesting theory about, uh, tending to produce sons under these conditions and then, uh, daughters under these conditions.
00:22:38.960So, for example, if you look at a human hierarchy, uh, people at the top end tend to produce sons, uh, with higher frequency, but people at the bottom end tend to produce daughters at higher frequency.
00:22:56.180Well, every child has a mother and a father.
00:23:00.980So we know that the aggregate reproductive success of females must equal the aggregate reproductive success of males.
00:23:10.720So if high class males are doing better, then it makes sense that lower class women are doing better.
00:24:54.500Uh, so if, if you can listen carefully enough to hear when someone's voice rises a bit, they're more likely to be practicing, uh, deception.
00:25:11.860So, I practiced as a clinician for a long time, and as a research psychologist, and I was very interested in how people deceived themselves and the kinds of psychopathologies that emerged.
00:25:29.880And, so here's a, here's a hypothesis.
00:25:34.480What I noticed often was that when people received information that contradicted one of their explicit beliefs, the information often manifested itself emotionally.
00:25:51.260And so, imagine that a husband comes home with lipstick on his collar, and the wife sees that and becomes agitated as a consequence.
00:26:02.100But then refuses to think through what the implications of that might be.
00:26:10.080And so, the self-deception isn't one fully thought out proposition versus another.
00:26:17.320It's a fully thought out set of propositions, say about marital stability, or at least partially thought out, versus an emotional cue of uncertain significance that has to be unpacked with difficulty.
00:26:32.100And avoidance of that is tantamount, at least to some form of self-deception.
00:30:08.140And all she has is a message that she's in error.
00:30:11.920It doesn't contain much other information.
00:30:14.200And it's going to be extremely hard for her to reconstruct all that theorizing she's done based on the assumption, erroneous assumption of monogamy.
00:30:26.500And so it's easiest just not to do it.
00:31:16.740Well, I think this idea maps onto your hypothesis that at times the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere can be delivering contradictory messages.
00:31:29.860So, if the left is linguistic and generates up detailed propositional arguments, let's say, that get held with some certainty, and the right emotionally signals error,
00:31:44.500then there's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done in order to unpack that error and remake all those propositional presumptions.
00:31:57.980That's what I don't understand in your argument.
00:32:02.060I don't understand why there's a huge amount of work where she's got to unpack a whole endless series of assumptions or arguments just because it is one thing.
00:32:51.040It seems to me, I mean, she has a simple decision.
00:32:56.320Does she confront him over it and say, Joe, what the hell is this?
00:33:04.880Or confront him whatever way she wants to.
00:33:09.020Okay, so imagine the complexity of that confrontation.
00:33:15.860And this is the sort of thing that I saw a lot in my clinical practice.
00:33:19.660So, because he lied about that, she no longer knows whether anything he's told her or anything he's done is true or real.
00:33:32.380Well, it's because she's violated this basic presupposition of trust.
00:33:38.960And so, part of the reason she's going to have a major emotional reaction to that is that she now doesn't know whether she can trust anything about him and may have to reevaluate all her perceptions of him, even those that are part of the past.
00:34:01.240Well, so there's a tremendous amount of work associated with that.
00:34:06.360You know, and part of what our certainties do, as far as I can tell, is inhibit anxiety and doubt, almost by definition.
00:34:14.480And so, now if you've discovered that you can't trust someone because they violated a fundamental presumption, then every part of the way you look at the world that's predicated on that trust has now become unstable.
00:34:31.100Well, now that is such a strong statement.
00:34:35.040You say everything that is associated with that violation of trust is now subject to reevaluation and so forth and so on.
00:34:50.380That's, I don't know, you, you know, you're the foundation of your argumentation towards me and I respect it.
00:35:02.360Is it your, have clinical experience dealing with people who come to you and talk to you about these kinds of things?
00:35:14.520So, you know, I think that's a good objection.
00:35:19.080And so, let me, let me propose something in relationship to that because I think that's a crucial objection that you made.
00:35:27.160So, one of the things that I wrestled with formulating when I was thinking about self-deception was the relationship of one belief to another.
00:35:42.820So, imagine that, and this is something you could object to, imagine that some beliefs are more fundamental than others and that fundamentalness or is a reflection of how many other beliefs depend on that belief.
00:36:00.720It's like a definition of fundamental, it's a hierarchy.
00:36:05.580And so, some beliefs are trivial because almost nothing depends on them, but other beliefs are absolutely fundamental because everything that you're doing depends on their validity.
