The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. Robin Dunbar - Legendary Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_910)

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00:01:05.240 Hi everybody this is Ghat Saad. I've been doing this for many many years. I've had many

00:01:11.640 unbelievable guests on my show. Few have turned me into a little school girl with giddiness as much

00:01:18.860 as the next gentleman I'll be speaking to right now. Professor Robin Dunbar. How are you doing sir?

00:01:24.840 I'm very good. I'm slightly worried about turning you into whatever it was you were going to be.

00:01:31.040 A goody school girl.

00:01:33.160 Yeah.

00:01:33.820 Well let me tell you why. I mean I'm gonna come to a few. I prepared a few books and this is not meant to

00:01:40.600 be promotion of my work. I get enough exposure in life but it's really an homage to you.

00:01:46.560 My first book ever the evolutionary basis of consumption Robin Dunbar is in there when we're

00:01:53.600 talking about the you know Machiavellianism social intelligence hypothesis the evolutionary roots

00:02:00.120 of gossip all topics that you cover all covered in this book number one. Number two now this might

00:02:07.420 surprise you. I only found this out earlier today. One of the photo templates of my 2011 book is what I

00:02:15.980 what I state is arguably the rock star in the animal kingdom. My favorite animal the gelata baboon. I found out

00:02:25.580 that that was your doctoral dissertation. Third point and then I will cede the floor to you.

00:02:31.500 biography on Conrad Lawrence and I find out that Robin Dunbar studied under Nico Timbergen who was

00:02:42.020 one of the co-Nobel winners. Unbelievable stuff. I was going to read your stuff. I'll add it later

00:02:49.460 sort of your your bio. Let's begin Nico Timbergen. Tell us about this.

00:02:54.940 Well um yeah that was a curious coincidence so you have to understand that I went to university to

00:03:03.340 study philosophy. Serious um what's called Oxford philosophy or English philosophy as it was that

00:03:12.240 dominated the western world until well only a few um a decade or two ago really. Um so this was

00:03:21.340 you know sort of what I'd been genuinely interested in and and um uh excited by um but the problem is

00:03:30.580 I went to Oxford University and you can't do philosophy on its own you have to do it something else

00:03:34.880 and I chose philosophy and psychology as the least bad option. I had very little idea what psychology was

00:03:42.020 because you couldn't study it at high school so you know I'd probably read a few pop psychology books

00:03:48.740 of the day but uh aside from that I knew very little about it. Anyway I set off on this and who

00:03:54.220 should we get the first two terms of lectures from but young Nico Timbergen and an even younger Richard

00:04:02.620 Dawkins. Wow! And um this was quite enlightening to me. I mean I I had grown up in East Africa. I

00:04:12.780 hadn't grown up really in in in in the UK or um or Europe even if it becomes that um I'd grown up

00:04:20.140 grown up in East Africa wandering around the bush looking at animals probably down the wrong end of a

00:04:26.140 um a gun but never mind um and this stuff that he was the the ethologists were doing in the 60s

00:04:34.300 was just amazing to me it was fascinating. So I then went and did two undergraduate expeditions

00:04:41.340 studying monkeys first in West Africa the first year and the second year in Ethiopia.

00:04:46.420 So I can see how the gelada baboon is coming up but go ahead keep going. Yeah so um Ethiopia 1.00

00:04:52.540 turned out to have been well it was a proposal uh that we'd gone and talked to John Crook who who

00:04:59.300 had been studying the gelada baboon um in in Ethiopia and had done a uh a wildlife um program on

00:05:07.180 on the BBC television and uh one of my um fellow traveler travelers had um seen it and rushed off to

00:05:15.840 see him uh to see if he had any projects we could do and he he suggested we do baboons which is what 0.99

00:05:21.600 we went and did but then this stuff was so exciting to do fieldwork on on primates um I decided that's

00:05:30.000 what I was going to do for my PhD so I went back to him um with a view to doing something on gelada

00:05:35.980 which is what I then went and did and I did a postdoc on gelada afterwards uh so two very long

00:05:41.700 field trips um also spent a lot of time studying antelope and uh um uh because there were simply

00:05:50.360 lots of them around I mean what do you do when you're sitting in the middle of 60,000 projects

00:05:55.160 you know why settle for one well let's let's do lots of them so I got very excited by ungulates

00:06:02.180 spent uh much of the next decade studying ungulate ungulates in East Africa and in the west coast of

00:06:09.020 Scotland so and when did you make the switch to uh the hairless primates uh these weird things that 0.67

00:06:17.920 we have to live among yeah well um it was the last thing I was interested in studying and then um

00:06:27.720 come the 1980s um uh late 1980s um this was sort of Thatcherite Reaganite economics at stake big problem

00:06:41.540 um not much money in the system anywhere no no funding for trivial stuff like field studies of

00:06:48.440 animals in the wild you know okay if you're going to cure cancer we'll give you what what's left in

00:06:53.520 the pot scrape it out um but really there was no funding at all and there were very very few jobs

00:06:59.460 the people who worked in animal animal behavior animal ecology um and so uh I decided when I finally

00:07:07.820 got a job lecturing at UCL in London University College London that I'd better think of something

00:07:15.780 constructive to do because I obviously wasn't going to get be able to get back to um be studying

00:07:20.480 um animals in the wild because you know there was no money so I thought well we can do what we do on

00:07:29.800 monkeys and antelope we can do it on humans too right there in the park or in the cafeteria in the

00:07:35.680 university cafeteria whatever um there's lots of interesting questions that you can ask we can

00:07:40.680 ask exactly the same kinds of questions as we would ask animals so that's how that kind of transition

00:07:46.300 to humans got started and I guess the hinge point I mean that was from about 1988 onwards the hinge point

00:07:55.180 really came in 91 92 when the Machiavellian intelligence idea was sort of circulating seriously and

00:08:05.520 um uh in the course of studying a very trivial problem namely why do monkeys spend too much time

