Transcript for #229 – Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution

Well, I haven't said exactly that we're less violent than chimps. What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence. One stems from proactive aggression and the other stems from reactive aggression. Proactive aggression is planned aggression. Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive. It's reactive because it takes place in seconds after the threat. And the thing that is really striking about humans compared to our close relatives is the great reduction in the degree of of reactive aggression. So we are far less violent than chimps when prompted by some relative in minor threat within our own society. And the way I judge that is with not super satisfactory data, but the The study which is particularly striking is one of people living as hunter-gatherers in a really upsetting kind of environment, namely people in Australia, living in a place where they got a lot of alcohol abuse. There's a lot of domestic violence. It's all a sort of a society that is as bad from the point of view of violence as an ordinary society can get. There's excellent data on the frequency which people actually have physical violence and hit each other. And we can compare that to data from several different sites comparing, we're looking at chimpanzee and Bonobo violence. difference is between two and three orders of magnitude, the frequency with which chimps and bonobos hid each other, chase each other, charge each other, physically engage, is something between 500 and 1000 times higher than in humans. So there's something just amazing about us, and you know, there's to be recognised for centuries, Aristotle drew attention to the fact that we behave in many ways, like domestic age animals, because we're so unviolent. But people say, well, what about the hideous engagements of this 20th century? The first and second world war and much else besides. And that is all proactive violence. All of that is gangs of people making deliberate decisions to go off an attack. in circumstances which ideally the attackers are going to be able to make their kills and then get out of there. In other words, not a face confrontation. That's the ordinary way that arm is trying to work. And there, it turns out that humans and chimpanzees are in a very similar kind of state. There's to say, if you look at the rate of death from chimpanzees conducting proactive coalition revylons, it's very similar in many ways to what you see in humans. So when not done regulated with proactive violence, it's just this reactive violence that is strikingly reduced in humans.

Indeed, they do. So this was discovered first in 1974. It was observed first in 1974, which was about the time that the first major study of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall had been going for something like five years during the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went. until then they'd been observed at a feeding station where Jane was luring them into to be observed by seeing bananas, which is great. She learned a lot, but she didn't learn what was happening at the edges of their ranges. So five years later, it became very obvious that there was hostile relationships between groups. And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form of the kind of hostile relationships that you see in many animals, which is a bunch of chimps in this case, shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders. But dramatically, in addition to that, there is a second kind of interaction. And that is when a party of chimpanzees makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory, silently, and then search for members of neighboring groups. And what they're searching for is a lone individual. So I've been with chimps when they've heard a loan individual under these circumstances or what they think is a loan one and they touch each other and look at each other and then charge forward very excited and then while they're charging all of a sudden the place where they heard a lone call erupts with a volley of calls. It was just one calling out of a larger party. And our chimps put on the brakes and scoot back for safety into their territory. But if in fact they do find a lone individual and they can sneak up to them Then they make deliberate attack. They're hunting. They're stalking and hunting and then they impose terrible damage, which typically ends in a kill straight away, but it might end up with the victim. so damaged that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later. So that was a very dramatic discovery because it really made people realise for the first time that Conrad Lorenz had been wrong when in the 1960s in his famous book on aggression he said warfare is restricted to humans animals do not deliberately kill each other. Well now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals that deliberately kill each other and they always do so under essentially the same circumstances which is when they feel safe doing it. So humans feel safe doing it when they got a weapon. Animals feel safe when they have a coalition. A coalition that has overwhelming power compared to the victim. And so wolves will do that, and lions will do that, and hyenas will do that, and chimpanzees will do it, and humans do it too.

No, they're very keen to avoid those kinds of battles. But occasionally, they can make a mistake. But so far, there have been no observations of anything like a battle in which both sides maintain themselves. And I think you can very confidently say that overwhelmingly what happens is that if they discover that there's several individuals on the other side, then both sides retreat. Nobody wants to get hurt. What they want to do is to hurt others.

Well, she's a wonderfully independent, courageous person, you know, who she famously began her studies not as a qualified person in terms of education, but qualified only by enthusiasm and considerable experience even in her early 20s with nature. So she's courageous in the sense of being able to take on challenges. The thing that is very impressive about her is her total fidelity to the observations. Very unwilling to extend beyond the observations. We know, waiting until they mount up and you've really got a confident picture. and tremendous attention to individuals. So, you know, that was an interesting problem from her point of view because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombe, the particular community of Kassakelo about 60 individuals, So Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganika. She was there initially with her mother and then alone for two or three years of really intense observation and then slowly joined by other people. what she discovered was that there were obvious differences in individual personality. And the difficulty about that was that when she reported this to the larger scientific world initially her advisors at Cambridge, they said, well, you know, we know not a handler at, because you've got to treat all these animals as the same, basically, because There is no research tradition of thinking about personalities. Well, now, whatever it is, 60 years later, the study of personalities is a very rich part of the study on all behavior. Anyway, the important point in terms of, you know, what she like is that she stuck to her guns and she absolutely insisted that, you know, we have to show, describe in great detail the differences in personality among these individuals and then you can leave it to the evolution of biologists to think about what it means.

Yes, I mean, it's particularly difficult with gyms because gyms are so similar to humans in their behavior that it's very easy to make those projections, as you say. The process involves making very clear definitions of of what a behavior is. You know, aggression can be defined in terms of a forceful hit, a bite, and so on. And writing down every time these things happened. And then slowly tossing up the numbers of times that they happen from individual A towards individuals BCD and E. So that you build up a very concrete picture rather than interpreting at any point and stopping and saying, well, they seem to be rather aggressive. So the formal system is that you build up a pattern of the relationships based on a description of the different types of interactions, the aggressive and the friendly interactions and all of these are defined in concrete. And so from that you extract a pattern of relationships and the relationships can be defined as, you know, relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive, based on the frequency of these types of interactions. And so one can talk in terms of individuals having a relationship, which on the scores of friendliness is to stand deviations outside the mean.

