Dr. Robin Dunbar - Legendary Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_910)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
152.32524
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Robin Dunbar joins me to talk about his life and career as a psychologist and animal behaviorist, and how he became interested in the African baboon, the gala baboon. He also talks about his favorite animal, the gelata baboon and why it's one of his favorite animals.
Transcript
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Hi everybody this is Ghat Saad. I've been doing this for many many years. I've had many
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unbelievable guests on my show. Few have turned me into a little school girl with giddiness as much
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as the next gentleman I'll be speaking to right now. Professor Robin Dunbar. How are you doing sir?
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I'm very good. I'm slightly worried about turning you into whatever it was you were going to be.
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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
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be promotion of my work. I get enough exposure in life but it's really an homage to you.
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My first book ever the evolutionary basis of consumption Robin Dunbar is in there when we're
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talking about the you know Machiavellianism social intelligence hypothesis the evolutionary roots
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of gossip all topics that you cover all covered in this book number one. Number two now this might
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surprise you. I only found this out earlier today. One of the photo templates of my 2011 book is what I
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what I state is arguably the rock star in the animal kingdom. My favorite animal the gelata baboon. I found out
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that that was your doctoral dissertation. Third point and then I will cede the floor to you.
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biography on Conrad Lawrence and I find out that Robin Dunbar studied under Nico Timbergen who was
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one of the co-Nobel winners. Unbelievable stuff. I was going to read your stuff. I'll add it later
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sort of your your bio. Let's begin Nico Timbergen. Tell us about this.
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Well um yeah that was a curious coincidence so you have to understand that I went to university to
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study philosophy. Serious um what's called Oxford philosophy or English philosophy as it was that
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dominated the western world until well only a few um a decade or two ago really. Um so this was
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you know sort of what I'd been genuinely interested in and and um uh excited by um but the problem is
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I went to Oxford University and you can't do philosophy on its own you have to do it something else
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and I chose philosophy and psychology as the least bad option. I had very little idea what psychology was
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because you couldn't study it at high school so you know I'd probably read a few pop psychology books
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of the day but uh aside from that I knew very little about it. Anyway I set off on this and who
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should we get the first two terms of lectures from but young Nico Timbergen and an even younger Richard
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Dawkins. Wow! And um this was quite enlightening to me. I mean I I had grown up in East Africa. I
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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
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grown up in East Africa wandering around the bush looking at animals probably down the wrong end of a
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um a gun but never mind um and this stuff that he was the the ethologists were doing in the 60s
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was just amazing to me it was fascinating. So I then went and did two undergraduate expeditions
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studying monkeys first in West Africa the first year and the second year in Ethiopia.
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So I can see how the gelada baboon is coming up but go ahead keep going. Yeah so um Ethiopia
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turned out to have been well it was a proposal uh that we'd gone and talked to John Crook who who
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had been studying the gelada baboon um in in Ethiopia and had done a uh a wildlife um program on
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on the BBC television and uh one of my um fellow traveler travelers had um seen it and rushed off to
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see him uh to see if he had any projects we could do and he he suggested we do baboons which is what
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we went and did but then this stuff was so exciting to do fieldwork on on primates um I decided that's
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what I was going to do for my PhD so I went back to him um with a view to doing something on gelada
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which is what I then went and did and I did a postdoc on gelada afterwards uh so two very long
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field trips um also spent a lot of time studying antelope and uh um uh because there were simply
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lots of them around I mean what do you do when you're sitting in the middle of 60,000 projects
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you know why settle for one well let's let's do lots of them so I got very excited by ungulates
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spent uh much of the next decade studying ungulate ungulates in East Africa and in the west coast of
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Scotland so and when did you make the switch to uh the hairless primates uh these weird things that
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we have to live among yeah well um it was the last thing I was interested in studying and then um
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come the 1980s um uh late 1980s um this was sort of Thatcherite Reaganite economics at stake big problem
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um not much money in the system anywhere no no funding for trivial stuff like field studies of
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animals in the wild you know okay if you're going to cure cancer we'll give you what what's left in
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the pot scrape it out um but really there was no funding at all and there were very very few jobs
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the people who worked in animal animal behavior animal ecology um and so uh I decided when I finally
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got a job lecturing at UCL in London University College London that I'd better think of something
