Richard Wrangham: Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Richard Wrangham,

00:00:03.240 | a biological anthropologist at Harvard,

00:00:05.720 | specializing in the study of primates

00:00:08.280 | and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture,

00:00:12.200 | and other aspects of ape and human behavior

00:00:15.160 | at the individual and societal level.

00:00:18.340 | He began his career over four decades ago

00:00:20.960 | working with Jane Goodall

00:00:22.340 | and studying the behavior of chimps,

00:00:24.560 | and since then has done a lot of seminal work

00:00:27.320 | on human evolution

00:00:28.680 | and has proposed several theories

00:00:30.760 | for the roles of fire and violence

00:00:33.360 | in the evolution of us, hairless apes,

00:00:36.560 | otherwise known as homo sapiens.

00:00:39.440 | This is the Lux Friedman Podcast.

00:00:41.680 | To support it,

00:00:42.520 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:00:44.880 | And now, here's my conversation with Richard Wrangham.

00:00:48.960 | You've said that we're much less violent

00:00:53.080 | than our close living relatives, the chimps.

00:00:57.000 | Can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are

00:01:01.000 | and how violent our evolutionary relatives are?

00:01:04.520 | - Well, I haven't said exactly

00:01:05.960 | that we're less violent than chimps.

00:01:07.960 | What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence.

00:01:11.280 | One stems from proactive aggression

00:01:13.280 | and the other stems from reactive aggression.

00:01:15.600 | Proactive aggression is planned aggression.

00:01:17.840 | Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive.

00:01:20.760 | It's reactive because it takes place

00:01:24.560 | in seconds after the threat.

00:01:26.800 | And the thing that is really striking about humans

00:01:30.840 | compared to our close relatives

00:01:33.760 | is the great reduction in the degree of reactive aggression.

00:01:38.760 | So we are far less violent than chimps

00:01:43.160 | when prompted by some relatively minor threat

00:01:46.680 | within our own society.

00:01:48.600 | And the way I judge that is

00:01:51.040 | with not super satisfactory data,

00:01:54.520 | but the study which is particularly striking

00:01:59.440 | is one of people living as hunter-gatherers

00:02:04.440 | in a really upsetting kind of environment,

00:02:09.720 | namely people in Australia living in a place

00:02:14.720 | where they got a lot of alcohol abuse.

00:02:19.160 | There's a lot of domestic violence.

00:02:21.680 | It's all a sort of a society that is

00:02:26.680 | as bad from the point of view of violence

00:02:30.520 | as an ordinary society can get.

00:02:33.120 | There's excellent data on the frequency

00:02:36.960 | which people actually have physical violence

00:02:39.200 | and hit each other.

00:02:40.400 | And we can compare that to data

00:02:42.640 | from several different sites comparing,

00:02:46.160 | we're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence.

00:02:50.080 | And the difference is between two

00:02:53.280 | and three orders of magnitude.

00:02:55.440 | The frequency with which chimps and bonobos

00:02:57.480 | hit each other, chase each other,

00:02:58.840 | charge each other, physically engage

00:03:02.160 | is sometime between 500 and 1,000 times higher

00:03:06.800 | than in humans.

00:03:08.380 | So there's something just amazing about us.

00:03:09.920 | And this has been recognized for centuries.

00:03:13.600 | Aristotle drew attention to the fact

00:03:16.000 | that we behave in many ways like domesticated animals

00:03:19.000 | because we're so unviolent.

00:03:21.320 | But people say, "Well, what about the hideous engagements

00:03:26.320 | "of this 20th century, the First and Second World War

00:03:30.880 | "and much else besides?"

00:03:33.640 | And that is all proactive violence.

00:03:37.120 | All of that is gangs of people

00:03:39.840 | making deliberate decisions to go off and attack

00:03:45.160 | in circumstances which ideally

00:03:48.040 | the attackers are going to be able to make their kills

00:03:51.360 | and then get out of there.

00:03:53.320 | In other words, not face confrontation.

00:03:55.920 | That's the ordinary way that arm is trying to work.

00:03:58.760 | And there, it turns out that humans and chimpanzees

00:04:03.760 | are in a very similar kind of state.

00:04:07.120 | That is to say, if you look at the rate of death

00:04:10.960 | from chimpanzees conducting proactive

00:04:13.760 | coalitionary violence, it's very similar in many ways

00:04:17.880 | to what you see in humans.

00:04:20.280 | So we're not downregulated with proactive violence.

00:04:23.580 | It's just this reactive violence

00:04:25.720 | that is strikingly reduced in humans.

00:04:29.160 | - So chimpanzees also practice kind of tribal warfare.

00:04:33.200 | - Indeed they do, yeah.

00:04:36.040 | So this was discovered first in 1974.

00:04:38.960 | It was observed first in 1974,

00:04:40.960 | which was about the time that the first major study

00:04:47.760 | of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall

00:04:51.160 | had been going for something like five years

00:04:55.480 | during of the chimpanzees being observed

00:05:00.240 | wherever they went.

00:05:01.280 | Until then, they'd been observed at a feeding station

00:05:06.980 | where Jane was luring them in to be observed

00:05:11.040 | by seeing bananas, which is great.

00:05:12.920 | She had learned a lot, but she didn't learn

00:05:15.320 | what was happening at the edges of their ranges.

00:05:17.880 | So five years later, it became very obvious

00:05:22.480 | that there was hostile relationships between groups.

00:05:25.640 | And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form

00:05:30.560 | of the kind of hostile relationships

00:05:32.600 | that you see in many animals,

00:05:33.720 | which is a bunch of chimps in this case

00:05:38.000 | shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders.

00:05:44.920 | But dramatically, in addition to that,

00:05:47.520 | there is a second kind of interaction.

00:05:49.280 | And that is when a party of chimpanzees

00:05:54.280 | makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory

00:06:00.940 | silently and then search for members of neighboring groups.

00:06:07.240 | And what they're searching for is a lone individual.

00:06:11.740 | So I've been with chimps when they've heard

00:06:15.220 | a lone individual under these circumstances

00:06:17.940 | or what they think is a lone one,

00:06:19.920 | and they touch each other and look at each other

00:06:22.980 | and then charge forward, very excited.

00:06:26.080 | And then while they're charging, all of a sudden,

00:06:31.780 | the place where they heard a lone call

00:06:35.500 | erupts with a volley of calls.

00:06:37.460 | It was just one calling out of a larger party.

00:06:40.820 | And our chimps put on the brakes

00:06:43.460 | and scoot back for safety into their own territory.

00:06:46.660 | But if in fact they do find a lone individual

00:06:49.620 | and they can sneak up to them,

00:06:52.420 | then they make a deliberate attack.

00:06:54.940 | They're hunting, they're stalking and hunting,

00:06:57.500 | and then they impose terrible damage,

00:07:00.620 | which typically ends in a kill straight away,

00:07:03.000 | but it might end up with the victim so damaged

00:07:08.280 | that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later.

00:07:13.280 | So that was a very dramatic discovery

00:07:15.320 | because it really made people realize for the first time

00:07:20.320 | that Conrad Lorenz had been wrong when in the 1960s,

00:07:24.840 | in his famous book on aggression,

00:07:26.840 | he said warfare is restricted to humans,

00:07:30.760 | animals do not deliberately kill each other.

00:07:33.040 | Well, now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals

00:07:35.120 | that deliberately kill each other,

00:07:36.400 | and they always do so under essentially

00:07:38.520 | the same circumstances,

00:07:39.640 | which is when they feel safe doing it.

00:07:44.160 | So humans feel safe doing it when they got a weapon.

00:07:46.820 | Animals feel safe when they have a coalition,

00:07:52.360 | a coalition that has overwhelming power

00:07:54.800 | compared to the victim.

00:07:56.720 | And so wolves will do that and lions will do that

00:07:59.400 | and hyenas will do that and chimpanzees will do it

00:08:02.480 | and humans do it too.

00:08:05.340 | - Can they pull themselves into something

00:08:08.460 | that looks more like a symmetric war

00:08:10.580 | as opposed to an asymmetric one?

00:08:12.660 | So accidentally engaging on the lone individual

00:08:15.300 | and getting themselves into trouble?

00:08:17.220 | Or are they more aggressive

00:08:19.080 | in avoiding these kinds of battles?

00:08:21.380 | - No, they're very, very keen to avoid

00:08:23.260 | those kinds of battles,

00:08:24.080 | but occasionally they can make a mistake.

00:08:27.620 | But so far there have been no observations

00:08:32.300 | of anything like a battle

00:08:33.780 | in which both sides maintain themselves.

00:08:37.220 | And I think you can very confidently say

00:08:40.260 | that overwhelmingly what happens is

00:08:42.620 | that if they discover that there's several individuals

00:08:45.060 | on the other side, then both sides retreat.

00:08:48.220 | Nobody wants to get hurt.

00:08:50.260 | What they want to do is to hurt others.

00:08:52.020 | - Yes.

00:08:52.860 | So you mentioned Jane Goodall.

00:08:54.460 | You've worked with her.

00:08:56.660 | What was it like working with her?

00:08:58.120 | What have you learned from her?

00:09:01.100 | - Well, she's a wonderfully independent,

00:09:03.660 | courageous person,

00:09:05.020 | who she famously began her studies

00:09:09.700 | not as a qualified person in terms of education,

00:09:14.700 | but qualified only by enthusiasm

00:09:19.620 | and considerable experience

00:09:21.940 | even in her early 20s with nature.

00:09:24.280 | So she's courageous in the sense

00:09:28.060 | of being able to take on challenges.

00:09:32.060 | The thing that is very impressive about her

00:09:34.340 | is her total fidelity to the observations,

00:09:39.340 | very unwilling to extend beyond the observations,

00:09:45.860 | waiting until they mount up

00:09:48.460 | and you've really got a confident picture,

00:09:50.560 | and tremendous attention to individuals.

00:09:56.860 | So that was an interesting problem from her point of view

00:10:00.400 | because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombe,

00:10:05.400 | this particular community of Kasekela,

00:10:08.060 | about 60 individuals.

00:10:09.400 | So Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika.

00:10:14.700 | She was there initially with her mother

00:10:16.500 | and then alone for two or three years

00:10:20.420 | of really intense observation

00:10:22.620 | and then slowly joined by other people.

00:10:26.220 | What she discovered was that there were obvious differences

00:10:31.220 | in individual personality.

00:10:34.540 | And the difficulty about that was that

00:10:36.460 | when she reported this to the larger scientific world,

00:10:42.340 | initially her advisors at Cambridge,

00:10:45.960 | they said, "Well, we don't know how to handle that

00:10:49.860 | because you've got to treat all these animals

00:10:53.140 | as the same basically

00:10:54.380 | because there is no research tradition

00:10:59.380 | of thinking about personalities."

00:11:03.220 | Well, now, whatever it is, 60 years later,

00:11:06.720 | the study of personalities is a very rich part

00:11:11.540 | of the study of animal behavior.

00:11:13.240 | At any rate, the important point in terms of

00:11:17.340 | what was she like is that she stuck to her guns

00:11:19.220 | and she absolutely insisted that we have to show,

00:11:23.460 | describe in great detail,

00:11:25.260 | the differences in personality among these individuals

00:11:28.380 | and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologists

00:11:30.420 | to think about what it means.

00:11:32.660 | - So what is the process of observation like this

00:11:35.940 | like observing the personality

00:11:39.220 | but also observing in a way

00:11:41.540 | that's not projecting your beliefs about human nature

00:11:45.540 | or animal nature onto chimps,

00:11:48.800 | which is probably really tempting to project.

00:11:52.540 | So your understanding of the way the human world works,

00:11:55.940 | projecting that onto the chimp world.

00:11:59.420 | - Yes, I mean, it's particularly difficult with chimps

00:12:01.580 | because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior

00:12:05.220 | that it's very easy to make those projections, as you say.

00:12:09.740 | The process involves making very clear definitions

00:12:14.860 | of what a behavior is.

00:12:16.940 | You know, aggression can be defined

00:12:21.420 | in terms of a forceful hit, a bite and so on

00:12:25.540 | and writing down every time these things happen

00:12:30.340 | and then slowly totting up the numbers of times

00:12:32.660 | that they happen from individual A

00:12:35.780 | towards individuals B, C, D and E

00:12:37.740 | so that you build up a very concrete picture

00:12:41.620 | rather than interpreting at any point

00:12:43.780 | and stopping and saying,

00:12:44.900 | "Well, they seem to be rather aggressive."

00:12:48.420 | So the sort of formal system

00:12:51.800 | is that you build up a pattern of the relationships

00:12:54.500 | based on a description

00:12:57.380 | of the different types of interactions,

00:12:59.500 | the aggressive and the friendly interactions

00:13:01.940 | and all of these are defined in concrete

00:13:05.980 | and so from that, you extract a pattern of relationships

00:13:12.300 | and the relationships can be defined as

00:13:17.340 | relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive

00:13:22.340 | based on the frequency of these types of interactions

00:13:27.460 | and so one can talk in terms of individuals

00:13:31.020 | having a relationship which on the scores of friendliness

00:13:35.060 | is two standard deviations outside the mean.

00:13:38.180 | I mean, you know, it's--

00:13:41.020 | - In which direction, sorry?

00:13:42.420 | Both directions?

00:13:45.700 | - Well, I mean, you know, there will be obviously

00:13:48.020 | the friendly ones will be the ones

00:13:49.660 | who have exceptionally high rates

00:13:52.060 | of spending time close to each other,

00:13:54.460 | of touching each other in a gentle way,

00:13:56.580 | of grooming each other

00:13:59.100 | and by the way, finding that those things

00:14:01.060 | are correlated with each other.

00:14:03.380 | So it's possible to define a friendship

00:14:06.940 | with a capital F in a very systematic way

00:14:10.140 | and to compare that between individuals

00:14:14.760 | but also between communities of chimpanzees

00:14:18.780 | and between different species

00:14:21.060 | so that, you know, we can say that in some species,

00:14:23.420 | individuals have friends and others that don't at all.

00:14:26.860 | - What about just because there's different personalities

00:14:29.660 | and because they're so fascinating,

00:14:31.900 | what about sort of falling in love

00:14:33.620 | or forming friendships with chimps, you know?

00:14:37.220 | Like really, you know, connecting with them as an observer.

00:14:43.900 | What role does that play?

00:14:46.320 | 'Cause you're tracking these individuals

00:14:47.960 | that are full of life and intelligence

00:14:50.760 | for long periods of time.

00:14:53.540 | Plus, as a human, especially in those days for Jane,

00:14:58.120 | she's alone observing it.

00:15:00.280 | It gets lonely as a human.

00:15:02.080 | I mean, probably deeply lonely as a human being

00:15:05.000 | observe these other intelligent species.

00:15:07.720 | - It's a very reasonable question

00:15:08.840 | and of course, Jane in those early years,

00:15:11.560 | I think she's willing now to talk about the fact

00:15:15.260 | that she regrets to some extent how close she became.

00:15:19.820 | And the problem is not just from the humans,

00:15:23.620 | the problem is from the chimpanzees as well

00:15:25.460 | because they do things that are extremely affectionate,

00:15:30.460 | if you like.

00:15:32.660 | You know, at one point, Jane offered a ripe fruit

00:15:39.660 | to a chimpanzee called David Greybeard.

00:15:42.260 | David Greybeard took it and squeezed her hand

00:15:46.320 | as if to say thank you.

00:15:48.800 | And then I think he gave it back, if I remember rightly.

00:15:51.160 | - Yeah.

00:15:52.000 | (laughing)

00:15:53.500 | No thank you.

00:15:55.020 | - Right.

00:15:55.860 | - Oh, it's almost like thank you

00:15:59.400 | and returning the affection by giving the fruit.

00:16:02.560 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:16:03.400 | - If they did something like that.

00:16:04.220 | - Yeah, no, it was a gentle squeeze.

00:16:06.000 | I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard

00:16:08.120 | as occasionally has happened.

00:16:10.220 | Some chimps are aggressive to people

00:16:13.460 | and others are friendly.

00:16:16.400 | And the ones that are friendly

00:16:17.940 | tend to be rather sympathetic characters

00:16:20.240 | because they might be ones who are having problems

00:16:24.160 | in their own society.

00:16:26.120 | You know, so Jomio in Gombe used to come

00:16:29.400 | and sit next to me quite often.

00:16:31.700 | And he was having a hard time making it in that society,

00:16:35.800 | which I can describe to you

00:16:36.820 | in terms of the number of aggressive interactions

00:16:39.000 | if you want, you know,

00:16:39.840 | but just to be informed about it.

00:16:43.280 | So all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted.

00:16:48.280 | And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda

00:16:52.240 | for the last 30 years,

00:16:53.320 | we try extremely hard to impress

00:16:56.040 | on all of the research students who come with us

00:16:58.360 | that it is absolutely vital

00:17:00.080 | that you do not fall into that temptation.

00:17:02.720 | Now, you know, we heard a story of one person

00:17:05.840 | who did reach out and touch one of our chimps.

00:17:09.300 | It's a very, very bad idea.

00:17:12.160 | Not because the chimp is going to

00:17:14.060 | do anything violent at the time,

00:17:17.100 | but because if they learn

00:17:21.120 | that humans are as weak physically as we are

00:17:25.020 | compared to them,

00:17:26.000 | then they can take advantage of it, us.

00:17:28.740 | And that's what happened in Gombe.

00:17:30.740 | So after Jane had done the, you know,

00:17:34.300 | very obvious thing when you're first engaged in this game

00:17:38.780 | of allowing the infants to approach her

00:17:41.540 | and then tickling them and playing with them,

00:17:43.780 | some of those infants had the personality

00:17:49.140 | of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later.

00:17:53.300 | And so, you know, you had an individual, Frodo,

00:17:56.020 | who was violent on a regular basis

00:17:59.220 | towards humans when he was an adult,

00:18:00.700 | and he was quite dangerous.

00:18:01.620 | I mean, he could easily have killed someone.

00:18:02.900 | In fact, he did kill one person.

00:18:05.060 | He killed a baby that he took from a mother,

00:18:09.700 | a human baby that he took off her hip

00:18:11.980 | when he met her on the path.

00:18:13.820 | So, you know, it's a reminder that we're dealing with

00:18:18.300 | a species that are rather human-like

00:18:22.500 | in the range of emotions they have,

00:18:24.460 | in the capacities they have,

00:18:26.360 | and even in the strength they have,

00:18:28.940 | they are in many ways stronger than humans.

00:18:33.100 | So it's, you've got to be careful.

00:18:37.140 | - So in the full range of friendliness and violence,

00:18:39.980 | the capacity for these very human things.

00:18:43.220 | - Yes, I mean, it's very obvious with violence,

00:18:47.340 | as we talked about, you know, that they will kill.

00:18:50.220 | They will kill not just strangers.

00:18:52.080 | They can kill other adults within their own group.

00:18:57.660 | They can kill babies that are strangers.

00:18:59.660 | They can kill babies in their own group.

00:19:01.220 | So, you know, this is a long-lived individual.

00:19:04.420 | Obviously, these killings can't have very often,

00:19:06.660 | because otherwise they'd all be dead.

00:19:08.500 | And we're now finding that they can live

00:19:12.020 | to 50 or 60 years in the wild

00:19:14.220 | at relatively low population density,

00:19:16.220 | 'cause they're big animals,

00:19:17.340 | eating a rather specialized kind of food, the ripe fruits.

