The Incredible Evolution Of Human Violence - Dr Richard Wrangham
Guests: Dr Richard Wrangham
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
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if you look at males it turns out that in a number of animals males who have a relatively broad face are more aggressive there was a Canadian team that looked at hockey teams and looked at the number of minutes that individual players spent in The Penalty Box for being too aggressive there was a positive relationship between breadth of the face and the number of minutes spent in The Penalty Box right to say that humans are an
aggressive species do you think well yes in some ways we are incredibly aggressive because we are responsible for more deaths of members of our own species than is typical of other animals and yet at the same time of course you know the great Paradox about us is that in some ways we're just incredibly nice and tolerant and friendly and unaggressive um and for years we grappled with how to resolve these two contrary sides of our
personality but we cannot deny that part of us is uh is a really aggressive streak and we're seeing it at the moment in in wars that occur around the world and um and those of course have gone on throughout history what does it suggest about human nature or what our role is or what would be adaptive for us that we seem to be very effective at the barbell ends of aggression well you know one of the great questions
about human nature for uh two or three hundred years has been are we biologically predisposed to be aggressive or are we biologically predisposed to be tolerant are we a an inherently aggressive species that is tamed by Society or are we an inherently tolerant unaggressive species that is made aggressive by Society and you know my view and I think increasing view is that that's that question is misconceived you know
because the answer is that we're both or neither if you like that whether or not you look at our our tremendous capacity and even interest in committing um aggression uh or whether you look at our tolerant aversion to aggression both of them are part of our biology so I think that what we're learning about ourselves is that we have to recognize that we are a mixture and Society is not responsible either
for taming us or for making us the the sometimes horrible species that we sometimes are you know this is us take us or leave it who were the two philosophers that had this big push was one it wasn't Foucault who was the one who was the French guy went and lived Russo that was it sounds like yeah yeah writing just uh just before the French Revolution uh at the end of the 18th century um and um and and you know sort of very
ironic really you know because he has become associated with the notion that we are inherently non-violent and of course everyone had such high hopes for the French Revolution and then you know there's this wonderful charitable uh exotic new dawn of humanity turns into the guillotine and uh and then you know Napoleon uh and so on you know the disaster that um that befell uh the the the sort of growing sense of civilization uh in
Europe at that time and then the other great philosopher so so Russo is associated with the notion that that humans are inherently um unaggressive Are Made made aggressive by society and uh and then the opposite side was Thomas Hobbes who was living in the time of the English Civil War uh in the second half of the uh 17th century and uh and he was impressed by the fact that uh you really had to lock your door and you had to
worry about who your neighbors were because they might come and kill you and you know the Civil War was a terrible thing and so he was associated with the notion that uh there is something just inherently competitive uh cruel violent about humans and that what you need to be able to control them is a Superior Body a a an ultimate Authority he called it a leviathan we would now think about it as the state you know at that time
might have been the the monarch um to keep everybody under control and and you can look at both of these these great philosophers who have been representing these two opposing views you know superficially opposing views and think that in many ways both of them were right you know they they had a lot to them and that's that's why people have sort of supported one or the other over these years but um
uh you know the wonderful thing is that we can now put the uh the nature of human nature into a much broader perspective than ever was done by political philosophers who are basically of course sitting in their armchairs you know I mean from the point of view of modern science they weren't trying to to really figure out what was going on in terms of the wet biology or in terms of our evolutionary relationships but we
can do that now and and we can look at our close relatives uh the great apes and we can see elements of uh all these two contrasting types of behavior in our cousins and the fascinating thing about that is not that we can say oh well you know we have inherited a particular kind of quality from a particular kind of ape but instead what we can see is that Evolution Works in in a fascinating ways to generate in one
species a certain level of uh some kinds of aggression and another species are different kinds of aggression and we can figure out that there is a logic to The evolutionary history that leaves us deposited in our case on the 20th century or 21st century um with a particular set of inherent Tendencies what do you think is the evolutionary story of humor what we are now are uh ancestors journey through aggression
I think that we have to look back at the last two million years which is the time that we have been members of the genus homo you know just around two million years ago is when the genus homo arose when for the first time you've got a creature that uh could walk into a a clothes shop on Main Street and take clothes off the peg you know they were our size and shape um they were a smaller brand they were
much more robust uh they were you know big great big Beverages and great big broad faces uh but they were they were an early kind of human two million years ago and I think that for the whole of the two million years they were a species that were like wolves or chimpanzees or a few other uh species in being very good Hunters and also very good killers of your own species because once you once you're a good
Hunter you're like a lion or a wolf or a chimpanzee then it means that you can hunt anything and if you go on a hunt a member of your own species you're pretty good at that that Weaponry can be turned inward yes yes and it's not literally Weaponry in the sense of uh of a spear you know is the weapons of your claws and your and your brain and your mouth and and whatever it is and and in the case of of
actually all the species I mentioned the really important weapon is a coalition it's your gang it's ganging up for five of us against one of you because when you do that then you make yourself safe and none of these hunters will go out on their own and try and attack you know a wolf doesn't go out in and trying to attack a bison on its own you know it knows perfectly well that'd be incredibly dangerous thing to do but if
you have 10 wolves and one bison well now you're talking you know someone can nip the wall the uh it's uh rear end while the others are confronting it at the front and so on you know there's great advantage in numbers and that is the way that humans have always tended to attack and kill other humans it's through the advantage of numbers or surprise or other tactical Arrangements um that enable them to kill safely so if