Well, I mean, obviously, the friendly ones would be the ones who have exceptionally high rates of spending time close to each other, of touching each other in a gentle way, of grooming each other, and by the way, finding that those things are correlated with each other. So it's possible to define a friendship with the capital F in a very systematic way and to compare that between individuals but also between communities of chimpanzees and between different species. So that you know we can say that in some species individuals have friends and others they don't at all.

It's a very reasonable question, and of course, Jane in those early years, I think she's willing now to talk about the fact that she regrets to some extent, how close she became. And the problem is not just from the humans, the problem is from the chimpanzees as well, because they do things that are extremely affectionate, if you like. You know, at one point Jane offered a ripe fruit to a chimpanzee called David Grabeard. David Grabeard took it and squeezed her hand. As if to say thank you. I think you gave it back if I remember rightly.

All right.

You know, it was a gentle squeeze. I mean, Jim has his good squeeze. You're very hard as occasionally has happened. Some chimps are aggressive to people and others are friendly and the ones that are friendly tend to be rather sympathetic characters because they might be ones who are having problems in their own society. You know, so, Jo Mio in Gombe used to come and sit next to me quite often and he was having a hard time making it in that society, you know, which I can describe to you in terms of the number of aggressive interactions if you want, you know, but just to be informed about it. So all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted. And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda for the last 30 years, we try extremely hard to impress on all of the research students who come with us that is absolutely vital that you do not fall into that temptation. Now, you know, we heard a story of one person who did reach out and touched one of our chimps. It's a very, very bad idea. Not because the chip is going to. do anything violent at the time. But because if they learn that humans are as weak physically as we are compared to them, then they can take advantage of it. And that's what happened in Gombe. So after Jane had done the very obvious thing when you first engaged in this game of allowing the infants to approach her and then tickling them and playing with them. Some of those infants had the personality of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later. And so, you know, you had an individual Frodo who was violent on a regular basis towards humans when he was adult and he was quite dangerous. And he could easily kill someone. In fact, he did kill on one person, he killed a baby. He took from a mother, a human baby, that he took off her hip when he met her on the path. So, you know, it's a reminder that we're dealing with a species that are rather human-like in the range of emotions they have, in the capacities they have, and even in the strength they have, they are in many ways stronger than humans. So it's a, you've got to be careful.

Yes, I mean it's it's very obvious with with violence as we talked about you know that they will kill they will kill not just strangers. They can kill other adults within their own group. They can kill babies that are strangers they can kill babies in their own group. So you know that This is a long-lived individual, obviously these killings can't have very often, because otherwise they'd all be dead. And we're now finding that they can live to 50 or 60 years in the wild at relatively low population density, because they're big animals eating a rather specialised kind of food, the right fruits. So it doesn't happen all the time. With friendliness, they are very strong to support each other. They very much depend on the close friendships, which they express through physical contact and particularly through grooming. So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another are my present for grooming a very common way of starting turning their back or presenting an arm or something like that and the other just ripples their fingers through the hair and that's partly just soothing and it's partly looking for parasites but mostly it's just soothing yes And the point about this is it can go on for half an hour. It can go on for sometimes even an hour. So this is an amazing, you know, a major expression of interest in somebody else.

Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s, I was in Gombe with Jengoodle and was studying feeding behaviour. But during that time, we were seeing, and I say, we, because there were hover doesn't research students all in her camp. We were discovering that chimps had this capacity for violence. The first kill happened during that time, which was of an infant and an neighboring group. And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions. And this was the start of my interest because it was such chilling evidence of an extraordinary similarity between chimps and humans. Now at that time, we didn't know very much about how chimpanzees and humans were related. chimps, gorillas, bonobos are all three big black hairy things that live in the African forests and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits and walk on their knuckles. On the old rather similar to each other. So they seem as though those three species, chimps and gorillas and bonobos, should all be each other's closest relatives and humans are something rather separate. And so any of them would be even dressed to us. subsequently we learn that actually that's not true and that there's a special relationship between humans and chimpanzees but at the time even without knowing that it was obvious that there was something very odd about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered they were making tools She had seen that they were hunting meat. She had seen that they were sharing the meat among each other. She has seen that the societies were dominated politically by males, coalitions of males. All of these things goes resonate so closely with humans. And then it turns out that in contrast to conventional wisdom at the time, the chimpanzees were capable of hunting and killing members of neighboring groups. Well, at that point, the similarities between chimps and humans become less a matter of sheer intellectual fascination than something that has a really deep meaning about our understanding of ourselves. I mean until then you can cheerfully think of humans as a species apart from the rest of nature because we are so peculiar. But when it turns out that as it turns out one of our two closest relatives has got these features that we share and that one of the features is something that is the most horrendous as well as fascinating aspect of human behavior. Then how can you resist just trying to find out what's going on?

Until we had this information about chimpanzees, it was possible to believe that the psychology behind warfare was totally the result of some kind of cultural recent cultural innovation, the dad nothing to do with our biology. Or if you'd like to discuss some you to do with sin and garden, the devil and that sort of thing. But what the chimps tell us After we think carefully about it, is that it seems undoubtedly the case that our evolutionary psychology has given us the same kind of attitude towards violence as occurred in chimpanzees. and in both species, it has evolved because of its evolutionary significance. In other words, it has been helpful to the individuals who have practiced it. Now we know that, as I mentioned, other species do this as well. In fact, wolves. which this is a really kind of a ronical observation. Conrad Lorenz, who I mentioned had been the person who thought that human aggression in the form of killing members of our own species was unique to our species. He was a great fan of wolves. He studied wolves. In captivity, he noted that wolves are very unlikely to harm each other in spats among members of the same group. What happens is that one of them will roll over and present their neck, much as you see in a dog park nowadays, and the other might put their jaws on the neck, but will not bite. Okay, so now it turns out that if you study wolves in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting for each other, they are in fierce competition. And as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves is due to being killed by other wolves, adult mortality. So it's a really serious business. The chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern of understanding animals in which you don't have an instinct for violence. What you have is an instinct if you like to use violence adaptively. And if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive. If the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be. So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent than others. Because of things like the frequency with which a large party of males is likely to meet a lone victim. And that's going to depend on the local ecology. But you know, so the overall answer to the question of what are chimps teachers is that we have to take very seriously the notion that in humans The tendency to make war is a consequence of a long-term evolutionary adaptation and not just a military ideology or some sort of local patriarchal phenomenon. And of course, you know, a reading of history, a judicious reading of history, fits that very easily because war is so complex.