00:19:20.480 | So it doesn't happen all the time.

00:19:23.940 | With friendliness, they are very strong

00:19:27.820 | to support each other.

00:19:28.820 | They very much depend on their close friendships,

00:19:33.820 | which they express through physical contact,

00:19:38.940 | and particularly through grooming.

00:19:41.640 | So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another.

00:19:46.140 | I might present for grooming, a very common way of starting,

00:19:50.820 | turning their back or presenting an arm

00:19:53.180 | or something like that,

00:19:54.020 | and the other just riffles their fingers through the hair.

00:19:56.980 | And that's partly just soothing,

00:20:00.500 | and it's partly looking for parasites.

00:20:04.380 | But mostly it's just soothing.

00:20:06.420 | And the point about this is it can go on for half an hour.

00:20:11.420 | It can go on for sometimes even an hour.

00:20:15.460 | So this is a major expression of interest in somebody else.

00:20:21.300 | - When did your interest in this one particular aspects

00:20:25.700 | of chimp come to be, which is violence?

00:20:28.940 | When did the study of violence in chimps

00:20:32.280 | become something you're deeply interested in?

00:20:34.540 | - Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s,

00:20:40.800 | I was in Gombe with Jane Goodall

00:20:43.060 | and was studying feeding behavior.

00:20:46.200 | But during that time, we were seeing,

00:20:49.060 | and I say we because there were half a dozen

00:20:52.420 | research students all in her camp.

00:20:55.840 | We were discovering that chimps

00:21:01.220 | had this capacity for violence.

00:21:05.060 | The first kill happened during that time,

00:21:07.480 | which was of an infant in a neighboring group.

00:21:10.020 | And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions.

00:21:15.240 | And this was the start of my interest

00:21:18.840 | because it was such chilling evidence

00:21:21.780 | of an extraordinary similarity between chimps and humans.

00:21:26.780 | Now, at that time, we didn't know very much

00:21:32.340 | about how chimpanzees and humans were related.

00:21:36.120 | Chimps, gorillas, bonobos are all three big black hairy

00:21:41.060 | things that live in the African forests

00:21:43.660 | and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits.

00:21:48.960 | And walk on their knuckles.

00:21:50.240 | And they all look rather similar to each other.

00:21:51.800 | So they seem as though those three species,

00:21:54.840 | chimps and gorillas and bonobos,

00:21:56.720 | should all be each other's closest relatives.

00:21:59.400 | And humans are something rather separate.

00:22:01.520 | And so any of them would be of interest to us.

00:22:04.660 | Subsequently, we learn that actually that's not true.

00:22:08.520 | And that there's a special relationship

00:22:10.440 | between humans and chimpanzees.

00:22:13.400 | But at the time, even without knowing that,

00:22:15.920 | it was obvious that there was something very odd

00:22:18.440 | about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered

00:22:22.760 | they were making tools.

00:22:25.360 | She had seen that they were hunting meat.

00:22:29.020 | She had seen that they were sharing the meat

00:22:31.720 | among each other.

00:22:33.160 | She had seen that the societies were dominated politically

00:22:36.440 | by males, coalitions of males.

00:22:38.600 | All of these things, of course,

00:22:39.760 | resonate so closely with humans.

00:22:42.220 | And then it turns out that in contrast

00:22:47.400 | to conventional wisdom at the time,

00:22:50.040 | the chimpanzees were capable of hunting and killing

00:22:53.760 | members of neighboring groups.

00:22:55.260 | Well, at that point, the similarities

00:23:00.360 | between chimps and humans become less a matter

00:23:04.600 | of sort of sheer intellectual fascination

00:23:09.160 | than something that has a really deep meaning

00:23:11.480 | about our understanding of ourselves.

00:23:15.600 | I mean, until then, you can cheerfully think of humans

00:23:19.680 | as a species apart from the rest of nature

00:23:22.800 | because we are so peculiar.

00:23:24.760 | But when it turns out that, as it turns out,

00:23:28.440 | one of our two closest relatives

00:23:30.040 | has got these features that we share

00:23:34.800 | and that one of the features is something

00:23:37.660 | that is the most horrendous,

00:23:40.080 | as well as fascinating, aspect of human behavior,

00:23:44.560 | then how can you resist just trying

00:23:48.060 | to find out what's going on?

00:23:49.960 | - So I have to say this.

00:23:51.600 | I'm not sure if you're familiar with the man,

00:23:54.440 | but fans of this podcast are.

00:23:56.320 | So we're talking about chimps,

00:23:58.480 | we're talking about violence.

00:23:59.940 | My now friend, Mr. Joe Rogan, is a big fan of those things.

00:24:04.300 | I'm a big fan of these topics.

00:24:06.120 | I think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics.

00:24:10.120 | So as you're saying, why do we find the exploration

00:24:15.120 | of violence and the relations between chimps so interesting?

00:24:20.880 | What can they teach us about ourselves?

00:24:23.940 | - Until we had this information about chimpanzees,

00:24:29.800 | it was possible to believe that the psychology

00:24:37.520 | behind warfare was totally the result

00:24:42.520 | of some kind of recent cultural innovation.

00:24:48.600 | It had nothing to do with our biology.

00:24:51.420 | Or if you like, that it's got something to do

00:24:54.240 | with sin and God and the devil and that sort of thing.

00:24:59.240 | But what the chimps tell us,

00:25:04.920 | after we think carefully about it,

00:25:08.140 | is that it seems undoubtedly the case

00:25:11.680 | that our evolutionary psychology has given us

00:25:16.680 | the same kind of attitude towards violence

00:25:22.680 | as occurred in chimpanzees.

00:25:25.400 | And in both species, it has evolved

00:25:29.360 | because of its evolutionary significance.

00:25:32.080 | In other words, because it's been helpful

00:25:34.600 | to the individuals who have practiced it.

00:25:37.880 | And now we know that, as I mentioned,

00:25:41.880 | other species do this as well.

00:25:44.120 | In fact, wolves, which this is a really

00:25:49.120 | kind of ironical observation.

00:25:53.160 | Conrad Lorenz, who I mentioned, had been the person

00:25:55.840 | who thought that human aggression in the form

00:26:00.220 | of killing members of our own species

00:26:02.000 | was unique to our species.

00:26:04.080 | He was a great fan of wolves.

00:26:05.600 | He studied wolves.

00:26:07.020 | And in captivity, he noted that wolves

00:26:09.920 | are very unlikely to harm each other in spats

00:26:14.920 | among members of the same group.

00:26:17.440 | What happens is that one of them will roll over

00:26:19.160 | and present their neck, much as you see

00:26:20.640 | in a dog park nowadays, and the other might put

00:26:24.760 | their jaws on the neck but will not bite.

00:26:26.800 | Okay, so now it turns out that if you study wolves

00:26:30.300 | in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting

00:26:35.260 | for each other, they are in fierce competition,

00:26:39.320 | and as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves

00:26:43.700 | is due to being killed by other wolves, adult mortality.

00:26:47.540 | - Wow.

00:26:48.380 | - So it's a really serious business.

00:26:50.240 | The chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern

00:26:55.500 | of understanding animals in which you don't have

00:27:00.280 | an instinct for violence.

00:27:02.060 | What you have is an instinct, if you like,

00:27:05.140 | to use violence adaptively.

00:27:07.800 | And if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive.

00:27:11.700 | If the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be.

00:27:14.740 | So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent

00:27:18.380 | than others because of things like the frequency

00:27:22.180 | with which a large party of males is likely

00:27:25.800 | to meet a lone victim, and that's gonna depend

00:27:28.880 | on the local ecology.

00:27:30.480 | But, you know, so the overall answer to the question

00:27:35.700 | of what do chimps teach us is that we have to take

00:27:39.300 | very seriously the notion that in humans,

00:27:43.320 | the tendency to make war is a consequence

00:27:48.980 | of a long-term evolutionary adaptation

00:27:52.380 | and not just a military ideology or some sort

00:27:56.420 | of local patriarchal phenomenon.

00:27:59.320 | And of course, a reading of history,

00:28:03.040 | a judicious reading of history fits that very easily

00:28:07.120 | because war is so commonplace.

00:28:09.820 | - It's not an accident.

00:28:11.720 | So it's not a construction of human civilization.

00:28:14.560 | It's deeply within us, violence.

00:28:17.520 | So what's the difference between violence

00:28:20.420 | on the individual level versus group?

00:28:24.640 | It seems like with chimps and with wolves,

00:28:26.880 | there's something about the dynamic of multiple chimps

00:28:31.380 | together that increase the chance of violence.

00:28:36.280 | Or is violence still fundamentally part of the individual?

00:28:41.000 | Like would an individual be as violent

00:28:45.000 | as they might be as part of a group?

00:28:47.960 | - If we're talking about killing,

00:28:51.200 | then violence in the sense of killing

00:28:54.200 | is very much associated with a group.

00:28:59.000 | And the reason is that individuals don't benefit

00:29:03.920 | by getting into a fight in which they risk

00:29:06.620 | being hurt themselves.

00:29:08.660 | So it's only when you have overwhelming power

00:29:12.640 | that the temptation to try and kill another victim

00:29:16.760 | rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it.

00:29:20.640 | The average number of chimpanzee males

00:29:27.840 | that attack a single male in something like 50 observations

00:29:32.840 | that have accumulated in the last 50 years

00:29:36.000 | from various different study sites is eight, eight to one.

00:29:41.920 | Now, sometimes it can go as low as three to one,

00:29:46.800 | but that's getting risky.

00:29:49.440 | But if you have eight, you can see what can happen.

00:29:51.640 | I mean, basically you have one male on one foot,

00:29:55.880 | another male on another foot, another male on an arm,

00:29:58.080 | another male on another arm.

00:29:59.640 | Now you have an immobilized victim

00:30:02.480 | with four individuals capable of just doing the damage.

00:30:06.320 | And so they can then move in and tear out his thorax

00:30:08.680 | and tear off his testicles and twist an arm

00:30:11.440 | until it breaks and do this appalling damage

00:30:15.520 | with no weapons.

00:30:16.720 | - What is the way in which they prefer

00:30:21.880 | to commit the violence?

00:30:23.640 | Is there something to be said about the actual process of it?

00:30:27.800 | Is there an artistry to it?

00:30:29.360 | So if you look at human warfare,

00:30:32.360 | there's different parts in history

00:30:34.160 | prefer different kind of approaches to violence.

00:30:37.800 | It had more to do with tools, I think, on the human side.

00:30:41.240 | But just the nature of violence itself,

00:30:44.760 | sorry, the practice, the strategy of violence,

00:30:47.520 | is it basically the same?

00:30:49.080 | You improvise, you immobilize the victim,

00:30:53.440 | and they just rip off different parts

00:30:54.960 | of their body kind of thing?

00:30:56.760 | - Yeah, you have to understand

00:30:58.200 | that these things are happening at high speed

00:31:01.640 | in thick vegetation, mostly,

00:31:06.120 | so that they have not been filmed carefully.

00:31:10.040 | We have a few little glimpses of them

00:31:13.680 | from one or two people like David Watts,

00:31:16.760 | who's got some great video,

00:31:17.920 | but we don't know enough to be able to say that.

00:31:21.320 | It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles

00:31:23.880 | that vary between communities, cultural styles,

00:31:28.440 | but it is possible.

00:31:30.520 | And one thing that is striking is that

00:31:33.920 | the number of times that an individual victim

00:31:37.120 | has been killed immediately has been higher

00:31:41.320 | in Kibale Forest in Uganda

00:31:45.160 | than in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.

00:31:48.600 | It's conceivable, that's just chance.

00:31:50.160 | We don't have real numbers now, but what is this?

00:31:54.320 | I can't remember the exact numbers,

00:31:55.380 | but 10 versus 15 or something.

00:31:58.180 | So maybe they damage to the point of expecting a death

00:32:06.440 | in one place and they just finish it off in the other,

00:32:09.120 | but most likely that sort of difference

00:32:12.060 | will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.

00:32:17.060 | - You know, human beings are able to conceive

00:32:19.880 | of the philosophical notion of death, of mortality.

00:32:23.360 | Is there any of that for chimps

00:32:27.480 | when they're thinking about violence?

00:32:30.460 | Is violence, like what is the nature

00:32:33.500 | of their conception of violence, do you think?

00:32:36.520 | Do they realize they're taking

00:32:38.460 | another conscious being's life,

00:32:41.600 | or is it some kind of like optimization

00:32:45.940 | over the use of resources or something like that?

00:32:48.500 | - I don't think it's, I can't think of any way

00:32:53.320 | to get an answer to the question

00:32:55.140 | of what they know about that.

00:32:56.720 | I think that the way to think about the motivation

00:33:03.280 | is rather like the motivation in sex.

00:33:08.280 | So when males are interested in having sex with a female,

00:33:14.600 | whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans,

00:33:17.020 | they don't think about the fact that what this is going

00:33:21.320 | to do is to lead to a baby, mostly.

00:33:25.260 | - You're right.

00:33:26.100 | - Mostly what they're thinking about is,

00:33:27.600 | I want to get my end away.

00:33:29.880 | And I think that it's a similar kind of process

00:33:34.480 | with the chimps.

00:33:35.760 | What they are thinking about is,

00:33:37.680 | I want to kill this individual.

00:33:41.680 | And it's hard to imagine that taking

00:33:45.580 | the other individual's perspective

00:33:47.600 | and thinking about what it means for them to die

00:33:50.200 | is going to be an important part of that.

00:33:51.760 | In fact, there's reasons to think

00:33:53.760 | it should not be an important part of it,

00:33:55.120 | 'cause it might inhibit them,

00:33:56.100 | and they don't want to be inhibited.

00:33:57.960 | The more efficient they are in doing this, the better.

00:34:01.680 | But I think it's interesting to think

00:34:03.240 | about this whole motivational question,

00:34:04.720 | because it does produce the sort of rather haunting thought

00:34:09.720 | that there has been selection in favor

00:34:12.400 | of enthusiasm about killing.

00:34:15.540 | And in our relatively gentle

00:34:22.020 | and deliberately moral society that we have today,

00:34:26.560 | it's very difficult for us to face the thought

00:34:29.000 | that in all of us, there might've been a residue

00:34:34.000 | and more than that, sort of an active potential

00:34:42.240 | for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else.

00:34:46.580 | But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously

00:34:52.640 | by thinking of circumstances

00:34:54.760 | in which it would be true

00:34:56.920 | that the ordinary human male would be delighted

00:35:02.960 | to be part of a group that was killing someone.

00:35:06.640 | What you've got to do is to be in a position

00:35:10.400 | where you're regarding the victim

00:35:12.560 | as dangerous and thoroughly hostile.

00:35:16.400 | - But the pure enjoyment of violence,

00:35:21.040 | there's, I don't know if you know this historian,

00:35:23.920 | Dan Carlin, he has a podcast.

00:35:25.960 | He has an episode, three, four hour episode

00:35:30.960 | that I recommend to others, it's quite haunting.

00:35:34.920 | But he takes us through an entire history,

00:35:38.340 | it's called "Painful Tainment."

00:35:40.760 | The history of humans enjoying the murder of others

00:35:45.760 | in a large group.

00:35:48.880 | So like public executions were part of,

00:35:51.800 | long part of human history.

00:35:53.600 | And there's something that,

00:35:55.040 | for some reason humans seem to have been drawn

00:36:00.300 | to just watching others die.

00:36:03.360 | And he ventures to say that that may still be part of us.

00:36:06.800 | For example, he said if it was possible to televise,

00:36:11.400 | to stream online, for example,

00:36:13.320 | the execution and the murder of somebody,

00:36:15.960 | or even the torture of somebody,

00:36:18.000 | that a very large fraction of the population on earth

00:36:23.240 | would not be able to look away.

00:36:25.000 | They'd be drawn to that somehow.

00:36:26.760 | As a very dark thought that we were drawn to that.

00:36:31.720 | So you think that's part of us in there somewhere,

00:36:34.000 | that selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing

00:36:39.000 | and the enjoyment of observing those in our tribe

00:36:44.320 | doing the killing.

00:36:47.440 | - Yes, I mean, and that word you produced at the end

00:36:51.160 | is critical, I think.

00:36:52.720 | Because it would be a little bit weird, I think,

00:36:57.480 | to imagine a lot of enjoyment

00:37:00.760 | about people in your own tribe being killed.

00:37:03.720 | - Right.

00:37:04.640 | - I don't think we're interested in violence

00:37:06.200 | for violence's sake that much.

00:37:08.440 | It's when you get these social boundaries set up.

00:37:14.840 | And in today's world, happily,

00:37:20.800 | we kind of are already one world.

00:37:24.020 | You have to dehumanize someone to get to the point

00:37:29.200 | where they are really outside our recognition of a tribe

00:37:34.200 | at some level, which is the whole human species.

00:37:37.400 | But in ancient times, that would not have been true.

00:37:41.120 | Because in ancient times,

00:37:42.640 | there are lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers

00:37:47.280 | in which the appearance of a stranger

00:37:50.400 | would lead to an immediate response of shooting on sight.

00:37:56.920 | Because what was human was the people

00:38:00.600 | that were in your society.

00:38:03.240 | And the other things that actually looked like us

00:38:06.120 | and were human in that sense, were not regarded as human.

00:38:09.720 | So there was a kind of automatic dehumanization

00:38:13.640 | of everybody that didn't speak our language

00:38:16.160 | or hadn't already somehow become recognized

00:38:20.640 | as sufficiently like us to escape

00:38:25.240 | the dehumanization content.

00:38:27.760 | - And so hopefully the story of human history

00:38:29.960 | is that we are, that tribalism fades away.

00:38:34.960 | That our dehumanization, the natural desire to dehumanize

00:38:39.120 | or a tendency to dehumanize groups

00:38:42.280 | that are not within this tribe decreases over time.

00:38:45.800 | And so then the desire for violence decreases over time.

00:38:49.760 | - Yeah, I mean, that's the optimistic perspective.

00:38:52.520 | And the great sort of concern of course,

00:38:56.240 | is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts

00:39:00.360 | and then dehumanization happens and then violence is released

00:39:03.560 | as Hannah Arendt says.

00:39:06.080 | You know, there currently is no known alternative to war

00:39:10.080 | as a means of settling really important conflicts.

00:39:15.160 | - So if we look at the big picture,

00:39:18.720 | what role has violence or do you think violence

00:39:21.960 | has played in the evolution of Homo sapiens?

00:39:24.960 | So we are quite an intelligent,

00:39:27.960 | got a beautiful particular little branch

00:39:31.400 | on the evolutionary tree.

00:39:32.900 | What part of that was played by our tendency to be violent?

00:39:39.040 | - Well, I think that violence was responsible

00:39:43.920 | for creating your Homo sapiens.

00:39:46.160 | And that raises the question of what Homo sapiens is.

00:39:54.280 | - Yes.

00:39:56.040 | (laughs)

00:39:57.280 | Yeah, exactly.

00:39:58.760 | - So, you know, nowadays people begin the sort of concept

00:40:03.760 | of what Homo sapiens is by thinking about features

00:40:10.840 | that are very obviously different

00:40:12.400 | from all of the other species of Homo.