you're asking what is the evolutionary story of human aggression I think the story that carries all the way through to to Modern Warfare is that we were good at hunting and we turned the hunting ability against members of our own species when it suited us to do so and just you know we see this in war nowadays because War consists of a series of asymmetric attacks we bomb their side data they'd bomb us
it's an asymmetric attack in the sense that it's a pretty premeditated planned attack when it's pretty safe for the attackers what's not safe is what happens later when they attack us so that's one kind of aggression wolf like chimp-like lion-like that's humans throughout the period of the genus homo the other kind of aggression is something that is um probably uh the big event that changed everything
happened around three or four hundred thousand years ago and this is the invention of or the development of a sufficiently skilled language that groups of men were able to kill members of their own group using that same coalitionary ability that same gang but the huge complication when you are forming a gang against a member of your own group is how the Dickens do you know that the ones that you hope are going to
be in your gang aren't going to turn against you and you as say the instigator of a gang let's go and get that guy might suddenly turn out to be the victim and they all turn against you the the quotationary Dynamics become terrifying if you are trying to organize a group against a member of your own group is different from when you're attacking a member of another group because then you can all agree we hate
the members of that other group but the emotions are mixed when you're talking about individuals within the same group and the solution to that is sufficiently good language where individuals can talk to each other and get a real sense of reassurance slowly developing you know just floating an idea so you know that guy is a bit weird recently don't you think you know and um eventually getting confidence that yes okay let's agree you
know he really deserves to be sent back to the witches um and we'll get him and we'll all agree and that's it now this ability to execute another member of your own group changes Society hugely because until then almost unimaginably for humans as we grow up in society today we would have had a really bullying system I mean maybe it is imaginable if you remember High School you know where there is some guy at the
top who really throws his weight around you know I mean not all high schools are like this but it does happen from time to time and um I throw his weight around and you know he takes advantage of his his ability to physically dominate everybody else uh all animals do this basically you know all the primates the chimpanzees and the gorillas even the bonobos um uh all the monkeys you have some Top Male and he takes out on everybody else
and what is it what does he get he gets well the females and he gets the majority of the mating he gets the best food he gets into fights a lot of course but um but he really just bullies everybody and once you get this ability to form a coalition that can kill a bully in your group then all of a sudden Everything Changes because nobody dares to be the bully that exerts his power the Tyrant that takes everything for himself
and all of a sudden uh you get changes in society and then slowly you get changes in the evolution of our aggressive tendencies and what you're doing when you take out these bullies is you are uh doing to humans what Farmers have long done to domesticated animals or to wild animals as they became domesticated you are selecting inadvertently in the case of humans for the non-bullies for the less aggressive
individuals and at this point we have to stop just take a breather and say there are two kinds of aggression in animals in general humans are no exception that have very distinctive Dynamics and the one we first talked about the one that is involved in hunting is a premeditated form of aggression which is not necessarily involved in the emotions very strongly at all it's a very deliberate kind of aggression
saying to herself that I have a goal I want to go and kill that animal or that person I want to go and steal that gold and if I have to kill someone to do it I'll get it and then the other kind of aggression so that was called proactive premeditated predatory the other kind of aggression is reactive it's when you as a man uh come into your home bedroom and find another man in bed with your wife and you just lose it
this is not premeditated thoughtful unemotional this is impulsive it's defensive it's reacting to a threat and you just lash out and and uh you you you're a very emotionally aroused and the aim here is to just get rid of that threat chase the guy out of the bedroom window kill him do whatever and it turns out that these two kinds of aggression proactive and reactive are somewhat different in the way that
they are controlled in the brain and they can be following different evolutionary trajectories so you can maintain a high level of proactive aggression and have a selection acting against your reactive aggression and that's what happened in humans starting about three or four hundred thousand years ago when um proactive aggression kept going we had great hunters all the time but reactive aggression started going down
we became much less reactive in our aggressive tendencies how do we know that how do we know that date it's beautiful when you select a domestic a wild animal and choose to have the successive Generations being those that are are the result of breeding by the less aggressive the less reactively aggressive individuals then they show elements of um some quite surprising biological traits and these we know these traits very well
because they occur in domesticated animals all these different lines of domesticated animals uh unrelated Lions dogs cows goats cats they all tend to have white patches of fur on them why do the white patches of fur it's not because a farmer needs to have a cow that's got a white patch on its forehead or a horse that's got white toes these just occur spontaneously we know this now because there's this wonderful
Russian experiment starting in the 1950s by a guy called Dmitry belaf and he started breeding foxes and lo and behold within a few Generations the fox has got white patches of fur on them why is that it's because the foxes he chose to breed were the ones that were least aggressive he would walk towards the foxes when they were about six weeks old when they were you know just just young ones um he would write down the distance that
the human would get within the fog with a as they approached the fox when the fox said that was it reacting and then he would breed from the ones that allowed the humans to get closest the least reactively aggressive and in 10 Generations they got white patches of fur hello there's something mysterious going on here and we're beginning to get a handle on what it is about the biology that says when you select against reactive
aggression you develop these symptoms of the domestication syndrome like white patches of fur another one is floppy ears there is no wild animal actually there's there are there's only one kind of wild animal that has floppy ears do you know what it is elephant yes very good nailed it boom uh that's that's what Darwin pointed out he said but all the domesticated animals you will find some individuals and some some groups that
have got floppy ears um and uh the floppy ears uh yeah they're associated with young ones in wolves but in in many dogs they retain those floppy ears all the way through an adulthood into adulthood so this is a another feature of the domestication syndrome well now obviously humans don't have floppy ears um I'll wait for well um we don't often have white patches of fur but um but there are some features of the domestication syndrome