If we're talking about killing, then violence in the sense of killing is very much associated with a group. And the reason is that individuals don't benefit by getting into a fight in which they risk being hurt themselves. So it's only when you have overwhelming power that the temptation to try and kill another victim rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it. The average number of chimpanzee males that attack a single male in something like 50 observations that have accumulated in the last 50 years from various different study sites is 8. 8 to 1. Now sometimes it can go as low as 3 to 1. But that's getting risky. But if you have eight, you can see what can happen. I mean, basically, you have one male on one foot, another male on another foot, another male on an arm, another male on another arm. Now you have an immobilized victim with four individuals capable of just doing the damage. So they can then move in and tear out his thorax and tear off his testicles and twist an arm into the brakes and do this, you know, appalling damage with no weapons.

Yeah, you have to understand that these things are happening at high speed in thick vegetation, mostly. So that they have not been filmed carefully. We have a few little glimpses of them from one of the people like David Watts, who's got some great video. We don't know enough to be able to say that. It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles that vary between communities, cultural styles, but it is possible. One thing that is striking is that the number of times that an individual victim has been killed immediately has been higher in Kibbali forest in Uganda than in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It's conceivable that's just chance we don't have a real numbers now, but what is this? I can't remember exact numbers, but you know 10 versus 15 or something. So maybe they damage to the point of expecting a death in one place and they just finish it off in the other, but most likely that sort of difference will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.

I can't think of any way to get it answers the question of what they know about that. I think that the way to think about the motivation is rather like the motivation in sex. So when males are interested in having sex with a female, whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans, They don't think about the fact that what this is going to do is to lead to a baby. Mostly what they're thinking about is I want to get my end away. And I think that's a similar kind of process with the chimps. What they are thinking about is I want to kill this. Yes, it's individual. And it's hard to imagine that taking the other individuals perspective and thinking about what it means for them to die is going to be an important part of that. In fact, there's reasons to think it should not be an important part of it because it might inhibit them and they don't want to be inhibited. They're more efficient they are in doing this the better. But I think it's interesting to think about this home motivational question because it does produce the surrounding thought that there has been selection in favor of enthusiasm about killing. And in our relatively gentle and deliberately moral society that we have today, it's very difficult for us to face the thought that in all of us there might have been a residue and a more than that sort of an actively an active potential. for that thought of really enjoying getting someone else. But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously by thinking of circumstances in which it would be true. that the ordinary human male would be delighted to be part of a group that was killing someone. What you've got to do is to be in a position where you're regarding the victim as dangerous and thoroughly hostile.

Yes, I mean, and that word you produced at the end is critical, I think, you know, because it would be a little bit weird, I think, to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people in your own tribe being killed. Right. I don't think we're interested in violence, violence is sake, that much. It's when you get these social boundaries set up. And in today's world, you know, happily we kind of are already one world. You know, you have to dehumanize someone to get to the point where they are really outside, you know, our recognition of a tribe at some level, which is, you know, the whole human species. But in ancient times, that would not have been true, because in ancient times, there are lots of accounts of hunters and gathers in which the appearance of a stranger would lead to an immediate response of shooting on site because what was human was the people that were in your society and the other things that actually looked like us and you know were were human in that sense were not regarded as human. So there was an automatic dehumanization of everybody that didn't speak our language or hadn't already somehow become recognized as sufficiently like us to escape the humanization context.

Yeah, I mean, that's the optimistic perspective. And the great sort of concern, of course, is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts, and then dehumanization happens, and then violence is released. As Hannah Aaron says, you know, there currently is no alternative to war, as a means of settling really important conflicts.

When I think that violence was responsible for creating human homo sapiens, And that raises the question of what homosexuality ends is. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, nowadays people begin the the sort of concept of what homo sapiens is by thinking about features that are very obviously different from all of the other species of homo. And our large brain, our very rounded cranium, a relatively small face. These are characteristics which are developed in a relatively modern way by about 170,000 years ago, so it's one of the earliest skulls in Africa that really captures that. But it has been argued that that is an episode in a process that has been started, essentially earlier, and there's no doubt that that's true. Homestopians, there's species that has been changing pretty continuously throughout the length of time, it's there. And it goes back to 300,000 years ago, 315 naturally is the time, the best estimate of a date for a series of bones from Morocco that have been dated three or four years ago at that time, and have been characterized as earliest homo sapiens. Now at that point, they are only beginning the trend of satianization and that trend consists basically of grasinalization of making our ancestors less robust, shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller brow ridge, narrower face, thinner cranium, all these things that are associated with reduced violence.

started 3 to 400,000 years ago and if you look at 170 it's got even more like us and if you look at 100 it's got more like us again and if you look at 50 it's more like us again it's all the way it's just getting more and more like the moderns. So the question is what happened between 3 to 400,000 years ago to produce homo sapiens and I think we have a pretty good answer now on the answer comes from violence and the story begins by focusing on this question Why is it that in the human species, we are unique among all primates in not having an alpha male in any group? In the sense that what we don't have is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male. And the answer that has been portrayed most richly by Christopher Bowham and whose work I've elaborated on is that only in humans do you have a system by which any male who tries to bully others? and become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha binobo or an alpha baboon or anything like that. Any male tries to do that in humans gets taken down by a coalition of beta males. That coalition?

Okay. And that's the way all our societies work now. Yes. And because individuals try to be alpha and then they get taken out.

