Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution
嘉宾：Richard Wrangham
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The following is a conversation with Richard Wrangham,
a biological anthropologist at Harvard,
specializing in the study of primates
and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture,
and other aspects of ape and human behavior
at the individual and societal level.
He began his career over four decades ago
working with Jane Goodall
and studying the behavior of chimps,
and since then has done a lot of seminal work
on human evolution
and has proposed several theories
for the roles of fire and violence
in the evolution of us, hairless apes,
otherwise known as homo sapiens.
This is the Lux Friedman Podcast.
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And now, here's my conversation with Richard Wrangham.
You've said that we're much less violent
than our close living relatives, the chimps.
Can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are
and how violent our evolutionary relatives are?
- Well, I haven't said exactly
that we're less violent than chimps.
What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence.
One stems from proactive aggression
and the other stems from reactive aggression.
Proactive aggression is planned aggression.
Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive.
It's reactive because it takes place
in seconds after the threat.
And the thing that is really striking about humans
compared to our close relatives
is the great reduction in the degree of reactive aggression.
So we are far less violent than chimps
when prompted by some relatively minor threat
within our own society.
And the way I judge that is
with not super satisfactory data,
but the study which is particularly striking
is one of people living as hunter-gatherers
in a really upsetting kind of environment,
namely people in Australia living in a place
where they got a lot of alcohol abuse.
There's a lot of domestic violence.
It's all a sort of a society that is
as bad from the point of view of violence
as an ordinary society can get.
There's excellent data on the frequency
which people actually have physical violence
and hit each other.
And we can compare that to data
from several different sites comparing,
we're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence.
And the difference is between two
and three orders of magnitude.
The frequency with which chimps and bonobos
hit each other, chase each other,
charge each other, physically engage
is sometime between 500 and 1,000 times higher
than in humans.
So there's something just amazing about us.
And this has been recognized for centuries.
Aristotle drew attention to the fact
that we behave in many ways like domesticated animals
because we're so unviolent.
But people say, "Well, what about the hideous engagements
"of this 20th century, the First and Second World War
"and much else besides?"
And that is all proactive violence.
All of that is gangs of people
making deliberate decisions to go off and attack
in circumstances which ideally
the attackers are going to be able to make their kills
and then get out of there.
In other words, not face confrontation.
That's the ordinary way that arm is trying to work.
And there, it turns out that humans and chimpanzees
are in a very similar kind of state.
That is to say, if you look at the rate of death
from chimpanzees conducting proactive
coalitionary violence, it's very similar in many ways
to what you see in humans.
So we're not downregulated with proactive violence.
It's just this reactive violence
that is strikingly reduced in humans.
- So chimpanzees also practice kind of tribal warfare.
- Indeed they do, yeah.
So this was discovered first in 1974.
It was observed first in 1974,
which was about the time that the first major study
of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall
had been going for something like five years
during of the chimpanzees being observed
wherever they went.
Until then, they'd been observed at a feeding station
where Jane was luring them in to be observed
by seeing bananas, which is great.
She had learned a lot, but she didn't learn
what was happening at the edges of their ranges.
So five years later, it became very obvious
that there was hostile relationships between groups.
And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form
of the kind of hostile relationships
that you see in many animals,
which is a bunch of chimps in this case
shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders.
But dramatically, in addition to that,
there is a second kind of interaction.
And that is when a party of chimpanzees
makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory
silently and then search for members of neighboring groups.
And what they're searching for is a lone individual.
So I've been with chimps when they've heard
a lone individual under these circumstances
or what they think is a lone one,
and they touch each other and look at each other
and then charge forward, very excited.
And then while they're charging, all of a sudden,
the place where they heard a lone call
erupts with a volley of calls.
It was just one calling out of a larger party.
And our chimps put on the brakes
and scoot back for safety into their own territory.
But if in fact they do find a lone individual
and they can sneak up to them,
then they make a deliberate attack.
They're hunting, they're stalking and hunting,
and then they impose terrible damage,
which typically ends in a kill straight away,
but it might end up with the victim so damaged
that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later.
So that was a very dramatic discovery
because it really made people realize for the first time
that Conrad Lorenz had been wrong when in the 1960s,
in his famous book on aggression,
he said warfare is restricted to humans,
animals do not deliberately kill each other.
Well, now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals
that deliberately kill each other,
and they always do so under essentially
the same circumstances,
which is when they feel safe doing it.
So humans feel safe doing it when they got a weapon.
Animals feel safe when they have a coalition,
a coalition that has overwhelming power
compared to the victim.
And so wolves will do that and lions will do that
and hyenas will do that and chimpanzees will do it
and humans do it too.
- Can they pull themselves into something
that looks more like a symmetric war
as opposed to an asymmetric one?
So accidentally engaging on the lone individual
and getting themselves into trouble?
Or are they more aggressive
in avoiding these kinds of battles?
- No, they're very, very keen to avoid
those kinds of battles,
but occasionally they can make a mistake.
But so far there have been no observations
of anything like a battle
in which both sides maintain themselves.
And I think you can very confidently say
that overwhelmingly what happens is
that if they discover that there's several individuals
on the other side, then both sides retreat.
Nobody wants to get hurt.
What they want to do is to hurt others.
- Yes.
So you mentioned Jane Goodall.
You've worked with her.
What was it like working with her?
What have you learned from her?
- Well, she's a wonderfully independent,
courageous person,
who she famously began her studies
not as a qualified person in terms of education,
but qualified only by enthusiasm
and considerable experience
even in her early 20s with nature.
So she's courageous in the sense
of being able to take on challenges.
The thing that is very impressive about her
is her total fidelity to the observations,
very unwilling to extend beyond the observations,
waiting until they mount up
and you've really got a confident picture,
and tremendous attention to individuals.
So that was an interesting problem from her point of view
because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombe,
this particular community of Kasekela,
about 60 individuals.
So Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika.
She was there initially with her mother
and then alone for two or three years
of really intense observation
and then slowly joined by other people.
What she discovered was that there were obvious differences
§02Transcript · 10:31–20:32
in individual personality.
And the difficulty about that was that
when she reported this to the larger scientific world,
initially her advisors at Cambridge,
they said, "Well, we don't know how to handle that
because you've got to treat all these animals
as the same basically
because there is no research tradition
of thinking about personalities."
Well, now, whatever it is, 60 years later,
the study of personalities is a very rich part
of the study of animal behavior.
At any rate, the important point in terms of
what was she like is that she stuck to her guns
and she absolutely insisted that we have to show,
describe in great detail,
the differences in personality among these individuals
and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologists
to think about what it means.
- So what is the process of observation like this
like observing the personality
but also observing in a way
that's not projecting your beliefs about human nature
or animal nature onto chimps,
which is probably really tempting to project.
So your understanding of the way the human world works,
projecting that onto the chimp world.
- Yes, I mean, it's particularly difficult with chimps
because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior
that it's very easy to make those projections, as you say.
The process involves making very clear definitions
of what a behavior is.
You know, aggression can be defined
in terms of a forceful hit, a bite and so on
and writing down every time these things happen
and then slowly totting up the numbers of times
that they happen from individual A
towards individuals B, C, D and E
so that you build up a very concrete picture
rather than interpreting at any point
and stopping and saying,
"Well, they seem to be rather aggressive."
So the sort of formal system
is that you build up a pattern of the relationships
based on a description
of the different types of interactions,
the aggressive and the friendly interactions
and all of these are defined in concrete
and so from that, you extract a pattern of relationships
and the relationships can be defined as
relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive
based on the frequency of these types of interactions
and so one can talk in terms of individuals
having a relationship which on the scores of friendliness
is two standard deviations outside the mean.
I mean, you know, it's--
- In which direction, sorry?
Both directions?
- Well, I mean, you know, there will be obviously
the friendly ones will be the ones
who have exceptionally high rates
of spending time close to each other,
of touching each other in a gentle way,
of grooming each other
and by the way, finding that those things
are correlated with each other.
So it's possible to define a friendship
with a capital F in a very systematic way
and to compare that between individuals
but also between communities of chimpanzees
and between different species
so that, you know, we can say that in some species,
individuals have friends and others that don't at all.
- What about just because there's different personalities
and because they're so fascinating,
what about sort of falling in love
or forming friendships with chimps, you know?
Like really, you know, connecting with them as an observer.
What role does that play?
'Cause you're tracking these individuals
that are full of life and intelligence
for long periods of time.
Plus, as a human, especially in those days for Jane,
she's alone observing it.
It gets lonely as a human.
I mean, probably deeply lonely as a human being
observe these other intelligent species.
- It's a very reasonable question
and of course, Jane in those early years,
I think she's willing now to talk about the fact
that she regrets to some extent how close she became.
And the problem is not just from the humans,
the problem is from the chimpanzees as well
because they do things that are extremely affectionate,
if you like.
You know, at one point, Jane offered a ripe fruit
to a chimpanzee called David Greybeard.
David Greybeard took it and squeezed her hand
as if to say thank you.
And then I think he gave it back, if I remember rightly.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
No thank you.
- Right.
- Oh, it's almost like thank you
and returning the affection by giving the fruit.
- Yeah, exactly.
- If they did something like that.
- Yeah, no, it was a gentle squeeze.
I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard
as occasionally has happened.
Some chimps are aggressive to people
and others are friendly.
And the ones that are friendly
tend to be rather sympathetic characters
because they might be ones who are having problems
in their own society.
You know, so Jomio in Gombe used to come
and sit next to me quite often.
And he was having a hard time making it in that society,
which I can describe to you
in terms of the number of aggressive interactions
if you want, you know,
but just to be informed about it.
So all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted.
And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda
for the last 30 years,
we try extremely hard to impress
on all of the research students who come with us
that it is absolutely vital
that you do not fall into that temptation.
Now, you know, we heard a story of one person
who did reach out and touch one of our chimps.
It's a very, very bad idea.
Not because the chimp is going to
do anything violent at the time,
but because if they learn
that humans are as weak physically as we are
compared to them,
then they can take advantage of it, us.
And that's what happened in Gombe.
So after Jane had done the, you know,
very obvious thing when you're first engaged in this game
of allowing the infants to approach her
and then tickling them and playing with them,
some of those infants had the personality
of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later.
And so, you know, you had an individual, Frodo,
who was violent on a regular basis
towards humans when he was an adult,
and he was quite dangerous.
I mean, he could easily have killed someone.
In fact, he did kill one person.
He killed a baby that he took from a mother,
a human baby that he took off her hip
when he met her on the path.
So, you know, it's a reminder that we're dealing with
a species that are rather human-like
in the range of emotions they have,
in the capacities they have,
and even in the strength they have,
they are in many ways stronger than humans.
So it's, you've got to be careful.
- So in the full range of friendliness and violence,
the capacity for these very human things.
- Yes, I mean, it's very obvious with violence,
as we talked about, you know, that they will kill.
They will kill not just strangers.
They can kill other adults within their own group.
They can kill babies that are strangers.
They can kill babies in their own group.
So, you know, this is a long-lived individual.
Obviously, these killings can't have very often,
because otherwise they'd all be dead.
And we're now finding that they can live
to 50 or 60 years in the wild
at relatively low population density,
'cause they're big animals,
eating a rather specialized kind of food, the ripe fruits.
So it doesn't happen all the time.
With friendliness, they are very strong
to support each other.
They very much depend on their close friendships,
which they express through physical contact,
and particularly through grooming.
So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another.