that are associated with our bones and they are things like relatively uh slender light boned compared to our ancestors shorter faces smaller chewing teeth males becoming more female-like and guess what all of these things started happening around 300 000 years ago and just became more and more developed with time and so that's why we can say that was selection against reactive aggression starting at that time and that's why
we've ended up relatively reduced in our tendency for reactive aggression unlike our very well maintained unfortunately tendency for proactive aggression okay let's let's recap The Story So Far So humans are ancestors develop the ability to first off uh coalitionally hunt that then allows them to take down bigger prey that is something which can get turned inward but for the next one and a half million years you have the problem
of a little bit more you have the problem of coordination up until about 400 to 300 000 years ago when you get language especially Advanced language you have the ability to coordinate more effectively not only do you have the uh literal weapons of the size and the shape and the fists and the teeth and now the tools that we've been using the Spears and the arrows perhaps but you also have the ability to plan in advance
to be able to also gauge the reliability of your other coalitional members and to be able to say right we're going to take him down because he's being a dick so yeah it's time it's time for him to go what that ends up happening is a self-domestication of humans by humans where the most aggressive mostly males I'm going to guess will be pruned off the top the ones that are too tyrannical end up being executed by the remainder
of the group what this means is that those ones some of them very well may have ended up reproducing before they were executed but on average you're going to have a lower level of reproduction from those individuals and if they have sons that like the aggressive Sun hypothesis I suppose if you have aggressive Sons they are more likely to be killed before they have sons and so on and so forth which means
that over time the most aggressive males are removed now this is a relatively short period of time you know 300 000 years ago doesn't sound like long for us to have been doing this but as you've identified in only the space of between five and ten generations of foxes you're able to see a pretty rapid anatomical change in regards to the foreign this is met with certain anatomical changes in humans which includes
shortening of the face less aggressive uh less powerful jaws less large teeth reduced brow Ridge I'm going to guess and then you said that men or males became more female-like which I'm going to guess means less muscle mass overall lower bone density etc etc so for the burgeoning professional athletes amongst us maybe a little bit unhappy that those males were selected out of the group and you know
we see this with the difference in strength between ocean chimps right that a chimp could easily rip a human limb from limo so I've heard uh and that means that we have very much not only um adapted to the selective pressures outwardly that the environment gave to us but almost kind of adapted to the selective pressures that we placed on ourselves socially through this execution is that about right yes
absolutely exactly yeah so so we have been very responsible for our own evolutionary trajectory uh for the last you know quarter of a million years and more and and you say you know it all seems to be relatively recent and is true but of course we we have an excellent fossil record and so you know we know very well that there have been these changes going pretty continuously for the last quarter of a million years
and more how can you talk about psychological changes compared with our ancestors who are no longer around it's not like you can study our ancestors 300 000 years ago you can see the anatomical changes but even those are mostly wasted away apart from what's left in terms of bone and teeth structure how can you talk about the implied psychological changes well I mean the only way we can really do it confidently is through this
correlation with the bones and there are some correlations that are still very fascinating today I mean one of them is uh concerns the breadth of the face uh in relationship to the length of the face and uh it turns out that uh in in a number of animals and humans is one of them uh if you look at males males who have a relatively broad face are more aggressive and there have been a bunch of studies
which show that this is true for humans nowadays so it's oh you are the breadth of our faces has been reduced is become in males more female-like relatively narrow faces uh here's a lovely example of a study um which I think makes a couple of important points um there was a Canadian team that looked at ice hockey as we would call it or hockey is it was recorded in the states um uh looked at uh a number of
College hockey teams and a number of professional hockey teams and looked at the number of minutes that individual players spent in The Penalty Box for being too rough being for being too aggressive and of course it's interesting to think about this because uh you know what we're going to see is that the players who had broader faces spend more time in The Penalty Box on average but the referees are not really
particularly aware of this because they've got helmets on so you can't you know you it's difficult to even know like it's prejudiced by the referees against the broad-faced community right exactly that's right an important point in this study was that for each of the study each of the teams that they looked at there was a positive relationship between breadth of the face and the number of minutes spent in The Penalty
Box but in no case was it significant statistically significant those who say it's not a very strong relationship uh within each team but in every team it happened every college team and every professional team I think it was a a total of 12 teams so the overall significance was very clear but you cannot look at in an individual man and say yeah you know you've got a broad face we know that you are an
aggressive type you're going to punch me yeah right yeah wow it's a trend you know okay so what is you mentioned about the changes that would have happened with regards to mostly male to male aggression what is interesting or is there anything that you know about changes which occurred to females were females self uh domesticated at all throughout this period you know it's it's uh it's harder to know I mean we don't have the same kind
of uh evidence concerning females so you're saying that the uh female from 300 000 years ago would have been able to walk into the department store and Garner fewer looks perhaps than the male because on average they would have changed less is that right to say well um we'd have to give her a makeover before she went in obviously yeah um what we don't have with females is um the equivalent evidence of the
changes that were happening in males independent of the males you know it seems to me very likely that females were indeed much more sort of independent um uh aggressors in those days um but we don't know the reason I say that is because in some ways females have changed particularly strongly compared to um our sort of apish past compared to males you know the males are still a little bit more brutish
um a little bit less refined a little bit hairier um a little bit more like our apish ancestors and and they you know the early forms of homo so females in many ways changed particularly strongly they've become you know feminization has really changed them from um from what they probably were which was a much more uh male-like uh set of individuals but but we don't have at the moment um any kind of really clear story