Yes. Exactly. Okay. So, well, so at some point alpha males get taken out. Well, what alpha males are, are males who respond with high reactive violence to any challenge to their status. You see it all the time in primates. Some Peter Male thinks he's getting strong and you know, maturing in wisdom and so on, and he refuses to cow-tow to the alpha male. And the alphabet comes straight in and charges at him. Or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes or then take an opportunity to attack him. All of these primates have got a high tendency for reactive aggression. And that enables this possibility of the males. We don't. We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier. And the questions, when did that reduction happen? Well, Cut to the famous experiments by the Russian biologist, Dmitry Believ, who tried domesticating wild animals. When you domesticate wild animals, what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression. You are selecting those individuals to breed who are most willing to be approached by a human or by another member of their own species and are least likely to erupt in a reactive aggression. And you only have to do that for a few generations to discover that there are changes in the skull and those changes consist of shorter face, smaller teeth, reduced maleness or the males become increasingly female-like and reduced brain size. Well, the changes that are characteristic of domestic age animals in general compared to wild animals are all found in homosapiens compared to our, our rare ancestors. So it's a very strong signal that when we first see homosapiens, what we're seeing is evidence of a reduction in reactive aggression. And that suggests that what's happening with homosapiens is that that is the point at which there is selection against the alpha males. And therefore, the way in which this selection happened would have been the way it happens today. The beat of males take him out. So I think that Homer Sapiens is a species characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression as a kind of instrumental consequence of the suppression of the alpha male. And the story of our species is the story of how the beat of males took charge. and have been responsible for the generation of a new kind of human and incidentally for imposing on the society a new set of values. because when those be the males discovered that they could take out the previous alpha male. And continues to do so, because in every generation there'll always be some male who says, maybe I'll become the alpha male. So they just keep chopping them down. In discovering that, they also obviously discovered that they could kill anybody in the group. Three males, young males, anybody who didn't follow their values. And so this story is one of one in which the males of our species, and these would be the breeding males, have been able to impose their values on everybody else. And there are two kind of values. There's one kind of value is things that are good for the group, like thou shalt not murder. And the other kind of value is things that are good for the males. So Chaz, hey, guess what? When good food comes in, males get it first.

I'll get murdered now nowadays when when homosapiens meet homosapiens and we don't know each other initially then conflict breaks out and the more militarily able group wins you know we've seen that everywhere throughout the way age of exploration and throughout history So I'm real surprised, you know, the conventional wisdom that you see nowadays in contemporary anthropology is very reluctant to point to success in warfare as the reason why Sapiens wiped out Neanderthals within about 3,000 years, all of the Sapiens coming into Europe for 43,000 years ago. And people are much more inclined to say, well, the Nanchals wrote low population density, so they just couldn't survive the demographic. sort of sweep or that disease came in and maybe those things might have been important but far away the most obvious possibility is that Sapiens were just or powerful they had everyone agrees they had larger groups They had better weapons. They had projectile weapons, bows and arrows, to judge from the little micro-lith bits of flake, which the Andersals didn't. you know nowadays there's evidence of of interbreeding quite extensive interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals as well as with some other groups and sometimes people say well you know so they love each other they they made love not war I think they made love and war and you know wouldn't necessarily be too loving I mean But if you just follow through from typical ethnography nowadays of when Tom and the groups meet subordinate groups, they didn't know each other, then you can imagine that Neanderthal females would essentially be captured and taken into Sapiens groups.

I think you've got to distinguish between groups and within groups. I think what the world has been slowly waking up over the last several decades to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war. And that me says that it's just another example of power corrupts because when frustrated, scared, elated soldiers come upon females in a group that has been essential dehumanization of, then they get carried away by opportunity. It is not always possible to argue that this is adaptive nowadays because, you know, you get lots and lots of stories of women being abused to the point of being killed. You know, she'll be gang raped and then killed. There's lots of terrible cases of that reported and all sorts of different wars. But you can see that that could build on a pattern that would have been adaptive if happening in under such a much less extreme circumstances. The war is very extreme nowadays in the sense that you get battles in which people are sent by a military hierarchy into a war situation in which they do not feel what hunters and gathers would typically have felt, which would have been that if we attack, we have an excellent chance of getting away with it. Nowadays, you know, you're sent in across the summer or whatever it is, and there's a very high chance you will be killed, and that's totally unnatural and a novel evolutionary experience, I think. Then this sexual coercion within groups, and So that takes various kinds of forms. But nowadays, of course, I think people recognize increasingly that the principle form of sexual intimidation and rape occurs within relationships. It's not stranger rape that is really, you know, statistically important. There's much more what happens behind the walls of a bedroom where people have been living for some time. And just two sort of thoughts and observations about this. One is that It may seem odd that males should think it a good idea to impose themselves sexually on someone with whom they have a relationship. But what they're doing is intimidating someone in a relationship in which the relative power in the relationship has continuing significance for a long time. And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual. It's to do with domestic relationships, it's to do with the man getting his own way all the way.

Yeah, exactly. And in that respect, it's worth noting that although this wasn't appreciated for some time, it's emerging that in a bunch of primates, you have somewhat somewhat parallel kinds of sexual intimidation. where males will target particular females, even though a group in which the norm is for females to mate with multiple males. But each male will target a particular female, and the more he is aggressive towards her, then the more she conforms to his wishes when he wants to mate. So a long-term pattern of sexual intimidation. So there's that aspect. The other aspect I would just note is that males get away with a lot compared to females in the any kind of intersectional conflict. So the punishment here's one example of this, the punishment for a husband killing a wife has always been much less than the punishment for a wife killing a husband. And you see similar sorts of things in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on. And I bring this up in the context of males sexually intimidating their partners, be it wives or whoever. because it's a reminder that it's basically a patriarchal world that we have come from, a patriarchal world in which male alliances tend to support males and take advantage of the fact that they have political power at the expense of females. And I would say that that all goes back to what happened three to 400,000 years ago. when the bidermales took charge, and they started imposing their own norms on society as a whole, and they've continued to do so. And we now look at ourselves and Jordan Peterson says, we are not a patriarchal society. Well, you know, it's true that the laws try and make it even handed nowadays between males and females. But obviously, we are patriarchal, de facto, because society is still in many ways, you know, supports

I don't want to go deep into his missing perspectives, but I just think that what he's doing in that particular example is focusing on the legalistic position and that's great that you know you do not find a formal patriarchy in the law anything like to the extent that you could find it a hundred years ago and so on yeah women have got the vote now hooray but it took a long time for women to get the vote And it remains the case that the women suffer in various kinds of ways. A woman who has lots of sexual partners is treated much more rudely than a male who has lots of sexual partners. There are all sorts of informal ways in which it's a rougher being a woman than it is a man.