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constructive to do because I obviously wasn't going to get be able to get back to um be studying
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um animals in the wild because you know there was no money so I thought well we can do what we do on
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monkeys and antelope we can do it on humans too right there in the park or in the cafeteria in the
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university cafeteria whatever um there's lots of interesting questions that you can ask we can
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ask exactly the same kinds of questions as we would ask animals so that's how that kind of transition
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to humans got started and I guess the hinge point I mean that was from about 1988 onwards the hinge point
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really came in 91 92 when the Machiavellian intelligence idea was sort of circulating seriously and
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um uh in the course of studying a very trivial problem namely why do monkeys spend too much time
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grooming other people not just themselves um it suddenly dawned on me you could actually test
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the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis directly and quantitatively rather than kind of with just a few
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examples which is how these things tended to be done so I did that and um then kind of went well
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actually we could stick humans into this regression equation that we get for monkeys and apes and see
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what it predicts for humans and it predicted um a number about 150 so I then spent some very late
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nights and several bottles of whiskey trying to track down track down um uh quantitative data on
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hunter-gatherer group sizes that's why the whiskey was necessary it was extremely frustrating
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trying to find quantitative data in the ethnographic literature but I got a decent sample and it turned
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out and I was kind of doing a reverse engineering thing here you know we got a prediction of 150 for
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if you like the natural cognitive size of human groups but what's the natural size of human groups
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humans live in you know complex social systems with many tiers which tier is the right one to look at
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so I kind of went well let's look at all the tiers see if there are any consistencies in numbers
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and then ask which one matches 150 and that turned out to be the kind of not the one that everybody
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all anthropologists seem to spend their time engaged with which is the band which is turns out in my view
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anyway simply to be an ecological unit it's a ecologically convenient unit it's not really their living
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but it's their living group it's not really their social group their social group is the next layer
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up um which is a clan or a community or something like that or a regional grouping
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and that consistently um in every data set's looked at since then has a value of about 150.
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so let me let me uh mention a quick two two quick stories about your dunbar's number of 150
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so in 2008 I had been invited to Indiana University uh do you know who Peter Todd is
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yes yes yeah Peter Todd you know fast and frugal heuristics with gigarens and so on yeah
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so he had moved from the Max Planck Institute uh to Indiana University and my first book had come out
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so he invited me out and at one point I was meeting I unfortunately I don't remember his name
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a social psychologist and I was meeting the people in his lab and this so this is 2008 almost 20 years
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ago and they had just ran some network analyses on groups you know friendship group sizes online
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and of course I was armed with your Dunbar number I said to them so they so he was there the head
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of the lab the professor with a few of his students I said oh before you give me any information
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can I guess what the app the average size of the network was and so he looked at me sort of with
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some incredulity like how would you know you haven't looked at the data I said how about if I say it's
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about 150 and so he he goes that's exactly right and then of course I then explained Dunbar's number
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so that's story one story two at one point I was writing something and I wanted to see
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you know how many different areas the 150 comes up and so I thought oh how about the average number
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of wedding guests at a wedding and I had done a quick search and it came out to 148 so your immortality
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is saved forever more Robin uh I mean are you pleased that that number I mean rarely do academics
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have an insight that becomes you know part of popular culture I dare say that Dunbar's number has
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is this something that gives you a unique sense of accomplishment and that you've crossed over
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in in some sense yes because it's ended up being picked up and applied not just by boring old
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uh academics studying humans or or whatever it may be but that it's been taken up by
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computer sciences dealing with the design of uh social media and so on it's been picked up and
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it and applied extensively in in the world of business organization um and these are sort of way
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outside areas that um I I would be interested in and again the other areas sort of acquired some
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no notoriety in his his network science which is mostly statistical physics so as a result of that
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I've ended up uh being a professor of statistical physics in a competing science department for three
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years but you probably never took a physics course in university but absolutely none I mean I I I
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went I mean as I say I went to university of philosophy I was a dyed-in-the-wool humanities person