I might present for grooming, a very common way of starting,
turning their back or presenting an arm
or something like that,
and the other just riffles their fingers through the hair.
And that's partly just soothing,
and it's partly looking for parasites.
But mostly it's just soothing.
And the point about this is it can go on for half an hour.
It can go on for sometimes even an hour.
So this is a major expression of interest in somebody else.
- When did your interest in this one particular aspects
of chimp come to be, which is violence?
When did the study of violence in chimps
become something you're deeply interested in?
§03Transcript · 20:34–31:45
- Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s,
I was in Gombe with Jane Goodall
and was studying feeding behavior.
But during that time, we were seeing,
and I say we because there were half a dozen
research students all in her camp.
We were discovering that chimps
had this capacity for violence.
The first kill happened during that time,
which was of an infant in a neighboring group.
And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions.
And this was the start of my interest
because it was such chilling evidence
of an extraordinary similarity between chimps and humans.
Now, at that time, we didn't know very much
about how chimpanzees and humans were related.
Chimps, gorillas, bonobos are all three big black hairy
things that live in the African forests
and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits.
And walk on their knuckles.
And they all look rather similar to each other.
So they seem as though those three species,
chimps and gorillas and bonobos,
should all be each other's closest relatives.
And humans are something rather separate.
And so any of them would be of interest to us.
Subsequently, we learn that actually that's not true.
And that there's a special relationship
between humans and chimpanzees.
But at the time, even without knowing that,
it was obvious that there was something very odd
about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered
they were making tools.
She had seen that they were hunting meat.
She had seen that they were sharing the meat
among each other.
She had seen that the societies were dominated politically
by males, coalitions of males.
All of these things, of course,
resonate so closely with humans.
And then it turns out that in contrast
to conventional wisdom at the time,
the chimpanzees were capable of hunting and killing
members of neighboring groups.
Well, at that point, the similarities
between chimps and humans become less a matter
of sort of sheer intellectual fascination
than something that has a really deep meaning
about our understanding of ourselves.
I mean, until then, you can cheerfully think of humans
as a species apart from the rest of nature
because we are so peculiar.
But when it turns out that, as it turns out,
one of our two closest relatives
has got these features that we share
and that one of the features is something
that is the most horrendous,
as well as fascinating, aspect of human behavior,
then how can you resist just trying
to find out what's going on?
- So I have to say this.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the man,
but fans of this podcast are.
So we're talking about chimps,
we're talking about violence.
My now friend, Mr. Joe Rogan, is a big fan of those things.
I'm a big fan of these topics.
I think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics.
So as you're saying, why do we find the exploration
of violence and the relations between chimps so interesting?
What can they teach us about ourselves?
- Until we had this information about chimpanzees,
it was possible to believe that the psychology
behind warfare was totally the result
of some kind of recent cultural innovation.
It had nothing to do with our biology.
Or if you like, that it's got something to do
with sin and God and the devil and that sort of thing.
But what the chimps tell us,
after we think carefully about it,
is that it seems undoubtedly the case
that our evolutionary psychology has given us
the same kind of attitude towards violence
as occurred in chimpanzees.
And in both species, it has evolved
because of its evolutionary significance.
In other words, because it's been helpful
to the individuals who have practiced it.
And now we know that, as I mentioned,
other species do this as well.
In fact, wolves, which this is a really
kind of ironical observation.
Conrad Lorenz, who I mentioned, had been the person
who thought that human aggression in the form
of killing members of our own species
was unique to our species.
He was a great fan of wolves.
He studied wolves.
And in captivity, he noted that wolves
are very unlikely to harm each other in spats
among members of the same group.
What happens is that one of them will roll over
and present their neck, much as you see
in a dog park nowadays, and the other might put
their jaws on the neck but will not bite.
Okay, so now it turns out that if you study wolves
in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting
for each other, they are in fierce competition,
and as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves
is due to being killed by other wolves, adult mortality.
- Wow.
- So it's a really serious business.
The chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern
of understanding animals in which you don't have
an instinct for violence.
What you have is an instinct, if you like,
to use violence adaptively.
And if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive.
If the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be.
So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent
than others because of things like the frequency
with which a large party of males is likely
to meet a lone victim, and that's gonna depend
on the local ecology.
But, you know, so the overall answer to the question
of what do chimps teach us is that we have to take
very seriously the notion that in humans,
the tendency to make war is a consequence
of a long-term evolutionary adaptation
and not just a military ideology or some sort
of local patriarchal phenomenon.
And of course, a reading of history,
a judicious reading of history fits that very easily
because war is so commonplace.
- It's not an accident.
So it's not a construction of human civilization.
It's deeply within us, violence.
So what's the difference between violence
on the individual level versus group?
It seems like with chimps and with wolves,
there's something about the dynamic of multiple chimps
together that increase the chance of violence.
Or is violence still fundamentally part of the individual?
Like would an individual be as violent
as they might be as part of a group?
- If we're talking about killing,
then violence in the sense of killing
is very much associated with a group.
And the reason is that individuals don't benefit
by getting into a fight in which they risk
being hurt themselves.
So it's only when you have overwhelming power
that the temptation to try and kill another victim
rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it.
The average number of chimpanzee males
that attack a single male in something like 50 observations
that have accumulated in the last 50 years
from various different study sites is eight, eight to one.
Now, sometimes it can go as low as three to one,
but that's getting risky.
But if you have eight, you can see what can happen.
I mean, basically you have one male on one foot,
another male on another foot, another male on an arm,
another male on another arm.
Now you have an immobilized victim
with four individuals capable of just doing the damage.
And so they can then move in and tear out his thorax
and tear off his testicles and twist an arm
until it breaks and do this appalling damage
with no weapons.
- What is the way in which they prefer
to commit the violence?
Is there something to be said about the actual process of it?
Is there an artistry to it?
So if you look at human warfare,
there's different parts in history
prefer different kind of approaches to violence.
It had more to do with tools, I think, on the human side.
But just the nature of violence itself,
sorry, the practice, the strategy of violence,
is it basically the same?
You improvise, you immobilize the victim,
and they just rip off different parts
of their body kind of thing?
- Yeah, you have to understand
that these things are happening at high speed
in thick vegetation, mostly,
so that they have not been filmed carefully.
We have a few little glimpses of them
from one or two people like David Watts,
who's got some great video,
but we don't know enough to be able to say that.
It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles
that vary between communities, cultural styles,
but it is possible.
And one thing that is striking is that
the number of times that an individual victim
has been killed immediately has been higher
in Kibale Forest in Uganda
than in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
§04Transcript · 31:48–43:18
It's conceivable, that's just chance.
We don't have real numbers now, but what is this?
I can't remember the exact numbers,
but 10 versus 15 or something.
So maybe they damage to the point of expecting a death
in one place and they just finish it off in the other,
but most likely that sort of difference
will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.
- You know, human beings are able to conceive
of the philosophical notion of death, of mortality.
Is there any of that for chimps
when they're thinking about violence?
Is violence, like what is the nature
of their conception of violence, do you think?
Do they realize they're taking
another conscious being's life,
or is it some kind of like optimization
over the use of resources or something like that?
- I don't think it's, I can't think of any way
to get an answer to the question
of what they know about that.
I think that the way to think about the motivation
is rather like the motivation in sex.
So when males are interested in having sex with a female,
whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans,
they don't think about the fact that what this is going
to do is to lead to a baby, mostly.
- You're right.
- Mostly what they're thinking about is,
I want to get my end away.
And I think that it's a similar kind of process
with the chimps.
What they are thinking about is,
I want to kill this individual.
And it's hard to imagine that taking
the other individual's perspective
and thinking about what it means for them to die
is going to be an important part of that.
In fact, there's reasons to think
it should not be an important part of it,
'cause it might inhibit them,
and they don't want to be inhibited.
The more efficient they are in doing this, the better.
But I think it's interesting to think
about this whole motivational question,
because it does produce the sort of rather haunting thought
that there has been selection in favor
of enthusiasm about killing.
And in our relatively gentle
and deliberately moral society that we have today,
it's very difficult for us to face the thought
that in all of us, there might've been a residue
and more than that, sort of an active potential
for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else.
But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously
by thinking of circumstances
in which it would be true
that the ordinary human male would be delighted
to be part of a group that was killing someone.
What you've got to do is to be in a position
where you're regarding the victim
as dangerous and thoroughly hostile.
- But the pure enjoyment of violence,
there's, I don't know if you know this historian,
Dan Carlin, he has a podcast.
He has an episode, three, four hour episode
that I recommend to others, it's quite haunting.
But he takes us through an entire history,
it's called "Painful Tainment."
The history of humans enjoying the murder of others
in a large group.
So like public executions were part of,
long part of human history.
And there's something that,
for some reason humans seem to have been drawn
to just watching others die.
And he ventures to say that that may still be part of us.
For example, he said if it was possible to televise,
to stream online, for example,
the execution and the murder of somebody,
or even the torture of somebody,
that a very large fraction of the population on earth
would not be able to look away.
They'd be drawn to that somehow.
As a very dark thought that we were drawn to that.
So you think that's part of us in there somewhere,
that selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing
and the enjoyment of observing those in our tribe
doing the killing.
- Yes, I mean, and that word you produced at the end
is critical, I think.
Because it would be a little bit weird, I think,
to imagine a lot of enjoyment
about people in your own tribe being killed.
- Right.
- I don't think we're interested in violence
for violence's sake that much.
It's when you get these social boundaries set up.
And in today's world, happily,
we kind of are already one world.
You have to dehumanize someone to get to the point
where they are really outside our recognition of a tribe
at some level, which is the whole human species.
But in ancient times, that would not have been true.
Because in ancient times,
there are lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers
in which the appearance of a stranger
would lead to an immediate response of shooting on sight.
Because what was human was the people
that were in your society.
And the other things that actually looked like us
and were human in that sense, were not regarded as human.
So there was a kind of automatic dehumanization
of everybody that didn't speak our language
or hadn't already somehow become recognized
as sufficiently like us to escape
the dehumanization content.
- And so hopefully the story of human history
is that we are, that tribalism fades away.
That our dehumanization, the natural desire to dehumanize
or a tendency to dehumanize groups
that are not within this tribe decreases over time.
And so then the desire for violence decreases over time.
- Yeah, I mean, that's the optimistic perspective.
And the great sort of concern of course,
is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts
and then dehumanization happens and then violence is released
as Hannah Arendt says.
You know, there currently is no known alternative to war
as a means of settling really important conflicts.
- So if we look at the big picture,
what role has violence or do you think violence
has played in the evolution of Homo sapiens?
So we are quite an intelligent,
got a beautiful particular little branch
on the evolutionary tree.
What part of that was played by our tendency to be violent?
- Well, I think that violence was responsible
for creating your Homo sapiens.
And that raises the question of what Homo sapiens is.
- Yes.
(laughs)
Yeah, exactly.
- So, you know, nowadays people begin the sort of concept
of what Homo sapiens is by thinking about features
that are very obviously different
from all of the other species of Homo.
And our large brain, our very rounded cranium,
our relatively small face, these are characteristics
which are developed in a relatively modern way
by about 170,000 years ago, say.
You know, it's one of the earliest skulls in Africa
that really captures that.
But it has been argued that that is a,
an episode in a process that has been started
substantially earlier.
And there's no doubt that that's true.
Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing
pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there.
And it goes back to 300,000 years ago,
315, literally, is the time, the best estimate of a date
for a series of bones from Morocco
that have been dated three or four years ago at that time
and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens.