Yeah, which is, you know, human nature is awkward because it includes some unpleasant features that when we sit back and reflect about them, we would like to them to go away. Yeah. But it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned to try and have sex with at least one woman, you know, often lots of women. And so women are constantly putting pressure on women in ways that women find unpleasant. And if men sit back and reflect about it, they think, yeah, we shouldn't do this. But actually, it just goes on because of human nature.

Well, I think that it's easy to imagine that most men could have become Denghis Khan. It's possible that he had a particular streak of psychopathy. You know, it's striking that by the time you become immensely powerful, then you're a willingness to do terrible things for the interest of yourself in your group. becomes very high. Stalin, Marcy Tong, these sorts of people have histories in which they do not show obvious psychopathy. But by the time they are big leaders, they are really psychopathic in the sense that they do not follow the ordinary morality of considering the harm that they are doing to their victims. What kind of experiment would we need to discover whether or not anybody could fall into this position? I don't know, but Lord Acton's famous dictum was power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And then the point that people often forget is the next sentence that he said, which is, great men are almost always bad men. And that is right. It is very difficult to find a great man in history who was not responsible for terrible things.

seems to me what really motivated Stalin was not so much communism as the retention of power. So once he became leader and in the process of becoming leader, he was absolutely desperate to get rid of anybody who was a challenger. He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody even on his side. who might possibly be showing end limerings of willingness to challenge him. So, you know, when he apparently had a cure-off murdered, a cure-off was a great communist. Trotsky was a great communist. You know all all all his rivals and I mean when he went into the towns and and murdered people by the tens of thousands or I'll come in a lot of them were coming a what was it communist that's right, but but what he was worried about was that they were rivals to him

Well, I suspect you're being very charitable here, but, I mean, maybe you're, you know, enough not starting to realize.

but it was more than that again because I mean he really wanted power for the Soviet Union and so surely the reason that he orchestrated the export of wheat from Ukraine and in so doing was willing to lead to mass derivation was because he wanted to sell it on the market in order to be able to build up the power of the Soviet Union. You know, I'll turn to view of communism, might have been, well, you know, let's just make sure everybody survives and make sure everybody has enough to eat and we'll all be mutually supportive in a communal network. But no, but he wanted the power for the country.

Yes, no, absolutely. Yes. And so just like you in Ponzi's, we are fiercely tribal and the tribalism resides particularly in male psychology. And it's very scary because once you assemble a set of males who share tribal identity, then they have power that they can exert with very little concerned about what they're doing to damage other people.

You know what we're talking about is tribal power, right? Power on behalf of a group. Yes. And yeah, that seems to me to go right back to a deep evolutionary origin, because you see essentially the same thing in a whole bunch of animals. that most of the sort of cognitively complex animals live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries. And so what you see in chimpanzees is echoed in almost all of the primates, the difference between us and chimpanzees and humans on the one hand and other primates on the other. is that we kill and they don't. And the reason they don't is because they never meet in the context where there are massive imbalances of power. So two groups of baboons, the study on this side and 50 on this side, fine, nobody's going to try and kill anybody else because the serious risks involved. But nevertheless, they are tribal. So they will have fairly intense intergroup interactions in which everybody knows whose side is on who is on whose side. And the long-term consequences of winning those battles, non-lethal battles, is that the dominance, I get access to larger areas of land, more safety and so on with chances are better record of reproductive success subsequently.

Yes, right.

It's beneficial, you know, it's beneficial in the sense that it evolved by natural selection to benefit the individuals who did it. Yes. But if you if my bug, you mean something that from the point of view of the species, it would be great if you could just wipe this out, right, because the species would somehow do better. Yes, as a result. Then yes, but then you know, males are a bug.

The fact that there are some nice things to males doesn't mean that they're not bugs. Maybe they're quite nice bugs. But it would be much better for the species as a whole not to have to have males who impose this violence on the species as a whole.

Well, what do you mean by conflict? I mean, you can have conflicts in the sense of people have different ideas about the solution to a problem. And so their ideas are in conflict. They can sit down with it and on a log and chat about it. And then decide, OK, you're right. Or I'm wrong. Or whatever. But if my conflict, you mean a great idea to build a nuclear bomb and set that off, then no, you know, I don't see why it's a good idea to have all this violence.

Oh, I'm sure you're right. It probably humans would not have evolved in the sense that we have. But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution will continue in the way it has. So there's all sorts of indications that the importance of violence has been reduced over time. And this has made famous Stephen Pinker's book, but others have written about it too, that the frequency of death from violence in every country you look at has been declining. That's just great. And so, you know, the amazing thing about this is that even when you take the death due to the first World War and the second World War, the 20th century appears to have been statistically meaning rates of death per individual. The least violent in history. So we haven't got very far down the coast and on violence, but I don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it. I think it's ridiculous, frankly, you know, excuse my frangness to say that violence is a good thing. I think that it would be a wonderful concept if we could evolve somehow to a world with 3,000 years from now. where violence is really regarded as simply appalling and that they look back on our time and come believe what we were doing.

It's got to be very, very different from what we're doing nowadays. And it's on imagination a bit different if we could imagine it, then maybe we could work towards it. Nobody knows how to work towards it.