00:08:12.100 grooming other people not just themselves um it suddenly dawned on me you could actually test

00:08:18.600 the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis directly and quantitatively rather than kind of with just a few

00:08:26.000 examples which is how these things tended to be done so I did that and um then kind of went well

00:08:34.200 actually we could stick humans into this regression equation that we get for monkeys and apes and see

00:08:40.740 what it predicts for humans and it predicted um a number about 150 so I then spent some very late

00:08:47.220 nights and several bottles of whiskey trying to track down track down um uh quantitative data on

00:08:56.340 hunter-gatherer group sizes that's why the whiskey was necessary it was extremely frustrating

00:09:01.880 trying to find quantitative data in the ethnographic literature but I got a decent sample and it turned

00:09:09.280 out and I was kind of doing a reverse engineering thing here you know we got a prediction of 150 for

00:09:15.500 if you like the natural cognitive size of human groups but what's the natural size of human groups

00:09:22.360 humans live in you know complex social systems with many tiers which tier is the right one to look at

00:09:29.060 so I kind of went well let's look at all the tiers see if there are any consistencies in numbers

00:09:34.380 and then ask which one matches 150 and that turned out to be the kind of not the one that everybody

00:09:42.660 all anthropologists seem to spend their time engaged with which is the band which is turns out in my view

00:09:50.160 anyway simply to be an ecological unit it's a ecologically convenient unit it's not really their living

00:09:56.780 but it's their living group it's not really their social group their social group is the next layer

00:10:01.320 up um which is a clan or a community or something like that or a regional grouping

00:10:06.800 and that consistently um in every data set's looked at since then has a value of about 150.

00:10:15.040 so let me let me uh mention a quick two two quick stories about your dunbar's number of 150

00:10:22.000 so in 2008 I had been invited to Indiana University uh do you know who Peter Todd is

00:10:29.300 yes yes yeah Peter Todd you know fast and frugal heuristics with gigarens and so on yeah

00:10:34.720 so he had moved from the Max Planck Institute uh to Indiana University and my first book had come out

00:10:40.720 so he invited me out and at one point I was meeting I unfortunately I don't remember his name

00:10:46.540 a social psychologist and I was meeting the people in his lab and this so this is 2008 almost 20 years

00:10:52.560 ago and they had just ran some network analyses on groups you know friendship group sizes online

00:11:00.140 and of course I was armed with your Dunbar number I said to them so they so he was there the head

00:11:07.220 of the lab the professor with a few of his students I said oh before you give me any information

00:11:12.660 can I guess what the app the average size of the network was and so he looked at me sort of with

00:11:22.880 some incredulity like how would you know you haven't looked at the data I said how about if I say it's

00:11:27.760 about 150 and so he he goes that's exactly right and then of course I then explained Dunbar's number

00:11:34.340 so that's story one story two at one point I was writing something and I wanted to see

00:11:40.480 you know how many different areas the 150 comes up and so I thought oh how about the average number

00:11:47.560 of wedding guests at a wedding and I had done a quick search and it came out to 148 so your immortality

00:11:56.860 is saved forever more Robin uh I mean are you pleased that that number I mean rarely do academics

00:12:04.140 have an insight that becomes you know part of popular culture I dare say that Dunbar's number has

00:12:12.040 is this something that gives you a unique sense of accomplishment and that you've crossed over

00:12:16.880 in in some sense yes because it's ended up being picked up and applied not just by boring old

00:12:29.840 uh academics studying humans or or whatever it may be but that it's been taken up by

00:12:36.460 computer sciences dealing with the design of uh social media and so on it's been picked up and

00:12:45.940 it and applied extensively in in the world of business organization um and these are sort of way

00:12:53.640 outside areas that um I I would be interested in and again the other areas sort of acquired some

00:13:00.580 no notoriety in his his network science which is mostly statistical physics so as a result of that

00:13:07.300 I've ended up uh being a professor of statistical physics in a competing science department for three

00:13:13.020 years but you probably never took a physics course in university but absolutely none I mean I I I

00:13:20.080 went I mean as I say I went to university of philosophy I was a dyed-in-the-wool humanities person

00:13:26.240 through high school and and really the first half of my undergraduate career I always claim I was the

00:13:32.740 origin of C.P. Snow's two cultures there are scientists who do serious stuff and there are

00:13:38.780 humanities people who waffle and I went I am on the waffling side 1.00

00:13:42.840 this this science stuff is boring and tedious and you know what have you but I I made this

00:13:51.200 enormous transition so it's kind of fun to have um ended up back in some sense can I can I can I make

00:14:00.340 an attempt at consilience E.O. Wilson's gorgeous yes yes uh linking snow's two cultures so I just if

00:14:09.840 this was two weeks ago today actually my birthday was on October 13th so I received as a matter of fact

00:14:14.780 stay on the line I usually don't get up but hold on a second do you do you know what this book is

00:14:22.600 have you have you ever seen Rhapsody no this is a this is a book by Arthur Schnitzler who was a

00:14:30.100 Austrian psychiatrist by by training uh who wrote this novella called Rhapsody a dream novel

00:14:38.240 the rights to that novel hey I'm going to link it to snow and consilience in a second bear with me

00:14:44.240 the rights to this novella by the way this is a first first edition 1927 that my family

00:14:52.600 bought for me two weeks ago for my birthday now so so this is one of the guys out of the Vienna

00:14:59.420 circle group uh so he was uh not the Vienna circle in the sense of the philosophers

00:15:04.480 and the mathematicians but the wider sort of Vienna yes you know this this extraordinary

00:15:11.100 efference of uh intellectual activity yes I only just discovered it last year just amazing it's out

00:15:20.380 of this world it's unbelievable so anyway so Stanley Kubrick the the famed filmmaker reads this novella

00:15:26.960 and again I I want to show off I am holding the 1927 first edition uh he's he reads the novella