00:40:14.760 | And our large brain, our very rounded cranium,

00:40:20.720 | our relatively small face, these are characteristics

00:40:24.280 | which are developed in a relatively modern way

00:40:27.760 | by about 170,000 years ago, say.

00:40:31.480 | You know, it's one of the earliest skulls in Africa

00:40:34.020 | that really captures that.

00:40:36.600 | But it has been argued that that is a,

00:40:42.320 | an episode in a process that has been started

00:40:47.320 | substantially earlier.

00:40:50.320 | And there's no doubt that that's true.

00:40:52.280 | Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing

00:40:55.160 | pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there.

00:41:00.160 | And it goes back to 300,000 years ago,

00:41:03.440 | 315, literally, is the time, the best estimate of a date

00:41:08.640 | for a series of bones from Morocco

00:41:12.000 | that have been dated three or four years ago at that time

00:41:16.960 | and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens.

00:41:21.480 | Now at that point, they are only beginning the trend

00:41:26.480 | of sapienization.

00:41:27.840 | And that trend consists basically of gracilization,

00:41:31.840 | of making our ancestors less robust,

00:41:37.040 | shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller brow ridge,

00:41:40.720 | narrower face, thinner cranium,

00:41:45.480 | all these things that are associated with reduced violence.

00:41:50.480 | Okay, so that's saying what,

00:41:54.280 | that's Homo sapiens beginning.

00:41:56.160 | So it began sometime 300,000 to 400,000 years ago,

00:41:59.600 | because by 315,000 years ago,

00:42:01.600 | you've already got something recognizable.

00:42:03.360 | - So you're more on that side of things,

00:42:05.200 | that those are this gradual process.

00:42:06.720 | It's not 150, 170,000 years ago.

00:42:09.200 | It started like 400,000 years ago, and it's just--

00:42:14.200 | - It started three to 400,000 years ago.

00:42:16.360 | And if you look at 170, it's got even more like us.

00:42:19.920 | And if you look at 100, it's got more like us again.

00:42:23.520 | And if you look at 50, it's more like us again.

00:42:25.360 | It's all the way.

00:42:26.280 | It's just getting more and more like the moderns.

00:42:29.080 | So the question is, what happened

00:42:30.760 | between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago

00:42:32.560 | to produce Homo sapiens?

00:42:34.640 | And I think we have a pretty good answer now.

00:42:38.040 | And the answer comes from violence.

00:42:40.080 | And the story begins by focusing on this question.

00:42:44.040 | Why is it that in the human species,

00:42:49.040 | we are unique among all primates

00:42:51.480 | in not having an alpha male in any group,

00:42:55.600 | in the sense that what we don't have

00:42:59.560 | is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male?

00:43:04.800 | And the answer that has been portrayed most richly

00:43:09.800 | by Christopher Bohm and whose work I've elaborated on

00:43:18.600 | is that only in humans do you have a system

00:43:23.720 | by which any male who tries to bully others

00:43:28.560 | and become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla

00:43:33.200 | or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha bonobo

00:43:35.240 | or an alpha baboon or anything like that,

00:43:37.520 | any male who tries to do that in humans

00:43:39.560 | gets taken down by a coalition of beta males.

00:43:44.460 | That coalition.

00:43:47.880 | - Yes.

00:43:49.280 | That's a really good picture of human society, yes.

00:43:52.120 | I like it.

00:43:52.960 | - Okay.

00:43:53.800 | So and that's the way all our societies work now.

00:43:55.600 | - Yes.

00:43:56.480 | - Because individuals try and be alpha

00:43:58.640 | and then they get taken out.

00:44:00.000 | - Yeah, I mean, we don't usually think of ourselves

00:44:02.000 | as beta males, but yes, I suppose that's what democracy is.

00:44:06.440 | - Exactly.

00:44:07.280 | - Yes.

00:44:08.100 | - Exactly.

00:44:08.940 | Okay, so at some point, alpha males get taken out.

00:44:14.560 | Well, what alpha males are are males who respond

00:44:17.760 | with high reactive violence to any challenge

00:44:21.520 | to their status.

00:44:22.680 | You see it all the time in primates.

00:44:25.040 | Some beta male thinks he's getting strong

00:44:28.000 | and maturing in wisdom and so on,

00:44:31.640 | and he refuses to kowtow to the alpha male.

00:44:35.840 | And the alpha male comes straight in and charges at him.

00:44:39.320 | Or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes

00:44:42.120 | and then take an opportunity to attack him.

00:44:44.320 | All of these primates have got a high tendency

00:44:51.280 | for reactive aggression.

00:44:53.200 | And that enables the possibility of alpha males.

00:44:56.400 | We don't.

00:44:57.240 | We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier.

00:45:00.400 | And the question is, when did that reduction happen?

00:45:03.120 | Well, cut to the famous experiments

00:45:08.520 | by the Russian biologist Dmitry Belyaev,

00:45:12.280 | who tried domesticating wild animals.

00:45:16.260 | When you domesticate wild animals,

00:45:19.880 | what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression.

00:45:23.720 | You are selecting those individuals to breed

00:45:28.200 | who are most willing to be approached by a human

00:45:31.960 | or by another member of their own species

00:45:34.360 | and are least likely to erupt in a reactive aggression.

00:45:39.360 | And you only have to do that for a few generations

00:45:42.920 | to discover that there are changes in the skull.

00:45:47.080 | And those changes consist of

00:45:50.720 | shorter face, smaller teeth,

00:45:57.040 | reduced maleness,

00:45:59.320 | the males become increasingly female-like,

00:46:01.840 | and reduced brain size.

00:46:04.900 | Well, the changes that are characteristic

00:46:08.400 | of domesticated animals in general

00:46:10.400 | compared to wild animals are all found in homo sapiens

00:46:13.880 | compared to our early ancestors.

00:46:16.660 | So it's a very strong signal

00:46:18.420 | that when we first see homo sapiens,

00:46:21.040 | what we're seeing is evidence of a reduction

00:46:24.200 | in reactive aggression.

00:46:26.240 | And that suggests that what's happening with homo sapiens

00:46:29.360 | is that that is the point

00:46:32.080 | at which there is selection against the alpha males.

00:46:35.480 | And therefore, the way in which the selection happened

00:46:39.320 | would have been the way it happens today.

00:46:41.480 | The beta males take them out.

00:46:42.920 | So I think that homo sapiens is a species

00:46:47.480 | characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression,

00:46:52.480 | as a kind of incidental consequence,

00:46:55.360 | of the suppression of the alpha male.

00:46:58.480 | And the story of our species

00:47:00.760 | is the story of how the beta males took charge

00:47:04.040 | and have been responsible

00:47:07.880 | for the generation of a new kind of human,

00:47:11.980 | and incidentally,

00:47:15.020 | for imposing on the society

00:47:21.120 | a new set of values.

00:47:24.200 | Because when those beta males discovered

00:47:26.720 | that they could take out the previous alpha male

00:47:29.880 | and continue to do so,

00:47:31.000 | 'cause in every generation,

00:47:32.200 | there'll always be some male who says,

00:47:33.520 | "Oh, well, maybe I'll become the alpha male."

00:47:36.200 | So they just keep chopping them down.

00:47:38.260 | In discovering that, they also obviously discovered

00:47:42.400 | that they could kill anybody in the group.

00:47:44.500 | Females, young males,

00:47:47.480 | anybody who didn't follow their values.

00:47:52.960 | And so this story is one in which the males of our species,

00:47:57.960 | and these would be the breeding males,

00:48:01.460 | have been able to impose their values on everybody else.

00:48:06.760 | And there is two kinds of values.

00:48:08.080 | There's one kind of value is things

00:48:09.640 | that are good for the group,

00:48:10.640 | like thou shalt not murder.

00:48:12.380 | And the other kind of value

00:48:15.200 | is things that are good for the males,

00:48:18.100 | such as, hey, guess what?

00:48:21.200 | When good food comes in, males get it first.

00:48:23.440 | - Yes.

00:48:24.280 | I mean, it's fascinating that that kind of set of ideals

00:48:28.480 | could out-compete the others.

00:48:31.920 | Do you have a sense of why,

00:48:35.360 | or maybe you can comment on Neanderthals

00:48:37.440 | and all the other early humans,

00:48:39.200 | why did Homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish

00:48:44.200 | and all the other ones,

00:48:45.680 | all the other branches of evolution died out?

00:48:50.560 | Or got murdered out.

00:48:51.720 | - Nowadays, when Homo sapiens meets Homo sapiens,

00:48:56.000 | and we don't know each other initially,

00:48:59.160 | then conflict breaks out

00:49:00.600 | and the more militarily able group wins.

00:49:05.600 | You know, we've seen that everywhere

00:49:09.080 | throughout the age of exploration and throughout history.

00:49:13.220 | So I'm rather surprised.

00:49:15.960 | You know, the conventional wisdom

00:49:19.000 | that you see nowadays in contemporary anthropology

00:49:23.120 | is very reluctant to point to success in warfare

00:49:28.120 | as the reason why sapiens wiped out Neanderthals

00:49:32.400 | within about 3,000 years of the sapiens

00:49:35.480 | coming into Europe 43,000 years ago.

00:49:38.640 | And people are much more inclined to say,

00:49:42.200 | well, the Neanderthals were at low population density,

00:49:45.160 | so they just couldn't survive the demographic sort of sweep.

00:49:50.160 | Or the disease came in,

00:49:53.880 | and maybe those things might've been important.

00:49:56.520 | But far and away, the most obvious possibility

00:49:59.960 | is that sapiens were just,

00:50:03.440 | were powerful.

00:50:06.680 | They had, everyone agrees they had larger groups.

00:50:09.300 | They had better weapons.

00:50:12.520 | They had projectile weapons, bows and arrows,

00:50:15.840 | to judge from the little microlith bits of flake,

00:50:20.200 | which the Neanderthals didn't.

00:50:23.520 | You know, nowadays there's evidence of interbreeding,

00:50:29.000 | quite extensive interbreeding

00:50:30.360 | between sapiens and Neanderthals,

00:50:33.080 | as well as with some other groups.

00:50:35.120 | And sometimes people say, well, you know,

00:50:37.240 | so they loved each other.

00:50:38.520 | They made love, not war.

00:50:40.400 | I think they made love and war.

00:50:42.760 | And, you know, it wouldn't necessarily have been too loving.

00:50:46.480 | I mean, if you just follow through

00:50:49.220 | from typical ethnographies nowadays

00:50:51.680 | of when dominant groups meet subordinate groups,

00:50:55.380 | they didn't know each other,

00:50:56.840 | then you can imagine that Neanderthal females

00:51:00.520 | would essentially be captured

00:51:02.400 | and taken into sapiens groups.

00:51:07.080 | - Maybe you can comment on this cautiously and eloquently.

00:51:12.080 | What's the role of sexual violence in human evolution?

00:51:18.200 | 'Cause you mentioned taking Neanderthal females.

00:51:21.480 | You've also mentioned that some of these rules

00:51:23.920 | are defined by the male side of the society.

00:51:28.760 | What's the role of sexual violence in this story?

00:51:31.600 | - I think you've got to distinguish

00:51:34.120 | between groups and within groups.

00:51:36.680 | And, you know, I think the world has been slowly waking up

00:51:41.680 | over the last several decades

00:51:46.000 | to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war.

00:51:51.000 | And that to me says that it's just another example

00:51:57.640 | of power corrupts because, you know,

00:52:01.360 | when frustrated, scared, elated soldiers

00:52:06.360 | come upon females in a group

00:52:12.800 | that there's been essential dehumanization of,

00:52:16.360 | then they get carried away by opportunity.

00:52:20.560 | It is not always possible to argue

00:52:25.120 | that this is adaptive nowadays

00:52:28.560 | because, you know, you get lots and lots of stories

00:52:31.160 | of women being abused to the point of being killed.

00:52:36.160 | She'll be gang raped and then killed.

00:52:41.200 | There's lots of terrible cases of that reported

00:52:46.200 | from all sorts of different wars.

00:52:47.840 | But you can see that that could build on a pattern

00:52:54.560 | that would have been adaptive

00:52:57.400 | if happening under sort of much less extreme circumstances.

00:53:01.560 | The war is very extreme nowadays

00:53:05.200 | in the sense that you get battles

00:53:07.480 | in which people are sent by a military hierarchy

00:53:11.280 | into a war situation in which they do not feel

00:53:14.160 | what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt,

00:53:16.480 | which would have been that if we attack,

00:53:18.640 | we have an excellent chance of getting away with it.

00:53:21.960 | Nowadays, you know, you're sent in across the Somme

00:53:25.240 | or whatever it is, and there's a very high chance

00:53:27.800 | you will be killed, and that's totally unnatural

00:53:30.320 | and a novel evolutionary experience, I think.

00:53:33.080 | Then there's sexual coercion within groups.

00:53:37.160 | So that takes various kinds of forms.

00:53:42.140 | But nowadays, of course,

00:53:44.720 | I think people recognize increasingly

00:53:46.960 | that the principal form of sexual intimidation and rape

00:53:54.760 | occurs within relationships.

00:53:57.100 | It's not stranger rape

00:53:59.840 | that is really statistically important.

00:54:03.440 | It is much more what happens behind the walls

00:54:08.440 | of a bedroom where people have been living for some time.

00:54:14.240 | And just two sort of thoughts and observations about this.

00:54:20.880 | One is that it may seem odd

00:54:25.440 | that males should think it a good idea, as it were,

00:54:32.840 | to impose themselves sexually on someone

00:54:38.320 | with whom they have a relationship.

00:54:40.180 | But what they're doing is intimidating someone

00:54:46.000 | in a relationship in which the relative power

00:54:49.380 | in the relationship has continuing significance

00:54:52.840 | for a long time.

00:54:54.360 | And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual.

00:54:58.840 | You know, it's to do with domestic relationships,

00:55:01.920 | it's to do with the man getting his own way all the way.

00:55:06.200 | - It's power dynamics, and the sexual aggression

00:55:09.840 | is one of the tools to regain power, gain power,

00:55:13.240 | gain more power, and that kind of thing.

00:55:14.920 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:55:16.680 | And in that respect, it's worth noting

00:55:21.340 | that although this wasn't appreciated for some time,

00:55:25.700 | it's emerging that in a bunch of primates,

00:55:28.340 | you have somewhat similar, somewhat parallel kinds

00:55:32.620 | of sexual intimidation,

00:55:35.020 | where males will target particular females,

00:55:37.840 | even in a group in which the norm is for females

00:55:41.320 | to mate with multiple males.

00:55:43.520 | But each male will target a particular female

00:55:45.980 | and the more he is aggressive towards her,

00:55:49.580 | then the more she conforms to his wishes

00:55:53.220 | when he wants to mate.

00:55:55.260 | So a long-term pattern of sexual intimidation.

00:55:57.960 | So there's that aspect.

00:56:00.340 | The other aspect I would just note is that

00:56:02.700 | males get away with a lot compared to females

00:56:08.980 | in any kind of intersexual conflict.

00:56:15.820 | You know, so the punishment, here's one example of this,

00:56:19.920 | the punishment for a husband killing a wife

00:56:23.460 | has always been much less than the punishment

00:56:25.620 | for a wife killing a husband.

00:56:27.120 | And you see similar sorts of things

00:56:32.180 | in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on.

00:56:37.180 | I bring this up in the context of males

00:56:42.980 | sexually intimidating their partners,

00:56:46.780 | be it wives or whoever,

00:56:49.160 | because it's a reminder that it's basically

00:56:54.360 | a patriarchal world that we have come from.

00:56:57.780 | A patriarchal world in which male alliances

00:57:02.060 | tend to support males and take advantage of the fact

00:57:06.260 | that they have political power at the expense of females.

00:57:09.760 | And I would say that that all goes back

00:57:11.980 | to what happened three to 400,000 years ago,

00:57:14.780 | when the beta males took charge

00:57:16.660 | and they started imposing their own norms

00:57:19.160 | on society as a whole, and they've continued to do so.

00:57:22.500 | And we now look at ourselves and, you know,

00:57:24.820 | Jordan Peterson says, "We are not a patriarchal society."

00:57:28.780 | Well, you know, it's true that the laws

00:57:31.100 | try and make it even-handed nowadays

00:57:33.780 | between males and females,

00:57:35.420 | but obviously we are patriarchal de facto,

00:57:38.820 | because society still in many ways supports men

00:57:43.580 | better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.

00:57:48.020 | - So beta male patriarchal. (laughs)

00:57:51.860 | If we were looking at the evolutionary history.

00:57:55.300 | Okay, is there, maybe sticking on Jordan for a second,

00:57:58.860 | is there, so he's a psychologist, right?

00:58:04.420 | And what part of the picture do you think he's missing

00:58:09.420 | in analyzing the human relations?

00:58:14.780 | Like what does he need to understand

00:58:20.140 | about our origins in violence

00:58:22.380 | and the way that society has been constructed?

00:58:24.940 | - Oh, I don't want to go deep

00:58:27.540 | into his missing perspectives, you know,

00:58:30.340 | but I just think that what he's doing

00:58:34.540 | in that particular example

00:58:35.900 | is focusing on the legalistic position.

00:58:40.180 | And that's great that, you know,

00:58:44.020 | you do not find formal patriarchy in the law,

00:58:48.180 | anything like to the extent

00:58:49.740 | that you could find it a hundred years ago and so on.

00:58:53.620 | You know, women have got the vote now, hooray,

00:58:56.060 | but it took a long time for women to get the vote.

00:58:58.660 | And it remains the case

00:59:02.260 | that the women suffer in various kinds of ways.

00:59:07.260 | You know, I mean, a woman who has lots of sexual partners

00:59:13.540 | is treated much more rudely

00:59:17.940 | than a male who has lots of sexual partners.

00:59:21.220 | There are all sorts of informal ways

00:59:23.100 | in which it's rougher being a woman than it is a man.

00:59:27.180 | - And if we look at the surface layer of the law,

00:59:32.180 | we may miss the deeper human nature,

00:59:36.260 | like the origins of our human nature that still operates

00:59:41.180 | no matter what the law says.

00:59:42.620 | - Yeah, which is, you know, human nature is awkward

00:59:47.140 | because it includes some unpleasant features

00:59:50.980 | that when we sit back and reflect about them,

00:59:54.180 | we would like them to go away.

00:59:57.900 | But it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned

01:00:02.900 | to try and have sex with at least one woman,

01:00:09.420 | and you know, often lots of women.

01:00:14.060 | And so men are constantly putting pressure on women

01:00:17.260 | in ways that women find unpleasant.

01:00:19.860 | And if men sit back and reflect about it,

01:00:21.660 | they think, "Yeah, we shouldn't do this."

01:00:22.900 | But actually it just goes on because of human nature.

01:00:26.260 | - So maybe looking at particular humans in history,

01:00:30.940 | let's talk about Genghis Khan.

01:00:32.860 | So is this particular human who was one

01:00:37.220 | of the most famous examples of large-scale violence,

01:00:42.220 | is he a deep representative of human nature,

01:00:45.740 | or is he a rare exception?

01:00:47.940 | - Well, I think that it's easy to imagine

01:00:52.940 | that most men could have become Genghis Khan.

01:00:57.460 | It's possible that he had a particular streak of psychopathy.