Now at that point, they are only beginning the trend
of sapienization.
And that trend consists basically of gracilization,
of making our ancestors less robust,
shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller brow ridge,
narrower face, thinner cranium,
all these things that are associated with reduced violence.
Okay, so that's saying what,
that's Homo sapiens beginning.
So it began sometime 300,000 to 400,000 years ago,
because by 315,000 years ago,
you've already got something recognizable.
- So you're more on that side of things,
that those are this gradual process.
It's not 150, 170,000 years ago.
It started like 400,000 years ago, and it's just--
- It started three to 400,000 years ago.
And if you look at 170, it's got even more like us.
And if you look at 100, it's got more like us again.
And if you look at 50, it's more like us again.
It's all the way.
It's just getting more and more like the moderns.
So the question is, what happened
between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago
to produce Homo sapiens?
And I think we have a pretty good answer now.
And the answer comes from violence.
And the story begins by focusing on this question.
Why is it that in the human species,
we are unique among all primates
in not having an alpha male in any group,
in the sense that what we don't have
is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male?
And the answer that has been portrayed most richly
by Christopher Bohm and whose work I've elaborated on
is that only in humans do you have a system
§05Transcript · 43:23–54:08
by which any male who tries to bully others
and become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla
or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha bonobo
or an alpha baboon or anything like that,
any male who tries to do that in humans
gets taken down by a coalition of beta males.
That coalition.
- Yes.
That's a really good picture of human society, yes.
I like it.
- Okay.
So and that's the way all our societies work now.
- Yes.
- Because individuals try and be alpha
and then they get taken out.
- Yeah, I mean, we don't usually think of ourselves
as beta males, but yes, I suppose that's what democracy is.
- Exactly.
- Yes.
- Exactly.
Okay, so at some point, alpha males get taken out.
Well, what alpha males are are males who respond
with high reactive violence to any challenge
to their status.
You see it all the time in primates.
Some beta male thinks he's getting strong
and maturing in wisdom and so on,
and he refuses to kowtow to the alpha male.
And the alpha male comes straight in and charges at him.
Or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes
and then take an opportunity to attack him.
All of these primates have got a high tendency
for reactive aggression.
And that enables the possibility of alpha males.
We don't.
We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier.
And the question is, when did that reduction happen?
Well, cut to the famous experiments
by the Russian biologist Dmitry Belyaev,
who tried domesticating wild animals.
When you domesticate wild animals,
what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression.
You are selecting those individuals to breed
who are most willing to be approached by a human
or by another member of their own species
and are least likely to erupt in a reactive aggression.
And you only have to do that for a few generations
to discover that there are changes in the skull.
And those changes consist of
shorter face, smaller teeth,
reduced maleness,
the males become increasingly female-like,
and reduced brain size.
Well, the changes that are characteristic
of domesticated animals in general
compared to wild animals are all found in homo sapiens
compared to our early ancestors.
So it's a very strong signal
that when we first see homo sapiens,
what we're seeing is evidence of a reduction
in reactive aggression.
And that suggests that what's happening with homo sapiens
is that that is the point
at which there is selection against the alpha males.
And therefore, the way in which the selection happened
would have been the way it happens today.
The beta males take them out.
So I think that homo sapiens is a species
characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression,
as a kind of incidental consequence,
of the suppression of the alpha male.
And the story of our species
is the story of how the beta males took charge
and have been responsible
for the generation of a new kind of human,
and incidentally,
for imposing on the society
a new set of values.
Because when those beta males discovered
that they could take out the previous alpha male
and continue to do so,
'cause in every generation,
there'll always be some male who says,
"Oh, well, maybe I'll become the alpha male."
So they just keep chopping them down.
In discovering that, they also obviously discovered
that they could kill anybody in the group.
Females, young males,
anybody who didn't follow their values.
And so this story is one in which the males of our species,
and these would be the breeding males,
have been able to impose their values on everybody else.
And there is two kinds of values.
There's one kind of value is things
that are good for the group,
like thou shalt not murder.
And the other kind of value
is things that are good for the males,
such as, hey, guess what?
When good food comes in, males get it first.
- Yes.
I mean, it's fascinating that that kind of set of ideals
could out-compete the others.
Do you have a sense of why,
or maybe you can comment on Neanderthals
and all the other early humans,
why did Homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish
and all the other ones,
all the other branches of evolution died out?
Or got murdered out.
- Nowadays, when Homo sapiens meets Homo sapiens,
and we don't know each other initially,
then conflict breaks out
and the more militarily able group wins.
You know, we've seen that everywhere
throughout the age of exploration and throughout history.
So I'm rather surprised.
You know, the conventional wisdom
that you see nowadays in contemporary anthropology
is very reluctant to point to success in warfare
as the reason why sapiens wiped out Neanderthals
within about 3,000 years of the sapiens
coming into Europe 43,000 years ago.
And people are much more inclined to say,
well, the Neanderthals were at low population density,
so they just couldn't survive the demographic sort of sweep.
Or the disease came in,
and maybe those things might've been important.
But far and away, the most obvious possibility
is that sapiens were just,
were powerful.
They had, everyone agrees they had larger groups.
They had better weapons.
They had projectile weapons, bows and arrows,
to judge from the little microlith bits of flake,
which the Neanderthals didn't.
You know, nowadays there's evidence of interbreeding,
quite extensive interbreeding
between sapiens and Neanderthals,
as well as with some other groups.
And sometimes people say, well, you know,
so they loved each other.
They made love, not war.
I think they made love and war.
And, you know, it wouldn't necessarily have been too loving.
I mean, if you just follow through
from typical ethnographies nowadays
of when dominant groups meet subordinate groups,
they didn't know each other,
then you can imagine that Neanderthal females
would essentially be captured
and taken into sapiens groups.
- Maybe you can comment on this cautiously and eloquently.
What's the role of sexual violence in human evolution?
'Cause you mentioned taking Neanderthal females.
You've also mentioned that some of these rules
are defined by the male side of the society.
What's the role of sexual violence in this story?
- I think you've got to distinguish
between groups and within groups.
And, you know, I think the world has been slowly waking up
over the last several decades
to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war.
And that to me says that it's just another example
of power corrupts because, you know,
when frustrated, scared, elated soldiers
come upon females in a group
that there's been essential dehumanization of,
then they get carried away by opportunity.
It is not always possible to argue
that this is adaptive nowadays
because, you know, you get lots and lots of stories
of women being abused to the point of being killed.
She'll be gang raped and then killed.
There's lots of terrible cases of that reported
from all sorts of different wars.
But you can see that that could build on a pattern
that would have been adaptive
if happening under sort of much less extreme circumstances.
The war is very extreme nowadays
in the sense that you get battles
in which people are sent by a military hierarchy
into a war situation in which they do not feel
what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt,
which would have been that if we attack,
we have an excellent chance of getting away with it.
Nowadays, you know, you're sent in across the Somme
or whatever it is, and there's a very high chance
you will be killed, and that's totally unnatural
and a novel evolutionary experience, I think.
Then there's sexual coercion within groups.
So that takes various kinds of forms.
But nowadays, of course,
I think people recognize increasingly
that the principal form of sexual intimidation and rape
occurs within relationships.
It's not stranger rape
that is really statistically important.
It is much more what happens behind the walls
of a bedroom where people have been living for some time.
§06Transcript · 54:14–1:06:06
And just two sort of thoughts and observations about this.
One is that it may seem odd
that males should think it a good idea, as it were,
to impose themselves sexually on someone
with whom they have a relationship.
But what they're doing is intimidating someone
in a relationship in which the relative power
in the relationship has continuing significance
for a long time.
And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual.
You know, it's to do with domestic relationships,
it's to do with the man getting his own way all the way.
- It's power dynamics, and the sexual aggression
is one of the tools to regain power, gain power,
gain more power, and that kind of thing.
- Yeah, exactly.
And in that respect, it's worth noting
that although this wasn't appreciated for some time,
it's emerging that in a bunch of primates,
you have somewhat similar, somewhat parallel kinds
of sexual intimidation,
where males will target particular females,
even in a group in which the norm is for females
to mate with multiple males.
But each male will target a particular female
and the more he is aggressive towards her,
then the more she conforms to his wishes
when he wants to mate.
So a long-term pattern of sexual intimidation.
So there's that aspect.
The other aspect I would just note is that
males get away with a lot compared to females
in any kind of intersexual conflict.
You know, so the punishment, here's one example of this,
the punishment for a husband killing a wife
has always been much less than the punishment
for a wife killing a husband.
And you see similar sorts of things
in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on.
I bring this up in the context of males
sexually intimidating their partners,
be it wives or whoever,
because it's a reminder that it's basically
a patriarchal world that we have come from.
A patriarchal world in which male alliances
tend to support males and take advantage of the fact
that they have political power at the expense of females.
And I would say that that all goes back
to what happened three to 400,000 years ago,
when the beta males took charge
and they started imposing their own norms
on society as a whole, and they've continued to do so.
And we now look at ourselves and, you know,
Jordan Peterson says, "We are not a patriarchal society."
Well, you know, it's true that the laws
try and make it even-handed nowadays
between males and females,
but obviously we are patriarchal de facto,
because society still in many ways supports men
better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.
- So beta male patriarchal. (laughs)
If we were looking at the evolutionary history.
Okay, is there, maybe sticking on Jordan for a second,
is there, so he's a psychologist, right?
And what part of the picture do you think he's missing
in analyzing the human relations?
Like what does he need to understand
about our origins in violence
and the way that society has been constructed?
- Oh, I don't want to go deep
into his missing perspectives, you know,
but I just think that what he's doing
in that particular example
is focusing on the legalistic position.
And that's great that, you know,
you do not find formal patriarchy in the law,
anything like to the extent
that you could find it a hundred years ago and so on.
You know, women have got the vote now, hooray,
but it took a long time for women to get the vote.
And it remains the case
that the women suffer in various kinds of ways.
You know, I mean, a woman who has lots of sexual partners
is treated much more rudely
than a male who has lots of sexual partners.
There are all sorts of informal ways
in which it's rougher being a woman than it is a man.
- And if we look at the surface layer of the law,
we may miss the deeper human nature,
like the origins of our human nature that still operates
no matter what the law says.
- Yeah, which is, you know, human nature is awkward
because it includes some unpleasant features
that when we sit back and reflect about them,
we would like them to go away.
But it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned
to try and have sex with at least one woman,
and you know, often lots of women.
And so men are constantly putting pressure on women
in ways that women find unpleasant.
And if men sit back and reflect about it,
they think, "Yeah, we shouldn't do this."
But actually it just goes on because of human nature.
- So maybe looking at particular humans in history,
let's talk about Genghis Khan.
So is this particular human who was one
of the most famous examples of large-scale violence,
is he a deep representative of human nature,
or is he a rare exception?
- Well, I think that it's easy to imagine
that most men could have become Genghis Khan.
It's possible that he had a particular streak of psychopathy.
You know, it's striking that by the time you become
immensely powerful, then your willingness
to do terrible things for the interest of yourself
and your group becomes very high.
Stalin, Mao Zedong, these sorts of people have histories
in which they do not show obvious psychopathy.
But by the time they are big leaders,
they are really psychopathic in the sense
that they do not follow the ordinary morality
of considering the harm that they are doing
to their victims.
What kind of experiment would we need to discover
whether or not anybody could fall into this position?