00:15:37.420 buys the rights to it sits on it for I don't know how long and then just before he passes away

00:15:44.580 eyes wide shut is released which is a classic movie which you should see and it's literally

00:15:50.280 the play-by-play of this book now why am I mentioning this because it's an it's a novella

00:15:55.600 so it's literature but if you read it as an evolutionary psychologist you're like oh boy do I

00:16:03.240 get this it's basically just to give you the premise it's basically about what happens when a husband

00:16:09.700 and wife decide to do the ill-advised thing of sharing to with one another their secret fantasies 0.86

00:16:19.180 now when the when the woman shares some of her fantasies with the husband it doesn't go too well for

00:16:26.940 very basic evolutionary reasons that we would understand so here's an example where we are

00:16:32.660 drawing the consilience we're doing the snow we are building the bridge because literary Darwinism

00:16:38.660 is exactly applying evolutionary theory to literature that's why I was so moved by this

00:16:44.500 book what do you got to say about this yeah no no well I mean you know bearing in mind that I have

00:16:50.860 still at least half a foot in the in the humanities and and sort of my um kind of majors in that area

00:17:00.500 if you like uh were English literature and history and history I actually in it well you in those days

00:17:08.240 you had to take a special exam uh entrance exam to to get to Oxford or Cambridge universities they

00:17:15.080 did they didn't care about the kind of state uh qualifications they they used entirely their own

00:17:22.820 entrance exams so history is my main subject and that's what I got on in on technically I could have

00:17:29.420 studied history if I wanted to but I've maintained an interest in both these fields I have collaborations

00:17:35.060 with historians um you know sort of trying to trying to help historians uh add some real backbone theory

00:17:46.340 from evolution to what they do which is in general worked extremely well and been been great fun but

00:17:52.460 also um I've I've you know had on the back burner and that's partly because there's so much of what

00:17:58.560 we've done over the last two decades um in the aftermath of the social brain hypothesis and Dunbar's

00:18:06.100 number has been trying to understand how individuals create friendships if you like and how those are

00:18:14.760 scaled up to create communities you know what what is it what are the mechanisms involved and one of

00:18:21.280 those very clearly became storytelling and this sent me back to um storytelling drama and novels and stuff

00:18:30.120 which I've always been interested in anyway but we had a long three-year project on trying to apply

00:18:36.480 evolutionary ideas to um storytelling in the form of form of drama um which was kind of fun but I I

00:18:45.280 always mention that I was giving a lecture last week big lecture down down down at Bristol University

00:18:53.220 and I pointed out to them or I said let me introduce you to the founding mother of um social psychology

00:19:00.420 because there has never been anybody who's done it better um and and um uh she's the classic 18th century

00:19:12.000 um novelist um whose name I blanked all completely now um what do I mean pride and prejudice

00:19:19.560 uh Jane Austen Jane Austen okay so I said you know let me introduce you to the founding mother of

00:19:26.540 of social psychology Jane Austen nobody has such an acute sense of observation of the foibles of human

00:19:35.200 behavior and got it absolutely bang on as she did I mean it was absolutely incredible it's just like

00:19:41.520 reading um um evolutionary psychology textbook exactly right uh so so I think you know I mean it's

00:19:50.420 absolutely and I mean I have to say in the consilience sense that because I have uh an academic foot

00:19:59.240 very much in psychology and and therefore mechanisms but also a second foot in biology because I did my PhD

00:20:08.020 although in a psychology department I did it in a group of zoologists doing evolutionary ecology

00:20:13.500 essentially and that was what my PhD in all my research thereafter was on animals very much in

00:20:20.600 that vein so I have you know I always look at things both in terms of their evolutionary function

00:20:26.040 and in terms of um the mechanisms that that produce those effects um and and that means that

00:20:35.920 you end up sort of gradually being forced to cover every discipline that bears on what you do from

00:20:42.840 genetics and physiology right through to um uh ecology and and you know environments and and and even

00:20:53.820 plants I've spent more time uh pairing at plants probably than most people uh uh would want to do

00:21:02.080 well um and it's that that you know because I have this very broad range of interests um and and sort

00:21:12.180 of spend most of my time trying to figure out how they all come together and produce this you know

00:21:17.040 extraordinary complexity of the world we live in it does leave me um uh interested in and appreciative

00:21:25.060 of all these other disciplines whether they're humanities or or or sciences you know I kind of

00:21:31.960 don't distinguish between them sometimes the humanities get uh mislaid a little bit in terms of

00:21:39.000 strange theories shall we say but still you know history is a science you know it's trying to explain

00:21:46.960 something in the past archaeology is a science and literature is kind of doing the same in the sense

00:21:52.760 it's meant to tell us a little bit about you know how at least one person thinks the the the human

00:21:59.840 world actually actually works well it's the it's the practical application of deep evolutionary insights

00:22:07.540 right so you you create a novel and then the it is tested in the market if it is congruent with basic

00:22:16.280 biological imperatives I want to read it if it isn't I don't want to read I mean as you probably know

00:22:22.300 I'm housed in a business school I try to apply evolutionary psychology in various business disciplines

00:22:28.180 most typically in in a consumatory setting well that's a wonderful arena to test many of our most

00:22:36.380 fundamental principles but I want to come back in a second for a second to consilience to

00:22:41.660 interdisciplinarity one of the things that frustrates me the most and I'm I dare say it's probably the same

00:22:48.200 for you is when I hear so there are many detractors of evolutionary thinking at least evolutionary

00:22:53.860 thinking as applied to human behavior right there's a great yes there's the term human reticence effect

00:23:00.180 this is not my term that basically says it is perfectly reasonable to apply the evolutionary lens to every 0.70

00:23:07.280 single species on earth except one called homo sapiens once you make that jump then you are a quack

00:23:15.160 you know post hoc speculative unfalsifiable right yeah and what frustrates me the most Robin is that