01:01:03.300 | You know, it's striking that by the time you become

01:01:13.180 | immensely powerful, then your willingness

01:01:18.180 | to do terrible things for the interest of yourself

01:01:23.100 | and your group becomes very high.

01:01:28.100 | Stalin, Mao Zedong, these sorts of people have histories

01:01:36.340 | in which they do not show obvious psychopathy.

01:01:42.300 | But by the time they are big leaders,

01:01:44.180 | they are really psychopathic in the sense

01:01:46.140 | that they do not follow the ordinary morality

01:01:50.860 | of considering the harm that they are doing

01:01:55.620 | to their victims.

01:01:56.660 | What kind of experiment would we need to discover

01:02:03.380 | whether or not anybody could fall into this position?

01:02:06.660 | I don't know.

01:02:07.660 | But, you know, Lord Acton's famous dictum

01:02:11.780 | was power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

01:02:16.740 | And then the point that people often forget

01:02:19.060 | is the next sentence that he said,

01:02:20.540 | which is great men are almost always bad men.

01:02:24.780 | And that is right.

01:02:26.380 | It is very difficult to find a great man in history

01:02:29.860 | who was not responsible for terrible things.

01:02:33.020 | - I think there's some aspect of it

01:02:35.900 | that it's not just power.

01:02:37.860 | I think men who have been the most destructive

01:02:43.300 | in human history are not psychopathic completely.

01:02:48.300 | They have convinced themselves of an idea.

01:02:52.940 | It's like the idea is psychopathic.

01:02:55.500 | Stalin, for example, Hitler's a complicated one.

01:02:58.200 | I think he was legitimately insane.

01:03:00.420 | But I think Stalin has convinced himself

01:03:03.000 | that he's doing good.

01:03:05.940 | So the idea of communism is the thing that's psychopathic

01:03:09.220 | in his mind, like it bred, you construct a worldview

01:03:12.860 | in which the violence is justified,

01:03:15.620 | the cruelty is justified.

01:03:17.480 | So there, in that sense, first of all,

01:03:21.340 | you can construct experiments, unethical experiments

01:03:24.380 | that could test this.

01:03:25.220 | But in that sense, anybody else could have been

01:03:28.980 | in Stalin's position.

01:03:30.820 | It's the idea that could overtake the mind

01:03:34.100 | of a human being and in so doing justify cruel acts.

01:03:38.340 | And that seems to be, at least in part, unique to humans,

01:03:42.100 | is the ability to hold ideas in our minds

01:03:45.540 | and share those ideas and use those ideas

01:03:49.400 | to convince ourselves that proactive violence

01:03:53.740 | on a large scale is a good idea.

01:03:56.120 | So that, I don't know if you have a comment.

01:03:59.140 | - I suppose so.

01:03:59.980 | But it seems to me what really motivated Stalin

01:04:04.580 | was not so much communism as the retention of power.

01:04:09.580 | So once he became leader

01:04:16.460 | and in the process of becoming leader,

01:04:19.140 | he was absolutely desperate to get rid of anybody

01:04:22.740 | who was a challenger.

01:04:24.140 | He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody,

01:04:28.500 | even on his side, who might possibly be showing

01:04:32.580 | a glimmerings of willingness to challenge him.

01:04:36.060 | So when he apparently had Kirov murdered,

01:04:41.060 | Kirov was a great communist.

01:04:44.420 | Trotsky was a great communist.

01:04:46.940 | All his rivals.

01:04:49.540 | And I mean, when he went into the towns

01:04:52.340 | and murdered people by the tens of thousands.

01:04:55.220 | - They were all communists.

01:04:56.220 | - A lot of them were explicit communists, that's right.

01:05:00.140 | But what he was worried about was

01:05:01.540 | that they were rivals to him.

01:05:03.340 | - I suppose the thought is I am the best person

01:05:08.860 | to bring about a global sort of embrace of communism

01:05:13.860 | and others are not.

01:05:17.620 | And so we have to get rid of those others.

01:05:19.700 | - Well, I suspect you're being very charitable here,

01:05:21.660 | but I mean, maybe you're,

01:05:24.660 | you know enough about Stalin to really--

01:05:26.700 | - Yes, well, so the point I'm making, I do quite a bit,

01:05:30.940 | is from my understanding and sense,

01:05:34.420 | of course we can't know for sure,

01:05:36.180 | is he believed in communism.

01:05:38.660 | This wasn't purely a game of power.

01:05:42.780 | Now he got drunk with power pretty quickly,

01:05:46.300 | but he really believed for, I believe his whole life,

01:05:50.700 | that communism is good for the world.

01:05:54.100 | And that, I don't know what role that belief plays

01:05:59.100 | with the more natural human desire for power.

01:06:03.820 | I don't know, but it just seems like--

01:06:06.140 | - As we agreed, he's killing a lot of communists

01:06:08.380 | on his journey.

01:06:10.460 | - But it's not, that calculus doesn't work that way.

01:06:15.580 | There's humans who are communists

01:06:18.420 | and then there's the idea of communism.

01:06:20.940 | So for him, in his delusional worldview,

01:06:25.780 | killing a few people is worth the final result

01:06:30.340 | of bringing communism to the whole world.

01:06:32.740 | - But it was more than that again,

01:06:33.780 | because I mean, he really wanted power for the Soviet Union.

01:06:37.620 | And so surely the reason that he,

01:06:40.520 | he orchestrated the export of wheat from Ukraine,

01:06:49.820 | and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation,

01:06:53.900 | was because he wanted to sell it on the market

01:06:56.020 | in order to be able to build up the power

01:06:58.500 | of the Soviet Union.

01:07:00.900 | You know, alternative view of communism

01:07:02.820 | might have been, well, you know,

01:07:04.660 | let's just make sure everybody survives

01:07:07.180 | and make sure everybody has enough to eat

01:07:09.580 | and we'll all be mutually supportive in a communal network.

01:07:13.660 | But no, but he wanted the power for the country.

01:07:16.140 | - Well, I guess, exactly.

01:07:17.340 | So it's not even communism,

01:07:19.340 | the set of ideas are like Marxism or something like that.

01:07:21.820 | It's the country.

01:07:23.100 | I guess what I'm saying is

01:07:25.060 | it's not purely power for the individual.

01:07:29.820 | It's power for a vision for this great nation,

01:07:33.460 | the Soviet Union.

01:07:34.860 | And similar with Hitler,

01:07:37.180 | the guy believed that this is a great nation, Germany.

01:07:42.180 | And like they, it's a nation that's been wronged

01:07:46.580 | throughout history and needs to be righted.

01:07:49.940 | And there's some dance between the individual,

01:07:53.700 | human and the tribe.

01:07:55.580 | - Yes, no, absolutely.

01:07:57.020 | Yes, and so just like chimpanzees,

01:07:59.780 | you know, we are fiercely tribal

01:08:01.340 | and the tribalism resides particularly in male psychology.

01:08:06.940 | And it's very scary because once you assemble

01:08:12.540 | a set of males who share a tribal identity,

01:08:17.140 | then they have power that they can exert

01:08:20.420 | with very little concern

01:08:25.780 | about what they're doing to damage other people.

01:08:28.180 | - Do you think this, so Nietzschean will to power,

01:08:33.900 | we talked about the corrupting nature of power.

01:08:36.140 | Do you think that's a manifestation

01:08:38.700 | of those early origins of violence?

01:08:42.860 | What's the connection of this desire for power

01:08:46.020 | and our proclivity for violence?

01:08:48.980 | - You know, what we're talking about is tribal power, right?

01:08:54.460 | Power on behalf of a group.

01:08:56.940 | - Yes.

01:08:57.780 | - And I, yeah, that seems to me to go right back

01:09:00.060 | to a deep evolutionary origin

01:09:04.540 | because you see essentially the same thing

01:09:07.220 | in a whole bunch of animals.

01:09:10.500 | You know, that most of the sort of

01:09:14.100 | cognitively complex animals live in social groups

01:09:18.180 | in which they have tribal boundaries.

01:09:20.220 | And so what you see in chimpanzees

01:09:25.380 | is echoed in almost all of the primates.

01:09:28.820 | The difference between us and, you know,

01:09:32.740 | chimpanzees and humans on the one hand

01:09:34.540 | and other primates on the other,

01:09:37.560 | is that we kill and they don't.

01:09:39.280 | And the reason they don't is because they never meet

01:09:42.880 | in the context where there are massive imbalances of power.

01:09:45.960 | So two groups of baboons, you know,

01:09:49.160 | there's 30 on this side and 50 on this side, fine.

01:09:52.600 | Nobody's gonna try and kill anybody else

01:09:54.640 | because the serious risks involved.

01:09:57.580 | But nevertheless, they are tribal.

01:10:02.160 | So, you know, they will have fairly intense

01:10:06.160 | intergroup interactions in which everybody knows

01:10:09.640 | who is on whose side.

01:10:12.560 | And the long-term consequences of winning those battles,

01:10:17.560 | non-lethal battles, is that the dominance get access

01:10:23.760 | to larger areas of land, more safety and so on,

01:10:28.920 | with chances are better record

01:10:33.680 | of reproductive success subsequently.

01:10:38.620 | - Do you think this, from an evolutionary perspective,

01:10:42.760 | is a feature or a bug?

01:10:44.240 | Our natural sort of tendency to form tribes?

01:10:49.240 | - So what's a bug?

01:10:52.020 | - Oh, sorry, this is a computer programming analogy.

01:10:57.700 | - Meaning like it would be more beneficial,

01:11:02.700 | is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes

01:11:07.780 | from an evolutionary perspective?

01:11:09.220 | - Yeah, yeah, but--

01:11:10.980 | - What does it mean, what does a bug mean?

01:11:13.220 | - Yes, right, I mean--

01:11:15.260 | - Well, yeah, 'cause like where's evolution going anyway?

01:11:17.500 | - It's beneficial from, you know, it's beneficial

01:11:19.740 | in the sense that it evolved by natural selection

01:11:22.540 | to benefit the individuals who did it.

01:11:25.420 | But if by bug you mean something that,

01:11:28.820 | from the point of view of the species,

01:11:30.240 | it would be great if you could just wipe this out,

01:11:32.580 | because the species would somehow do better as a result.

01:11:36.060 | Then yes, but then, you know, males are a bug.

01:11:38.420 | - Come on now, there's some nice things to males,

01:11:46.180 | speaking as a male.

01:11:48.100 | - The fact that there are some nice things to males

01:11:50.140 | doesn't mean that they're not bugs.

01:11:51.960 | You know, maybe they're quite nice bugs,

01:11:53.900 | but it would be much better for the species as a whole

01:11:56.380 | not to have to have males who impose this violence

01:12:00.400 | on the species as a whole.

01:12:01.820 | - Yeah, as somebody who practiced controlled violence

01:12:05.140 | and doing a lot of martial arts, yeah, I'm not sure.

01:12:10.020 | It does seem kind of fun to have this kind

01:12:12.700 | of controlled violence, also sports.

01:12:15.300 | Also, I mean, the question of conflict in general,

01:12:18.420 | I guess that's the deeper question.

01:12:20.540 | Don't you think there's some value to conflict

01:12:24.180 | for the improvement of society, for progress?

01:12:27.740 | That this tension between tribes,

01:12:31.060 | isn't this like a experiment,

01:12:35.260 | a continued experiment we conduct with each other

01:12:37.660 | and to figure out what is a better world to build?

01:12:40.220 | Like you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas

01:12:44.980 | to go to war with each other.

01:12:47.480 | It's like the United States with the 50 states

01:12:50.600 | and it's the laboratory of ideas.

01:12:53.640 | Don't you think that is, again, feature versus bug?

01:12:57.180 | This kind of conflict, when it doesn't get out of hand,

01:13:02.960 | is actually ultimately progressive,

01:13:05.000 | productive for a better world?

01:13:06.740 | - Well, what do you mean by conflict?

01:13:10.080 | I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of

01:13:12.880 | people have different ideas about the solution to a problem.

01:13:16.520 | And so their ideas are in conflict.

01:13:18.920 | They can sit down with it on a log and chat about it

01:13:23.480 | and then decide, okay, you're right,

01:13:25.660 | or I'm wrong or whatever.

01:13:27.120 | But if by conflict, you mean a great idea

01:13:33.080 | to build a nuclear bomb and set that off,

01:13:35.520 | then no, I don't see why it's a good idea

01:13:39.640 | to have all this violence.

01:13:40.960 | - Yeah, there's...

01:13:44.560 | (sighs)

01:13:46.880 | I wonder, I mean, it's not a good idea,

01:13:49.920 | but I wonder if human history would evolve

01:13:52.280 | the way it did without the violence.

01:13:54.240 | - Oh, I'm sure you're right.

01:13:56.760 | Probably humans would not have evolved

01:13:58.600 | in the sense that we have.

01:14:00.680 | But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution

01:14:05.680 | will continue in the way it has.

01:14:10.960 | So there's all sorts of indications

01:14:14.440 | that the importance of violence has been reduced over time.

01:14:20.600 | And this is made famous in Steven Pinker's book,

01:14:25.760 | but others have written about it too,

01:14:27.600 | that the frequency of death from violence

01:14:33.520 | in every country you look at has been declining.

01:14:37.440 | That's just great.

01:14:39.280 | And so, the amazing thing about this

01:14:41.080 | is that even when you take the deaths

01:14:43.240 | due to the First World War and the Second World War,

01:14:46.020 | the 20th century appears to have been statistically,

01:14:50.300 | meaning rates of death per individual,

01:14:52.920 | the least violent in history.

01:14:57.360 | So we haven't got very far down the course to nonviolence,

01:15:03.240 | but I don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it.

01:15:05.720 | I think it's ridiculous, frankly.

01:15:08.840 | Excuse my frankness, to say that violence is a good thing.

01:15:13.120 | I think that it would be a wonderful concept

01:15:16.840 | if we could evolve somehow to a world

01:15:19.720 | 3,000 years from now where violence

01:15:23.280 | is really regarded as simply appalling

01:15:26.800 | and that they look back on our time

01:15:29.920 | and can't believe what we were doing.

01:15:32.560 | - Yeah, but of course, violence takes

01:15:34.640 | a lot of different shapes.

01:15:35.760 | As we start to think deeper and deeper

01:15:37.320 | about living beings on Earth, for example,

01:15:40.760 | the violence we commit and the torture

01:15:42.480 | we commit to animals, and then perhaps down the line,

01:15:45.240 | as we've talked offline about,

01:15:46.680 | is with robots and that kind of thing.

01:15:49.360 | So there's just so many ways to commit violence to others.

01:15:52.640 | And some people now talk about violence

01:15:54.480 | in the space of ideas, which of course,

01:15:57.200 | to me at least, is a bit of a silly notion

01:15:59.640 | relative to use that same V word

01:16:02.840 | for the space of ideas versus actual physical violence.

01:16:06.440 | But it may be that a long time from now,

01:16:08.920 | we see that even violence in the space of ideas

01:16:12.600 | is quite a manifestation of that same kind of violence.

01:16:16.680 | And so it is interesting where this is headed.

01:16:19.480 | And I think you're absolutely right.

01:16:23.020 | A world, a nonviolent world,

01:16:26.080 | does seem like a better world.

01:16:27.580 | I wonder if the constraints on resources

01:16:30.620 | somehow make that world more and more difficult,

01:16:34.360 | especially as we run out of resources.

01:16:36.120 | - Well, it's got to be very, very different

01:16:37.480 | from what we're doing nowadays.

01:16:38.920 | And it's unimaginably different.

01:16:40.880 | If we could imagine it, then maybe we could work towards it.

01:16:43.200 | At the moment, nobody knows how to work towards it.

01:16:45.480 | - Well, that's kind of the stories of humans,

01:16:46.960 | is we don't really know the future.

01:16:48.640 | We're trying to ad hoc kind of develop it as we go

01:16:53.200 | and sometimes get into trouble.

01:16:54.960 | - Yeah. - As to violence.

01:16:57.040 | - But George Orwell's vision in 1984

01:16:59.800 | was of two or three world powers,

01:17:03.880 | each so powerful that nobody could destroy the other.

01:17:08.880 | But the notion of an evolutionarily stable relationship

01:17:16.080 | among heavily armed world powers

01:17:20.160 | just does not seem as though it's reasonable at all.

01:17:25.160 | That is to say, we've now got 170 or 190 nations

01:17:33.200 | in the world dominated by a few big ones,

01:17:38.200 | all with arms pointing at each other.

01:17:42.200 | And the notion that we could just carry on

01:17:45.320 | having peace talks and making sure that these arms

01:17:49.240 | don't get involved in some kind of massive conflagration

01:17:54.080 | seems incredibly optimistic.

01:17:56.960 | Some kind of major change has to happen,

01:18:00.160 | whereby, and some people would like to see

01:18:03.160 | all the weapons go, that'd be great.

01:18:05.080 | I'm a member of that sort of group

01:18:07.840 | that tries to see that happen.

01:18:10.600 | It's gonna be very difficult to see it happen.

01:18:13.080 | Another kind of concept is the nations themselves

01:18:16.040 | will dissolve and will become one government.

01:18:21.040 | That itself is a terrifying vision

01:18:23.720 | because the capacity for abuse by a single world power

01:18:28.040 | would be so problematic.

01:18:30.720 | And in addition, how do you get there

01:18:32.440 | without a war in the first place?

01:18:34.120 | So at the moment, we have no reasonable

01:18:38.680 | kind of future in mind, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.

01:18:41.960 | It's just that we haven't yet defined it.

01:18:43.560 | - And a lot of people in the cryptocurrency space

01:18:46.000 | argue that you can create decentralized societies

01:18:49.600 | if you take away the power from states

01:18:52.240 | to define the monetary system.

01:18:54.080 | So they argue like if you make the monetary system

01:18:58.680 | such that it's disjoined from the control

01:19:01.240 | of any one individual, any one government,

01:19:03.940 | then that might be a way to form

01:19:05.720 | sort of ad hoc decentralized societies.

01:19:08.040 | They just pop up all over the place.

01:19:10.800 | That's a really interesting technological solution

01:19:13.880 | to how to remove the overreach of power from governments.

01:19:17.960 | - Yes, right, absolutely.

01:19:20.000 | And it may well be that the future will emerge

01:19:24.520 | out of some sort of quite surprising direction like that.

01:19:28.640 | - Is it nevertheless surprising to you

01:19:31.160 | that we have not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons?

01:19:34.240 | So the mutually assured destruction

01:19:36.480 | that we've had for many decades

01:19:38.440 | from somebody who studies violence,

01:19:40.740 | how does that make sense to you?

01:19:43.240 | - Well, I mean, I'm surprised only in the sense

01:19:45.440 | that accidental, the fact that we have not had

01:19:49.960 | an accident yet has been quite remarkable.

01:19:54.480 | Because all the accounts are that we've come very close

01:19:57.720 | to having very serious accidents

01:19:59.280 | where people on either side have misread intentions

01:20:03.120 | or apparent launches and so on.

01:20:05.260 | So yes, I think it is remarkable.

01:20:08.640 | There's a nasty generalization that can be made

01:20:13.640 | that the longer that powerful states go

01:20:19.140 | without having wars, then the worse the war is afterwards.

01:20:23.440 | And you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense

01:20:28.480 | because basically what's happening with these tribal groups

01:20:32.080 | that the nations are at the moment

01:20:33.800 | is that after a big war, like the Second World War,

01:20:39.080 | they establish new kinds of dominance relationships.