involving how would that happen it was that just a an incidental consequence of selection on males it doesn't seem very likely but it's a theoretical possibility um or was there intense selection on females to become less aggressive themselves that could well well be the case so interesting because the ability the male male ability to coordinate more complex coalitions to physically take down a male would have had a
similar impact on female capacity to form coalitions I've been learning a lot about intersexual competition your Joyce beninson's of the world and so on and so forth have been on the show a lot and um the female capacity for gossip and Coalition making breaking backbiting venting and all the rest of it is otherworldly and it it has to have been the difference as well between the way that males display
um Power struggles aggression um the compete competitions for status who it is that they're concerned about with State it's the fact that men are positively um inclined toward a member of their group who is stronger than them or better than them at a thing because typically that Coalition would have met well if we've got to go take down that Mammoth together Richard you look like you've got a good set of biceps on you
that means that we can you can grab it and I'll get it with the spear up I don't know how you take down a mammoth um the women on the other hand have such an unbelievable Divergence in the way that they go about things so it seems like it would make sense to me that this increased coordination coalitional capacity would have caused women during that period as well to have opened up a whole new world of uh
changes yes for sure yeah and it's it's very plausible there's another dynamic as well which is that uh the evolution of patriarchy what do you mean that well uh humans I think can be thought of as having two kinds of patriarchy uh one is the the sort of more individualistic the type that occurs in uh animals where a male can beat up on a female just because he's bigger than her because he's stronger
uh he can dominate her but there's another type as well and that is uh what you might call institutional patriarchy well within the group There are rules that develop in the society as a whole that benefit men at the expense of women what would be an ancestral example of one of those you could say um that uh females who have adulterous relationship are going to be punished more heavily than males who do
which is something that happens pretty much universally you know across societies it's a it's extremely common and you never get it in the other direction you never find that males are punished more heavily than females so you know I think what's going on here is that you have an alliance among the males they don't like it when females are adulterous because each of the females belongs to a particular male let me fold a very
interesting piece of information that I learned a couple of weeks ago I want to say that this was maybe Christina Durante or someone else who taught me that women condemn promiscuity more the more sons that they have because they want the male parental uncertainty they want to tune that down so women who have sons show an increased uh distaste for promiscuity and I thought that that was absolutely fascinating so yes
absolutely I wonder how much it's just uh it's just the men that would have been behind the condemnation of the promiscuous women I mean you know you roll intra sexual competition into this and you say well I have a man what we actually want to do in almost like a form of capital punishment to be able to show this is what happens if you do that now if you were a single woman that's one fewer competition uh one for your
competitor within your mating market for a future potential mate and if you are a partnered up woman that would be one fewer potential competitor for your existing mate and if you're a woman who has sons that is one fewer potentially promiscuous male parental uncertainty inducing partner for one of your sons so I actually think that there might be some motivation for women here as well yeah yeah and then if if a woman has
daughters then she would quite like her daughters to be able to have the choice of um you know choosing which man she has for which which baby promiscuous women have got I mean aside from the whole slut-shaming thing uh it's there are a lot of pressures from pretty much everywhere and a lot of incentives from both men and women ancestrally and in the modern world to really I mean that's not to say that that isn't against male promiscuity
too but it definitely seems like uh yeah there's a lot of pressure for for women to tune down that promiscuity yeah and and I mean so when you had um men taking it out on the tyrant I take in other words taking it out on the alpha male uh by ultimately killing him I mean so they're controlling anybody who is taking more than his fair share of the females which until then he always did as the alpha male you know
the alpha chimp takes a big share of paternity but after that then um it's a really important feature of uh belonging to the alpha Alliance that every male gets a female what's the alpha Alliance the alpha Alliance is is what I call the the group of males who are responsible for um killing the Tyrant uh okay okay so they they become the leaders of the the society and and of course once they have discovered that they can kill the tyrant
then that means they can kill anybody including each other including each other so so there's this tremendous um selection for in favor of conformity in favor of all the emotions that show that you are part of the Gang um but also it imposes tremendous pressures on females because from now on any female who goes against the Norms that are imposed by the alpha Alliance is going to be vulnerable to herself
being executed and and you you see you know horrendous accounts in uh the hunter-gatherer ethnographies of the 19th and 18th centuries where people were still getting glimpses of what it was really like to be hunting others before the missions had come in and the governments had come in to to get rid of all of the um more uh violent forms of of interaction and and you get these stories of you know a woman who
um has a committed adultery uh she gets killed a woman who has even seen the sacred trumpets of the men killer what's what do you mean what sacred trumpets well men often have rituals that um are associated with the reasons or the justifications for males being dominant over females uh so uh you know the sacred trumpets uh you know these are things that literally you can't find in particular societies
but they're iconic of uh the the justifications that men produce uh you know why why should the why should you men you know always get the the best food right which they tend to do they they the the meat uh the females will get some but the males will get the best the best opportunities why should it when the men get well you know that's all the gods say who said that God said that we go off and we talk to the god the
sacred trumpet trumpets I see so this this is what particularly interests me that we were sort of moving now from the realm of individual uh anatomical psychological and then societal civilizational changes into morality now we're kind of moving ourselves across into values and virtues and what is upheld and how the interplay of all of this works foreign thinker well actually how how has this impacted morality how how did these