00:23:23.060 it is the exact opposite to that attack that you typically see in evolutionary theory right so

00:23:29.480 the the idea of nomological networks of cumulative evidence which I discuss in my work uh David Schmidt has

00:23:36.840 written a great paper on it with Pilcher the idea is when you demonstrate that a phenomenon

00:23:42.980 holds true across species across time periods across cultures across methodologies across disciplines

00:23:51.040 is that suggesting that we are just sipping a martini with a cigar and coming up with fanciful stories

00:23:57.760 or is it suggesting that we actually put our evidentiary threshold much higher than other sciences

00:24:03.660 so do you think that we'll ever be able to break through that phoenix that keeps rising from the ashes

00:24:10.520 or forevermore will be accused of being unfalsifiable bullshitters well I think it's weird because the

00:24:20.460 notwithstanding if you like the success of the evolutionary um uh perspective really beginning with

00:24:31.600 Ed Wilson's sociobiology tome in in the mid uh 70s which really turned the whole thing around

00:24:39.760 um we there is still an extraordinary resistance to the idea of doing applying or introducing anything

00:24:49.740 biological genetic or evolutionary into many disciplines not just this is this is what

00:24:56.520 astonishes me I can understand the humanities people going oh it's it's you know irrelevant to us or

00:25:02.060 you know assuming that humans uh genetically um uh you know because their behavior is genetically determined

00:25:10.300 and we know that's not true uh you can understand them saying that but what what really

00:25:15.440 both disappoints and astounds me is the frequency which perfectly

00:25:22.080 good biologists of good standing maintain the same attitude towards humans also known forgive me for

00:25:32.340 interrupting you also known as the lewington gould effect yes well it is but it's going on long

00:25:40.460 since they've ceased to be affecting anything that's what they're doing so we had a we we did a number of

00:25:47.500 attempts to demolish some of the more insane attempts to disprove both the social brain hypothesis

00:25:54.320 and Dunbar's number which would still go on you know I deal with probably one a week of these attempts

00:26:01.780 but anyway we had a major onslaught onto it um a couple of years back and a paper had come out of

00:26:08.640 Cambridge by a bunch of behavioral ecologists they're mostly graduate students and maybe postdocs

00:26:14.340 um arguing that a the social brain hypothesis doesn't apply at all everything is driven by

00:26:23.000 ecology to which I sort of raise my eyes to heaven and go well of course it's all bloody ecology what do

00:26:29.760 you think but the question I'm asking is how do they solve their ecological problems not what's in

00:26:37.580 driving everything but they had the bizarre audacity in some way to conclude at the end of their

00:26:44.240 paper in future all comparative analyses of primates animals mammals whatever for these kind of

00:26:52.260 things should de facto dis dis include humans humans should not be included and so when we

00:27:01.620 produced our enormous riposte which I'd like to refer to as the four weddings and a funeral paper

00:27:07.440 which I which in knowing that that would never get past editors I carefully restructured as uh four

00:27:16.360 errors and a fallacy in comparative analyses I we ended up in the last paragraph uh essentially saying

00:27:25.700 this is bizarre that these these are people who there was about 10 or 12 people authors on it this

00:27:33.340 was a sort of big kind of mission statement as they were they're all dyed in the wool signed up card

00:27:41.160 carrying evolutionary ecologists how remotely possible is it for people who are in a day job good

00:27:52.760 darwinists to possibly say humans should be excluded darwin wrote two bloody books on humans

00:27:59.920 right what have these kids read but by the way i just find it shocking but by the way this is how

00:28:09.060 so this book the parasitic mind really i started writing it in my head straight out of my phd when

00:28:17.840 i got my first professorship where when i was trying to darwinize well the social sciences in general the

00:28:24.500 business school in particular and i would get these otherwise you know very accomplished economists and

00:28:30.800 organizational psychologists and consumer psychologists exhibiting such animus to what

00:28:36.560 seemed to me the most banal statement we can't fully understand consumers and managers and and

00:28:43.720 employees and investors without invoking the biological forces that caused them to behave in those arenas the

00:28:52.080 way that they do but i was a quack guy i didn't belong in the business school and so on and so that was

00:28:57.660 originally where i got this idea of okay these people are parasitized because how else could you

00:29:04.240 explain such a cognitive and emotional obstacle their brains have been hijacked so so while the book

00:29:11.820 came out in 2020 i've been damn writing this book for 30 years of my career and i'm sure you face the

00:29:18.220 same kind of animus yeah yeah well just going back to the point you made a little earlier about

00:29:24.000 business school and being in a business school or business environment i mean i've i have actually

00:29:28.820 along the way um done quite a few or been involved in quite a few advertising campaigns which have been

00:29:36.640 kind of fun to do you know with a number of big products i mean seriously big products as well as

00:29:42.220 smaller ones but i i've i've done them he says trying to justify his existence of uh after the fact

00:29:49.780 because actually they allowed us to collect data and you know so you've got somebody with pockets that

00:29:57.300 are so deep they don't you know doing a massive great survey study uh that would cost an arm and a leg

00:30:04.840 from one of the big survey companies is nothing peanuts them you know i could never afford off any of my

00:30:10.200 research grants to do that so it was it was a kind of way of combining the um sort of my interests um

00:30:16.440 if you like with and getting something out of it with with their advertising interests and they're all

00:30:21.840 fairly reasonable um but i've always maintained one of the reasons i went went into that and then

00:30:28.900 in into some degree of business consultancy was that people who work in the real world

00:30:37.040 like businessmen or people that manufacture stuff or whatever you know they they don't they're not

00:30:44.460 sitting in an ivory tower with their big cigar exactly right if it if it doesn't work if it doesn't work 0.99

00:30:51.660 in reality there is money involved and they are very averse to losing money on you know stupid ideas 0.97