01:20:42.180 | And then during the periods of peace,

01:20:45.760 | what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships

01:20:50.760 | change because some nations become poorer,

01:20:54.540 | some become richer,

01:20:55.960 | some become more militarily powerful and so on.

01:20:58.560 | Generally, economy and military goes hand in hand.

01:21:02.280 | So right now, China emerged from the war

01:21:05.520 | as a relatively low status state and is now high status.

01:21:09.520 | So if this were chimpanzees, what would happen

01:21:11.600 | is that you would predict a conflict

01:21:13.120 | because you need to have a readjustment

01:21:16.120 | of the formal dominance relationships

01:21:18.240 | to recognize the new in practice dominance relationships

01:21:22.280 | recognized by the economy and the military.

01:21:24.740 | So the longer that you have a period of peace

01:21:29.220 | following a war, then the more these tensions

01:21:32.320 | of unresolved changed dominance relationships build up.

01:21:37.140 | And the longer they take to occur,

01:21:39.520 | then the more challenging are gonna be the conflicts.

01:21:44.520 | - That's a terrifying view 'cause we've been

01:21:48.920 | out of conflict for quite a bit.

01:21:50.440 | - That's right. - Maybe it's building up.

01:21:52.680 | - So it's a scary view, but on the other hand,

01:21:55.000 | things have changed hugely

01:21:56.600 | with the advent of nuclear weapons

01:21:59.720 | because at least that conforms to this psychology

01:22:04.720 | that is very clear in other animals,

01:22:06.720 | which is you don't want to get into a fight

01:22:08.840 | if you are going to get hurt.

01:22:11.080 | So that's the whole principle of MAD,

01:22:13.520 | Mutually Assured Destruction.

01:22:15.680 | And it's doubtless been why powerful nations

01:22:18.640 | like America and Russia have not used

01:22:22.720 | their nuclear weapons since 1945.

01:22:25.500 | So if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches,

01:22:32.140 | then maybe the fact of MAD does fit into human psychology

01:22:37.300 | in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions

01:22:41.400 | without using them.

01:22:42.520 | But we haven't yet really faced that challenge.

01:22:47.440 | I mean, the Soviet Union collapsed

01:22:49.680 | because of the poor economy,

01:22:52.160 | but with China desperate to take back Taiwan

01:22:57.160 | and America shifting its focus on the Pacific,

01:23:03.200 | the potential for something going wrong

01:23:05.840 | is clearly very high.

01:23:07.160 | - So what's the hopeful case that you can make

01:23:11.400 | for a long-term surviving and thriving human civilization,

01:23:15.800 | given all the dangers that we face?

01:23:18.060 | - Well, I can't really exactly make one.

01:23:22.140 | I would just say that...

01:23:23.380 | (Lex laughing)

01:23:25.620 | We're talking about the dangers.

01:23:27.500 | Obviously the dangers are there.

01:23:29.860 | But what I would sort of think about

01:23:32.280 | is the notion that surprises come

01:23:37.280 | from all sorts of different directions.

01:23:39.980 | I mean, you work in robotics,

01:23:44.900 | and I could well imagine that there will be advances

01:23:49.700 | in robotics that in some way I can't even conceive

01:23:52.860 | will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict.

01:23:57.860 | Something about, by the time chips have been planted

01:24:01.720 | in human brains and we're all instantly sharing information

01:24:05.540 | in a way that we never did before,

01:24:07.540 | will this change the nature of human existence

01:24:12.020 | in such a way that these conflicts get resolved?

01:24:15.100 | - So remove the conflicts, but keep some of the magic,

01:24:17.740 | the beauty of what it means to be human.

01:24:19.600 | So still be able to enjoy life, the richness of life,

01:24:22.740 | the full complexity of life.

01:24:24.700 | 'Cause you can remove conflict by giving everybody a pill,

01:24:28.340 | and then they go to sleep, right?

01:24:30.420 | You still want life to be amazing, exciting, interesting.

01:24:35.420 | And so that's where you have to find the balance.

01:24:39.880 | - Well, it's, yes, I mean, it's all science fiction stuff.

01:24:42.960 | And so how it's gonna work out, totally unclear.

01:24:47.740 | I don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing.

01:24:55.040 | I mean, first of all, you somehow get rid of males.

01:24:57.880 | I think you really need to get rid of males

01:25:00.040 | 'cause males are the source of a major problem,

01:25:05.040 | which is the lust for power and the resulting conflict.

01:25:10.640 | - But you don't think the males

01:25:12.320 | are also a source of beauty and creation?

01:25:15.120 | - No, no, no, I mean, I don't have anything against males

01:25:18.120 | as individuals and that sort of thing.

01:25:20.800 | And males have clearly done a lot.

01:25:22.800 | I mean, they've been incredibly exploratory and creative

01:25:27.040 | and what they've done in art and music has been wonderful

01:25:30.920 | and that sort of thing.

01:25:32.120 | On the other hand, I'm not sure

01:25:34.880 | there's anything particularly special.

01:25:36.160 | And I think that probably females could do the same thing

01:25:39.160 | just as well when given the chance.

01:25:40.920 | - Yes, including the dark stuff.

01:25:44.320 | I mean, a part of me is not understanding the,

01:25:47.960 | so there is evolutionary distinction between men and women,

01:25:52.600 | but I tend to believe both men and women,

01:25:55.720 | if you look out into the future, can be destructive,

01:25:58.640 | can be evil, can be greedy, can be corrupted by power.

01:26:02.000 | So if you move males from the picture,

01:26:03.640 | which are historically connected to this evolution

01:26:07.160 | that we've been talking about,

01:26:08.680 | that women are gonna fill that role quite nicely.

01:26:11.920 | And then it'll be just the same kind of process,

01:26:15.080 | not the same, but it'll be new and interesting.

01:26:20.080 | There's a sense that the will to power,

01:26:24.040 | craving power, committing violence

01:26:26.480 | is somehow coupled with all the things

01:26:30.720 | that are beautiful about life.

01:26:32.560 | That if you remove conflict completely,

01:26:35.080 | if you remove all the evil in the world,

01:26:37.700 | it seems like you're going to,

01:26:43.720 | you're not going to have a stable place

01:26:47.520 | for the beauty, for the goodness.

01:26:49.440 | Like there's always has to be a dragon to fight.

01:26:54.300 | For the way, if you look at human history,

01:26:56.140 | now you can say, the reason I'm nervous

01:26:58.820 | about a sort of utopia where everything is great

01:27:02.340 | is every time you look through human history,

01:27:04.620 | when utopia has been chased,

01:27:06.700 | you run into a lot of trouble,

01:27:08.460 | or again, sneaks into this evil, this craving for power.

01:27:13.460 | Now you can say that's a male problem,

01:27:16.600 | but I just think it's a human problem.

01:27:18.900 | And it's not even a human problem,

01:27:20.420 | it's a chimp problem too.

01:27:22.060 | It's life on earth problem.

01:27:23.620 | Intelligent life on earth problem.

01:27:25.500 | So like, it's better to not necessarily get rid

01:27:30.500 | of the sources of the darker sides of human nature,

01:27:34.580 | but more create mechanisms that the kindness,

01:27:38.100 | the goodness as, the goodness paradox, your book,

01:27:41.780 | that that is incentivized and encouraged, empowered.

01:27:50.140 | - Well, look, I don't think it would be utopia

01:27:54.260 | if you got rid of the males.

01:27:56.460 | - Right.

01:27:57.300 | - And certainly females are capable of conflict.

01:28:00.620 | I just think it's a gamble worth taking

01:28:03.260 | if you could actually do it.

01:28:04.860 | You can certainly find females in history

01:28:07.100 | who've done unpleasant things.

01:28:09.300 | But nevertheless, we have a very strong evolutionary theory

01:28:13.500 | which explains why males benefit more

01:28:16.980 | by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do.

01:28:21.520 | And so if we want to talk about reducing conflict,

01:28:27.500 | then it would reduce it to get rid of males.

01:28:31.940 | Now I understand this is a fantasy.

01:28:34.100 | And I think it's a fantasy that people would be able

01:28:37.100 | to talk about fairly soon

01:28:38.480 | because reproductive technology is getting to the point

01:28:41.900 | where it's quite likely that human females

01:28:46.460 | could breed without the use of males.

01:28:49.220 | And so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic

01:28:55.520 | if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies.

01:29:00.660 | - It's a really interesting thought experiment.

01:29:03.740 | I will agree with you that if given two buttons,

01:29:07.380 | one is get rid of all women,

01:29:09.620 | and the other button is get rid of all men,

01:29:13.960 | realizing that I have a stake in this choice,

01:29:18.960 | probably getting rid of all men.

01:29:20.760 | If I wanted to preserve Earth

01:29:25.640 | and the richness of life on Earth,

01:29:28.400 | I would probably get rid of all men.

01:29:30.240 | I don't know.

01:29:31.080 | - I don't think you have a stake in it.

01:29:32.320 | You know, I mean, you're saying that because you're a man.

01:29:35.280 | - Yeah.

01:29:36.120 | - But I don't see why being a man should make you

01:29:39.520 | any more interested in having a male future for the world

01:29:42.600 | than a female future.

01:29:43.600 | You know, you've got just as many ancestors

01:29:45.960 | who were male as were female.

01:29:48.360 | - Well, my problem is I'll have to die.

01:29:50.320 | - Well, that's gonna happen anyway.

01:29:53.720 | - I know, but like I prefer to die tomorrow, not today.

01:29:57.000 | You know, I prefer to hit the snooze button

01:30:00.560 | on the whole mortality thing.

01:30:02.760 | But it's interesting.

01:30:03.600 | - But this is not suggesting that males have to die

01:30:05.560 | in order to make room for females.

01:30:06.800 | It's just, you know, all you have to do is just say,

01:30:11.480 | don't let's have any more males born.

01:30:13.920 | - Interesting.

01:30:14.760 | - Of course, you know, the difficulty is that

01:30:16.600 | because we're tribal, you know, some country somewhere

01:30:19.840 | would say, well, we're not gonna do that.

01:30:21.360 | - Yeah.

01:30:22.200 | - And then guess what?

01:30:23.020 | They'd take over, you know, because they're male.

01:30:24.760 | So that's why it's impossible to imagine actually happening.

01:30:27.760 | - You know what, I'm gonna take that

01:30:31.040 | and actually think about it.

01:30:32.200 | I don't know, I'm uncomfortable.

01:30:34.920 | There's a certain kind of woke culture

01:30:39.280 | that I've been kind of uncomfortable with

01:30:41.600 | because it's not women necessarily.

01:30:44.520 | It's more just, there's a lot of bullying I see.

01:30:48.280 | There's a lack of empathy and a lack of kindness

01:30:50.880 | towards others that's created by that culture.

01:30:53.440 | So, but you're speaking about something else.

01:30:55.200 | You're speaking about reducing conflict in this world

01:31:00.200 | and looking at the basics of our human nature

01:31:04.440 | and its origins in the evolution of Homo sapiens

01:31:10.080 | and thinking about which kind of aspects of human nature,

01:31:14.440 | if we get rid of them, will make for a better world.

01:31:17.320 | It's an interesting thought experiment.

01:31:19.840 | Worth thinking about.

01:31:20.680 | - But it is only a thought experiment.

01:31:21.680 | I mean, you know, it's got no practical meaning right now.

01:31:24.960 | And I take your point that, you know,

01:31:28.280 | males get a hard rap nowadays in some ways

01:31:32.440 | because the balance of social power

01:31:38.640 | is moving against, I mean, you know, quite rightly

01:31:43.640 | and in a strong sense, of course,

01:31:47.120 | against all the nasty things that males do.

01:31:50.040 | But what people sometimes fail to remember

01:31:55.680 | is that life is very hard for males

01:32:00.600 | who don't have the power, who don't have money,

01:32:06.280 | who don't have access to women.

01:32:08.880 | You know, I'm sympathetic to incels.

01:32:13.680 | I'm not sympathetic to them using violence

01:32:18.400 | to solve their problems,

01:32:20.200 | but I am very sympathetic to the fact that it's not easy

01:32:25.200 | simply to be told by well-off,

01:32:32.920 | feminist, middle-class people

01:32:36.520 | that you shouldn't behave like this

01:32:38.080 | or you shouldn't feel like this, because you do.

01:32:40.360 | - Yes, it's who you are.

01:32:42.360 | I mean, in general, just empathy and kindness,

01:32:45.960 | male or female, I believe,

01:32:51.960 | will be the thing that builds a better world.

01:32:54.360 | And that's practiced in different ways

01:32:57.360 | from different backgrounds,

01:32:58.660 | but ultimately you should listen to others

01:33:01.580 | and empathize with the experience of others

01:33:04.120 | and put more love out there in the world.

01:33:06.480 | Now, that hopefully is the way to reduce conflict,

01:33:09.360 | reduce violence, and reduce that whole psychological

01:33:15.280 | experience of being powerless in this world,

01:33:19.820 | powerless to become the best version of yourself.

01:33:22.520 | And that, you know-

01:33:23.360 | - Well, no one's gonna disagree

01:33:24.440 | with all those fine sentiments, right?

01:33:27.160 | But that, yes, but that's an actionable thing

01:33:32.020 | is actually practice empathy, right?

01:33:35.140 | Like saying that somebody should be silenced

01:33:40.100 | or just like this group is bad and this group is good.

01:33:43.800 | I just feel like that's not empathy.

01:33:45.380 | Empathy is understanding the experience of others

01:33:50.380 | and respecting it.

01:33:52.960 | Like, I mean, that's what a better world looks like.

01:33:57.260 | That's what the reduction of conflict looks like.

01:33:59.740 | It's like, as opposed to saying my tribe is right,

01:34:03.700 | your tribe is wrong, forget the violence

01:34:07.140 | or non-violence part.

01:34:08.740 | That just that act of saying my tribe is right,

01:34:11.180 | that tribe is wrong, removing that from the picture.

01:34:13.620 | That's the way to make a better world.

01:34:15.720 | Like that's the way to reduce the violence, I think.

01:34:18.320 | Not necessarily removing the people

01:34:21.740 | who are causing the violence.

01:34:24.140 | You have to get to the source of the problem.

01:34:25.940 | I don't mean the evolutionary source,

01:34:27.260 | but just the mindset that creates the violence

01:34:32.260 | is usually just the lack of empathy for others.

01:34:35.960 | - Yeah, but you know, I mean, you can't just teach that

01:34:40.460 | because our evolutionary psychology

01:34:43.540 | puts us in particular directions.

01:34:45.540 | - So you don't think, do you think it's possible to learn

01:34:50.500 | through practice to resist the basics

01:34:53.980 | of our evolutionary psychology, the basic forces?

01:34:56.900 | - Yeah, I mean, lots and lots of training,

01:35:01.660 | you know, lots and lots of education can do it.

01:35:05.060 | The famously most peaceful society

01:35:09.220 | that anthropologists have recorded

01:35:11.860 | involves a tremendous amount of teaching,

01:35:16.860 | including some punishment.

01:35:18.900 | You know, it's a society in Thailand.

01:35:20.940 | You have to beat it out of children to make 'em nice.

01:35:25.940 | - So it's carrot and steak.

01:35:27.780 | - You know, the point is that you do not find societies

01:35:31.300 | in which people are spontaneously

01:35:34.340 | showing the kinds of behaviors

01:35:39.160 | that we would all love them to show.

01:35:41.980 | - It requires work.

01:35:43.300 | - It requires work.

01:35:45.100 | - What is your book titled "Goodness Paradox"?

01:35:47.940 | What are the main ideas in this book?

01:35:50.300 | - Well, the paradox is the fact that humans show extremes

01:35:55.300 | in relationship to both violence and nonviolence.

01:36:00.460 | And the violence is that we are one of these few animals

01:36:04.220 | in which we use coalitionary proactive violence

01:36:08.860 | to kill members of our own species.

01:36:10.700 | And we do it in large numbers,

01:36:12.220 | just like a few other species.

01:36:14.700 | And the nonviolence is we're particularly extreme

01:36:18.900 | in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence.

01:36:23.860 | And I told you the story of how we get there.

01:36:26.900 | So what's so extraordinary about us

01:36:28.620 | is that most animals are either high on both

01:36:32.940 | or relatively low on both.

01:36:35.420 | So chimpanzees are high on proactive violence

01:36:38.340 | and reactive violence.

01:36:40.020 | Bonobos are less than chimpanzees on both of those,

01:36:44.220 | but still hundreds of times more

01:36:46.340 | reactively aggressive than humans are.

01:36:49.900 | What we've done is retain proactive violence being high

01:36:54.940 | and got reactive violence really being low.

01:36:59.180 | And so we have these wonderful societies

01:37:01.140 | in which we're all so incredibly nice to each other

01:37:03.740 | and tolerant and calm and can meet strangers

01:37:07.020 | and have no problem about leading to any kind of conflict.

01:37:12.580 | At the same time as we are one of the worst

01:37:15.780 | killing machine species that's ever existed.

01:37:19.660 | So what's so extraordinary about this

01:37:21.460 | is that if you look at the political philosophers

01:37:24.820 | of the last few hundred years,

01:37:26.820 | you've got this fight famously

01:37:29.900 | between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

01:37:33.300 | or literally you've got the fight between their followers.

01:37:36.340 | So the followers of Hobbes say,

01:37:38.580 | "Well, Hobbes was right, but we're not."

01:37:40.900 | Well, Hobbes was right because he says

01:37:42.900 | that we are naturally violent and you need a leviathan,

01:37:46.460 | a sort of central government or a king

01:37:49.340 | to be able to suppress the violence.

01:37:51.740 | So we're naturally horrid and we can learn to be good.

01:37:55.900 | Whereas Jean-Jacques Rousseau is interpreted

01:37:58.260 | as saying the opposite, that we are naturally good

01:38:01.420 | and it's only when culture intervenes

01:38:03.460 | and horrid ideologies come in that we become uncivilized.

01:38:08.380 | And so people have had this endless fight

01:38:10.900 | between are we naturally corrupt or are we naturally kind?

01:38:15.900 | And that has gone on for years.

01:38:19.700 | And it's only in the last two or three decades

01:38:23.060 | that anthropologists like Christopher Bohm

01:38:25.220 | and Bruce Naft have said,

01:38:26.500 | "Look, it's obvious what the answer is.

01:38:28.660 | We are both of these things."

01:38:30.420 | And what is so exciting now is I think

01:38:32.660 | we can understand why we are both.

01:38:34.900 | And the answer is we come from ancestors

01:38:38.240 | that were elevated on proactive aggression,

01:38:40.700 | that were hunters and killers,

01:38:43.740 | both of animals and of each other.

01:38:46.520 | And you've got to include that

01:38:49.260 | as almost certain from the past.

01:38:52.900 | And then now we've taken our reactive aggression

01:38:57.900 | and we've down-regulated it and that's given us power.

01:39:02.540 | It's given us power because once you get rid

01:39:05.820 | of the alpha male, once the beta males take over

01:39:08.560 | and force selection in favor of a more tolerant,

01:39:13.360 | less reactively aggressive individual,

01:39:17.080 | the effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable

01:39:22.000 | of focusing on things other than conflict.