changes inform the evolution of human morality in your view I think that uh the emergence of what I'm calling the alpha Alliance the the gang that is able to control the tyrant uh is essentially simultaneous with the evolution of um of moral principles that are based on the concept of right and wrong so there's a kind of morality of sympathy that you see a little bit developed in the higher primates and and
maybe dolphins and so on uh where there is a tendency for individuals just to understand to be empathic towards uh another individual who is suffering and some people call that morality and that's fine you can call him morality but it's not on morality based on the principles of right and wrong morality is based on the principles of right and wrong is much more arbitrary the right and wrong varies among
different societies what is right and what is wrong and I think the way to think about it is that once you have a Power Group the alpha Alliance that is capable of executing anybody in the group and are therefore able to impose on the group their ideas about what benefits them from a selfish perspective what they do is to say here is Right behavior and here is wrong Behavior you know right behavior is and then
they'll lay out a series of things that are good for the group as a whole like we're not going to steal from each other anymore okay anybody caught stealing we're going to punish you if you carry on doing it you're dead but they also have a different kind of moral principle as well which is purely selfish not just good for the group as a whole but good for the men if there's any problem with the food
supply the men get the first choice if we find that a man and a woman have been having sex that is outside uh let's call it marriage well man can be understood but the women that's no good so I think that there are the morality begins with the concept of right and wrong right and wrong is the result of what benefits the alpha Alliance the group that can get rid of anybody can kill anybody because they have that ability to talk
about it and do it and there are those two ways in which they think of right and wrong one is what's good for the group as a whole and the other is what's good for the men and the reason that it would be adaptive for everybody within a group to conform to that is that anybody who decides to transgress it is going to pay a very high individual price yeah so yeah in your in your view does that mean that
our sense of right and wrong is basically us working out how to be of how to avoid being killed by small groups of alpha males pretty much exactly right there are moral philosophers that are throwing themselves off Bridges at the moment hearing this thinking no it's good there must be more well um I I think you know this is a an area of discussion that has not been you know sufficiently aired at the moment
um but I feel very very comfortable thinking that this all derives from power dynamics that uh that the the sense of right and wrong is ultimately a sense of how to protect yourself from this um evolutionary novelty which is the fact that individuals can be killed at very low cost to The Killers do you have any inclination but is there any suggestion that this sense of right and wrong exists outside
of culture that you know is it that each generation must learn what is right and what is wrong and you or is there something which is embedded in US genetically which gives us an inclination toward this too or a predisposition perhaps well I mean we're clearly very conformist uh as a as a species um and you know children uh at a very young age uh learn to conform and they learn to impose rules on each other and
or that when I say learn to you know they do it almost spontaneously so that certainly suggests that the you know the basic Norm psychology is uh it's being called uh has been inculcated into us but what you're asking uh Are there specific versions of what's right and wrong uh and um I'm not I'm not convinced about that you know that there might be uh something like um involving theft is some very basic
principles uh involving harming each other but but most of these things are subject to some kind of fluidity yeah so I guess some sort of inherent feeling of fairness uh maybe um like discussed aversion or your discussed threshold stuff like that you know if you were to do something that made you feel very traumatized yourself you know the fact that uh soldiers deal with things like PTSD would be pretty maladaptive if we were
just supposed to be uh proact um how would you say unboundedly proactive aggressors uh you would just come back and yeah why would there be an issue you know I just I did the thing that I did the thing that I'm supposed to do um so speaking of that actually has there ever been have you ever discovered or could you imagine a situation in which proactive aggression was selected against in any animal um
well uh if you take uh our two closest relatives chimpanzees and bonobos the uh you can make two strong claims I think first of all that bonobos have much less proactive aggression than chimpanzees and secondly that their common ancestor was much more like a chimpanzee than like a bonobo and the reason you can say that is that there's an out Group which is the gorilla and gorillas are much more like a
chimpanzee than psychology so what that means is that there's probably been selection against proactive aggression in bonobo as compared to chimps interesting wasn't there something unique about the fact that bonobos had a female lead coalitionary self-domestication root yeah can you explain that why females why not male you've just we've just spent half an hour explaining about how the alpha Alliance and the
guys and they take down and so on what power do women have in a very close relative of us right no it's fascinating it's similar and it's fascinatingly different uh I think it's similar because you get the same evidence of self-domestication in the bones and the anatomy of bonobos compared to chimps as you do in humans compared to our ancestors or by the way compared to Neanderthals um a difference is
that in bonobos you still have alpha males whereas in humans you don't have alpha males in the primate sense and so the self-domestication that's happened in human in bonobos does not involve removing the alpha male alpha males don't get killed um and you know we certainly don't have a really good handle on the dynamic and bonobos but what you see nowadays is that when a male gets out of hand he is not taken down by males he is
taken down by females so you get a male who challenges a female over a piece of food say and she gives a squeak um the five females who were closest all rushed to her Aid and they all go chasing that male and he runs off and is is terrified and rightly so because those females can impose a lot of damage you know like any gang they're pretty effective and they can bite his Knuckles off or uh give them some nasty
wounds maybe in the end we'll see some evidence of killing like that I don't know so there's something very different that's going on in the self-domestication of bonobos from humans uh it's not directed at um or the current behavior is not directed at um eliminating the Tyrant males what it is directed at is stopping the males from being aggressive towards the females what's different why what's the pressure
that's different there between humans and bonobos well uh it may not be the pressure so different as the ability so you know you could argue that the pressure in bonobos might be just as great for males to take out the Tyrant male because and you and that that would be a very fair argument because we know about the distribution of paternity in bonobos and we know that even you though you've got this sort of relatively Pacific