00:30:59.920 and yet they have bought this stuff you know big time i mean they just get very excited and all of 0.97

00:31:07.540 them you talk to them about this you know dunbar's numbers which is what it should strictly be the

00:31:12.660 fractal series of numbers of the layers um the way we create um uh social groups out of these

00:31:21.220 bonding mechanisms and they kind of go ah that explains everything i'm not understood i want to

00:31:28.960 i want to build on what you just said so in my own career of course just like you i've had

00:31:34.720 you know practitioners approach me and of course i also navigate as you said in the ivory tower and

00:31:40.880 and my observation perfectly congruent with yours is that i've almost never had any pushback

00:31:48.400 from the practitioners they just listen and go oh so you can create advertising messages that invoke

00:31:55.340 our deep evolutionary mechanisms i'm in whereas it is usually the academics who are wedded to what

00:32:03.040 seems to be an opposing ideology that scream and shout the loudest because if i'm right then they

00:32:09.820 somehow think that they are wrong so you're exactly right yeah yeah i mean it's it's just surreal

00:32:15.160 actually well um you know this is the the age-old story that you know nobody except academics would

00:32:26.500 spend so much time and effort and money arguing about something so trivial as they do um and and and you

00:32:37.500 end up with these bizarre battles between people you know in a kind of all or none game you know either

00:32:46.360 we're completely right or you're completely wrong right and there are no no it's like a religion

00:32:54.440 it's i mean it really is like a religion you i kind of sit back and i go but i'm not saying you're

00:33:00.660 wrong i'm just saying you've only given half the story yeah yeah that's the proximate ultimate story

00:33:06.300 yes yes that's exactly that you know and the frequency with which people make these egregious

00:33:13.340 philosophical errors uh logical errors of you know testing between two different

00:33:19.500 timberg and wise i mean the old man must be absolutely turning in his grave at some of the stuff

00:33:25.300 that's published and under his his his banner of evolutionary studies of behavior i mean it's just

00:33:34.660 shocking do you do you feel that so and i'm not the first to say this but i can't remember

00:33:42.180 who said this but that the cognitive and emotional you know blowback against evolutionary thinking as

00:33:51.980 applied to human behavior in a sense it is an indelible part of the architecture of the human mind

00:33:58.660 and this is why even though you may think that you've quelled the typical detractors then the 0.96

00:34:06.780 phoenix re-arises with the next generation of imbeciles right and so and so my question is 0.51

00:34:12.740 could there ever be a mind vaccine such that now all people who study phenomena involving biological 0.98

00:34:23.460 agents will one day say yeah i mean of course biological principles apply or the more pessimistic

00:34:30.940 response would be no i think we will be forever more fighting the exact same set of issues what's

00:34:37.780 your position on that i would say the that in in some sense uh it's going to be very difficult to

00:34:47.900 eradicate but not impossible i perhaps that's the the place to the positive end is a place to start

00:34:54.580 first because i i would say it's simply a matter of proper training and i simply hold myself up

00:35:01.540 as the perfect example of this but i i as a dyed-in-the-wool humanities person who viewed science

00:35:09.940 any kind of science as boring and um confused even about the world um you know i that would have been

00:35:21.080 my view but i was very lucky in that actually that helped enormously doing philosophy because that's so

00:35:28.860 rigorous in its um uh analyses of of um how we think basically about the world um that it always

00:35:39.140 made me very finely attuned to that so it made me allowed me to pick up on the issue of tim

00:35:44.060 bergen's wise but these were things that we were then taught uh right as basic certainly as graduate

00:35:50.880 students you know the the the whole principles of tim bergen's four wise which seemed to have

00:35:56.520 disappeared and anyway those with no sense of poetry now take it to call them tim bergen's four

00:36:04.400 questions which i just just sad has no music but there we go um you know the it you can learn

00:36:17.460 you can and you can in some sense if you like then be converted from one view to the other but it

00:36:23.020 requires better quality teaching at all levels and i'm afraid that's where the kind of

00:36:29.460 spanner in the in the machine um uh slows things up it doesn't make it impossible it's just

00:36:38.160 it it's clearly going to take a very long time to overcome the attitudes of the existing teachers whether

00:36:48.640 these are high school teachers or um uh university teachers or other influences as it were in in the

00:36:57.120 wider sense of the term um you know that if you don't understand these things then they are

00:37:02.100 somewhat arcane and my very first popular science book was really on this theme it was called the

00:37:09.040 trouble with science right um um which um essentially argued that actually science is a natural human

00:37:18.800 ability it's just that it's not a normal human ability in that we are capable of doing it we have the

00:37:26.640 computing power to do it in our brains but it's there are too many kind in everyday life um you know a it's

00:37:35.080 very demanding in in terms of training and so on and thinking that you have to do but also you know

00:37:42.580 evolution being what it is has uh necessarily uh filled the brain with lots of quick and dirty

00:37:51.600 uh uh heuristics which cut through a lot of the complex thinking for us most of which work adequately

00:37:59.980 but are completely wrong right and and it's those it's those those natural heuristics that sit in sit in

00:38:09.740 the brain i think that are the problem because you know we find it difficult to separate out motivations

00:38:15.220 from functional explanations you know just sort of explanations about uh why i fall in love with

00:38:22.380 somebody in terms of my emotional state as opposed which is the bit of the world we live in in in

00:38:29.820 practice in everyday life with the kind of stepping back uh into the background and seeing the bigger

00:38:36.220 picture and being able to explain it in evolutionary terms or in neurophysiological terms or whatever it may be

00:38:43.100 that's the tricky part i think because most people are too immersed and of course by the time they get

00:38:49.220 to be adults they've spent what 20 plus years immersed in this much more immediate proximate um

00:38:57.780 level of explanation well dawkins your your colleague at uh forgive me for interrupting you at uh oxford

00:39:06.180 talked about middle world right so that you know things that phenomena that happen at the nano level