01:39:24.960 | And so we have social groups in which individuals,

01:39:28.880 | instead of constantly being on edge

01:39:30.960 | in the way that chimpanzees are with each other,

01:39:34.500 | are able to interact in ways that enable them

01:39:38.320 | to share looking at a tool together

01:39:41.760 | or share their food together

01:39:44.040 | or pass ideas from one to the other

01:39:47.240 | or support each other when they're ill

01:39:49.560 | or whatever the issue is,

01:39:51.680 | cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective.

01:39:56.120 | So you asked earlier, you know,

01:39:57.240 | what did I think about why sapiens were able to expand

01:40:01.680 | at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically

01:40:04.240 | around 40,000 years ago?

01:40:06.680 | And the answer is that whatever it was,

01:40:11.260 | it had something to do with the sapiens' ability

01:40:14.440 | to cooperate.

01:40:15.900 | You know, that was what gave them bigger groups.

01:40:18.220 | That's what enabled them to have a far more effective way

01:40:23.220 | of living and I suspect it was to do with the weapons

01:40:26.200 | and military aspects, but even if it wasn't that,

01:40:29.920 | the greater cooperation that sapiens were showing

01:40:34.920 | would have been hugely important.

01:40:36.880 | So sapiens then had groups of, you know,

01:40:40.400 | who knows exactly how big they were,

01:40:42.080 | but scores of people to judge from their remains,

01:40:47.080 | whereas Neanderthals were living in widely separated,

01:40:52.840 | small groups of, you know, maybe as many as 15

01:40:56.220 | or 20 people sometimes,

01:40:58.800 | where they saw others so rarely that they were inbreeding

01:41:02.240 | at high levels, you know,

01:41:03.960 | fathers having babies with their daughters.

01:41:07.180 | Very different world.

01:41:09.760 | - Very different world.

01:41:10.600 | - And that's probably what our world was like

01:41:12.280 | before we got sapiens.

01:41:13.640 | - Before we got sapiens.

01:41:14.920 | And it's fascinating that there was that kind of violence

01:41:18.320 | against, once you get rid of the alpha males,

01:41:24.440 | you have now the freedom to have kindness amongst the beta,

01:41:29.440 | the beta males, like not kindness,

01:41:32.280 | but collaboration, that's the better word.

01:41:34.480 | - Yes, right, much more collaboration,

01:41:36.520 | not just among the males, among the beta males,

01:41:38.900 | but also among the gamma males and the females.

01:41:42.760 | - Yeah, I don't know what a gamma male is,

01:41:44.880 | but I imagine there's a whole alphabet.

01:41:47.560 | - Well, I don't know about a whole alphabet,

01:41:48.760 | but I think the big layers are the married men

01:41:53.240 | and the unmarried men,

01:41:55.040 | because the married men had a problem

01:41:57.280 | with the unmarried men, right?

01:41:59.160 | I mean, you see it in ethnographies

01:42:01.200 | of hunters and gatherers recently,

01:42:03.240 | where the unmarried men would be given rules,

01:42:06.340 | such as, I mean, a very extreme rule

01:42:08.720 | in Northern Australia was you cannot come to the camp

01:42:12.680 | for months, you have to go away

01:42:14.560 | and live somewhere out in the bush,

01:42:17.280 | 'cause we don't want you anywhere near our wives.

01:42:20.000 | And then another kind of rule is,

01:42:22.960 | if you are in the camp,

01:42:25.040 | you must be in the firelight all the time,

01:42:27.720 | otherwise we don't know what you're doing out in the dark.

01:42:30.720 | So we're looking at real efforts to control them,

01:42:33.920 | because the men who had lots of wives

01:42:36.920 | did not want those horrid bachelors

01:42:38.680 | sneaking around the place.

01:42:40.320 | - I love this.

01:42:41.160 | You also wrote the book titled "Catching Fire,

01:42:45.000 | How Cooking Made Us Human."

01:42:47.840 | What's the central idea in this book?

01:42:49.800 | - The subtitle "How Cooking Made Us Human"

01:42:52.480 | refers not to Homo sapiens, but to Homo erectus.

01:42:56.320 | So human there means the genus Homo.

01:42:59.060 | And Homo erectus is the first full member

01:43:03.720 | of the genus Homo in the sense that it looked like us,

01:43:08.720 | just with a sort of slightly more robust build

01:43:12.160 | and a smaller brain.

01:43:14.120 | And the central idea of "Catching Fire"

01:43:17.360 | is that it was the control of fire

01:43:22.080 | that was responsible for the emergence of Homo erectus

01:43:27.080 | and therefore the genus Homo,

01:43:30.800 | which happened two million years ago.

01:43:33.040 | And it was an evolution

01:43:36.560 | from a line of australopithecines.

01:43:41.560 | And australopithecines are the creatures

01:43:46.400 | from whom we evolved.

01:43:49.360 | They were present in Africa

01:43:52.880 | from something like six or seven million years ago,

01:43:57.120 | up to, actually up to one million years ago.

01:44:01.560 | And then a branch led off to Homo

01:44:04.800 | around two million years ago.

01:44:06.400 | And the way to think of australopithecines

01:44:10.120 | is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright.

01:44:14.080 | So they were erect bipedal walkers.

01:44:17.040 | They were like chimpanzees in the sense

01:44:21.120 | that they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee.

01:44:25.320 | They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee,

01:44:28.040 | a little bit smaller actually.

01:44:29.560 | And they had big jaws

01:44:32.520 | because they were still eating raw food.

01:44:36.860 | They had big teeth and big jaws.

01:44:39.600 | And then around two million years ago,

01:44:42.720 | the line of australopithecines,

01:44:44.240 | which ended with an intermediate species,

01:44:47.080 | a kind of missing link area,

01:44:48.400 | 'cause it is not missing, called habilis,

01:44:53.000 | sometimes called Homo habilis,

01:44:54.520 | but more properly in my view,

01:44:56.080 | called australopithecus habilis.

01:44:57.920 | That gave rise to Homo erectus.

01:45:02.440 | And Homo erectus, here's how different it was.

01:45:06.000 | It had a smaller mouth,

01:45:09.880 | a smaller jaw,

01:45:11.560 | smaller teeth,

01:45:13.200 | and to judge from its ribs and pelvis, smaller gut.

01:45:17.760 | In addition, it had lost what australopithecines all had,

01:45:23.360 | which was adaptations for climbing in the trees.

01:45:26.360 | And that meant that Homo erectus

01:45:29.080 | must have slept on the ground.

01:45:30.580 | And since it slept on the ground,

01:45:34.160 | it should have been able to defend itself

01:45:35.800 | somehow against predators.

01:45:37.600 | And I can't think of any way they could have done that

01:45:39.680 | unless they had fire.

01:45:41.860 | So there are two major clues to why it was with Homo erectus

01:45:46.860 | that our ancestors first acquired the control of fire.

01:45:55.100 | One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees

01:45:58.740 | in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos

01:46:01.620 | and all the other primates do.

01:46:04.000 | And the other is that there was this striking reduction

01:46:11.060 | throughout the gut,

01:46:13.020 | reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus

01:46:17.340 | and in the gut itself.

01:46:19.300 | And that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans,

01:46:24.300 | which is that our guts are about two thirds of the size

01:46:28.580 | of what they would be if we ate raw food

01:46:31.940 | to judge by the great apes.

01:46:34.400 | So at some point in our evolution,

01:46:39.540 | we acquired the skill of cooking

01:46:43.080 | and skill of controlling fire.

01:46:44.780 | At no time between two million years ago and the present,

01:46:50.700 | do we see any changes in our anatomy that can,

01:46:54.860 | as it were, justify the enormous change that happens

01:46:59.860 | when you are an animal that learns to control fire.

01:47:04.180 | But at two million years ago,

01:47:05.340 | we have exactly what you'd expect,

01:47:07.260 | namely the guts becoming smaller

01:47:09.860 | because the food is becoming softer

01:47:11.980 | and much more easy to digest.

01:47:13.620 | So you don't have to work so hard in your body to digest it.

01:47:17.200 | And as I say, a commitment to sleeping on the ground,

01:47:21.260 | which I think you'd be absolutely crazy to do nowadays

01:47:25.620 | on a moonless night in the middle of Serengeti

01:47:29.820 | unless you had fire.

01:47:31.260 | I've slept out quite a lot in various parts of Africa

01:47:34.420 | in the bush and you will not catch me

01:47:37.940 | just lying on the ground in an area with lots of predators

01:47:42.460 | unless I got a fire with me.

01:47:43.940 | - You're going to get eaten.

01:47:46.140 | - You're gonna get terrified and you're gonna get eaten.

01:47:49.120 | - Okay, so there's a million questions I wanna ask.

01:47:51.980 | So one, is it very naturally coupled

01:47:55.820 | the discovery of controlled fire and cooking with fire?

01:47:59.500 | Is that an obvious leap?

01:48:01.440 | - Well, here's what we know.

01:48:03.260 | We know that all the animals that we've tested

01:48:06.780 | like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw.

01:48:10.640 | So this is true for all the great apes.

01:48:13.140 | We've tested them.

01:48:14.260 | - That's fascinating, by the way.

01:48:17.340 | Why is that?

01:48:18.420 | That's just like a property of food, I suppose.

01:48:20.980 | - Yes, I think what it is is that animals are always looking

01:48:25.900 | for any kind of way to get food that is easier to digest.

01:48:31.700 | And there are various signals in the food

01:48:33.740 | such as the amount of sugar there,

01:48:35.740 | the amount of free amino acids

01:48:37.900 | 'cause the amino acids can be tasted.

01:48:40.740 | And the physical qualities of the food

01:48:44.660 | be particularly important, how tough the food is.

01:48:47.460 | Always prefer softer food provided it feels safe,

01:48:52.140 | tastes safe.

01:48:53.860 | And these kinds of sensory cues

01:48:56.980 | are all there in cooked food.

01:49:01.140 | It's soft, it doesn't have so many toxins,

01:49:04.700 | it's not so noxious to taste, easier to chew.

01:49:08.500 | So everyone loves it spontaneously.

01:49:11.940 | Your dogs and your cats prefer cooked food to raw food.

01:49:14.500 | Well, maybe you can say that's a consequence

01:49:16.580 | of domestication.

01:49:17.420 | But even, as I say, all of the great apes,

01:49:20.120 | you test naive ones and they prefer it cooked if they can.

01:49:25.940 | - So then obvious once you have fire,

01:49:28.020 | you're going to accidentally discover that food changes

01:49:31.300 | when you apply fire to it

01:49:32.540 | and then it's going to be the big crazy new fad.

01:49:37.300 | - Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth.

01:49:39.020 | I mean, if they have fire at all

01:49:41.180 | and their food rolls into it,

01:49:43.900 | five minutes later it tastes better than it did before.

01:49:46.820 | - How big of an invention from an engineering perspective

01:49:50.380 | do you think is the discovery of fire?

01:49:53.060 | Do you think for the fire to be discovered,

01:49:57.980 | for Homo erectus, Homo sapiens,

01:50:00.260 | do you think it's the greatest invention ever?

01:50:02.560 | - Yeah, I think that the control of fire

01:50:09.180 | has been ultimately responsible for essentially

01:50:14.260 | how grandiose do I want to be here?

01:50:17.540 | You know, the entire human story, going back to Homo,

01:50:21.780 | is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal.

01:50:26.280 | And perhaps the biggest way

01:50:29.060 | in which it is likely to have changed us

01:50:31.140 | is it reduced the difficulty of making a large brain.

01:50:36.140 | So, you know, the story here is that

01:50:41.220 | the constraints on brain size are energetic.

01:50:46.000 | You and I have brains that are something like

01:50:52.500 | 2.5% of our body weight.

01:50:55.820 | It consumes around 25% of all of our calories.

01:51:02.100 | So it's disproportionate.

01:51:05.480 | There are other expensive organs in our body as well,

01:51:08.600 | such as the heart.

01:51:09.740 | And what's different about the brain is that

01:51:15.920 | in addition to us being able to fuel it

01:51:18.760 | in a way that other animals can't,

01:51:21.160 | we also have reasons for wanting to have an even bigger brain

01:51:24.980 | whereas we don't want an even bigger heart.

01:51:27.080 | So what those reasons are is unclear.

01:51:31.020 | But with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain,

01:51:36.020 | cooking makes it possible

01:51:38.580 | because it's supplying more calories

01:51:42.620 | and it is enormously reducing the amount of time

01:51:46.020 | that it takes to chew your food.

01:51:48.500 | So if you were a gorilla

01:51:49.820 | and you wanted to have a bigger brain,

01:51:53.320 | you might say, "Okay, well, let's just eat some more."

01:51:56.880 | But gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day

01:52:01.880 | in the sense that they are eating for

01:52:05.760 | maybe seven or eight hours a day in some seasons.

01:52:10.480 | That's just chewing.

01:52:11.300 | And then they've got to sit around and digest their food

01:52:13.680 | because they can't just eat all the time.

01:52:15.620 | They've got to take a break

01:52:17.240 | while the food is digested in the stomach

01:52:21.640 | and then passed into the gut.

01:52:23.800 | So the stomach is already full.

01:52:25.840 | So basically gorillas are eating

01:52:29.080 | about the maximum rate already.

01:52:31.220 | So how does a gorilla get a bigger brain?

01:52:33.500 | It doesn't.

01:52:34.600 | It's actually got a smaller brain

01:52:36.080 | relative to its body size than chimpanzee does.

01:52:39.100 | And that's the basic problem for our ancestors.

01:52:44.320 | Then you come along and cook,

01:52:46.000 | and all of a sudden you can get an increased amount

01:52:49.380 | of energy from your food.

01:52:50.900 | You are spending much less energy on digesting your food.

01:52:55.540 | There are 25 bodily processes or more

01:53:00.300 | that are involved in digesting your food,

01:53:03.220 | making the acid that takes the proteins apart,

01:53:06.880 | maintaining the brush border

01:53:09.420 | where the molecules are taken across the gut wall,

01:53:13.380 | and so on.

01:53:15.020 | That all costs.

01:53:16.300 | It costs you to digest your food.

01:53:17.900 | It costs less if you cook your food.

01:53:19.580 | So you get a net gain in the amount of energy.

01:53:22.780 | And you are reducing the amount of time

01:53:25.700 | from, in our case, our ancestors,

01:53:29.100 | probably around 50% of the day chewing,

01:53:32.940 | to nowadays one hour a day chewing.

01:53:36.460 | So all of a sudden you've got hours a day

01:53:38.260 | in which to do other things,

01:53:39.820 | to use those brains that you've now enabled to grow.

01:53:44.220 | So with Homo erectus,

01:53:45.620 | you start the process of getting a bigger brain,

01:53:47.980 | and famously, throughout the whole period

01:53:50.500 | of the evolution of the genus Homo,

01:53:52.540 | you have a steadily increasing size of brain.

01:53:56.260 | Until right at the end when it actually gets smaller,

01:54:00.940 | but that's a different story.

01:54:02.460 | - Which end is this?

01:54:04.020 | Which, are we talking about Homo sapiens?

01:54:06.260 | - Yeah, with Homo sapiens,

01:54:07.840 | you get a smaller brain from,

01:54:10.660 | people haven't got it exactly down,

01:54:13.220 | but at least 30,000 years ago, it starts declining.

01:54:17.260 | And so the fascinating thing about that

01:54:20.420 | is that all domesticated animals have smaller brains

01:54:23.420 | than their wild ancestors.

01:54:25.500 | And I...

01:54:27.420 | - The domestication is intricately connected

01:54:32.820 | to this brain size, you think?

01:54:34.260 | - And exactly.

01:54:35.700 | So I think what we're seeing in humans

01:54:37.180 | is that same manifestation.

01:54:39.860 | And then the fascinating question is why?

01:54:43.380 | And the only point I would want to make about this

01:54:45.660 | is that there's no evidence that

01:54:48.860 | in the small brain domesticates,

01:54:51.740 | they're losing, say, an average about 15% of brain size.

01:54:55.620 | In the small brain domesticates

01:54:56.980 | compared to their wild ancestors,

01:54:58.420 | there's no indication of a loss of cognitive ability.

01:55:02.640 | So I think what's going on is that

01:55:07.060 | it's a younger brain, it's a more pedomorphic brain,

01:55:10.460 | and it looking like the juveniles of the ancestor,

01:55:13.920 | but just as our kids are very smart

01:55:17.480 | and can learn amazing things compared to adults,

01:55:19.900 | all they lack is wisdom and maturity,

01:55:21.860 | but in terms of sheer cognitive ability, they got it.

01:55:25.560 | And I think that's the same with domesticated animals

01:55:27.620 | compared to their wild ancestors,

01:55:28.860 | and probably therefore with Homo sapiens,

01:55:32.620 | say 30,000 years ago, compared to their ancestors.

01:55:36.860 | So we have smaller brains than Neanderthals.

01:55:39.060 | - Size, Richard, isn't everything.

01:55:43.340 | - Exactly.

01:55:44.180 | - What's the connection between fire,

01:55:47.300 | cooking, and the eating of meat?

01:55:50.460 | Which came first, do you think?

01:55:53.160 | Humans starting to enjoy the eating of meat

01:55:56.940 | or the invention of fire and the use of fire for cooking?

01:56:01.440 | - I think that fire increased the using of meat,

01:56:04.380 | but the fact that chimpanzees really like to hunt

01:56:09.380 | and kill meat, as do bonobos, certainly puts us in,

01:56:14.500 | so those two species have a common ancestor

01:56:18.260 | with us going six, seven million years ago,

01:56:20.540 | and it was from that common ancestor

01:56:22.220 | that you get the Australopithecine line.

01:56:24.140 | It's very likely, therefore, Australopithecines

01:56:26.340 | were eating meat when they could get it,

01:56:28.300 | which wouldn't be very often

01:56:29.340 | 'cause they wouldn't be very good sprinters,

01:56:31.960 | but nevertheless, they would occasionally

01:56:33.220 | be able to get some meat,

01:56:34.660 | and I bet they loved it all the time,

01:56:36.580 | and basically all primates like meat if they can get it,

01:56:39.340 | almost all of them.

01:56:40.300 | But I think fire would have been very important

01:56:44.780 | for a couple of reasons.

01:56:48.020 | One is that once you eat your food cooked,

01:56:53.020 | then you're saving yourself time.

01:56:54.660 | By saving yourself time, you can free up

01:57:00.740 | the opportunity to go and hunt more

01:57:03.540 | 'cause hunting is a high-risk, high-gain activity.

01:57:06.400 | There's every risk that you will get nothing

01:57:10.680 | on one particular afternoon that you go off

01:57:13.860 | looking for opportunities to kill,

01:57:16.580 | but it's high gain because when you do get something,

01:57:20.140 | you bring down a kudu,

01:57:21.840 | then you've got a serious amount of meat.

01:57:24.380 | What did males and females do with the time

01:57:29.140 | they were saving from not having to chew their food?

01:57:32.740 | I think that in the case of males,

01:57:35.300 | it's very reasonable to think,

01:57:36.300 | they spent a greatly increased amount of time hunting.

01:57:39.580 | So chimpanzees, they hunt maybe two or three times a month,

01:57:44.300 | and the average hunt length is 20 minutes.

01:57:46.560 | With humans, they're hunting maybe 20 times a month,

01:57:52.580 | and the average hunt length is six hours.