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through high school and and really the first half of my undergraduate career I always claim I was the
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origin of C.P. Snow's two cultures there are scientists who do serious stuff and there are
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humanities people who waffle and I went I am on the waffling side
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this this science stuff is boring and tedious and you know what have you but I I made this
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enormous transition so it's kind of fun to have um ended up back in some sense can I can I can I make
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an attempt at consilience E.O. Wilson's gorgeous yes yes uh linking snow's two cultures so I just if
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this was two weeks ago today actually my birthday was on October 13th so I received as a matter of fact
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stay on the line I usually don't get up but hold on a second do you do you know what this book is
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have you have you ever seen Rhapsody no this is a this is a book by Arthur Schnitzler who was a
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Austrian psychiatrist by by training uh who wrote this novella called Rhapsody a dream novel
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the rights to that novel hey I'm going to link it to snow and consilience in a second bear with me
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the rights to this novella by the way this is a first first edition 1927 that my family
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bought for me two weeks ago for my birthday now so so this is one of the guys out of the Vienna
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circle group uh so he was uh not the Vienna circle in the sense of the philosophers
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and the mathematicians but the wider sort of Vienna yes you know this this extraordinary
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efference of uh intellectual activity yes I only just discovered it last year just amazing it's out
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of this world it's unbelievable so anyway so Stanley Kubrick the the famed filmmaker reads this novella
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and again I I want to show off I am holding the 1927 first edition uh he's he reads the novella
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buys the rights to it sits on it for I don't know how long and then just before he passes away
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eyes wide shut is released which is a classic movie which you should see and it's literally
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the play-by-play of this book now why am I mentioning this because it's an it's a novella
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so it's literature but if you read it as an evolutionary psychologist you're like oh boy do I
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get this it's basically just to give you the premise it's basically about what happens when a husband
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and wife decide to do the ill-advised thing of sharing to with one another their secret fantasies
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now when the when the woman shares some of her fantasies with the husband it doesn't go too well for
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very basic evolutionary reasons that we would understand so here's an example where we are
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drawing the consilience we're doing the snow we are building the bridge because literary Darwinism
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is exactly applying evolutionary theory to literature that's why I was so moved by this
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book what do you got to say about this yeah no no well I mean you know bearing in mind that I have
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still at least half a foot in the in the humanities and and sort of my um kind of majors in that area
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if you like uh were English literature and history and history I actually in it well you in those days
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you had to take a special exam uh entrance exam to to get to Oxford or Cambridge universities they
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did they didn't care about the kind of state uh qualifications they they used entirely their own
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entrance exams so history is my main subject and that's what I got on in on technically I could have
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studied history if I wanted to but I've maintained an interest in both these fields I have collaborations
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with historians um you know sort of trying to trying to help historians uh add some real backbone theory
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from evolution to what they do which is in general worked extremely well and been been great fun but
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also um I've I've you know had on the back burner and that's partly because there's so much of what
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we've done over the last two decades um in the aftermath of the social brain hypothesis and Dunbar's
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number has been trying to understand how individuals create friendships if you like and how those are
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scaled up to create communities you know what what is it what are the mechanisms involved and one of
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those very clearly became storytelling and this sent me back to um storytelling drama and novels and stuff
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which I've always been interested in anyway but we had a long three-year project on trying to apply
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evolutionary ideas to um storytelling in the form of form of drama um which was kind of fun but I I
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always mention that I was giving a lecture last week big lecture down down down at Bristol University
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and I pointed out to them or I said let me introduce you to the founding mother of um social psychology
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because there has never been anybody who's done it better um and and um uh she's the classic 18th century
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um novelist um whose name I blanked all completely now um what do I mean pride and prejudice
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uh Jane Austen Jane Austen okay so I said you know let me introduce you to the founding mother of
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of social psychology Jane Austen nobody has such an acute sense of observation of the foibles of human
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behavior and got it absolutely bang on as she did I mean it was absolutely incredible it's just like
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reading um um evolutionary psychology textbook exactly right uh so so I think you know I mean it's
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absolutely and I mean I have to say in the consilience sense that because I have uh an academic foot