00:39:13.080 your brain and mind have not evolved to understand it phenomena that happen at the cosmological level

00:39:18.420 your brain and mind haven't evolved and so to use this still explanations that may have happened

00:39:24.960 millions of years ago the architecture of our human minds is not you know well adapted to do that

00:39:31.920 and so that that was the genesis of my question which is maybe there is this this bug feature in our

00:39:39.000 brain that will always make it fully capable of being parasitized by animus towards evolutionary

00:39:45.240 psychology yes yes no i think that's absolutely right because um these positions are if you like

00:39:52.660 which is what i was sort of trying to say um are the default position and this is why it's difficult

00:40:00.160 to overcome because with each generation is not something which like genetics you know you can

00:40:05.800 introduce a new gene it takes off and it's there in the population forever um that's not ever going

00:40:10.900 to happen because well unless there's major evolution in the human mind and i suspect we're we've reached

00:40:16.880 the end there isn't much we can do from here on in um other than tinker that that you will always have

00:40:25.920 this natural default for children as it were that's where we all start and you know you either uh teach

00:40:33.800 them in a way that reinforces those ideas which is what tends to happen because that you know

00:40:38.720 teachers and lecturers and what have you are all living in the real world and we all tend to think in

00:40:43.020 these simple terms or you can have better educated educators who can present a more sophisticated

00:40:51.920 nuanced view of of evolutionary theory as we have it now and as presumably we are going to have even

00:40:58.420 better in the future um which will allow each generation to go through the aha moment that you

00:41:06.660 and i of course went through i'm so glad you said this because my next question was going to be

00:41:11.840 what was your evolutionary aha moment and before you answer it i can suspect that having been taught

00:41:18.540 by nico timbergood might be where you got your aha moment but let me give you mine so it was first

00:41:25.180 semester as a doctoral student uh at cornell uh i i'd never heard of evolutionary psychology i was

00:41:33.140 very much interested in psychology of decision making uh studying the cognitive processes of how we make

00:41:38.840 decisions specifically how do we search for information when do we know when to stop acquiring

00:41:44.380 additional information that was the topic of my right dissertation and then first semester

00:41:50.020 my eventual doctoral supervisor who is by training a cognitive psychologist said hey you should take

00:41:55.920 this advanced social psychology course by this gentleman called dennis regan so this wasn't an

00:42:00.800 evolutionary psychology course it was a social psychology course about halfway through the semester

00:42:04.820 he assigns homicide by daily and wilson i read this my brain explodes and i said that's it i'm going to

00:42:13.440 use the evolutionary framework in in the consumer slash economic setting so that was my epiphany

00:42:19.920 moment do you have a similar sort of moment where you say this is where i said this is it for me

00:42:26.220 i guess so actually i mean it's it's kind of more difficult and the reason i hesitate is that having

00:42:34.720 worked all the way through within that kind of environment as it gradually developed it's very hard to say

00:42:42.000 you know in that sense you know i was fortunate in that i lived through the scientific revolution

00:42:48.340 right in in the mid 70s that produced all this and in fact mentioning martin daly i mean i he was the

00:42:55.780 last person to look at my thesis phd thesis before i went in for my wow biver examination we he and i

00:43:05.620 shared a room and you know that's unbelievable and and he was a young postdoc and he was working on

00:43:13.460 sensible stuff like voles in the sahara

00:43:16.320 it was long before he'd caught the buck and he came over to do plain small mammal socio-ecology really

00:43:27.780 um but we were all kind of influenced by this and it's interesting to reflect back on because

00:43:33.560 that evolutionary group under john crook in bristol was basically creating socio-ecology john crook had

00:43:43.360 invented socio-ecology the social systems are a product of the animals attempts to solve their

00:43:49.720 ecological problems so there are a deep correlation he'd work he worked that out on birds and then he'd

00:43:54.420 applied it to primates and you know um and eventually applied to humans and at each step

00:44:00.480 uh everybody in the previous um disciplinary um congregation had had abused him for bailing out

00:44:10.000 when when he applied these ideas to primates and said the ornithologist got all upset and he applied

00:44:18.000 it to humans the primatologist got all upset it's very funny but anyway we had been used to thinking

00:44:24.580 in these kind of evolutionary ways but they weren't i mean they were definitely not group selectionists but

00:44:31.620 they weren't clearly not group selectionists if you can think about it and and so people tend to slip

00:44:37.960 into kind of group selection and then uh simultaneously as it were sociobiology um earwilson's

00:44:45.920 sociobiology and richard dawkins's selfish gene appeared and that really for all of us i think in

00:44:51.520 that that cohort that was our epiphany because everybody went well as richard has commented actually

00:44:58.400 in one of his other books many years later you know something must be right because everybody goes

00:45:03.620 oh yeah i knew that i just never appreciated it right and we had that moment you kind of go

00:45:12.300 ah that's it and i really remember going so my my two field studies of uh gelada baboons in

00:45:19.740 ethiopia uh 71 72 for my um uh phd work and then 74 75 for my postdoc i remember um they were all bedded

00:45:33.580 very much in this sort of socio-ecological um uh framework as it were and i remember going out

00:45:39.660 uh for the 74 75 study with one framework in mind and coming back with the other

00:45:46.500 because actually we had just looking at what the animals are doing and that that to me is the key

00:45:54.520 for good quality research well even in physics you know it's it's understanding your organism from the

00:46:01.860 inside right otherwise you're just inventing avatars in your own mind

00:46:07.560 the great problem and if you if you you know it's being so immersed in the system you're working on

00:46:15.700 whether it's cosmology or or or animals or humans you know that you actually can see and feel

00:46:24.000 what the organism or the system is seeing and feeling that's when you you do the best quality

00:46:31.120 work those are the people that do the best quality work because they really understand

00:46:34.840 how the the mechanisms involved are working and it was that that's my second field study