01:57:55.380 | Yeah, so it's a huge difference.

01:57:56.980 | - Yeah.

01:57:57.820 | - So, and that's possible because the time was available

01:58:00.460 | because they were cooking.

01:58:01.820 | - Less chewing, more hunting.

01:58:03.460 | - You got it.

01:58:04.300 | (laughing)

01:58:05.140 | The other thing is that the meat is so much nicer.

01:58:10.140 | - Yeah.

01:58:11.460 | - So when a chimpanzee kills a monkey,

01:58:14.180 | and I mean, they are so excited about killing a monkey.

01:58:17.620 | They are so excited about going into the hunt,

01:58:19.500 | and when they make the kill, then there's screams everywhere

01:58:23.940 | and some try to seize it and capture it

01:58:27.500 | and take it away from the others,

01:58:28.860 | and eventually the strongest one has it,

01:58:32.100 | and the others sit around begging

01:58:34.100 | and trying to get some and tear it off,

01:58:35.820 | and so they all love it.

01:58:37.660 | There are others who, he often goes to the top of a tree

01:58:41.540 | in order to be able to get away

01:58:42.620 | from all of these beggars and scavengers,

01:58:44.660 | and while he's there, drops of blood or little scraps

01:58:49.060 | will fall down to the bottom,

01:58:50.380 | and the junior members of society,

01:58:52.940 | the females and young and that sort of thing,

01:58:55.420 | they are racing through to find a particular leaf

01:58:58.780 | that's got a drop of blood on it so they can lick it.

01:59:00.740 | I mean, they love it.

01:59:02.180 | (laughing)

01:59:04.100 | But it takes them a lot of time to chew it.

01:59:08.100 | I mean, it's the same thing as for cooked food in general.

01:59:11.500 | So they are getting meat very slowly into their bodies,

01:59:16.500 | and there sometimes comes a time when they just say,

01:59:19.620 | I've had enough of this, I need real food,

01:59:22.020 | and they'll drop the meat and go off and eat fruit again

01:59:25.940 | because they can get fruit into their bodies

01:59:28.020 | so much faster than they can get meat.

01:59:29.980 | So once they're cooking, that problem is solved,

01:59:34.900 | and they can eat the meat so just much more readily.

01:59:37.380 | So I think that meat eating will become important

01:59:40.260 | for two reasons with cooking.

01:59:42.460 | - So the key, not to oversimplify,

01:59:45.940 | but the key moments in human history

01:59:48.620 | are with the Homo erectus, the discovery of fire

01:59:52.860 | and the use of fire for cooking,

01:59:55.300 | and then with Homo sapiens, the beta males

02:00:00.300 | killing off the alpha males so that the cooperation

02:00:03.320 | can exist, and cooperation leads to communication

02:00:07.060 | and language and ideas, the sharing of ideas,

02:00:09.540 | that kind of thing.

02:00:10.820 | - Well, yes, the only thing I would modify on that

02:00:13.780 | is that you have to ask, how is it that the beta males

02:00:17.540 | were able to kill the alpha male?

02:00:20.000 | And we now know that although chimpanzees do kill males

02:00:25.720 | within their own group sometimes,

02:00:27.820 | it's not a process of killing the alpha male.

02:00:31.300 | It's taking advantage of opportunity

02:00:33.120 | when some male gets into a bad position,

02:00:36.320 | but it's not a systematic ability to kill the alpha male.

02:00:39.420 | And you can see why, 'cause they don't have language.

02:00:42.900 | And without language, it's very difficult to know

02:00:46.520 | how confident you can be of the support of others

02:00:50.160 | against a particular individual within your own group.

02:00:53.940 | When you're attacking someone from another group,

02:00:55.700 | that problem is solved.

02:00:56.980 | You know, we all hate the, you know, those guys.

02:01:01.620 | But the alpha male has got alliances within his group.

02:01:06.620 | Some of those allies might be willing to turn against him.

02:01:10.600 | Some of them might be harboring deep feelings

02:01:13.500 | of resentment, but how does anyone else know that?

02:01:17.840 | So in other words, I think that you have to have

02:01:20.200 | some kind of language that is pretty good

02:01:23.820 | to solve the problems of gaining confidence

02:01:27.800 | that five of you say, you know, or some number

02:01:32.640 | can trust each other in this final attack.

02:01:38.560 | And, you know, even nowadays it's difficult.

02:01:41.800 | - I mean, you mentioned Stalin.

02:01:44.280 | It's like, why was everybody terrified?

02:01:48.460 | Any dictator that takes control,

02:01:50.240 | why is all of us as individuals terrified

02:01:53.280 | when you know there's millions of us?

02:01:55.180 | - That's right.

02:01:57.040 | - And so like that, we lack the language

02:02:00.060 | because our basic psychology of fear overtakes us.

02:02:04.460 | Like who can we talk to?

02:02:06.220 | Who can we talk to and not get killed ourselves?

02:02:08.660 | - Exactly, that's right.

02:02:10.460 | But do you have this intuition that some kind of language

02:02:14.180 | was developing along with this process

02:02:18.680 | of beta males taking over?

02:02:20.180 | - Yes, yes.

02:02:21.020 | I mean, once you have sufficient language

02:02:23.740 | to be able to have the beta males conspiring

02:02:25.820 | to kill the alpha male, then you have selection

02:02:30.100 | in favor of cooperation and tolerance, as we spoke about.

02:02:33.940 | And at that point, there will be increased ability

02:02:38.220 | to communicate and the language will get richer

02:02:40.020 | and better and better.

02:02:41.660 | So yes, absolutely, positive feedback loop

02:02:44.380 | once you get the situation started.

02:02:47.000 | - Can you maybe comment on the full complexity

02:02:53.060 | and richness of the human mind through this process?

02:02:55.700 | We've been casually saying cooking, fire,

02:03:00.580 | and beta males leading to cooperation.

02:03:05.580 | But how does the beauty of the human mind

02:03:09.540 | emerge from all of this?

02:03:10.660 | Is there other further steps we need to understand?

02:03:13.060 | Or is it as simple as this language emerging

02:03:16.500 | from taking over the alpha male and the cooperation?

02:03:21.260 | Or am I also over-romanticizing

02:03:23.860 | how amazing the human mind is?

02:03:25.780 | Is it just like one small step

02:03:27.660 | in a long journey of evolution?

02:03:30.260 | - Well, if the beauty of the human mind

02:03:34.600 | is the ability of us all to be creative,

02:03:39.600 | to explore, that's one kind of beauty.

02:03:47.840 | Another kind of beauty is the empathy that we can show.

02:03:55.240 | And we think of that as beautiful

02:03:58.040 | because it is a kind of rare and special ability

02:04:03.440 | compared to the sort of ordinary selfishness

02:04:08.440 | that can commonly predominate.

02:04:12.400 | I suppose we have to think of different sources

02:04:17.240 | for those two types.

02:04:19.080 | I suppose a general answer is that

02:04:24.560 | there has been selection in favor of bigger brains,

02:04:29.160 | which probably in general has been associated

02:04:31.920 | with increasing cognitive ability.

02:04:33.840 | And as that has happened,

02:04:35.840 | the complexity of life has increased

02:04:41.100 | because people have more and more complex,

02:04:45.880 | highly differentiated strategies

02:04:48.400 | in response to each other's more complex,

02:04:51.300 | highly differentiated strategies.

02:04:53.560 | We get to a point where there is deception

02:04:55.760 | and self-deception.

02:04:57.920 | There is a manipulation of ideas

02:05:02.800 | through stories that we invent

02:05:05.200 | and stories that we pass on.

02:05:07.200 | I guess all I'm wanting to say is that

02:05:12.160 | there is a world of the mind

02:05:17.200 | that evolves in response to these platforms

02:05:22.200 | that are put there.

02:05:25.880 | The platform of increasing brain size

02:05:28.720 | and therefore cognitive ability

02:05:30.120 | made possible by increased energy supply.

02:05:34.120 | The platform of cooperation and tolerance

02:05:38.960 | in a world in which there remains a lot of conflict

02:05:42.920 | and therefore a need to respond to the conflict

02:05:46.480 | and manipulate your allies appropriately.

02:05:49.080 | I don't see either kind of beauty

02:05:53.400 | that's coming sort of totally independently

02:05:54.960 | of these things.

02:05:55.880 | I don't think there's a selection

02:05:58.760 | for staring into the sunset and creating poetry.

02:06:02.640 | - Yes.

02:06:03.480 | - But I guess sexual selection,

02:06:06.240 | males wanting to impress females in different ways

02:06:10.400 | will lead to them wanting to--

02:06:13.680 | - Write poetry?

02:06:15.160 | - Well, yes, show off.

02:06:16.760 | - Yeah, in all the different ways.

02:06:18.520 | So all of these are natural consequences

02:06:20.640 | of just coming up with strategies

02:06:23.440 | of how to cooperate and how to achieve certain ends.

02:06:27.240 | So that's just like a natural--

02:06:28.920 | - Yeah, I mean, we haven't spoken about sexual selection,

02:06:31.960 | but that is a really important part of it.

02:06:34.240 | They try to out-compete each other

02:06:37.240 | normally without any physical conflict

02:06:43.080 | just in order to be able to be chosen

02:06:45.080 | by mates of the opposite sex.

02:06:46.920 | And that is certainly a major source of creativity.

02:06:51.240 | - So you've studied chimps.

02:06:56.200 | You also, all the other relatives, gorillas.

02:06:59.320 | What do you find beautiful and fascinating about chimps,

02:07:01.920 | about gorillas, about humans?

02:07:03.780 | Maybe you can paint the whole picture of that evolutionary,

02:07:07.120 | that little local pocket of the evolutionary tree.

02:07:09.920 | How are we related?

02:07:12.260 | What is the common ancestor?

02:07:14.200 | What are the interesting differences?

02:07:15.720 | I know I'm asking a million questions,

02:07:17.320 | but can you paint a map of what are chimps, gorillas,

02:07:22.320 | and humans, like how we're related

02:07:25.160 | and what you find fascinating about each?

02:07:27.360 | - In Africa, straddling the equator,

02:07:32.720 | there is a strip of rainforest

02:07:37.280 | that relies on the combination of high temperatures

02:07:42.280 | and rainfall that you get around the equator.

02:07:45.960 | That rainforest goes into about 22 countries.

02:07:50.740 | And throughout those countries, you have chimpanzees,

02:07:55.120 | although they've gone extinct in two of them.

02:07:57.320 | In just a fraction of them,

02:08:02.760 | but it was five countries,

02:08:04.920 | you've got gorillas where there are mountains.

02:08:09.920 | And in one country on the left bank of the Great Congo River

02:08:14.560 | you have bonobos.

02:08:15.880 | So in the African forest, you've got these three African apes,

02:08:20.840 | the only African apes,

02:08:22.140 | all of which are very similar

02:08:26.240 | in much of their way of life.

02:08:30.400 | They walk on their knuckles through the forest,

02:08:33.000 | looking for fruit trees and eating herbs

02:08:37.200 | when they can't find fruits.

02:08:41.320 | Gorillas represent the oldest chain.

02:08:46.040 | So about 10 million years ago,

02:08:49.000 | maybe as recently as eight million years ago,

02:08:51.760 | the ancestor of gorillas broke off

02:08:54.040 | from the ancestor leading to chimps and bonobos and humans.

02:08:57.300 | So they've probably remained very similar now

02:09:00.800 | to what they were then.

02:09:04.680 | They were probably the largest apes

02:09:08.960 | living in montane areas

02:09:11.000 | and spending more time eating just herbs, stems,

02:09:16.000 | not so vitally dependent on fruit

02:09:21.200 | and living in, if it was like the present,

02:09:26.840 | groups up to about 50 stable groups

02:09:30.620 | with one alpha male who was in charge.

02:09:37.000 | Gorillas are wonderfully slow and inquisitive

02:09:42.000 | compared to chimps and bonobos.

02:09:46.400 | I had the privilege of spending a week or two

02:09:52.320 | with gorillas at Dianne Fossey's camp

02:09:57.960 | before she was murdered.

02:10:00.120 | And I went out with two women, Kelly and Barb,

02:10:06.960 | to a particular group.

02:10:09.320 | And there was a young female in the group called Simba.

02:10:14.120 | And Simba approached us and stared at the two women.

02:10:18.280 | And then she came towards me

02:10:20.920 | and she very deliberately reached out her knuckles

02:10:25.920 | and touched me on the forehead.

02:10:28.520 | She was watched in doing this by a young male

02:10:34.200 | who was quite keen on her.

02:10:36.040 | And he was called Digit.

02:10:38.000 | And about five minutes later,

02:10:40.320 | Digit stood in front of us on the path.

02:10:44.120 | And Kelly was in front of me.

02:10:46.920 | And then there was Barb and then there was me.

02:10:50.200 | And he came charging down the path

02:10:51.840 | and he sidestepped around Kelly

02:10:53.840 | and he sidestepped around Barb.

02:10:56.040 | And me, he just knocked with his arm

02:10:59.560 | and sent me flying about five yards into the bushes.

02:11:02.660 | (Dave laughing)

02:11:04.600 | And I loved the way that that was a very deliberate response

02:11:08.880 | and I loved the way that Simba had been so interested in me

02:11:11.960 | and held my eye.

02:11:14.360 | Chimps and bonobos never hold your eye,

02:11:17.000 | but gorillas really look as though

02:11:18.760 | they're trying to sort of figure out,

02:11:20.000 | what are you thinking about?

02:11:21.440 | That was a species that goes back

02:11:27.600 | for something like 10 million years.

02:11:30.040 | - In that situation, was there a game being played?

02:11:34.640 | - Well, I mean, I felt that Digit was telling me,

02:11:38.440 | I don't want you messing with Simba.

02:11:40.560 | - But was Simba using you?

02:11:43.760 | - Oh, I see.

02:11:44.840 | Well, that's a fun idea.

02:11:46.520 | I don't see why she should be using me,

02:11:48.360 | but you mean testing how strongly

02:11:51.200 | Digit was prepared to intervene.

02:11:53.240 | - Yeah, exactly.

02:11:54.080 | - Oh, that's come straight out of

02:11:56.440 | a sort of adolescent high school playbook.

02:11:58.320 | - All right, well, that's all.

02:11:59.800 | - No, no, no, there's nothing wrong with it for that.

02:12:02.720 | - Yeah, I don't know, I never thought of that,

02:12:05.040 | and you never know.

02:12:06.840 | (Luke laughs)

02:12:08.160 | It's possible.

02:12:09.800 | - So, yeah, so, okay, so this is an ancient branch

02:12:14.160 | of the evolutionary tree, this gorilla that led to gorillas.

02:12:17.800 | - Gorillas.

02:12:19.200 | So then the next thing that happened

02:12:20.720 | on the evolutionary tree was six or seven million years ago,

02:12:23.760 | when you have the line between chimps and bonobos

02:12:30.040 | on the one hand and humans on the other splitting.

02:12:34.160 | And basically what happened is that at that point,

02:12:36.880 | a chimp-like ancestor leaves the forest,

02:12:40.760 | gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts,

02:12:45.240 | and that becomes the Australopithecines,

02:12:46.720 | and meanwhile, the chimpanzees and bonobo ancestor

02:12:50.880 | continues in the forest.

02:12:52.160 | And later what happens is that one branch of that

02:12:57.720 | crosses the Congo River and becomes a bonobos.

02:13:00.020 | That was only about 2 million years ago,

02:13:02.840 | maybe 1 million years ago.

02:13:04.140 | Now, the chimps that remained in the forest

02:13:07.520 | throughout this time and occupied all the countries

02:13:09.760 | across from West to East Africa now,

02:13:12.520 | again, we assume that they're pretty similar

02:13:16.000 | to the ones that live nowadays,

02:13:18.560 | where there's some variation from West to East.

02:13:21.840 | And these are animals that live in social communities

02:13:25.840 | of between say 20 and 200.

02:13:29.880 | They have a lot of them in one group,

02:13:32.360 | but they never come together in a single unit.

02:13:35.040 | They share an area, a community territory,

02:13:39.960 | and that area is defended by males,

02:13:41.800 | and within it females wander

02:13:43.800 | and bring up their young independently.

02:13:46.120 | And the females are very scared about the possibility

02:13:53.140 | that males will be mean to their infants.

02:13:55.820 | And in order to avoid them doing that,

02:13:58.640 | they do their best to mate with every single male

02:14:02.740 | in the group multiple times,

02:14:04.700 | as if to give a memory in that male of,

02:14:07.460 | "Yeah, yeah, I reminded you,

02:14:08.980 | so I'm not gonna be mean to your baby."

02:14:11.600 | So what's wonderful about chimps?

02:14:12.960 | Well, as we've spoken about them,

02:14:15.220 | they are creative and amazingly human-like,

02:14:20.140 | but I love the sort of the quiet moments

02:14:22.820 | and here's one.

02:14:24.100 | I've got two chimps who are grooming each other

02:14:30.780 | on a day when they are utterly exhausted.

02:14:33.680 | They've walked 11 kilometers the day before,

02:14:37.760 | up and down hills.

02:14:39.840 | And on this particular day,

02:14:42.180 | all they do is they get to one tree

02:14:44.380 | and they eat from that tree.

02:14:45.820 | And other than that, they only walk about 100 yards

02:14:48.500 | and they go back to sleep in the nest

02:14:50.340 | in which they woke up.

02:14:52.500 | So they're utterly exhausted

02:14:53.860 | and they're just eating nonstop

02:14:56.700 | 'cause they're trying to recover their energy.

02:14:59.900 | And this is Hugh and Charlie.

02:15:02.860 | And we think they were probably brothers,

02:15:04.420 | though we never actually got the genetic evidence

02:15:06.820 | to prove it.

02:15:08.540 | Well, I never remember now who it is,

02:15:11.660 | but let's say that they both come down from the tree

02:15:16.660 | and they're both carrying branches of the food

02:15:22.620 | or actually seeds from these branches.

02:15:25.100 | They're both engaged even in the midday sun

02:15:28.260 | when they want to come down

02:15:29.820 | and unshade themselves for a bit on the ground.

02:15:33.160 | They're still eating,

02:15:34.900 | but then Charlie finishes his branch

02:15:38.180 | and he starts grooming Hugh.

02:15:41.180 | And Hugh continues eating from his branch.

02:15:48.900 | Charlie eventually gets bored with this

02:15:51.580 | after a few minutes and he reaches out

02:15:55.380 | and he lifts the branch from which Hugh

02:15:58.980 | is still taking seeds and puts it over his head

02:16:03.060 | and puts it behind his back

02:16:05.100 | as far as possible away from Hugh.

02:16:07.620 | Hugh doesn't do anything.

02:16:10.660 | He just finishes his mouthful

02:16:12.340 | and then he turns to Charlie and grooms him.

02:16:15.020 | So this very polite way of saying,

02:16:16.700 | "Will you groom me please?" has worked.

02:16:19.820 | Then Hugh grooms around Charlie's back

02:16:24.820 | and around to the right side

02:16:28.380 | and then down his arm to a point

02:16:30.060 | where he can reach the branch again.

02:16:33.060 | And then he picks up the branch and continues.

02:16:36.140 | - Nonchalantly.

02:16:37.220 | - Right. - Yeah.