self-domesticated form it is still the case that the alpha male is getting just as high a proportion of the paternity as occurs in chimpanzees namely you know 70 in small groups I mean yeah it's really high um but what the bonobas don't have is the human ability for the subordinated annoyed frustrated in-cell type males to be able to get together and attack the tyrant I think because of this difficulty of
forming a confident coalition presumably those those males those underlings would have the same ability of coordination and Coalition as the females though it's not like the females have something specific that the males don't that's true what the females have unlike humans is an ability to spend time together on a relatively permanent basis so that whenever a female is frustrated and annoyed by a particular male then the
feet they're always females there to be able to attack him and that's unlike humans where uh you know in all societies humans break up by day and and go off in small groups and uh and a man can uh find an opportunity to beat up on a female uh when there are no females around to to support her I suppose as well being Patra local at least on average where you know the woman perhaps gets married off to the husband maybe is
displaced slightly geographically away from kin kinship us use my help and then in addition you know there's the fact that um once you've got the alpha Alliance who have already shown that they can kill the Tyrant male then once you have language any male who says you know I I was attacked by half a dozen females the other day you know I couldn't believe it and he goes and tells his mates then and all of a sudden you've got a very
powerful male group that can do something about those females uh interesting okay so getting back to the the morality things I think this is really interesting you mentioned before that um men typically throughout history have come up with uh some would say arbitrary and Fantastical Solutions and excuses for why they may be given preference in certain areas of life does this make the mythology and the storytelling around a
lot of this essentially just plausible justifications for what men want to do yes for what benefits the uh the male Alliance um so I think the story of human society you know major major story of human society is that it is designed around uh what benefits the group of males that have taken power so they take power from the alpha male they um they have a monopoly on violence uh you know their Monopoly means that
they one of the rules is uh we're not going to tolerate violence within our group um so that leads to a series of of moral principles associated with that um the I think the basically you're right that um uh that the morality of a group is uh intimately associated with uh what benefits the males as a group and that might mean that some individuals are frustrated because the rules that have emerged out of the the
group are not necessarily beneficial for a particular male you know the male who is the cleverest or the the strongest or whatever he has to conform to the rest of the group himself but from the point of view of the group as a whole these moral principles were for their own benefit and so you know religions are are of course you know very male biased in terms of um the way they work the um the precepts
that come down from on high you know God gods are typically personifications they are personifications of something and and what what are the personifications of well I think the answer is the personifications of the interests of the male group a lot of third rails here Richard first off we've come for Morality and and cleanly decapitated that one and then next perhaps the entire institution of religion at large
as being a a more elaborate storytelling justification but I can completely see the logic I can completely see how it would be the case that emergently there needed to be a more sophisticated ethereal harder to refute it couldn't be something rational it couldn't be something that was um provable or disprovable here and now it can be like the number of of cows that somebody had killed or whatever it
had to be the the Special trumpet the magical Trumpet of the gods or whatever it wasn't that there was something that you said about a special path if women walked on a particular path and in quite a lot of these societies small scale societies you have areas that are restricted for males only to use and and if you emails even even by accident you know not knowing about them because they're a new female in the group or
something walk on the mail path then then they they can just be killed interesting because it's so important for the males to maintain complete control over uh the male cosmology the male there was a lot of evidence that you found for even um kin kin executions or whatever there was a story I think of a mother strangling her son in his sleep because he'd slept with somebody else's partner at some point
this to me seems like a very this should be selected against incredibly heavily why why would you choose you know in terms of Fitness adaptation why on Earth are you going to kill your own son as opposed to try and take on maybe the entire it's me and you son Let's Take on the entire tribe what's your understanding you're right that this this is very extreme and in terms of the ordinary expectations of
um individuals being expected to favor their own kin against Nom kin it doesn't really work but I think it reflects is the incredible power of the the dominating group with its ability to impose its own morality on everybody else and there may come a point at which I know cynical um examination of uh or appropriate strategy would say if I support my son who has been irritating others in this group then
he's going to get killed and I'm going to get killed and all our family is going to get killed and it may just behooved me to recognize that this individual is dragging us all down and I'll get rid of him and then we'll all be safe again the you know the the big picture here is that the ability to kill the ability of uh of a group to develop rules um that they can enforce is behind so many of the complexities of human
society complexities and and patterns that are very different from what we see in any other animal I think we've just massively underestimated the extraordinary revolutionary effect of the development of capital punishment it changes all the power dynamics what happens when we reach a period of human development of civilizational development where we now have a surplus of resources or actually it is an even
more interesting question have you thought about what would have happened how the local ecology the local resources and mating Market could have influenced the response to aggression so for instance if there was a period shortly after a a big war with a local tribe where there was a high female skewed sex ratio for instance or if it was a period after an ice age where there was a more abundant amount of food to go around
have you considered how the human aggression response might have been adapted to those kinds of situations well not really but but the the sort of gut feeling I have about this is that uh male desires male motivations um are almost infinite you know think about the fact that Emperors in various different societies around the world uh China India Peru when they get absolute power uh you know they're not quite the same
as alpha males in chimpanzees but they have the power equivalent in some ways but what do they do they just get infinite I mean essentially infinite numbers of females so you can take hierarchies in these Empires where you look at the most um powerful individual man and he might have a harem of ten thousand women and and he acts like a um a breeding bull where two females are brought to him every day whose menstrual