But you know, George Orwell's vision in 1984 was of, you know, two or three world powers, each so powerful that nobody could, could diminish the, could destroy the other. But the notion of an evolutionary stable relationship among heavily armed world powers just does not seem So it's reasonable at all. There's to say, you know, we've now got 170 or 190 nations in the world dominated by a few big ones all with arms pointing at each other. And the notion that we could just carry on having peace talks and making sure that these arms don't get involved in some kind of massive configuration seems incredibly optimistic. Some kind of major change has to happen, whereby, you know, in some people would like to see all the weapons go. That would be great. You know, I'm a member of that sort of group that tries to see that happen. It's going to be very difficult to see it happen. Another kind of concept is the nations themselves will dissolve and will become one government. That itself is a terrifying vision because the capacity for abuse by a single world power would be so problematic. And in addition, how do you get there without a war in the first place? So you know at the moment we have no reasonable kind of a future in mind, but I'm sure it's there somewhere so that we haven't yet to find it.

Yeah, that's right, absolutely. And it may well be that the future will emerge out of some sort of quite surprising direction like that.

Well, I mean, I'm surprised only in the sense that accidental, the fact that we have not had an accident has been quite remarkable. because all the accounts are that we've come very close to having very serious accidents where people either side of misread intentions or apparent launches and so on. So yes, I think it is remarkable. There is a nasty generalization that can be made that the longer that powerful states go without having wars, then the worse the war is afterwards. And you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense because basically what's happening with these tribal groups, that the nations are at the moment, is that after a big war, like the Second World War, they establish new kinds of dominance relationships. And then during the periods of peace, what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships change, because some nations become poorer, some become richer, some become more military powerful, and so on. Generally, economy and military go hand in hand. So, you know, right now China emerged from the war as a relatively low state as state and is now high status. So, if this were chimpanzees, you know, what would happen is that you would predict a conflict because you need to have a re-adjustment of the formal dominance relationships to recognize the new in practice dominance relationships recognized by the economy and the military. So the longer that you have of a period of peace following a war, then the more these tensions of unresolved changed domestic relationships, build up. And the longer they take to occur, then the more challenging are going to be the conflicts.

So it's a scary view, but on the other hand, things have changed hugely with the advent of nuclear weapons, because at least that conforms to this psychology that is very clear in other animals, which is you don't want to get into a fight if you are going to get hurt. So that's the whole principle of mad, mutually-show destruction. And it's doubtless being why powerful nations like America and Russia have not used their nuclear weapons since 1945. So if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches, then maybe the fact of mad does fit into human psychology in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions without using them. But we haven't yet really faced that challenge. The Soviet Union collapsed because of the poor economy. But with China desperate to take back Taiwan and America shifting its focus on the Pacific, the potential for something going wrong is clearly very high.

Well, I can't really exactly make one. I would just say that we're talking about the dangers. Obviously the dangers are there. But what I would sort of think about is the notion that that surprises come from all sorts of different directions. And I mean, you work in robotics. And I could well imagine that there will be advances in robotics and in some way I can't even conceive. We'll somehow undermine the motivation for conflict. something about, you know, by the time chips have been planted in human brains and we're all instantly sharing information in a way that we never did before. Will this change the nature of human existence in such a way that these conflicts get resolved?

Well, yes, I mean, it's all science fiction stuff and so how it's going to work out totally unclear. I don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing. First of all, you somehow get rid of males. I think you really need to get rid of males, because males are the source of a major problem, which is the lust for power and the resulting conflict.

No, I mean, I don't have anything against males as individuals, that sort of thing. And males have clearly done a lot. I mean, they've been incredibly exploratory and creative and what they've done in art and music has been wonderful and that sort of thing. On the other hand, I'm not sure there's anything particularly special. And I think that probably females could do the same thing just as well when given the chance.

Well, look, I don't think it would be utopia if you got rid of the males. Right. And certainly females capable of conflict. I just think it's a gamble worth taking if you could actually do it. You can certainly find females in history who don't unpleasant things. But nevertheless, we have a very strong evolutionary theory which explains why males benefit more by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do. If we want to talk about reducing conflicts, then it would reduce it to get rid of males. Now I understand this is a fantasy. I think it's a fantasy that people would be able to talk about fairly soon because reproductive technology is going to the point where it's quite likely that human females could breed without the use of males. And so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies.

I don't think you have a stake in it. You know, I mean, you're saying that because you're a man. Yeah. But I don't see why being a man should make you any more interested in having a male future for the world than a female future. You know, you've got just as many ancestors who were male as were female.

But this is not suggesting that males have to die in order to make room for females. It's just, you know, all you have to do is just say don't necessarily have any more males born. interesting. Of course, you know, the difficulty is that because we're tribal, you know, some country, somewhere, we say, well, we're not going to do that. Yeah. And then guess what? They'd take over. Yeah. Because they're male. So that's why it's impossible to imagine actually happening.

But it is only a thought experiment. I mean, you know, it's got no practical meaning right now. And I take your point. You know, males get a hard wrap nowadays in some ways because the balance of social power is moving against, I mean, you know, quite rightly in a strong sense course against all the nasty things that males do. But What people sometimes fail to remember is that life is very hard for males who don't have the power, who don't have money, who don't have access to women. I'm sympathetic to in cells. I'm not sympathetic to them using violence to solve their problems. But I am very sympathetic to the fact that it's not easy simply to be told by well-off feminist middle-class people that you shouldn't behave like this or you shouldn't feel like this because you do.

And that, you know, no one's going to disagree with all those fine sentiments.

Yeah, but you know, when you can't just teach that because there's our evolutionary psychology, but there's in particular directions.

Yeah, I mean, lots and lots of training, lots and lots of education can do it. The famously most peaceful society that anthropologists have recorded involves tremendous amount of teaching, including some punishment. It's a satin in Thailand. You have to beat it out of children to make them nice. There's carrots and steak. The point is that you do not find societies in which people are spontaneously showing the kinds of behaviors that we would all love them to show. requires work, it requires work.