00:36:17.800And so then, well, depending on how deep the belief is.
00:36:25.080Well, okay, but fair enough, good objection.
00:36:29.360But, you know, if you deal with someone who's profoundly depressed because something that was crucial to them was devastated, they will often have a tremendous amount of difficulty doing even those basic things.
00:37:39.840I'm a terrible person now, and I'm going to be a terrible person in the future, and there's nothing that can be done about it.
00:37:48.380And that's the sort of thinking that leads to suicide.
00:37:51.260And you can see the person going down the hierarchy of their beliefs, right, from the little argument, which is nothing, all the way down to something that is so basic to their self-concept that if it's challenged, they want to die.
00:38:06.000That happens a lot in real depression, real severe depression.
00:38:17.760I have been thinking about depression, you know, personally.
00:38:22.840I was presenting that conception of depression, you know, that cascade of doubt that I outlined as an illustration of what people are motivated to avoid when they practice self-deception.
00:38:40.580They don't want to start unraveling because they don't know where the unraveling will end.
00:38:50.980And that's partly why they won't investigate.
00:38:54.900Yes, I, you know, off the top of my head, I would agree with that kind of argument that.
00:39:01.920They don't want to pursue reality very far when it's easier to flip, flip part of it and be unconscious or try to become unconscious of the flip you're making.
00:39:26.100Now, in your book on self-deception, you outlined some of the social costs of self-deception, say, in relationship to warfare and talked about the way that the biases that we have to perhaps reject contradictory information can produce catastrophic consequences, say, at the policy level.
00:39:52.960You said, for example, that leaders and the people that they purport to lead are often extremely over optimistic at the beginning of a war and also have a proclivity to derogate and minimize the strength of their enemy.
00:40:11.040So, when you did your work on self-deception, did you draw any ethical conclusions from it?
00:40:23.540I mean, as an evolutionary biologist, you see it as a strategy in a sense, but it's a strategy that has a lot of costs.
00:40:32.300Initially, initially, I was very much down on both deception and self-deception.
00:40:41.060I was very much biased towards the truth and honesty.
00:40:48.080Then, I think when I saw the degree to which deception was advantageous,
00:40:58.000you mentioned in the book, having lots of examples from other animals of deceptive behavior and even morphology.
00:41:11.320And then, self-deception, I was against, you know, doubly, if you will, because you're deceiving yourself.
00:41:22.760So, you're both a victim and a victimizer, as I imagined it.
00:41:29.700Then, I came to kind of relax about both of them.
00:41:34.380I saw situations in which deception is something I would practice consciously, you know.
00:41:44.620But again, it might have to be a fairly serious situation in which you would have to construct a serious lie to get out of it.
00:41:58.960And I know there have been situations in my life not too, too long ago where I've spent a lot of time constructing a deception
00:42:10.820that gives off the minimal amount of cues so that it's hard to detect, if you will.
00:42:19.720When I walked my clients through situations where they had to construct deceptions to avoid, let's say, some serious consequence
00:42:30.980or maybe to gain some serious advantage, which often backfired in the long run,
00:42:38.420one of the things that seemed useful to do was to trace back into their story the events that led to the necessity of the deception.
00:42:52.840There's a Canadian songwriter who wrote a line that struck me in this regard.
00:47:19.540And David Buss has looked at the relationship between dark triad behavior.
00:47:25.760So that's narcissism, Machiavellianism, and aggression.
00:47:32.280I might have the third one wrong, but that's basically it.
00:47:35.240Now, younger women, younger inexperienced women, are much more likely to be attracted to dark triad guys.
00:47:46.200And that's partly, as far as I can tell, because they haven't had the experience to distinguish between narcissism, let's say,
00:47:55.800and success, and the confidence that comes with success.
00:48:00.860And that's an example of that inability to distinguish between aggression and competence.
00:48:06.160Now, the aggression might be necessary to deal with free riders and cheaters.
00:48:14.520So you're saying, are you, that some of these aggressive men might be attractive to women precisely because they would be hard on the malevolent types you're talking about?
00:48:38.880So the most common forms of pornographic fiction that women read feature surgeons, pirates, vampires, billionaires, and unfortunately, I can't remember the other one.
00:48:55.820But they're men who have, you could say power, but that's not it.
00:49:28.020When I see the political arguments that take place now, the accusation that the male hierarchy is a, let's say, oppressive patriarchy, right?
00:49:46.260What I see in that is partially this inability to distinguish between power and competence, and also failure to understand when aggressive action is necessary and desirable.