periods have been monitored so that they're most likely to be fertile on that day logistical nightmare yes and the and even the Emperors themselves complained about uh you know the obligations here but but nevertheless you know that's what it can go for and then but then the you know the vice Emperor whatever they call you know the the people under him they get a certain proportion and then under him another
proportion and so you know all the people in the government hierarchy uh have got uh their own uh Rich number of females the trickle-down effect of So when you say uh you know well so you know maybe everyone would just sort of stop and give up and and uh and make nice if they had lots of access to lots of females it seems to be more likely that what would happen is that that they would just all be competing for all of
these females again desire would expand appropriately I so I can see that absolutely in a post-agricultural world the interesting thing to fold in was the first question that I bailed out of which is there has to be some sort of a change in terms of how a tyranny or aggression is treated when one individual can start to accumulate far more resources once we get to the stage once we've got the Agricultural Revolution once we stop
being nomadic once we stay still for long enough to actually be able to accumulate defensive fortifications and stores of food and all the rest of the stuff it seems to me that that would maybe not be a hockey stick the same as the introduction of language but should have made a change to the dynamic of how humans relate to each other sufficiently because before that period how many women are you going to support a hundred
thousand years ago how many women can one man support realistically yes that's right and of course um you probably know what the the famous studies the tiwi of Northern Australia where uh you had hunters and gatherers in general becoming more polygenous as you went further north in Australia um and as you go further north towards the warmer regions uh you find that it's increasingly possible for women to look
after themselves without any male input in terms of the accessibility of plant and animal resources and the animal resources are generally fairly small they're sort of lizards more than um Buffalo weren't any um and uh and you had intense provisionally with the men having say 20 wives um and the support all went in the opposite direction to the one you were talking about that is to say a man would say oh my goodness you know I'm not
going to get enough food unless I have at least five wives and you know now I have 20 then I get lots of food because the women were supporting the men is that an element of the fact that when there is a surplus of resources the requirement for women to date sub-optimally for want of a better term there is less pressure for them to do that because them on their own are more likely to be fine they don't need the male protection
in this way well yes they don't need the middle support and so you know in contrast to what you had in Africa uh probably were uh there were large animals that did contribute significantly to the economy and where men were needed to be able to provide for females in that way um where that doesn't happen then um uh as it was saying it's increasingly possible for a few men to dominate access to the the females and you had a
very interesting system where um it was the the elders uh were really quite old like uh you know 40 years old almost like a gerontocracy type thing it was very gerontocratic that's absolutely right yeah relatively few old men uh they had a hard time of it because um you know there's no lights of course so they'd they'd go to sleep go to bed at home let's have the evening meal um with uh maybe 25 files for the 25
women that are the wives of a particular man and it was all too easy for some women to go out of the firelight and go and meet Bachelors uh and get into trouble that way and so the Bachelors were supposed to uh to go off a long way um they were supposed to go and live in a different part of the Bush for uh you know 10 years or something before they were allowed to come back and and be part of the system at all okay have you
considered in the modern world the changing dynamics that we have of um peace relative piece in our time the lack of requirement for men to do both big game hunting and warfare uh the condemnation generally of both proactive and reactive aggression whether that be socially or legislative legislatively and also the increasing female achievement and Independence that they have from men that in terms of
resources education employment you know a sperm donor and a good education will get you a long way in being able to raise a family without the requirement of a male have you considered what the goodness Paradox or the um approach our Humanity's approach to aggression looks like in this current version of civilization that we're in now well I agree that it it raises um questions about male roles and you
know I see all this stuff in the news about um adolescent boys feeling frustrated that they're not able to to be as male as their perceptions would like them to be and the way that Andrew Tate and his philosophy uh incredible appallingly appealing to to boys and I agree that it it kind of raises some really big issues about um about the future about whether or not it's going to be satisfactory for males
to be you know increasingly um powerless increasingly uh unnecessary I I but I've not I've not considered you know exactly what's going to happen I mean um it's not always easy to appreciate I think the fact that the same essential dynamic as you can see in a group of hunters and gatherers that is you know 20 people is I think at play in our society today in the sense that we have uh moral and institutional systems that keep violence
uh in its place and if you are violent in a small hunter-gatherer Society then you will be subject to a an arrow in the back um and everyone will say yes you deserved it you know or maybe plan it as an advance and the same happens nowadays with us if you are too violent then you will end up nowadays in prison um and presumably that will lead to a reduction in your reproductive success and we all have developed a whole series
of sensitivities to these complex rules that um keep us in in control now you're asking is it possible that these rules will get so burdensome and so at variance with our uh male spontaneous Tendencies to uh you know do the equivalent of go hunting um that uh that somehow the system will break down I you know I tend to doubt it but but you know it's uh it's a future that that we haven't been to before so you
know who knows what's going to happen I went for dinner a few weeks ago with David Buss and I was sat down and I've been pondering this question for a good while now um Richard Reeves who wrote a book called of boys and men he's a policy wonk type guy from Washington DC but wrote a phenomenal book it's very short you you'd really enjoy it it's called of boys and men uh just one uh New Yorker book of the Year 2022 actually and um
I asked the question of David and his partner who is a very accomplished social psychologist um what you some men in 2023 really what what role do they have when big game hunting and coalitional warfare is outsourced to the state you know in the form of armies and and law and a supermarket really really what role do we have because we're seeing women outperform men in education on average they're more