Well, the paradox is the fact that humans show extremes in relationship to both violence and non-violence. And the violence is that we are one of these few animals in which we use coalition reproductive violence to kill members of our own species. And we do it in large numbers just like a few other species. And the non-violence is where particularly extreme in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence. And I told you the story of how we get there. So what's extraordinary about us is that most animals are either high on both or relatively low on both. So chimpanzees are high on proactive violence and reactive violence. But no both are less than chimpanzees on both of those, but still hundreds of times more reactively aggressive than humans are. But we've done is retain a proactive violence being high and got a reactive violence really being low. And so we have these wonderful societies in which we're also incredibly nice to each other and tolerant and calm and can meet strangers and have no problem about leading to any kind of conflict. at the same time as we are one of the worst killing machine species that's ever existed. So what's extraordinary about this is that if you look at the political philosophers of the last few hundred years, You've got this fight famously between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, literally you've got the fight between their followers. So the followers of Hobbes say, Well Hobbes was right because he says that we are naturally violent and you need a Leviathan, a central government or a king to be able to suppress the violence. So we're naturally horrid and we can learn to be good. Whereas Jean Jacques Rousseau is interpreted as saying the opposite that we are naturally good and it's only when culture intervenes and horrid ideologies come in that we become uncivilized. And so people have had this endless fight between are we naturally corrupt or are we naturally kind? And that has gone on for years. And it's only in the last two or three decades that anthropologists like Christopher Bowen and Bruce Naft have said, look, you know, it's obvious what the answer is. We are both of these things. And what is so exciting now is I think we can understand why we are both. And the answer is we come from ancestors that were elevated on proactive aggression that were hunters and killers, both of animals and of each other. and you've got to include that, you know, as almost certain from the past. And then now we've taken our reactive aggression and we've down-regulated it and that's given us power. It's given us power because once you get rid of the alpha male, once the beta males take over and force selection in favor of a more tolerant, less reactively aggressive individual. The effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable of focusing on things other than conflict. And so we have social groups in which individuals, instead of constantly being on edge in the way that chimpanzees are with each other, are able to interact in ways that enable them to share, looking out a tool together, or share their food together, or pass ideas from one to another. or support each other when the ill or whatever the issue is, cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective. So you asked earlier, you know, what did I think about why Sapiens were able to expand at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically around 40, thousands of years ago? And the answer is that whatever it was, it had something to do with the Sapiens ability to cooperate. You know, that was what gave them bigger groups. That's what enabled them to have a far more effective way of living. And I suspect it was to do with the weapons and military aspects. But even if it wasn't that, the greater cooperation that Sapiens were showing would have been hugely important. So Sapiens then had groups of, you know, who knows exactly how big they were. scores of people to judge from their remains, whereas in the undertals, we're living in widely separated small groups of, you know, maybe as many as 15 or 20 people sometimes, where they saw others so rarely that they were in breeding at high levels, you know, fathers having babies with their daughters, very different worlds.

Yes. Right, not much more corruption. Not just among the males, but among the females. Also among the gamma males and the females.

Well, I don't know about hell enough, but I think the big lies are the married men and the unmarried men. Because the married men had a problem with the unmarried men. Right. I mean, you see it in ethnography of Hunter's and Galer's recently, where the unmarried men would be given rules, such as, I mean, a very extreme rule in Northern Australia was, you cannot come to the camp for months. You have to go away and live somewhere out in the bush, because we don't want you anywhere near our wives. And then another kind of, you know, rule is if you are in the camp, you must be in the firelight all the time. Otherwise, we don't know what you're doing out in the dark. So you really have to control them because the men who had lots of wives did not want those horny patchless sneaking around them.

There's some title how cooking made as human refers not to homo sapiens, but to homo erectus. So human there means the genus homo. And homo erectus is the first full member of the genus homo in the sense that it looked like us, just with a sort of slightly robust, more robust build and a small brain. And the central idea of catching fire is that it was the control of fire that was responsible for the emergence of homo erectus and therefore the genus homo, which happened two million years ago and it was an evolution from a line of Australopathasines. And Australopathasines are the creatures from whom we evolved. They were present in Africa from something like 6 or 7 million years ago, up to actually up to 1 million years ago, and then a branch led off to Homo around 2 million years ago. And the way to think of our struggle for the scenes is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright. So they were erect by pedal walkers. They were like chimpanzees in the sense that they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee. They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee, a little bit smaller actually. And they had big jaws because they were still eating raw food. They had big teeth and big jaws. And then around two million years ago, The line of Astralopethicine which ended with an intermediate species kind of missing link area, because it is not missing called habulus, sometimes called homo-habulus, but more properly in my view called Astralopethicus habulus. That gave rise to homorectus, and homorectus, here's how different it was. It had a smaller mouth, a smaller jaw, smaller teeth, and to judge from its ribs and pelvis, smaller gut. In addition, it had lost what our starter pythons all had, which was adaptations for climbing in the trees, And that meant that homo erectus must have slept on the ground. And since it's slept on the ground, it should have been able to defend itself somehow against protestors. And I can't think of any way they could have done that unless they had fire. So there are two major clues to why it was with homorectors that are ancestors first acquired the control of fire. One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos and all the other primates do. And the other is that there was this striking reduction throughout the gut. reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus and in the gut itself. And that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans, which is that our guts are about two thirds of the size of what they would be if we at raw food to judge by the great apes. So at some point in our evolution, We acquired the skill of cooking and skill of controlling fire. At no time between two million years ago and the present, do we see any changes in our anatomy that can, as it were, justify the enormous change that happens when you are an animal that learns to control fire. But at two million years ago, we have exactly what you'd expect. Namely, the guts becoming smaller because the food is becoming softer and much more easy to digest, so you don't have to work so hard in your body to digest it. And as I say, a commitment to sleeping on the ground Which I think you'd be absolutely crazy to do nowadays on a moonless night in the middle of Serengeti unless you had fire. I've slept out quite a lot in various parts of Africa in the bush and you will not catch me just lying on the ground in area where lots of predators unless I got a fire would be. You're going to get eaten. You're going to get terrified and you're going to get eaten.