00:46:41.380 was so different in character to my phd field so as you might expect it to be you know sort of

00:46:48.340 transition from a phd graduate student to a postdoc but also we had spent so long observing these

00:46:56.920 animals the the daylight suddenly clicked on in the middle of that field study and we came back

00:47:04.140 and there was dawkins's book on the table and ear wilson's book on the table and you i read those

00:47:10.360 and i went yep that's what i'm doing i actually so a couple of points number one i recently um so i was

00:47:17.460 speaking in london and in at university buckingham this past june right i wish i had reached out to

00:47:23.420 you uh and i ended up going to oxford for the first time ever and i richard dawkins was kind enough

00:47:29.700 to to invite me to his house he was filming a thing so we had a chance to meet and so on also met up

00:47:35.120 with i don't know if you know him do you know the the uh physicist david deutch i know the name

00:47:41.980 yeah he's an amazing guy at oxford but anyways uh we we got to chatting and so on and uh

00:47:48.580 sorry because you were saying that you were part of the scientific revolution and so i wanted to

00:47:53.140 share with you a story and i'm i'm the next generation right i'm about if i may say about

00:47:59.060 20 years younger than you and so i'm the next generation uh it's nice now that everybody thinks

00:48:04.960 i'm the old guy it's nice when i'm the young guy in the room yes uh but anyways uh but you're you're

00:48:10.300 only wise you're not old uh i remember 2001 you mentioned ucl so i was at my first human behavior

00:48:18.920 and evolution meeting right it's best it was at ucl that year were you there by any chance yes i

00:48:26.200 probably was oh okay well so anyway but i i don't think i had the pleasure of meeting you in person

00:48:31.520 because i would have otherwise remembered right so i i'm going to give the my talk the room is packed

00:48:38.100 i mean maybe 40 rows maybe i don't know 500 people at least and they certainly weren't coming

00:48:43.520 because i was a famous guy because i was still a very young professor and uh in the back of the room

00:48:49.720 were seated and then they eventually kind of called me over martin daly margo wilson john toby

00:48:58.000 lita cosmetes and david buss all of whom were big heroes evolutionary psychology but i'd never met them

00:49:06.140 and i remember after meeting them and they were you know very complimentary this is great what

00:49:10.940 you're doing and so on i remember for about you know three hours i was in the clouds just because

00:49:15.840 i just met all these heroic figures i wish i could have added you to that personal anecdote but i didn't

00:49:21.720 have the pleasure of meeting you then yeah that's too bad it ships passing in the night without

00:49:27.780 exactly uh so now you are officially i mean you're professor emeritus at oxford are you does that mean

00:49:37.280 you've you've gone fishing forever more or are you still deeply involved in all kinds of academic

00:49:42.580 stuff no i've gone fishing because because my research my writing is my fishing ah okay very good

00:49:52.160 you you got me worried there okay that i love that okay so so you're so the only thing that that's

00:49:57.980 probably changed is you're probably not doing sort of formal teaching is that is that true no yeah but

00:50:04.740 then i haven't done teaching formally probably for the last 15 maybe even 20 years oh really my yeah i was

00:50:13.200 latterly anyway um lucky enough to have a whole series of research professorships and things which

00:50:21.640 didn't require me to do much teaching maybe a bit of master's course teaching occasionally i would

00:50:27.320 dip a toe into undergraduates um and i was just really focused that's probably you know if you look

00:50:33.600 at my um publication output um you can see the consequences of that because over that period the

00:50:41.700 the number of papers i was producing was huge by anybody's not any normal persons uh but it was you know

00:50:50.060 not a function of uh me as such so much as me having the time yeah uh to devote and b also having

00:51:00.500 the uh resources financial resources to employ a lot of absolutely stunningly good uh postdocs and research

00:51:09.080 fellows on my project so um that that all came about but no i am i am uh the the only difference is the

00:51:18.060 pay scale is lower but i still do still do what i did before um and i'm publishing about 12 or 15

00:51:27.640 papers a year and a book every two years that is astounding we've just sent two two book manuscripts

00:51:35.080 off to to publishers which of of all of the different hats you've worn in your academic career

00:51:42.000 so of course standing up in front of the classroom publishing the peer-reviewed papers publishing

00:51:47.680 books that are meant for the general public which is a completely different skill which very few

00:51:53.160 professors unfortunately master doing public engagement doing your public consult consultancy

00:51:59.620 is there one that if you had to only do that one this is what you'd spend your time doing or do you

00:52:06.680 love all equally they're all part of what constitutes an academic career i i i would say i kind of enjoy

00:52:14.860 all of them yeah but my default always is actually doing science and that default is back on animals i'm

00:52:27.800 trying to understand primate social evolution and through that more generally mammalian social evolution

00:52:34.080 and through that vertebrate right social evolution but well they're higher vertebrates socially birds and

00:52:42.240 mammals and so forth um it that's the part although i haven't no no i have done a lot of i've never not

00:52:52.460 been doing field work uh for any length of time on large mammals uh until i went to oxford in 2007 and i

00:53:02.060 decided to close down my field projects um simply because i wouldn't have time to do them but you know

00:53:10.180 what drives me is just trying to understand the this enormously complex world that very smart animals

00:53:18.620 live in and why they do it why they've evolved that way and how they do it and so this has been the topic of

00:53:25.880 this enormous book it's enormously long um i've just sent off to um uh various publishers to have a look

00:53:37.660 at and see if they'll take um so it's it's the title essentially is the four fundamental forces of

00:53:44.740 social evolution and they're not the fundamental forces that everybody thinks that's what gives me

00:53:51.160 great pleasure because it'll blindside them completely this is an academic book or trade

00:53:56.500 book it is an academic book it is so it will be read by 13 people it will be read by 13 people which

00:54:03.360 is troubling because what it does is present a completely new vision if you like i'm i've been