I don't know.
But, you know, Lord Acton's famous dictum
was power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And then the point that people often forget
is the next sentence that he said,
which is great men are almost always bad men.
And that is right.
It is very difficult to find a great man in history
who was not responsible for terrible things.
- I think there's some aspect of it
that it's not just power.
I think men who have been the most destructive
in human history are not psychopathic completely.
They have convinced themselves of an idea.
It's like the idea is psychopathic.
Stalin, for example, Hitler's a complicated one.
I think he was legitimately insane.
But I think Stalin has convinced himself
that he's doing good.
So the idea of communism is the thing that's psychopathic
in his mind, like it bred, you construct a worldview
in which the violence is justified,
the cruelty is justified.
So there, in that sense, first of all,
you can construct experiments, unethical experiments
that could test this.
But in that sense, anybody else could have been
in Stalin's position.
It's the idea that could overtake the mind
of a human being and in so doing justify cruel acts.
And that seems to be, at least in part, unique to humans,
is the ability to hold ideas in our minds
and share those ideas and use those ideas
to convince ourselves that proactive violence
on a large scale is a good idea.
So that, I don't know if you have a comment.
- I suppose so.
But it seems to me what really motivated Stalin
was not so much communism as the retention of power.
So once he became leader
and in the process of becoming leader,
he was absolutely desperate to get rid of anybody
who was a challenger.
He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody,
even on his side, who might possibly be showing
a glimmerings of willingness to challenge him.
So when he apparently had Kirov murdered,
Kirov was a great communist.
Trotsky was a great communist.
All his rivals.
And I mean, when he went into the towns
and murdered people by the tens of thousands.
- They were all communists.
- A lot of them were explicit communists, that's right.
But what he was worried about was
that they were rivals to him.
- I suppose the thought is I am the best person
to bring about a global sort of embrace of communism
and others are not.
And so we have to get rid of those others.
- Well, I suspect you're being very charitable here,
but I mean, maybe you're,
you know enough about Stalin to really--
- Yes, well, so the point I'm making, I do quite a bit,
is from my understanding and sense,
of course we can't know for sure,
is he believed in communism.
This wasn't purely a game of power.
Now he got drunk with power pretty quickly,
but he really believed for, I believe his whole life,
that communism is good for the world.
And that, I don't know what role that belief plays
with the more natural human desire for power.
I don't know, but it just seems like--
- As we agreed, he's killing a lot of communists
§07Transcript · 1:06:08–1:16:38
on his journey.
- But it's not, that calculus doesn't work that way.
There's humans who are communists
and then there's the idea of communism.
So for him, in his delusional worldview,
killing a few people is worth the final result
of bringing communism to the whole world.
- But it was more than that again,
because I mean, he really wanted power for the Soviet Union.
And so surely the reason that he,
he orchestrated the export of wheat from Ukraine,
and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation,
was because he wanted to sell it on the market
in order to be able to build up the power
of the Soviet Union.
You know, alternative view of communism
might have been, well, you know,
let's just make sure everybody survives
and make sure everybody has enough to eat
and we'll all be mutually supportive in a communal network.
But no, but he wanted the power for the country.
- Well, I guess, exactly.
So it's not even communism,
the set of ideas are like Marxism or something like that.
It's the country.
I guess what I'm saying is
it's not purely power for the individual.
It's power for a vision for this great nation,
the Soviet Union.
And similar with Hitler,
the guy believed that this is a great nation, Germany.
And like they, it's a nation that's been wronged
throughout history and needs to be righted.
And there's some dance between the individual,
human and the tribe.
- Yes, no, absolutely.
Yes, and so just like chimpanzees,
you know, we are fiercely tribal
and the tribalism resides particularly in male psychology.
And it's very scary because once you assemble
a set of males who share a tribal identity,
then they have power that they can exert
with very little concern
about what they're doing to damage other people.
- Do you think this, so Nietzschean will to power,
we talked about the corrupting nature of power.
Do you think that's a manifestation
of those early origins of violence?
What's the connection of this desire for power
and our proclivity for violence?
- You know, what we're talking about is tribal power, right?
Power on behalf of a group.
- Yes.
- And I, yeah, that seems to me to go right back
to a deep evolutionary origin
because you see essentially the same thing
in a whole bunch of animals.
You know, that most of the sort of
cognitively complex animals live in social groups
in which they have tribal boundaries.
And so what you see in chimpanzees
is echoed in almost all of the primates.
The difference between us and, you know,
chimpanzees and humans on the one hand
and other primates on the other,
is that we kill and they don't.
And the reason they don't is because they never meet
in the context where there are massive imbalances of power.
So two groups of baboons, you know,
there's 30 on this side and 50 on this side, fine.
Nobody's gonna try and kill anybody else
because the serious risks involved.
But nevertheless, they are tribal.
So, you know, they will have fairly intense
intergroup interactions in which everybody knows
who is on whose side.
And the long-term consequences of winning those battles,
non-lethal battles, is that the dominance get access
to larger areas of land, more safety and so on,
with chances are better record
of reproductive success subsequently.
- Do you think this, from an evolutionary perspective,
is a feature or a bug?
Our natural sort of tendency to form tribes?
- So what's a bug?
- Oh, sorry, this is a computer programming analogy.
- Meaning like it would be more beneficial,
is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes
from an evolutionary perspective?
- Yeah, yeah, but--
- What does it mean, what does a bug mean?
- Yes, right, I mean--
- Well, yeah, 'cause like where's evolution going anyway?
- It's beneficial from, you know, it's beneficial
in the sense that it evolved by natural selection
to benefit the individuals who did it.
But if by bug you mean something that,
from the point of view of the species,
it would be great if you could just wipe this out,
because the species would somehow do better as a result.
Then yes, but then, you know, males are a bug.
- Come on now, there's some nice things to males,
speaking as a male.
- The fact that there are some nice things to males
doesn't mean that they're not bugs.
You know, maybe they're quite nice bugs,
but it would be much better for the species as a whole
not to have to have males who impose this violence
on the species as a whole.
- Yeah, as somebody who practiced controlled violence
and doing a lot of martial arts, yeah, I'm not sure.
It does seem kind of fun to have this kind
of controlled violence, also sports.
Also, I mean, the question of conflict in general,
I guess that's the deeper question.
Don't you think there's some value to conflict
for the improvement of society, for progress?
That this tension between tribes,
isn't this like a experiment,
a continued experiment we conduct with each other
and to figure out what is a better world to build?
Like you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas
to go to war with each other.
It's like the United States with the 50 states
and it's the laboratory of ideas.
Don't you think that is, again, feature versus bug?
This kind of conflict, when it doesn't get out of hand,
is actually ultimately progressive,
productive for a better world?
- Well, what do you mean by conflict?
I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of
people have different ideas about the solution to a problem.
And so their ideas are in conflict.
They can sit down with it on a log and chat about it
and then decide, okay, you're right,
or I'm wrong or whatever.
But if by conflict, you mean a great idea
to build a nuclear bomb and set that off,
then no, I don't see why it's a good idea
to have all this violence.
- Yeah, there's...
(sighs)
I wonder, I mean, it's not a good idea,
but I wonder if human history would evolve
the way it did without the violence.
- Oh, I'm sure you're right.
Probably humans would not have evolved
in the sense that we have.
But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution
will continue in the way it has.
So there's all sorts of indications
that the importance of violence has been reduced over time.
And this is made famous in Steven Pinker's book,
but others have written about it too,
that the frequency of death from violence
in every country you look at has been declining.
That's just great.
And so, the amazing thing about this
is that even when you take the deaths
due to the First World War and the Second World War,
the 20th century appears to have been statistically,
meaning rates of death per individual,
the least violent in history.
So we haven't got very far down the course to nonviolence,
but I don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it.
I think it's ridiculous, frankly.
Excuse my frankness, to say that violence is a good thing.
I think that it would be a wonderful concept
if we could evolve somehow to a world
3,000 years from now where violence
is really regarded as simply appalling
and that they look back on our time
and can't believe what we were doing.
- Yeah, but of course, violence takes
a lot of different shapes.
As we start to think deeper and deeper
about living beings on Earth, for example,
the violence we commit and the torture
we commit to animals, and then perhaps down the line,
as we've talked offline about,
is with robots and that kind of thing.
So there's just so many ways to commit violence to others.
And some people now talk about violence
in the space of ideas, which of course,
to me at least, is a bit of a silly notion
relative to use that same V word
for the space of ideas versus actual physical violence.
But it may be that a long time from now,
we see that even violence in the space of ideas
is quite a manifestation of that same kind of violence.
And so it is interesting where this is headed.
And I think you're absolutely right.
A world, a nonviolent world,
does seem like a better world.
I wonder if the constraints on resources
somehow make that world more and more difficult,
especially as we run out of resources.
- Well, it's got to be very, very different
from what we're doing nowadays.
And it's unimaginably different.
§08Transcript · 1:16:40–1:27:23
If we could imagine it, then maybe we could work towards it.
At the moment, nobody knows how to work towards it.
- Well, that's kind of the stories of humans,
is we don't really know the future.
We're trying to ad hoc kind of develop it as we go
and sometimes get into trouble.
- Yeah. - As to violence.
- But George Orwell's vision in 1984
was of two or three world powers,
each so powerful that nobody could destroy the other.
But the notion of an evolutionarily stable relationship
among heavily armed world powers
just does not seem as though it's reasonable at all.
That is to say, we've now got 170 or 190 nations
in the world dominated by a few big ones,
all with arms pointing at each other.
And the notion that we could just carry on
having peace talks and making sure that these arms
don't get involved in some kind of massive conflagration
seems incredibly optimistic.
Some kind of major change has to happen,
whereby, and some people would like to see
all the weapons go, that'd be great.
I'm a member of that sort of group
that tries to see that happen.
It's gonna be very difficult to see it happen.
Another kind of concept is the nations themselves
will dissolve and will become one government.
That itself is a terrifying vision
because the capacity for abuse by a single world power
would be so problematic.
And in addition, how do you get there
without a war in the first place?
So at the moment, we have no reasonable
kind of future in mind, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.
It's just that we haven't yet defined it.
- And a lot of people in the cryptocurrency space
argue that you can create decentralized societies
if you take away the power from states
to define the monetary system.
So they argue like if you make the monetary system
such that it's disjoined from the control
of any one individual, any one government,
then that might be a way to form
sort of ad hoc decentralized societies.
They just pop up all over the place.
That's a really interesting technological solution
to how to remove the overreach of power from governments.
- Yes, right, absolutely.
And it may well be that the future will emerge
out of some sort of quite surprising direction like that.
- Is it nevertheless surprising to you
that we have not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons?
So the mutually assured destruction
that we've had for many decades
from somebody who studies violence,
how does that make sense to you?
- Well, I mean, I'm surprised only in the sense
that accidental, the fact that we have not had
an accident yet has been quite remarkable.
Because all the accounts are that we've come very close
to having very serious accidents
where people on either side have misread intentions
or apparent launches and so on.
So yes, I think it is remarkable.
There's a nasty generalization that can be made
that the longer that powerful states go
without having wars, then the worse the war is afterwards.
And you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense
because basically what's happening with these tribal groups
that the nations are at the moment
is that after a big war, like the Second World War,
they establish new kinds of dominance relationships.
And then during the periods of peace,
what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships
change because some nations become poorer,
some become richer,
some become more militarily powerful and so on.
Generally, economy and military goes hand in hand.