02:16:38.140 | - So in other words,

02:16:39.820 | a very sort of simple little strategy,

02:16:42.020 | but it just shows the courtesy

02:16:43.900 | with which they can treat each other.

02:16:47.060 | And the days I love with chimps,

02:16:49.340 | so when you see that sort of thing,

02:16:50.460 | or when you see mothers just lying

02:16:52.660 | in a sunlit patch in the forest

02:16:55.220 | with their babies bouncing on top of them,

02:16:58.140 | just having a wonderful, peaceful time.

02:17:01.460 | And that's what most of their lives are like.

02:17:04.460 | So chimpanzees are the species

02:17:09.620 | that kind of unites the rest of the apes

02:17:11.900 | because a gorilla is in many ways

02:17:14.780 | just a big version of a chimpanzee.

02:17:16.500 | If you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee

02:17:19.100 | in your mind to be bigger,

02:17:20.220 | it basically turns into a gorilla.

02:17:22.540 | And then bonobos on the left bank of the Congo River

02:17:26.460 | are like a domesticated form of a chimpanzee,

02:17:32.020 | but obviously humans didn't domesticate them,

02:17:33.580 | so they're self-domesticated.

02:17:35.260 | They are less aggressive

02:17:37.020 | and they show all the marks of domestication

02:17:39.780 | that domestication animals do compared to wild animals

02:17:43.140 | in their bones.

02:17:44.660 | So they have reduced differences between males and females

02:17:47.540 | in which the males are more like females,

02:17:49.100 | they have smaller brains,

02:17:50.180 | they have shorter faces,

02:17:52.980 | smaller teeth and smaller bodies.

02:17:55.580 | All the things that domesticated animals show.

02:17:57.740 | And bonobos live in this environment

02:18:01.300 | in a strikingly peaceful way compared to the chimpanzees.

02:18:05.460 | There's no indication

02:18:07.660 | that they will have these aggressive kills

02:18:10.580 | and enough data now to show

02:18:12.500 | that there's a statistical difference

02:18:13.980 | in the frequency at which it would happen.

02:18:16.460 | And bonobos are famously erotic.

02:18:21.460 | The females have enlarged sexual parts,

02:18:26.660 | which swell to a particularly large size

02:18:30.340 | compared to the female chimpanzees.

02:18:33.740 | And the females have a lot of interactions

02:18:37.420 | with each other in which they excitedly

02:18:40.180 | rub their clitorises together

02:18:42.060 | and appear to have orgasms.

02:18:45.340 | And these occur in the context

02:18:47.580 | of some kind of social tension.

02:18:52.420 | And they sometimes happen before,

02:18:53.900 | sometimes happen after the social tension,

02:18:55.780 | and they seem to be devices, these interactions,

02:18:59.460 | for ensuring that everyone's friends

02:19:02.300 | and reducing the chances

02:19:03.940 | that they're actually going to get into a fight.

02:19:05.540 | - So it's a kind of a conflict resolution

02:19:08.660 | through sex or some kind of pleasurable sexual experience.

02:19:13.100 | - Well, it's often characterised as make love, not war.

02:19:15.540 | That's right. - Make love, not war.

02:19:17.380 | Okay.

02:19:19.100 | You mentioned to me offline

02:19:22.940 | that you have a deep love for nature.

02:19:25.580 | If we look at the world today,

02:19:28.380 | how can we ensure that the beautiful parts of nature

02:19:35.020 | remain a big part of our lives as human beings

02:19:39.660 | in the way we think about it,

02:19:41.060 | in the way we also keep it around, preserve it?

02:19:46.060 | You know, we keep it part of our minds

02:19:47.940 | and part of our world.

02:19:49.060 | - It's a very difficult question

02:19:55.100 | because every time there is a conflict

02:19:58.180 | between conservation of a natural habitat

02:20:02.180 | and allowing people to get that little bit of extra food

02:20:07.100 | for their babies,

02:20:08.420 | then naturally the tendency is for the humans to win.

02:20:13.100 | So we have this steady erosion

02:20:17.660 | in the face of tremendous efforts to conserve nature.

02:20:22.220 | We have a continuing steady erosion of habitats

02:20:25.980 | and all the species,

02:20:27.980 | and the numbers are always in the wrong direction.

02:20:31.740 | Occasionally you get sort of wonderful little examples

02:20:34.620 | of something being saved,

02:20:36.500 | but the overall trend is clear.

02:20:39.340 | And it's very difficult to see how one can ever escape that

02:20:43.060 | because it's not human.

02:20:45.260 | Now that we are essentially a single tribe

02:20:49.380 | to want to save an elephant,

02:20:53.740 | if it means killing 20 humans.

02:20:57.660 | So I think the only way in which we can really conserve

02:21:02.260 | is if we put tremendous effort

02:21:06.580 | into conserving the very best representative areas of nature.

02:21:11.580 | Often this will be the national parks that already exist.

02:21:18.900 | And what we have to do is to make them so valuable

02:21:22.740 | that actually it is worth it in terms of human survival

02:21:26.620 | to be able to keep those sorts of places.

02:21:29.060 | And that's the attitude that my colleagues and I

02:21:33.820 | have taken in Uganda,

02:21:34.860 | where we want to keep the Kibale National Park alive,

02:21:39.860 | which has got the largest population of chimpanzees

02:21:42.540 | in Uganda, and it's got elephants and wonderful birds

02:21:45.380 | and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on,

02:21:47.900 | and visitors, and lots and lots of visitors.

02:21:52.340 | It may be that we're going to have to have huge increases

02:21:55.780 | in the amount of charges that you pay for ecotourism,

02:21:59.780 | and you need to make sure that ecotourism is done right.

02:22:03.460 | In other places, you will keep nature there

02:22:07.260 | because it's useful for maintaining the climate,

02:22:12.260 | bringing rain.

02:22:14.680 | Maybe you can in some places

02:22:18.860 | convince people of the sheer sort of aesthetics

02:22:25.660 | of keeping nature that even over the long-term,

02:22:30.460 | presidents whose job it is to look for the future

02:22:35.460 | of the country will be persuaded

02:22:38.420 | that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons.

02:22:41.440 | But overall, what is required is for people

02:22:46.440 | in the rich countries to do much more investment

02:22:52.460 | than they have so far in maintaining both the natural places

02:22:57.460 | in their own countries and in the tropics.

02:23:02.900 | And if you look at Africa,

02:23:04.260 | the population trends are that Nigeria

02:23:10.300 | may become the most populous country in the world,

02:23:13.860 | I think, within a century.

02:23:15.940 | The future of African habitats,

02:23:21.060 | it's clear what's gonna happen in general.

02:23:23.300 | There's gonna be a huge conversion

02:23:25.380 | towards agricultural land.

02:23:26.840 | I heard Ed Wilson speak years ago

02:23:33.460 | about the prospect of the entire globe

02:23:37.940 | being turned into a single human feedlot.

02:23:41.220 | It's gonna take a lot to avoid that.

02:23:46.020 | He is out there calling for half the growth

02:23:51.020 | of the earth to be devoted to nature.

02:23:54.380 | It's incredibly ambitious and incredibly optimistic.

02:23:57.620 | But unless you have really exciting goals,

02:24:01.300 | probably nothing will be achieved.

02:24:03.000 | - Yeah, I mean, there's something to me,

02:24:07.260 | like when I visit New York and I see Central Park

02:24:09.620 | and somehow constructed a situation

02:24:11.780 | where you preserve this park in the middle,

02:24:14.500 | probably some of the most expensive land in the world.

02:24:17.940 | The fact that that's possible gives me hope

02:24:19.940 | that you can do this kind of preservation

02:24:21.940 | at a global scale.

02:24:23.160 | Perhaps for just the aesthetic reasons

02:24:26.060 | of just valuing the beauty

02:24:29.140 | and just respecting our origins

02:24:32.340 | of having come from the earth.

02:24:35.500 | - We are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees,

02:24:39.580 | bonobos, and gorillas as our close relatives

02:24:43.540 | still living on the earth.

02:24:44.580 | You know, we're unlucky that we don't have

02:24:45.940 | Australopithecines and other species of homo,

02:24:48.380 | but we're still lucky to have those

02:24:49.940 | because they are incredibly closely related to us

02:24:52.220 | compared to what most animals have.

02:24:54.540 | You know, there are many animals

02:24:55.500 | that don't have any close relatives to them on the earth,

02:24:59.060 | but not only are they relatively close,

02:25:01.340 | but they teach us so much about ourselves.

02:25:04.100 | You know, the similarities between them and ourselves

02:25:07.220 | raise questions that we can then test

02:25:09.780 | about the extent to which our own behavioral propensities

02:25:14.180 | are derived from the same evolutionary stock

02:25:17.100 | as in those great apes.

02:25:19.300 | Well, how much is that worth?

02:25:21.140 | You know, I mean, we could spend billions

02:25:23.180 | going to the Mars to find evidence of bacteria there,

02:25:28.180 | and that's fascinating too,

02:25:30.700 | but we should be spending billions on this earth

02:25:33.460 | in order to make sure that we have,

02:25:36.980 | I don't know how to say it, you know,

02:25:40.180 | substantial representative populations

02:25:43.620 | of these close relatives.

02:25:45.420 | - Yeah, that we can meet.

02:25:46.980 | - There's something like space tourism.

02:25:49.420 | When you go out into space and you look back down on earth,

02:25:53.380 | that's to a lot of people, including myself, is worth a lot.

02:25:57.260 | But why is that worth a lot?

02:25:59.660 | Is because it's humbling and beautiful

02:26:04.660 | in the same way that meeting our close evolutionary relatives

02:26:10.340 | is humbling and beautiful.

02:26:13.300 | Just to know that this is what we come from.

02:26:17.860 | This is who we are.

02:26:19.340 | Not just for the understanding or the science of it,

02:26:21.580 | but just like something about just the beauty

02:26:23.660 | of witnessing this.

02:26:24.940 | And again, it's both humbling and empowering

02:26:30.940 | that this place is fragile and we're damn lucky to be here.

02:26:34.640 | - Yes, and unfortunately,

02:26:37.700 | the problems are incredibly difficult to solve

02:26:40.420 | and there is no one solver.

02:26:42.140 | You know, it has to happen from a network

02:26:44.660 | of potentially cooperating people.

02:26:47.780 | But I mean, you're so right about it being daunting

02:26:49.780 | to think about what it looks like from space.

02:26:52.380 | And I love the view that Herman Muller expressed

02:26:55.380 | of being able to go out from space.

02:26:58.980 | And he said, "The whole of life would look like

02:27:02.180 | "a kind of rust on the planet."

02:27:04.440 | (laughing)

02:27:06.420 | - Yeah, so the aliens were to visit.

02:27:08.440 | I'm not sure they would notice the life.

02:27:10.260 | They would probably notice the trees or ocean.

02:27:15.260 | It's a kind of rust.

02:27:17.500 | But let me ask the big, ridiculous, philosophical question.

02:27:21.460 | What is the meaning of this rust?

02:27:23.740 | What do you think is the meaning of life on Earth?

02:27:26.280 | What is the meaning of our human, intelligent life?

02:27:28.940 | - Well, I think it's very clear

02:27:32.140 | that we have an evolutionary story

02:27:35.860 | that is only getting challenged around the edges.

02:27:40.860 | We have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life.

02:27:44.820 | And the meaning is, we are here as a consequence

02:27:49.820 | of materialistic processes

02:27:53.340 | that began, in our sense,

02:27:59.380 | with the establishment of the Earth

02:28:03.060 | four and a half billion years ago, whatever it was,

02:28:04.900 | and then water and oxygen and so on.

02:28:08.860 | And we are the astonishing consequence

02:28:13.140 | of the evolution of cells and multicellular organisms.

02:28:21.220 | The word random is the wrong word to use

02:28:27.500 | unless you understand what it means.

02:28:29.400 | It didn't happen by chance,

02:28:33.740 | but a lot of random events had to happen

02:28:35.780 | to make this possible.

02:28:37.660 | And those random events, of course,

02:28:39.380 | are the production of appropriate mutations.

02:28:42.380 | But the meaning of life is, there is no meaning.

02:28:48.220 | The really big mystery of life is, why is there a universe?

02:28:53.980 | - And that same why propagates itself

02:28:57.700 | through the whole of it, through the whole process of it

02:29:01.340 | for the emergence of planets, the emergence,

02:29:03.980 | first of all, of galaxies, of star systems, of planets,

02:29:08.980 | of the proteins required to construct

02:29:12.300 | the single-cell organisms, and the single-cell organism

02:29:15.180 | becoming complex organisms, and some of the clever fish

02:29:19.500 | crawling out onto the land and the whole of it.

02:29:23.100 | And then there's fire, some clever guy or lady

02:29:27.460 | invented fire, and then now here we are.

02:29:31.020 | It just does seem, speaking as a human,

02:29:34.460 | kind of special that we're able to reflect

02:29:36.300 | on the whole thing, where the whole--

02:29:38.260 | - Wonderful story, so much more interesting

02:29:40.060 | than the stories produced by religion.

02:29:42.180 | - (laughs) Yeah, it is beautiful,

02:29:44.420 | but it just seems special that us humans

02:29:46.500 | are able to write religions and construct stories.

02:29:51.060 | - Yeah, right. - And also do science.

02:29:54.100 | That seems kind of amazing.

02:29:58.400 | It seems like the universe is such

02:30:03.400 | that it creates beings like us

02:30:08.220 | that are able to investigate it.

02:30:10.960 | And that's why there's this longing for a why.

02:30:16.700 | That's just, that's such a beautiful little pocket

02:30:20.860 | of complexity created by the universe.

02:30:23.280 | It seems like there should be a why,

02:30:27.380 | but maybe there's just an infinite number of universes,

02:30:29.700 | and this is the one that led to this particular

02:30:33.960 | set of humans. - Even without

02:30:35.260 | an infinite number of universes,

02:30:36.460 | I bet there's an infinite number of intelligent beings.

02:30:38.980 | - Throughout this universe. - Yeah.

02:30:40.900 | Now that we know how many planets

02:30:43.020 | have the right sort of conditions,

02:30:44.820 | which is what, I can't remember, a lot.

02:30:48.380 | Some significant percentage of all planets.

02:30:50.640 | Then there are apparently billions of planets,

02:30:55.580 | and there's every, I mean,

02:30:58.780 | things happen so quickly on Earth.

02:31:00.380 | Once you got water, then you got life,

02:31:03.060 | and it did not take long for life to evolve

02:31:08.060 | in the big scheme of things.

02:31:09.980 | - And if you think, you look out there,

02:31:12.260 | say there's a nearly infinite number

02:31:14.700 | of intelligent civilizations,

02:31:16.620 | one dimension you could look at

02:31:18.520 | is the proclivity to violence they have.

02:31:21.780 | And it's interesting to think what level of violence

02:31:25.820 | is useful for extending the life of a civilization.

02:31:30.820 | So we have a particular set of violence in our history.

02:31:34.020 | Maybe being too peaceful is a problem in the early days.

02:31:38.340 | Maybe being too violent, quite obviously, is a problem.

02:31:42.220 | So you look at viruses.

02:31:43.440 | What kind of viruses on Earth propagate and succeed?

02:31:47.220 | If you're too deadly, that's a big problem.

02:31:50.060 | If you're not deadly enough, that's also a problem.

02:31:52.720 | So that is a fascinating exploration of--

02:31:56.180 | - I don't see any evidence.

02:31:57.820 | I don't see where you're coming from

02:31:59.300 | when you say that being too peaceful is a problem.

02:32:02.260 | - Well, because, so I'll say it this way.

02:32:06.020 | Death is a way to get rid of suboptimal solutions.

02:32:11.020 | So violence--

02:32:14.020 | - But there's lots of ways to die without violence.

02:32:16.220 | - Right.

02:32:17.100 | To me, death in itself is violence.

02:32:19.580 | And you can, I mean, a lot of people that talk about,

02:32:23.380 | for example, longevity and disease

02:32:25.900 | and all that kind of stuff,

02:32:26.740 | they see death is a, this is the way they talk about it.

02:32:31.340 | And it's interesting to philosophically think of it that way.

02:32:33.740 | It's just, death is, it's like mass murder that's happening.

02:32:37.660 | And it's like people that try to,

02:32:39.800 | from a biological perspective, help extend life,

02:32:42.940 | they see that you're helping the most,

02:32:47.860 | the biggest atrocity in the history of human civilization

02:32:51.140 | from their perspective is not allocating all our resources

02:32:56.140 | to solving death, right?

02:32:59.520 | Because death is a kind of violence.

02:33:02.040 | It is a kind of murder that we're allowing

02:33:04.820 | to be committed on us by nature.

02:33:06.900 | And so the flip side of that is death makes way

02:33:10.940 | for new life, for new ideas.

02:33:14.100 | And so that's--

02:33:14.940 | - Yes, but that's got nothing to do

02:33:16.500 | with peace versus war.

02:33:18.940 | You know, I mean, you have animals

02:33:20.380 | that are very, very peaceful,

02:33:21.760 | but they evolve just in the same way as other animals do.

02:33:25.100 | They just don't do it with death caused by violence.

02:33:28.560 | And violent death is premature death, surely.

02:33:31.180 | I mean, I don't mind about people dying.

02:33:33.660 | You know, what I mind about is people dying

02:33:37.260 | in their youth, middle age.

02:33:40.940 | - Prematurely.

02:33:42.020 | But some people would say all death is premature.

02:33:44.940 | It certainly feels that way.

02:33:46.660 | It's died too soon.

02:33:49.780 | Anyone who's ever died, died too soon.

02:33:52.220 | - Yeah, well, I mean, if we can become like sequoias

02:33:55.420 | and live for hundreds of years or thousands of years,

02:33:58.500 | that'd be great.

02:33:59.340 | - Do you ponder your own mortality?

02:34:02.580 | Are you afraid of death?

02:34:04.140 | - I don't think I'm afraid of it.

02:34:05.940 | You know, I'm reconciled to the fact it's gonna happen.

02:34:08.740 | I just feel frustrated because I enjoy life, you know,

02:34:13.900 | and I don't want to leave the party.

02:34:17.060 | - Yeah, it's kind of a fun party.

02:34:22.140 | I don't wanna leave the party either.

02:34:25.540 | So however we got here, we made one heck of an awesome party

02:34:28.660 | and you're right.

02:34:29.660 | Having a party with a little bit less violence in it

02:34:33.700 | is an even more fun party.

02:34:36.100 | Richard, I'm deeply honored that you spent time

02:34:38.500 | with me today.

02:34:39.340 | Your work is amazing.

02:34:40.660 | It includes some of the deepest thinking

02:34:43.780 | about our human history and the nature

02:34:46.900 | of human civilization.

02:34:47.940 | So again, thank you so much for talking today.

02:34:50.580 | It's an honor.

02:34:51.460 | - No, thanks for your great questions.

02:34:52.540 | It was a really fun conversation.

02:34:54.580 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:34:56.460 | with Richard Frangham.

02:34:58.380 | To support this podcast,

02:34:59.540 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:35:02.420 | And now let me leave you with some words from Jane Goodall.

02:35:05.900 | The greatest danger to our future is apathy.

02:35:10.300 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:35:13.220 | (upbeat music)

02:35:15.820 | (upbeat music)

02:35:18.420 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Richard Wrangham: Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #229

Chapters