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very much in psychology and and therefore mechanisms but also a second foot in biology because I did my PhD
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although in a psychology department I did it in a group of zoologists doing evolutionary ecology
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essentially and that was what my PhD in all my research thereafter was on animals very much in
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that vein so I have you know I always look at things both in terms of their evolutionary function
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and in terms of um the mechanisms that that produce those effects um and and that means that
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you end up sort of gradually being forced to cover every discipline that bears on what you do from
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genetics and physiology right through to um uh ecology and and you know environments and and and even
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plants I've spent more time uh pairing at plants probably than most people uh uh would want to do
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well um and it's that that you know because I have this very broad range of interests um and and sort
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of spend most of my time trying to figure out how they all come together and produce this you know
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extraordinary complexity of the world we live in it does leave me um uh interested in and appreciative
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of all these other disciplines whether they're humanities or or or sciences you know I kind of
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don't distinguish between them sometimes the humanities get uh mislaid a little bit in terms of
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strange theories shall we say but still you know history is a science you know it's trying to explain
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something in the past archaeology is a science and literature is kind of doing the same in the sense
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it's meant to tell us a little bit about you know how at least one person thinks the the the human
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world actually actually works well it's the it's the practical application of deep evolutionary insights
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right so you you create a novel and then the it is tested in the market if it is congruent with basic
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biological imperatives I want to read it if it isn't I don't want to read I mean as you probably know
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I'm housed in a business school I try to apply evolutionary psychology in various business disciplines
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most typically in in a consumatory setting well that's a wonderful arena to test many of our most
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fundamental principles but I want to come back in a second for a second to consilience to
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interdisciplinarity one of the things that frustrates me the most and I'm I dare say it's probably the same
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for you is when I hear so there are many detractors of evolutionary thinking at least evolutionary
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thinking as applied to human behavior right there's a great yes there's the term human reticence effect
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this is not my term that basically says it is perfectly reasonable to apply the evolutionary lens to every
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single species on earth except one called homo sapiens once you make that jump then you are a quack
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you know post hoc speculative unfalsifiable right yeah and what frustrates me the most Robin is that
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it is the exact opposite to that attack that you typically see in evolutionary theory right so
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the the idea of nomological networks of cumulative evidence which I discuss in my work uh David Schmidt has
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written a great paper on it with Pilcher the idea is when you demonstrate that a phenomenon
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holds true across species across time periods across cultures across methodologies across disciplines
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is that suggesting that we are just sipping a martini with a cigar and coming up with fanciful stories
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or is it suggesting that we actually put our evidentiary threshold much higher than other sciences
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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
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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
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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
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good biologists of good standing maintain the same attitude towards humans also known forgive me for
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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
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Cambridge by a bunch of behavioral ecologists they're mostly graduate students and maybe postdocs
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um arguing that a the social brain hypothesis doesn't apply at all everything is driven by
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ecology to which I sort of raise my eyes to heaven and go well of course it's all bloody ecology what do
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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
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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
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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
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this is bizarre that these these are people who there was about 10 or 12 people authors on it this
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was a sort of big kind of mission statement as they were they're all dyed in the wool signed up card
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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
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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
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in into some degree of business consultancy was that people who work in the real world
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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
00:30:51.660
in reality there is money involved and they are very averse to losing money on you know stupid ideas
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
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
00:34:06.780
phoenix re-arises with the next generation of imbeciles right and so and so my question is
00:34:12.740
could there ever be a mind vaccine such that now all people who study phenomena involving biological
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
00:43:16.320
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