So right now, China emerged from the war
as a relatively low status state and is now high status.
So if this were chimpanzees, what would happen
is that you would predict a conflict
because you need to have a readjustment
of the formal dominance relationships
to recognize the new in practice dominance relationships
recognized by the economy and the military.
So the longer that you have a period of peace
following a war, then the more these tensions
of unresolved changed dominance relationships build up.
And the longer they take to occur,
then the more challenging are gonna be the conflicts.
- That's a terrifying view 'cause we've been
out of conflict for quite a bit.
- That's right. - Maybe it's building up.
- So it's a scary view, but on the other hand,
things have changed hugely
with the advent of nuclear weapons
because at least that conforms to this psychology
that is very clear in other animals,
which is you don't want to get into a fight
if you are going to get hurt.
So that's the whole principle of MAD,
Mutually Assured Destruction.
And it's doubtless been why powerful nations
like America and Russia have not used
their nuclear weapons since 1945.
So if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches,
then maybe the fact of MAD does fit into human psychology
in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions
without using them.
But we haven't yet really faced that challenge.
I mean, the Soviet Union collapsed
because of the poor economy,
but with China desperate to take back Taiwan
and America shifting its focus on the Pacific,
the potential for something going wrong
is clearly very high.
- So what's the hopeful case that you can make
for a long-term surviving and thriving human civilization,
given all the dangers that we face?
- Well, I can't really exactly make one.
I would just say that...
(Lex laughing)
We're talking about the dangers.
Obviously the dangers are there.
But what I would sort of think about
is the notion that surprises come
from all sorts of different directions.
I mean, you work in robotics,
and I could well imagine that there will be advances
in robotics that in some way I can't even conceive
will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict.
Something about, by the time chips have been planted
in human brains and we're all instantly sharing information
in a way that we never did before,
will this change the nature of human existence
in such a way that these conflicts get resolved?
- So remove the conflicts, but keep some of the magic,
the beauty of what it means to be human.
So still be able to enjoy life, the richness of life,
the full complexity of life.
'Cause you can remove conflict by giving everybody a pill,
and then they go to sleep, right?
You still want life to be amazing, exciting, interesting.
And so that's where you have to find the balance.
- Well, it's, yes, I mean, it's all science fiction stuff.
And so how it's gonna work out, totally unclear.
I don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing.
I mean, first of all, you somehow get rid of males.
I think you really need to get rid of males
'cause males are the source of a major problem,
which is the lust for power and the resulting conflict.
- But you don't think the males
are also a source of beauty and creation?
- No, no, no, I mean, I don't have anything against males
as individuals and that sort of thing.
And males have clearly done a lot.
I mean, they've been incredibly exploratory and creative
and what they've done in art and music has been wonderful
and that sort of thing.
On the other hand, I'm not sure
there's anything particularly special.
And I think that probably females could do the same thing
just as well when given the chance.
- Yes, including the dark stuff.
I mean, a part of me is not understanding the,
so there is evolutionary distinction between men and women,
but I tend to believe both men and women,
if you look out into the future, can be destructive,
can be evil, can be greedy, can be corrupted by power.
So if you move males from the picture,
which are historically connected to this evolution
that we've been talking about,
that women are gonna fill that role quite nicely.
And then it'll be just the same kind of process,
not the same, but it'll be new and interesting.
There's a sense that the will to power,
craving power, committing violence
is somehow coupled with all the things
that are beautiful about life.
That if you remove conflict completely,
if you remove all the evil in the world,
it seems like you're going to,
you're not going to have a stable place
for the beauty, for the goodness.
Like there's always has to be a dragon to fight.
For the way, if you look at human history,
now you can say, the reason I'm nervous
about a sort of utopia where everything is great
is every time you look through human history,
when utopia has been chased,
you run into a lot of trouble,
or again, sneaks into this evil, this craving for power.
Now you can say that's a male problem,
but I just think it's a human problem.
And it's not even a human problem,
it's a chimp problem too.
It's life on earth problem.
Intelligent life on earth problem.
§09Transcript · 1:27:25–1:37:55
So like, it's better to not necessarily get rid
of the sources of the darker sides of human nature,
but more create mechanisms that the kindness,
the goodness as, the goodness paradox, your book,
that that is incentivized and encouraged, empowered.
- Well, look, I don't think it would be utopia
if you got rid of the males.
- Right.
- And certainly females are capable of conflict.
I just think it's a gamble worth taking
if you could actually do it.
You can certainly find females in history
who've done unpleasant things.
But nevertheless, we have a very strong evolutionary theory
which explains why males benefit more
by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do.
And so if we want to talk about reducing conflict,
then it would reduce it to get rid of males.
Now I understand this is a fantasy.
And I think it's a fantasy that people would be able
to talk about fairly soon
because reproductive technology is getting to the point
where it's quite likely that human females
could breed without the use of males.
And so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic
if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies.
- It's a really interesting thought experiment.
I will agree with you that if given two buttons,
one is get rid of all women,
and the other button is get rid of all men,
realizing that I have a stake in this choice,
probably getting rid of all men.
If I wanted to preserve Earth
and the richness of life on Earth,
I would probably get rid of all men.
I don't know.
- I don't think you have a stake in it.
You know, I mean, you're saying that because you're a man.
- Yeah.
- But I don't see why being a man should make you
any more interested in having a male future for the world
than a female future.
You know, you've got just as many ancestors
who were male as were female.
- Well, my problem is I'll have to die.
- Well, that's gonna happen anyway.
- I know, but like I prefer to die tomorrow, not today.
You know, I prefer to hit the snooze button
on the whole mortality thing.
But it's interesting.
- But this is not suggesting that males have to die
in order to make room for females.
It's just, you know, all you have to do is just say,
don't let's have any more males born.
- Interesting.
- Of course, you know, the difficulty is that
because we're tribal, you know, some country somewhere
would say, well, we're not gonna do that.
- Yeah.
- And then guess what?
They'd take over, you know, because they're male.
So that's why it's impossible to imagine actually happening.
- You know what, I'm gonna take that
and actually think about it.
I don't know, I'm uncomfortable.
There's a certain kind of woke culture
that I've been kind of uncomfortable with
because it's not women necessarily.
It's more just, there's a lot of bullying I see.
There's a lack of empathy and a lack of kindness
towards others that's created by that culture.
So, but you're speaking about something else.
You're speaking about reducing conflict in this world
and looking at the basics of our human nature
and its origins in the evolution of Homo sapiens
and thinking about which kind of aspects of human nature,
if we get rid of them, will make for a better world.
It's an interesting thought experiment.
Worth thinking about.
- But it is only a thought experiment.
I mean, you know, it's got no practical meaning right now.
And I take your point that, you know,
males get a hard rap nowadays in some ways
because the balance of social power
is moving against, I mean, you know, quite rightly
and in a strong sense, of course,
against all the nasty things that males do.
But what people sometimes fail to remember
is that life is very hard for males
who don't have the power, who don't have money,
who don't have access to women.
You know, I'm sympathetic to incels.
I'm not sympathetic to them using violence
to solve their problems,
but I am very sympathetic to the fact that it's not easy
simply to be told by well-off,
feminist, middle-class people
that you shouldn't behave like this
or you shouldn't feel like this, because you do.
- Yes, it's who you are.
I mean, in general, just empathy and kindness,
male or female, I believe,
will be the thing that builds a better world.
And that's practiced in different ways
from different backgrounds,
but ultimately you should listen to others
and empathize with the experience of others
and put more love out there in the world.
Now, that hopefully is the way to reduce conflict,
reduce violence, and reduce that whole psychological
experience of being powerless in this world,
powerless to become the best version of yourself.
And that, you know-
- Well, no one's gonna disagree
with all those fine sentiments, right?
But that, yes, but that's an actionable thing
is actually practice empathy, right?
Like saying that somebody should be silenced
or just like this group is bad and this group is good.
I just feel like that's not empathy.
Empathy is understanding the experience of others
and respecting it.
Like, I mean, that's what a better world looks like.
That's what the reduction of conflict looks like.
It's like, as opposed to saying my tribe is right,
your tribe is wrong, forget the violence
or non-violence part.
That just that act of saying my tribe is right,
that tribe is wrong, removing that from the picture.
That's the way to make a better world.
Like that's the way to reduce the violence, I think.
Not necessarily removing the people
who are causing the violence.
You have to get to the source of the problem.
I don't mean the evolutionary source,
but just the mindset that creates the violence
is usually just the lack of empathy for others.
- Yeah, but you know, I mean, you can't just teach that
because our evolutionary psychology
puts us in particular directions.
- So you don't think, do you think it's possible to learn
through practice to resist the basics
of our evolutionary psychology, the basic forces?
- Yeah, I mean, lots and lots of training,
you know, lots and lots of education can do it.
The famously most peaceful society
that anthropologists have recorded
involves a tremendous amount of teaching,
including some punishment.
You know, it's a society in Thailand.
You have to beat it out of children to make 'em nice.
- So it's carrot and steak.
- You know, the point is that you do not find societies
in which people are spontaneously
showing the kinds of behaviors
that we would all love them to show.
- It requires work.
- It requires work.
- What is your book titled "Goodness Paradox"?
What are the main ideas in this book?
- Well, the paradox is the fact that humans show extremes
in relationship to both violence and nonviolence.
And the violence is that we are one of these few animals
in which we use coalitionary proactive violence
to kill members of our own species.
And we do it in large numbers,
just like a few other species.
And the nonviolence is we're particularly extreme
in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence.
And I told you the story of how we get there.
So what's so extraordinary about us
is that most animals are either high on both
or relatively low on both.
So chimpanzees are high on proactive violence
and reactive violence.
Bonobos are less than chimpanzees on both of those,
but still hundreds of times more
reactively aggressive than humans are.
What we've done is retain proactive violence being high
and got reactive violence really being low.
And so we have these wonderful societies
in which we're all so incredibly nice to each other
and tolerant and calm and can meet strangers
and have no problem about leading to any kind of conflict.
At the same time as we are one of the worst
killing machine species that's ever existed.
So what's so extraordinary about this
is that if you look at the political philosophers
of the last few hundred years,
you've got this fight famously
between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
or literally you've got the fight between their followers.
So the followers of Hobbes say,
"Well, Hobbes was right, but we're not."
Well, Hobbes was right because he says
that we are naturally violent and you need a leviathan,
a sort of central government or a king
to be able to suppress the violence.
So we're naturally horrid and we can learn to be good.
Whereas Jean-Jacques Rousseau is interpreted
§10Transcript · 1:37:58–1:48:17
as saying the opposite, that we are naturally good
and it's only when culture intervenes
and horrid ideologies come in that we become uncivilized.
And so people have had this endless fight
between are we naturally corrupt or are we naturally kind?
And that has gone on for years.
And it's only in the last two or three decades
that anthropologists like Christopher Bohm
and Bruce Naft have said,
"Look, it's obvious what the answer is.
We are both of these things."
And what is so exciting now is I think
we can understand why we are both.
And the answer is we come from ancestors
that were elevated on proactive aggression,
that were hunters and killers,
both of animals and of each other.
And you've got to include that
as almost certain from the past.
And then now we've taken our reactive aggression
and we've down-regulated it and that's given us power.
It's given us power because once you get rid
of the alpha male, once the beta males take over
and force selection in favor of a more tolerant,
less reactively aggressive individual,
the effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable
of focusing on things other than conflict.