00:54:10.160 taken to describing it as sociobology 2.0 um this is this is picking up where ed wilson left off in the

00:54:18.720 last couple of chapters right and unpacking those in enormous detail finally i think understanding

00:54:25.000 what's going on um it's been great fun to do it and it's been great fun to do it precisely because

00:54:32.220 it it's so left field right that it's going to cause exactly as sociobiology was it's going to cause

00:54:40.620 a lot of people deep angst and uh there's going to be a terrible backlash um but it you know to

00:54:49.560 revert to this age-old um conversion story you know when they finally have argued themselves out

00:54:58.520 to a standstill and have come to realize that i'm right um we'll have the perfect storm of

00:55:05.580 committed converts beware of the ice bucket yes well yes i know i'm also conscious of that

00:55:15.600 for those of you who may not follow this maybe obscure reference eo wilson which robin just uh

00:55:24.120 referred to when he came out with sociobiology even some of the folks of course in his harvard

00:55:31.160 departments were very hostile to him at one point he was giving a lecture and some detractors threw

00:55:37.640 an ice bucket on him so uh get ready to receive similar treatment by the way for have you read

00:55:43.740 defenders of the truth yes you have okay fantastic uh i've actually i've been meaning to invite her over

00:55:52.760 uh several years ago she was kind enough to send me a copy of her biography of bill hamilton who's right

00:56:02.840 who is gigantic i mean you know arguably like yeah next darwin after darwin maybe robert rivers uh could

00:56:11.220 could also go for that title uh and i've never invited her so this i just remind remember have you ever met

00:56:17.120 her this is seger strale by the way yes yes um i think i did meet her very early on when she was

00:56:24.620 first proposing propounding these ideas uh in in the context of um human evolution she was very

00:56:34.460 interested in the human evolution story and the debates that were going on amongst human evolution

00:56:38.760 um uh folk as it were and i think i met her in london then i i um because i was that time i was in a

00:56:48.180 biological anthropology department or in an anthropology department that had a big biological

00:56:53.820 university of liverpool this was ucl ucl okay okay yeah in london and um um she must have been over for

00:57:05.480 some meeting or something like that but anyway i i because it appealed to my philosophical interest

00:57:11.900 and your interest in history right and the interest in history yeah yeah beautiful um so i have a lot of

00:57:18.080 time for her and oh wonderful okay last question although as i always tell my brilliant uh guests i

00:57:25.620 could keep you here for another five hours this is a question that has become customary for me to ask

00:57:30.240 just because it's a nice way to end sort of on a grand philosophical note so one of my professors

00:57:36.780 at cornell his name is tom gilovich he was sort of one of the pioneers of studying empirically the

00:57:42.500 psychology of regret and as you probably know there are two components to regret regret due to action

00:57:48.120 regret due to inaction regret due to action i regret that i cheated on my wife and now our my marriage is

00:57:54.100 over regret due to inaction i regret that i became an evolutionist because my dad was an evolutionist

00:58:00.160 i wanted to become a historian right and it turns out robin as it may not surprise you that the

00:58:06.240 biggest looming regret in people's minds is the one of the road not taken regret due to yes yes so if i

00:58:13.980 were to ask you and may you have many many more years on this beautiful earth if i were to ask you

00:58:19.280 today looking back at your life do you have any regrets and do you care to share your most looming one

00:58:25.800 what would it be uh in in many ways is actually not having done history or having done english

00:58:35.040 as a career right um uh history i seriously have uh dabbled in uh although probably most historians

00:58:47.660 would would not count it as history but it it's most definitely history and anyway it's

00:58:53.180 you know sort of a lot of it's been based around the icelandic viking uh family sagas you know as

00:58:59.840 historical documents and uh which i mean they're just amazing the detail that they they they provide

00:59:07.300 um but um and i've always always had this hankering to to to be a novelist or poet or something like

00:59:15.560 that uh and and never quite got around to it um and um but now the time has arrived gad now the time

00:59:24.420 has arrived because i've almost wrapped up all the academic stuff um i've that's not been published

00:59:32.700 although i could probably keep going for many years yet so you have do you have the confidence to take

00:59:38.180 a shot at writing that novel yeah oh yeah definitely oh well i've already started so oh wonderful so i've

00:59:47.680 got a couple of novels i'm working on and um a couple of major history books um big big big vision

00:59:56.280 history books really which of course are very out of fashion in history and that's the problem

01:00:00.740 is they're not looking at the big picture but it's really introducing an evolutionary perspective

01:00:07.800 to understanding history so a little bit more than just economics will you come back many more

01:00:13.480 times on the sad truth as each of these books makes it back into print with great pleasure

01:00:18.960 you know what people say do not meet your heroes this is a case where it made perfect sense for me to

01:00:26.960 meet one of my intellectual heroes robin you are a true delight thank you so much for coming on the

01:00:31.160 show stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline true pleasure and honor to meet you sir

01:00:35.800 and likewise a great pleasure uh to be on your show and i'm still puzzled as to why we've never met

01:00:43.880 i know right it could be because you didn't ever invite me to oxford when you had a lot more pull it

01:00:51.300 could be that well i never did invite anybody i was i was too busy but uh well i hope i hope to

01:00:59.860 remedy the situation i am invited to come out possibly to a house of lords thing possibly to arc

01:01:07.160 the organization that jordan peterson started in june so hopefully this will be an opportunity for us

01:01:14.200 to meet i i keep my fingers crossed okay sounds good wonderful thanks thanks robin stay on the line

01:01:19.920 there you my Jeanne

01:01:21.020 you

01:01:21.920 here you

01:01:37.960 there you

01:01:39.040 yeah

01:01:39.960 yeah

01:01:41.100 yeah

01:01:43.820 yeah

01:01:44.800 yeah

01:01:46.300 you

01:01:47.320 you

01:01:47.820 yeah

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 03, 2025

Dr. Robin Dunbar - Legendary Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_910)

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