conscientious they have fewer Geniuses but they also have fewer ADHD uh autistic [ __ ] members uh then when you sit them down and you put them into an office the kind of knowledge based office work that we have now also seems to lend itself towards women's predispositions at least in part um and now that they are able to achieve educational and employment parity with men they don't need them quite so much
anymore and then the previous roles that men had that they would have relied on to you know that Andrew Tate sort of gives a a little bit of a nod and a wink too those are no longer required of men and kind of the the nerfed kiddy version of that which was um capitalistic conquering and upward Mobility or if it was you know 500 years ago you were commanding a legion of surf so you were a baron or whatever right
you know whatever hierarchy you choose to have that was still very easy for men to dominate all of those have fallen away now Anna you know I asked one of my smartest friends who's thought about intersexual intersexual Dynamics mating attraction for what 40 years 50 years something like that and he didn't have an answer and I think that folding in your work around aggression around where morality may
come from uh ads what maybe a uh slightly Bleak but very interesting new area of Spotlight onto this discussion which is that a lot of the morality that we were working off of the back of was built in order to protect some of men's interests and now in a world during which those interests have been emancipated so much that anybody can access them the gatekeeping no longer works we've seen the downfall of all of the things
that we spoke about you know whether it's spirituality with or without religion you know the the Advent of scientism the rationalist world all of this has slowly just chipped away and degraded at all of the different little gatekeeping elements that we had that would keep this going and then the final uh decapitation was the fact that women didn't need mental resources anymore and yeah I do I'm going to Doha it looks
like to do a debate on literally on masculinity they want me to be the like the card carrying traditional masculinity is under attack and we need to stop it from happening I'm not I'm not I'm not convinced that I actually agree with that position which is maybe going to make me bad as a uh debater for that side but I certainly do feel a lot of sympathy both for myself and for a lot of other young men who go well okay
definitions and roles within Society need to change to adapt to what is happening in the society right it would it would be pointless for us to all value a Man based on how much of a warrior he he is when we're not at War for instance right so you need to reflect the roles with the ecology or with the local environment whatever's going on right now but you can get to the stage where you erode and dissolve and evaporate so many
of the constituent parts of what a concept used to mean to the point where it essentially means nothing anymore where the word masculinity would would not resemble anything compared with what it would have done previously therefore it's basically it's it's a moot point and we now need a new word to talk about what men are um so yes very very very interesting Richard I absolutely adore your work I think this is this is a fascinating
intersection of morality of anthropology of evolution of psychology of all of the stuff that you've gone through uh are you working on anything next can we expect anything from you soon I think I'll probably develop the ideas about patriarchy um a little bit more and and I think so the questions that you're you're raising are are really big you know are really important about what is the role of men
the one thing that I thought that you didn't mention just then is uh is kind of an odd one in a way but um men have got a tremendous role as fathers of sons yes uh you know helping to to bring to real sons because it does seem as though Sons benefit very often from having a male father figure but um but it's a funny thing that because the fathers very often don't know exactly what it is that they're trying to do
correct in in raising them it's not upheld it's not high status you know to be a stay-at-home dad is still not high status it's not high status for men to other men and it's not high status for men to their partner yeah so we also have this evolutionary mismatch of it relationships where the woman out earns the man the man is 50 more likely to need to use erectile dysfunction medication it's twice as likely to end
in divorce it's four times as likely to end in divorce if she contributes more than 80 of the household income all the way down I mean I wasn't literally thinking that that he has to be a stay-at-home dad but but just to be to be a dad at all you know because I mean I think one of the fascinating uh problems is going to arise in the pretty near future is that women are not going to need men for reproduction
yes that's that's already that's already happening I have a friend who's got a PhD she's a self-made millionaire 37 years old uh she's done not IVF but whatever embryo selection sperm donor thing and she's she's ready to go so that's that's halfway there but I I bet you that it won't take many decades before we don't need swim at all how would that work what would you do well uh you know that there are
um there are birds uh that are parthenogenetic that uh that have reproduction without any sperm and it seems to me that people will increasingly be able to discover what it is about sperm that is necessary uh for an egg and it won't be long after that before we figure out a way to have two over fuse so we'll be able to have a baby with each other um oh wow there's no theoretical reason why that shouldn't happen
we are racing to we must find a new thing for us to do Richard or we are racing toward obsolescence I feel well yeah but if you think about the species as a whole yeah I mean this this gets Fantastical but it seems to me that ultimately if you really want to envisage a a stable a relatively stable future for the human species I think it'd be a very good idea if if there are no Y chromosomes because you know the the ultimate source
of violence is the Y chromosome the women are clearly less given to what we might call irrational forms of aggression than men are and and I I would think that it would ultimately behoove us in a world of of new kinds of reproductive technology uh for a moral agreement in whatever kind of social structure we have in the world uh for the Y chromosome to be put into a test tube like smallpox and um and for it not to be manifest in
is that ethical to talk about essentially an entire gender's Eugenics removal from the future of civilization there's a question for you well we have decided to touch the final third rail uh just to to leave that there uh I've never even thought about that before uh and I have no idea what I think about it other than I don't quite like the idea of all men going and and leaving but I also thought before I read
your book that human morality hadn't occurred as a byproduct of alpha alliances so we'll see uh Richard look I I like I say your work's fantastic um when you thank you so much it's my pleasure when you come up with something new let's discuss it I would love to discuss it and if you do end up coming through to Austin at any point uh David has told me that we need to go for dinner so if you do fly through Texas
make sure that you add an extra day into your trip if people that are listening want to check out more of the stuff that you do where should they go on the internet um well I I studied chimpanzees and we have a a website called kibali chimpanzee project k-i-b-a-l-e kibali chimpanzee project and look up the goodness Paradox Richard I appreciate you thank you thanks Chris what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you
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