And so we have social groups in which individuals,
instead of constantly being on edge
in the way that chimpanzees are with each other,
are able to interact in ways that enable them
to share looking at a tool together
or share their food together
or pass ideas from one to the other
or support each other when they're ill
or whatever the issue is,
cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective.
So you asked earlier, you know,
what did I think about why sapiens were able to expand
at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically
around 40,000 years ago?
And the answer is that whatever it was,
it had something to do with the sapiens' ability
to cooperate.
You know, that was what gave them bigger groups.
That's what enabled them to have a far more effective way
of living and I suspect it was to do with the weapons
and military aspects, but even if it wasn't that,
the greater cooperation that sapiens were showing
would have been hugely important.
So sapiens then had groups of, you know,
who knows exactly how big they were,
but scores of people to judge from their remains,
whereas Neanderthals were living in widely separated,
small groups of, you know, maybe as many as 15
or 20 people sometimes,
where they saw others so rarely that they were inbreeding
at high levels, you know,
fathers having babies with their daughters.
Very different world.
- Very different world.
- And that's probably what our world was like
before we got sapiens.
- Before we got sapiens.
And it's fascinating that there was that kind of violence
against, once you get rid of the alpha males,
you have now the freedom to have kindness amongst the beta,
the beta males, like not kindness,
but collaboration, that's the better word.
- Yes, right, much more collaboration,
not just among the males, among the beta males,
but also among the gamma males and the females.
- Yeah, I don't know what a gamma male is,
but I imagine there's a whole alphabet.
- Well, I don't know about a whole alphabet,
but I think the big layers are the married men
and the unmarried men,
because the married men had a problem
with the unmarried men, right?
I mean, you see it in ethnographies
of hunters and gatherers recently,
where the unmarried men would be given rules,
such as, I mean, a very extreme rule
in Northern Australia was you cannot come to the camp
for months, you have to go away
and live somewhere out in the bush,
'cause we don't want you anywhere near our wives.
And then another kind of rule is,
if you are in the camp,
you must be in the firelight all the time,
otherwise we don't know what you're doing out in the dark.
So we're looking at real efforts to control them,
because the men who had lots of wives
did not want those horrid bachelors
sneaking around the place.
- I love this.
You also wrote the book titled "Catching Fire,
How Cooking Made Us Human."
What's the central idea in this book?
- The subtitle "How Cooking Made Us Human"
refers not to Homo sapiens, but to Homo erectus.
So human there means the genus Homo.
And Homo erectus is the first full member
of the genus Homo in the sense that it looked like us,
just with a sort of slightly more robust build
and a smaller brain.
And the central idea of "Catching Fire"
is that it was the control of fire
that was responsible for the emergence of Homo erectus
and therefore the genus Homo,
which happened two million years ago.
And it was an evolution
from a line of australopithecines.
And australopithecines are the creatures
from whom we evolved.
They were present in Africa
from something like six or seven million years ago,
up to, actually up to one million years ago.
And then a branch led off to Homo
around two million years ago.
And the way to think of australopithecines
is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright.
So they were erect bipedal walkers.
They were like chimpanzees in the sense
that they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee.
They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee,
a little bit smaller actually.
And they had big jaws
because they were still eating raw food.
They had big teeth and big jaws.
And then around two million years ago,
the line of australopithecines,
which ended with an intermediate species,
a kind of missing link area,
'cause it is not missing, called habilis,
sometimes called Homo habilis,
but more properly in my view,
called australopithecus habilis.
That gave rise to Homo erectus.
And Homo erectus, here's how different it was.
It had a smaller mouth,
a smaller jaw,
smaller teeth,
and to judge from its ribs and pelvis, smaller gut.
In addition, it had lost what australopithecines all had,
which was adaptations for climbing in the trees.
And that meant that Homo erectus
must have slept on the ground.
And since it slept on the ground,
it should have been able to defend itself
somehow against predators.
And I can't think of any way they could have done that
unless they had fire.
So there are two major clues to why it was with Homo erectus
that our ancestors first acquired the control of fire.
One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees
in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos
and all the other primates do.
And the other is that there was this striking reduction
throughout the gut,
reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus
and in the gut itself.
And that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans,
which is that our guts are about two thirds of the size
of what they would be if we ate raw food
to judge by the great apes.
So at some point in our evolution,
we acquired the skill of cooking
and skill of controlling fire.
At no time between two million years ago and the present,
do we see any changes in our anatomy that can,
as it were, justify the enormous change that happens
when you are an animal that learns to control fire.
But at two million years ago,
we have exactly what you'd expect,
namely the guts becoming smaller
because the food is becoming softer
and much more easy to digest.
So you don't have to work so hard in your body to digest it.
And as I say, a commitment to sleeping on the ground,
which I think you'd be absolutely crazy to do nowadays
on a moonless night in the middle of Serengeti
unless you had fire.
I've slept out quite a lot in various parts of Africa
in the bush and you will not catch me
just lying on the ground in an area with lots of predators
unless I got a fire with me.
- You're going to get eaten.
- You're gonna get terrified and you're gonna get eaten.
- Okay, so there's a million questions I wanna ask.
So one, is it very naturally coupled
the discovery of controlled fire and cooking with fire?
Is that an obvious leap?
- Well, here's what we know.
We know that all the animals that we've tested
like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw.
So this is true for all the great apes.
We've tested them.
- That's fascinating, by the way.
Why is that?
§11Transcript · 1:48:18–1:58:14
That's just like a property of food, I suppose.
- Yes, I think what it is is that animals are always looking
for any kind of way to get food that is easier to digest.
And there are various signals in the food
such as the amount of sugar there,
the amount of free amino acids
'cause the amino acids can be tasted.
And the physical qualities of the food
be particularly important, how tough the food is.
Always prefer softer food provided it feels safe,
tastes safe.
And these kinds of sensory cues
are all there in cooked food.
It's soft, it doesn't have so many toxins,
it's not so noxious to taste, easier to chew.
So everyone loves it spontaneously.
Your dogs and your cats prefer cooked food to raw food.
Well, maybe you can say that's a consequence
of domestication.
But even, as I say, all of the great apes,
you test naive ones and they prefer it cooked if they can.
- So then obvious once you have fire,
you're going to accidentally discover that food changes
when you apply fire to it
and then it's going to be the big crazy new fad.
- Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth.
I mean, if they have fire at all
and their food rolls into it,
five minutes later it tastes better than it did before.
- How big of an invention from an engineering perspective
do you think is the discovery of fire?
Do you think for the fire to be discovered,
for Homo erectus, Homo sapiens,
do you think it's the greatest invention ever?
- Yeah, I think that the control of fire
has been ultimately responsible for essentially
how grandiose do I want to be here?
You know, the entire human story, going back to Homo,
is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal.
And perhaps the biggest way
in which it is likely to have changed us
is it reduced the difficulty of making a large brain.
So, you know, the story here is that
the constraints on brain size are energetic.
You and I have brains that are something like
2.5% of our body weight.
It consumes around 25% of all of our calories.
So it's disproportionate.
There are other expensive organs in our body as well,
such as the heart.
And what's different about the brain is that
in addition to us being able to fuel it
in a way that other animals can't,
we also have reasons for wanting to have an even bigger brain
whereas we don't want an even bigger heart.
So what those reasons are is unclear.
But with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain,
cooking makes it possible
because it's supplying more calories
and it is enormously reducing the amount of time
that it takes to chew your food.
So if you were a gorilla
and you wanted to have a bigger brain,
you might say, "Okay, well, let's just eat some more."
But gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day
in the sense that they are eating for
maybe seven or eight hours a day in some seasons.
That's just chewing.
And then they've got to sit around and digest their food
because they can't just eat all the time.
They've got to take a break
while the food is digested in the stomach
and then passed into the gut.
So the stomach is already full.
So basically gorillas are eating
about the maximum rate already.
So how does a gorilla get a bigger brain?
It doesn't.
It's actually got a smaller brain
relative to its body size than chimpanzee does.
And that's the basic problem for our ancestors.
Then you come along and cook,
and all of a sudden you can get an increased amount
of energy from your food.
You are spending much less energy on digesting your food.
There are 25 bodily processes or more
that are involved in digesting your food,
making the acid that takes the proteins apart,
maintaining the brush border
where the molecules are taken across the gut wall,
and so on.
That all costs.
It costs you to digest your food.
It costs less if you cook your food.
So you get a net gain in the amount of energy.
And you are reducing the amount of time
from, in our case, our ancestors,
probably around 50% of the day chewing,
to nowadays one hour a day chewing.
So all of a sudden you've got hours a day
in which to do other things,
to use those brains that you've now enabled to grow.
So with Homo erectus,
you start the process of getting a bigger brain,
and famously, throughout the whole period
of the evolution of the genus Homo,
you have a steadily increasing size of brain.
Until right at the end when it actually gets smaller,
but that's a different story.
- Which end is this?
Which, are we talking about Homo sapiens?
- Yeah, with Homo sapiens,
you get a smaller brain from,
people haven't got it exactly down,
but at least 30,000 years ago, it starts declining.
And so the fascinating thing about that
is that all domesticated animals have smaller brains
than their wild ancestors.
And I...
- The domestication is intricately connected
to this brain size, you think?
- And exactly.
So I think what we're seeing in humans
is that same manifestation.
And then the fascinating question is why?
And the only point I would want to make about this
is that there's no evidence that
in the small brain domesticates,
they're losing, say, an average about 15% of brain size.
In the small brain domesticates
compared to their wild ancestors,
there's no indication of a loss of cognitive ability.
So I think what's going on is that
it's a younger brain, it's a more pedomorphic brain,
and it looking like the juveniles of the ancestor,
but just as our kids are very smart
and can learn amazing things compared to adults,
all they lack is wisdom and maturity,
but in terms of sheer cognitive ability, they got it.
And I think that's the same with domesticated animals
compared to their wild ancestors,
and probably therefore with Homo sapiens,
say 30,000 years ago, compared to their ancestors.
So we have smaller brains than Neanderthals.
- Size, Richard, isn't everything.
- Exactly.
- What's the connection between fire,
cooking, and the eating of meat?
Which came first, do you think?
Humans starting to enjoy the eating of meat
or the invention of fire and the use of fire for cooking?
- I think that fire increased the using of meat,
but the fact that chimpanzees really like to hunt
and kill meat, as do bonobos, certainly puts us in,
so those two species have a common ancestor
with us going six, seven million years ago,
and it was from that common ancestor
that you get the Australopithecine line.
It's very likely, therefore, Australopithecines
were eating meat when they could get it,
which wouldn't be very often
'cause they wouldn't be very good sprinters,
but nevertheless, they would occasionally
be able to get some meat,
and I bet they loved it all the time,
and basically all primates like meat if they can get it,
almost all of them.
But I think fire would have been very important
for a couple of reasons.
One is that once you eat your food cooked,
then you're saving yourself time.
By saving yourself time, you can free up
the opportunity to go and hunt more
'cause hunting is a high-risk, high-gain activity.
There's every risk that you will get nothing
on one particular afternoon that you go off
looking for opportunities to kill,
but it's high gain because when you do get something,
you bring down a kudu,
then you've got a serious amount of meat.
What did males and females do with the time
they were saving from not having to chew their food?
I think that in the case of males,
it's very reasonable to think,
they spent a greatly increased amount of time hunting.
So chimpanzees, they hunt maybe two or three times a month,
and the average hunt length is 20 minutes.
With humans, they're hunting maybe 20 times a month,
and the average hunt length is six hours.