00:50:03.400And that seems related to the free rider problem.
00:50:50.300Of negative emotion, anxiety particularly, and doubt.
00:50:59.380So, the beliefs that are more important to us are beliefs that other beliefs depend on, and when they're threatened, it's very emotionally destabilizing.
00:51:11.860And very hard on us from a physical perspective as well.
00:51:19.700Because when our core beliefs are disrupted, we don't know what to do, and therefore we have to prepare to do everything.
00:51:35.760And so, I think sometimes people engage in self-deception so that they don't have to undermine their core beliefs and dysregulate themselves like that.
00:52:21.660So, we could say that self-deception has its advantages, even as an adaptive strategy.
00:52:32.020And I think the idea that it can serve deception, as a handmaiden, say, is a powerful idea.
00:52:40.820But it doesn't look like it's an optimal strategy.
00:52:45.100And so, one of the things I wanted to ask you is, is there justification in evolutionary biology for, you know, you said strategies compete, right?
00:52:57.860And so, does that mean that there's an optimal strategy that we approximate, that we have an intuition of, even?
00:53:07.480God, I would tend to doubt that there's an optimal one.
00:53:13.140First of all, if there were an optimal strategy, why isn't everybody adopting it?
00:53:19.920Well, you may answer me by saying, well, it's adaptive, but not in all situations.
00:53:49.160I mean, you've also talked about runaway sexual selection.
00:53:54.140Okay, so, this is an answer to the problem you just posed, possibly.
00:53:59.680I mean, one thing that does seem to have been selected for, that operates across a very wide range of contexts, at least in human beings, is something like general intelligence.
00:54:11.220You know, and the cortical expansion that produced that.
00:54:16.620So, I would say, as a domain general, there's a domain general ability that might have been selected, that worked in most situations, and that was more intelligence, at least with humans.
00:54:28.100And that doesn't address the ethical issue exactly.
00:54:32.860And you said it was mostly being selected by women, female choice?
00:55:48.100But, you know, there is an idea in evolutionary biology, sort of implicit, that women select men who are higher, as high as they can manage in the status hierarchy.
00:56:02.080And that hierarchy is constructed as a consequence of the exercise of power.
00:56:09.260And I think that's wrong and dangerous, that idea.
00:56:13.300I don't think those hierarchies, the male hierarchies that influence female selection, are based on power.
00:56:22.100I think they're based on something more like competence.
00:56:25.860And I think it's associated with this capacity for reciprocal altruism.
00:56:30.080Because you want, if you're a woman, you want a man who's productive, but also generous.
00:56:36.560Certainly, I don't have anything to say against what you just said.
00:56:40.140I don't know what David Buss was arguing.
00:57:31.640But I don't understand why mimicry is not an example of deception.
00:57:40.700Let's say we're talking about moths or butterflies and predators, birds.
00:57:49.180So, you will have some butterflies that are perfectly tasty to birds, but there are a couple that are not, that have a poison that they ingest when they're caterpillars,
00:58:14.060which they retain in adulthood, which they retain in adulthood, so that they're distasteful and poisonous.
00:58:20.180So, then they attract, so to speak, mimics.
00:58:25.520Because now, if you're a related species, so you're similar in appearance already, but you don't happen to have the poison,
00:58:36.200then you evolve to be, to resemble that species more and more in order to gain the benefit that they have from having the poison.
00:58:49.420So, the predator makes the assumption that you've got the poison because you look exactly like the species that has the poison.
00:59:03.080And then they've done work, but I, you know, it's long ago, disappeared from my memory.
00:59:08.480They've done work on a relative frequency of the two kinds, and there are situations in which the mimic can be, you know, five or ten times as frequent as a model, as they're called,
00:59:27.040and they're gaining a benefit, and they're inflicting a marginal cost on the model.
00:59:35.240There are other situations in which, as they rise in number, the mimic, they inflict a cost on the model, because now birds snap the model.
00:59:51.900Of course, they spit it out, but that doesn't help the model.
00:59:56.800That just means the bird doesn't swallow the poison.
01:00:00.860You could make a similar case for narcissists.
01:00:06.420Imagine that the model is someone competent and confident, and maybe assertive because of that, and productive and generous,
01:00:19.740but the mimic just mimics the confidence and assertiveness.
01:00:24.320And then there is a cost inflicted on the model, because if there are enough narcissistic mimics,
01:00:32.700then the existence of the model starts to become doubtful.