Yeah, so it's a huge difference.
- Yeah.
- So, and that's possible because the time was available
because they were cooking.
- Less chewing, more hunting.
- You got it.
(laughing)
The other thing is that the meat is so much nicer.
- Yeah.
- So when a chimpanzee kills a monkey,
and I mean, they are so excited about killing a monkey.
§12Transcript · 1:58:17–2:08:57
They are so excited about going into the hunt,
and when they make the kill, then there's screams everywhere
and some try to seize it and capture it
and take it away from the others,
and eventually the strongest one has it,
and the others sit around begging
and trying to get some and tear it off,
and so they all love it.
There are others who, he often goes to the top of a tree
in order to be able to get away
from all of these beggars and scavengers,
and while he's there, drops of blood or little scraps
will fall down to the bottom,
and the junior members of society,
the females and young and that sort of thing,
they are racing through to find a particular leaf
that's got a drop of blood on it so they can lick it.
I mean, they love it.
(laughing)
But it takes them a lot of time to chew it.
I mean, it's the same thing as for cooked food in general.
So they are getting meat very slowly into their bodies,
and there sometimes comes a time when they just say,
I've had enough of this, I need real food,
and they'll drop the meat and go off and eat fruit again
because they can get fruit into their bodies
so much faster than they can get meat.
So once they're cooking, that problem is solved,
and they can eat the meat so just much more readily.
So I think that meat eating will become important
for two reasons with cooking.
- So the key, not to oversimplify,
but the key moments in human history
are with the Homo erectus, the discovery of fire
and the use of fire for cooking,
and then with Homo sapiens, the beta males
killing off the alpha males so that the cooperation
can exist, and cooperation leads to communication
and language and ideas, the sharing of ideas,
that kind of thing.
- Well, yes, the only thing I would modify on that
is that you have to ask, how is it that the beta males
were able to kill the alpha male?
And we now know that although chimpanzees do kill males
within their own group sometimes,
it's not a process of killing the alpha male.
It's taking advantage of opportunity
when some male gets into a bad position,
but it's not a systematic ability to kill the alpha male.
And you can see why, 'cause they don't have language.
And without language, it's very difficult to know
how confident you can be of the support of others
against a particular individual within your own group.
When you're attacking someone from another group,
that problem is solved.
You know, we all hate the, you know, those guys.
But the alpha male has got alliances within his group.
Some of those allies might be willing to turn against him.
Some of them might be harboring deep feelings
of resentment, but how does anyone else know that?
So in other words, I think that you have to have
some kind of language that is pretty good
to solve the problems of gaining confidence
that five of you say, you know, or some number
can trust each other in this final attack.
And, you know, even nowadays it's difficult.
- I mean, you mentioned Stalin.
It's like, why was everybody terrified?
Any dictator that takes control,
why is all of us as individuals terrified
when you know there's millions of us?
- That's right.
- And so like that, we lack the language
because our basic psychology of fear overtakes us.
Like who can we talk to?
Who can we talk to and not get killed ourselves?
- Exactly, that's right.
But do you have this intuition that some kind of language
was developing along with this process
of beta males taking over?
- Yes, yes.
I mean, once you have sufficient language
to be able to have the beta males conspiring
to kill the alpha male, then you have selection
in favor of cooperation and tolerance, as we spoke about.
And at that point, there will be increased ability
to communicate and the language will get richer
and better and better.
So yes, absolutely, positive feedback loop
once you get the situation started.
- Can you maybe comment on the full complexity
and richness of the human mind through this process?
We've been casually saying cooking, fire,
and beta males leading to cooperation.
But how does the beauty of the human mind
emerge from all of this?
Is there other further steps we need to understand?
Or is it as simple as this language emerging
from taking over the alpha male and the cooperation?
Or am I also over-romanticizing
how amazing the human mind is?
Is it just like one small step
in a long journey of evolution?
- Well, if the beauty of the human mind
is the ability of us all to be creative,
to explore, that's one kind of beauty.
Another kind of beauty is the empathy that we can show.
And we think of that as beautiful
because it is a kind of rare and special ability
compared to the sort of ordinary selfishness
that can commonly predominate.
I suppose we have to think of different sources
for those two types.
I suppose a general answer is that
there has been selection in favor of bigger brains,
which probably in general has been associated
with increasing cognitive ability.
And as that has happened,
the complexity of life has increased
because people have more and more complex,
highly differentiated strategies
in response to each other's more complex,
highly differentiated strategies.
We get to a point where there is deception
and self-deception.
There is a manipulation of ideas
through stories that we invent
and stories that we pass on.
I guess all I'm wanting to say is that
there is a world of the mind
that evolves in response to these platforms
that are put there.
The platform of increasing brain size
and therefore cognitive ability
made possible by increased energy supply.
The platform of cooperation and tolerance
in a world in which there remains a lot of conflict
and therefore a need to respond to the conflict
and manipulate your allies appropriately.
I don't see either kind of beauty
that's coming sort of totally independently
of these things.
I don't think there's a selection
for staring into the sunset and creating poetry.
- Yes.
- But I guess sexual selection,
males wanting to impress females in different ways
will lead to them wanting to--
- Write poetry?
- Well, yes, show off.
- Yeah, in all the different ways.
So all of these are natural consequences
of just coming up with strategies
of how to cooperate and how to achieve certain ends.
So that's just like a natural--
- Yeah, I mean, we haven't spoken about sexual selection,
but that is a really important part of it.
They try to out-compete each other
normally without any physical conflict
just in order to be able to be chosen
by mates of the opposite sex.
And that is certainly a major source of creativity.
- So you've studied chimps.
You also, all the other relatives, gorillas.
What do you find beautiful and fascinating about chimps,
about gorillas, about humans?
Maybe you can paint the whole picture of that evolutionary,
that little local pocket of the evolutionary tree.
How are we related?
What is the common ancestor?
What are the interesting differences?
I know I'm asking a million questions,
but can you paint a map of what are chimps, gorillas,
and humans, like how we're related
and what you find fascinating about each?
- In Africa, straddling the equator,
there is a strip of rainforest
that relies on the combination of high temperatures
and rainfall that you get around the equator.
That rainforest goes into about 22 countries.
And throughout those countries, you have chimpanzees,
although they've gone extinct in two of them.
In just a fraction of them,
but it was five countries,
you've got gorillas where there are mountains.
And in one country on the left bank of the Great Congo River
you have bonobos.
So in the African forest, you've got these three African apes,
the only African apes,
all of which are very similar
in much of their way of life.
They walk on their knuckles through the forest,
looking for fruit trees and eating herbs
when they can't find fruits.
Gorillas represent the oldest chain.
So about 10 million years ago,
maybe as recently as eight million years ago,
the ancestor of gorillas broke off
from the ancestor leading to chimps and bonobos and humans.
So they've probably remained very similar now
§13Transcript · 2:09:00–2:18:52
to what they were then.
They were probably the largest apes
living in montane areas
and spending more time eating just herbs, stems,
not so vitally dependent on fruit
and living in, if it was like the present,
groups up to about 50 stable groups
with one alpha male who was in charge.
Gorillas are wonderfully slow and inquisitive
compared to chimps and bonobos.
I had the privilege of spending a week or two
with gorillas at Dianne Fossey's camp
before she was murdered.
And I went out with two women, Kelly and Barb,
to a particular group.
And there was a young female in the group called Simba.
And Simba approached us and stared at the two women.
And then she came towards me
and she very deliberately reached out her knuckles
and touched me on the forehead.
She was watched in doing this by a young male
who was quite keen on her.
And he was called Digit.
And about five minutes later,
Digit stood in front of us on the path.
And Kelly was in front of me.
And then there was Barb and then there was me.
And he came charging down the path
and he sidestepped around Kelly
and he sidestepped around Barb.
And me, he just knocked with his arm
and sent me flying about five yards into the bushes.
(Dave laughing)
And I loved the way that that was a very deliberate response
and I loved the way that Simba had been so interested in me
and held my eye.
Chimps and bonobos never hold your eye,
but gorillas really look as though
they're trying to sort of figure out,
what are you thinking about?
That was a species that goes back
for something like 10 million years.
- In that situation, was there a game being played?
- Well, I mean, I felt that Digit was telling me,
I don't want you messing with Simba.
- But was Simba using you?
- Oh, I see.
Well, that's a fun idea.
I don't see why she should be using me,
but you mean testing how strongly
Digit was prepared to intervene.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Oh, that's come straight out of
a sort of adolescent high school playbook.
- All right, well, that's all.
- No, no, no, there's nothing wrong with it for that.
- Yeah, I don't know, I never thought of that,
and you never know.
(Luke laughs)
It's possible.
- So, yeah, so, okay, so this is an ancient branch
of the evolutionary tree, this gorilla that led to gorillas.
- Gorillas.
So then the next thing that happened
on the evolutionary tree was six or seven million years ago,
when you have the line between chimps and bonobos
on the one hand and humans on the other splitting.
And basically what happened is that at that point,
a chimp-like ancestor leaves the forest,
gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts,
and that becomes the Australopithecines,
and meanwhile, the chimpanzees and bonobo ancestor
continues in the forest.
And later what happens is that one branch of that
crosses the Congo River and becomes a bonobos.
That was only about 2 million years ago,
maybe 1 million years ago.
Now, the chimps that remained in the forest
throughout this time and occupied all the countries
across from West to East Africa now,
again, we assume that they're pretty similar
to the ones that live nowadays,
where there's some variation from West to East.
And these are animals that live in social communities
of between say 20 and 200.
They have a lot of them in one group,
but they never come together in a single unit.
They share an area, a community territory,
and that area is defended by males,
and within it females wander
and bring up their young independently.
And the females are very scared about the possibility
that males will be mean to their infants.
And in order to avoid them doing that,
they do their best to mate with every single male
in the group multiple times,
as if to give a memory in that male of,
"Yeah, yeah, I reminded you,
so I'm not gonna be mean to your baby."
So what's wonderful about chimps?
Well, as we've spoken about them,
they are creative and amazingly human-like,
but I love the sort of the quiet moments
and here's one.
I've got two chimps who are grooming each other
on a day when they are utterly exhausted.
They've walked 11 kilometers the day before,
up and down hills.
And on this particular day,
all they do is they get to one tree
and they eat from that tree.
And other than that, they only walk about 100 yards
and they go back to sleep in the nest
in which they woke up.
So they're utterly exhausted
and they're just eating nonstop
'cause they're trying to recover their energy.
And this is Hugh and Charlie.
And we think they were probably brothers,
though we never actually got the genetic evidence
to prove it.
Well, I never remember now who it is,
but let's say that they both come down from the tree
and they're both carrying branches of the food
or actually seeds from these branches.
They're both engaged even in the midday sun
when they want to come down
and unshade themselves for a bit on the ground.
They're still eating,
but then Charlie finishes his branch
and he starts grooming Hugh.
And Hugh continues eating from his branch.
Charlie eventually gets bored with this
after a few minutes and he reaches out
and he lifts the branch from which Hugh
is still taking seeds and puts it over his head
and puts it behind his back
as far as possible away from Hugh.
Hugh doesn't do anything.
He just finishes his mouthful
and then he turns to Charlie and grooms him.
So this very polite way of saying,
"Will you groom me please?" has worked.
Then Hugh grooms around Charlie's back
and around to the right side
and then down his arm to a point
where he can reach the branch again.
And then he picks up the branch and continues.
- Nonchalantly.
- Right. - Yeah.
- So in other words,
a very sort of simple little strategy,
but it just shows the courtesy
with which they can treat each other.
And the days I love with chimps,
so when you see that sort of thing,
or when you see mothers just lying
in a sunlit patch in the forest
with their babies bouncing on top of them,
just having a wonderful, peaceful time.
And that's what most of their lives are like.
So chimpanzees are the species
that kind of unites the rest of the apes
because a gorilla is in many ways
just a big version of a chimpanzee.
If you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee
in your mind to be bigger,
it basically turns into a gorilla.
And then bonobos on the left bank of the Congo River
are like a domesticated form of a chimpanzee,
but obviously humans didn't domesticate them,
so they're self-domesticated.
They are less aggressive
and they show all the marks of domestication
that domestication animals do compared to wild animals
in their bones.
So they have reduced differences between males and females
in which the males are more like females,
they have smaller brains,
they have shorter faces,
smaller teeth and smaller bodies.
All the things that domesticated animals show.
And bonobos live in this environment
in a strikingly peaceful way compared to the chimpanzees.
There's no indication
that they will have these aggressive kills
and enough data now to show
that there's a statistical difference
in the frequency at which it would happen.
And bonobos are famously erotic.
The females have enlarged sexual parts,
which swell to a particularly large size
compared to the female chimpanzees.
And the females have a lot of interactions
with each other in which they excitedly
rub their clitorises together
and appear to have orgasms.
And these occur in the context
of some kind of social tension.
And they sometimes happen before,
§14Transcript · 2:18:53–2:29:58
sometimes happen after the social tension,
and they seem to be devices, these interactions,
for ensuring that everyone's friends
and reducing the chances
that they're actually going to get into a fight.
- So it's a kind of a conflict resolution
through sex or some kind of pleasurable sexual experience.
- Well, it's often characterised as make love, not war.
That's right. - Make love, not war.
Okay.
You mentioned to me offline
that you have a deep love for nature.
If we look at the world today,
how can we ensure that the beautiful parts of nature
remain a big part of our lives as human beings
in the way we think about it,
in the way we also keep it around, preserve it?
You know, we keep it part of our minds
and part of our world.
- It's a very difficult question
because every time there is a conflict
between conservation of a natural habitat
and allowing people to get that little bit of extra food
for their babies,
then naturally the tendency is for the humans to win.
So we have this steady erosion
in the face of tremendous efforts to conserve nature.
We have a continuing steady erosion of habitats
and all the species,
and the numbers are always in the wrong direction.
Occasionally you get sort of wonderful little examples
of something being saved,
but the overall trend is clear.
And it's very difficult to see how one can ever escape that
because it's not human.
Now that we are essentially a single tribe
to want to save an elephant,
if it means killing 20 humans.
So I think the only way in which we can really conserve
is if we put tremendous effort
into conserving the very best representative areas of nature.
Often this will be the national parks that already exist.
And what we have to do is to make them so valuable
that actually it is worth it in terms of human survival
to be able to keep those sorts of places.
And that's the attitude that my colleagues and I
have taken in Uganda,
where we want to keep the Kibale National Park alive,
which has got the largest population of chimpanzees
in Uganda, and it's got elephants and wonderful birds
and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on,
and visitors, and lots and lots of visitors.
It may be that we're going to have to have huge increases
in the amount of charges that you pay for ecotourism,
and you need to make sure that ecotourism is done right.
In other places, you will keep nature there
because it's useful for maintaining the climate,
bringing rain.
Maybe you can in some places
convince people of the sheer sort of aesthetics
of keeping nature that even over the long-term,
presidents whose job it is to look for the future
of the country will be persuaded
that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons.
But overall, what is required is for people
in the rich countries to do much more investment
than they have so far in maintaining both the natural places
in their own countries and in the tropics.
And if you look at Africa,
the population trends are that Nigeria
may become the most populous country in the world,
I think, within a century.
The future of African habitats,
it's clear what's gonna happen in general.
There's gonna be a huge conversion
towards agricultural land.
I heard Ed Wilson speak years ago
about the prospect of the entire globe
being turned into a single human feedlot.
It's gonna take a lot to avoid that.
He is out there calling for half the growth
of the earth to be devoted to nature.
It's incredibly ambitious and incredibly optimistic.
But unless you have really exciting goals,
probably nothing will be achieved.
- Yeah, I mean, there's something to me,
like when I visit New York and I see Central Park
and somehow constructed a situation
where you preserve this park in the middle,
probably some of the most expensive land in the world.
The fact that that's possible gives me hope
that you can do this kind of preservation
at a global scale.
Perhaps for just the aesthetic reasons
of just valuing the beauty
and just respecting our origins
of having come from the earth.
- We are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees,
bonobos, and gorillas as our close relatives
still living on the earth.
You know, we're unlucky that we don't have
Australopithecines and other species of homo,
but we're still lucky to have those
because they are incredibly closely related to us
compared to what most animals have.
You know, there are many animals
that don't have any close relatives to them on the earth,
but not only are they relatively close,
but they teach us so much about ourselves.
You know, the similarities between them and ourselves
raise questions that we can then test
about the extent to which our own behavioral propensities
are derived from the same evolutionary stock
as in those great apes.
Well, how much is that worth?
You know, I mean, we could spend billions
going to the Mars to find evidence of bacteria there,
and that's fascinating too,
but we should be spending billions on this earth
in order to make sure that we have,
I don't know how to say it, you know,
substantial representative populations
of these close relatives.
- Yeah, that we can meet.
- There's something like space tourism.
When you go out into space and you look back down on earth,
that's to a lot of people, including myself, is worth a lot.
But why is that worth a lot?
Is because it's humbling and beautiful
in the same way that meeting our close evolutionary relatives
is humbling and beautiful.
Just to know that this is what we come from.
This is who we are.
Not just for the understanding or the science of it,
but just like something about just the beauty
of witnessing this.
And again, it's both humbling and empowering
that this place is fragile and we're damn lucky to be here.
- Yes, and unfortunately,
the problems are incredibly difficult to solve
and there is no one solver.
You know, it has to happen from a network
of potentially cooperating people.
But I mean, you're so right about it being daunting
to think about what it looks like from space.
And I love the view that Herman Muller expressed
of being able to go out from space.
And he said, "The whole of life would look like
"a kind of rust on the planet."
(laughing)
- Yeah, so the aliens were to visit.
I'm not sure they would notice the life.
They would probably notice the trees or ocean.
It's a kind of rust.
But let me ask the big, ridiculous, philosophical question.
What is the meaning of this rust?
What do you think is the meaning of life on Earth?
What is the meaning of our human, intelligent life?
- Well, I think it's very clear
that we have an evolutionary story
that is only getting challenged around the edges.
We have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life.
And the meaning is, we are here as a consequence
of materialistic processes
that began, in our sense,
with the establishment of the Earth
four and a half billion years ago, whatever it was,
and then water and oxygen and so on.
And we are the astonishing consequence
of the evolution of cells and multicellular organisms.
The word random is the wrong word to use
unless you understand what it means.
It didn't happen by chance,
but a lot of random events had to happen
to make this possible.
And those random events, of course,
are the production of appropriate mutations.
But the meaning of life is, there is no meaning.
The really big mystery of life is, why is there a universe?
- And that same why propagates itself
through the whole of it, through the whole process of it
for the emergence of planets, the emergence,
first of all, of galaxies, of star systems, of planets,
of the proteins required to construct
the single-cell organisms, and the single-cell organism
becoming complex organisms, and some of the clever fish
crawling out onto the land and the whole of it.
And then there's fire, some clever guy or lady
invented fire, and then now here we are.
It just does seem, speaking as a human,
kind of special that we're able to reflect
on the whole thing, where the whole--
- Wonderful story, so much more interesting
than the stories produced by religion.
- (laughs) Yeah, it is beautiful,
but it just seems special that us humans
are able to write religions and construct stories.
- Yeah, right. - And also do science.
That seems kind of amazing.
It seems like the universe is such
§15Transcript · 2:30:03–2:35:18
that it creates beings like us
that are able to investigate it.
And that's why there's this longing for a why.
That's just, that's such a beautiful little pocket
of complexity created by the universe.
It seems like there should be a why,
but maybe there's just an infinite number of universes,
and this is the one that led to this particular
set of humans. - Even without
an infinite number of universes,
I bet there's an infinite number of intelligent beings.
- Throughout this universe. - Yeah.
Now that we know how many planets
have the right sort of conditions,
which is what, I can't remember, a lot.
Some significant percentage of all planets.
Then there are apparently billions of planets,
and there's every, I mean,
things happen so quickly on Earth.
Once you got water, then you got life,
and it did not take long for life to evolve
in the big scheme of things.
- And if you think, you look out there,
say there's a nearly infinite number
of intelligent civilizations,
one dimension you could look at
is the proclivity to violence they have.
And it's interesting to think what level of violence
is useful for extending the life of a civilization.
So we have a particular set of violence in our history.
Maybe being too peaceful is a problem in the early days.
Maybe being too violent, quite obviously, is a problem.
So you look at viruses.
What kind of viruses on Earth propagate and succeed?
If you're too deadly, that's a big problem.
If you're not deadly enough, that's also a problem.
So that is a fascinating exploration of--
- I don't see any evidence.
I don't see where you're coming from
when you say that being too peaceful is a problem.
- Well, because, so I'll say it this way.
Death is a way to get rid of suboptimal solutions.
So violence--
- But there's lots of ways to die without violence.
- Right.
To me, death in itself is violence.
And you can, I mean, a lot of people that talk about,
for example, longevity and disease
and all that kind of stuff,
they see death is a, this is the way they talk about it.
And it's interesting to philosophically think of it that way.
It's just, death is, it's like mass murder that's happening.
And it's like people that try to,
from a biological perspective, help extend life,
they see that you're helping the most,
the biggest atrocity in the history of human civilization
from their perspective is not allocating all our resources
to solving death, right?
Because death is a kind of violence.
It is a kind of murder that we're allowing
to be committed on us by nature.
And so the flip side of that is death makes way
for new life, for new ideas.
And so that's--
- Yes, but that's got nothing to do
with peace versus war.
You know, I mean, you have animals
that are very, very peaceful,
but they evolve just in the same way as other animals do.
They just don't do it with death caused by violence.
And violent death is premature death, surely.
I mean, I don't mind about people dying.
You know, what I mind about is people dying
in their youth, middle age.
- Prematurely.
But some people would say all death is premature.
It certainly feels that way.
It's died too soon.
Anyone who's ever died, died too soon.
- Yeah, well, I mean, if we can become like sequoias
and live for hundreds of years or thousands of years,
that'd be great.
- Do you ponder your own mortality?
Are you afraid of death?
- I don't think I'm afraid of it.
You know, I'm reconciled to the fact it's gonna happen.
I just feel frustrated because I enjoy life, you know,
and I don't want to leave the party.
- Yeah, it's kind of a fun party.
I don't wanna leave the party either.
So however we got here, we made one heck of an awesome party
and you're right.
Having a party with a little bit less violence in it
is an even more fun party.
Richard, I'm deeply honored that you spent time
with me today.
Your work is amazing.
It includes some of the deepest thinking
about our human history and the nature
of human civilization.
So again, thank you so much for talking today.
It's an honor.
- No, thanks for your great questions.
It was a really fun conversation.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Richard Frangham.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Jane Goodall.
The greatest danger to our future is apathy.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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