Well, here's what we know. We know that all the animals that we've tested like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw. So this is true for all the great apes. We've tested them. That's fascinating, by the way.

Yes, I think what it is is that animals are always looking for any kind of way to get food that is easier to digest. And there are various signals in the food, such as the amount of sugar there, the amount of free amino acids, because the amino acids can be tasted. And the physical qualities of the food be particularly important, how tough the food is, always prefer softer food, provided it feel safe, taste safe. And these kinds of sensory cues are all there in cooked food. It's soft. It doesn't have so many toxins. It's not so noxious to taste. Easier to chew. So everyone loves it spontaneously. Your dog's in your cats prefer cooked food to raw food. Well, maybe you can say that's a consequence of domestication. But even, as I say, all of the great apes You test naive ones and they prefer it cooked to thicken.

If they have fire at all and they're food rolls into it, five minutes later it takes better than before.

Yeah I think that the control of fire has been ultimately responsible for essentially how grandiose do I want to be here, you know, the entire human story going back to Homo. It is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal. And perhaps the biggest way in which it is likely to have changed us is it reduced the difficulty of making a large brain. The story here is that the constraints on brain size are energetic. You and I have brains that are something like 2.5% of our body weight. It consumes around 25% of all of our calories. So it's disproportionate. There are other expensive organs in our body as well, such as the heart. And what's different about the brain is that in addition to us being able to fuel it in a way that other animals can't, we also have reasons for wanting to have an even bigger brain, whereas we don't want to even bigger heart. So what those reasons are is unclear. But with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain, cooking makes it possible because it's supplying more calories. And it is enormously reducing the amount of time that it takes to chew your food. So if you were a gorilla and you wanted to have a bigger brain, you might say, OK, well, let's just eat some more. But gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day in the sense that they're eating for maybe seven or eight hours a day in some seasons. That's just chewing and then they've got to sit around and digest their food because they can't just eat all the time. They've got to take a break while the food is digested in the stomach and then passed into the gut. So the stomach is already full. So basically, gorillas are eating about the maximum rate already. So how does a gorilla get a bigger brain? It doesn't. It's actually got a smaller brain relative to its body size and chimpanzee does. And that's the basic problem for our ancestors. Then you come along and cook on all of a sudden, you can get an increased amount of energy from your food. you are spending much less energy on digesting your food. There are 25 bodily processes or more that are involved in digesting your food, making the acid that takes the proteins apart, maintaining the brush border where the molecules are taken across the gut wall and so on. That all costs. It costs you to digest your food. It costs less if you cook your food. So you get a net gain in the amount of energy. And you are reducing the amount of time from our case, our ancestors probably around 50% of the day. chewing to nowadays, one hour a day chewing. So all of a sudden you got hours a day in which to do other things, to use those brains that you've now enabled to grow. So with home directors, you start the process of getting a bigger brain and famously, you know, throughout the whole period of the evolution of the genus homo, you have a steadily increasing size of brain. until right at the end when it actually gets smaller, but that's a different story, which enters this, which we talk about homo sapiens. Yeah, with homo sapiens, you've got a smaller brain from people haven't got it exactly down, but at least 30,000 years ago, it starts declining. And so the fascinating thing about that is that all domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild ancestors.

And do it exactly. So I think what we're seeing in humans is that same manifestation. And then the fascinating question is, it's why. And the only point I would want to make about this is that there is no evidence that in the small brain domesticoats, they're losing, saying average about 15% of brain size. In the small brain domesticoats compared to their wild ancestors, there's no indication of a loss of cognitive ability. So I think what's going on is that it's a younger brain, it's a more pitomorphic brain, and it's looking like the juveniles of the ancestor. But just as our kids are very smart and can learn amazing things, compared to adults, you all they lack is wisdom and maturity. But they, you know, in terms of sheer cognitive ability, they got it. And I think that's the same with domestic and animals compared to their wild ancestors, doesn't probably, therefore, with homeless apiens, say 30,000 years ago, compared to their ancestors. So we have smaller brains than the antitols.

I think that far increased the using of meat. But the fact that chimpanzees really like to hunt and kill meat as do bonobos. Certainly put this in. So they, they, those two species have a common ancestor with us going six or seven million years ago. And it was from that common ancestor that you get the Australopathy in line. It's very likely, therefore, Australopathy scenes were eating meat when they could get it. which wouldn't be very often because they wouldn't be very good sprinters but nevertheless they would occasionally be able to get some meat and I bet they loved it all the time and basically all primates like meat if they can get it or the store of them. But I think fire would have been very important for a couple of reasons. One is that once you eat your food cooked, then you're saving yourself time. By saving yourself time, you can free up the opportunity to go and hunt more. Because hunting is a high risk, high gain activity. There's every risk that you will get nothing on one particular afternoon that you go off looking for opportunities to kill. But it's high gain because when you do get something, you bring down a kudu, then you've got a serious amount of meat. What did males and females do with the time they were saving from not having to chew their food? I think that in the case of males it's very reasonable to think they spent a greatly increased amount of time hunting. So chimpanzees, they hunt maybe two or three times a month and the average hunt length is 20 minutes. with humans that hunting maybe 20 times a month and the average hunting length is 6 hours.

Yeah. So and that's possible because the time was available because they were cooking less chewing more hunting. You got it. The other thing is that the meat is so much nicer. You know, so when a chimpanzee kills a monkey and I mean they are so excited about killing a monkey. You know, they are so excited about going into the hunt and when they make the kill, then there's screams everywhere and some don't like to seize it and capture it and take it away from the others and eventually the strongest one has it and the others sit around begging and trying to get some and tear it off and so they will love it. There are others who, he often goes to the top of a tree in order to be able to get away from all of these beggars and scavengers. And while he's there, he drops of blood or a little scraps for fall down to the bottom. And the junior members of society, you know, the females and young, and that sort of thing, they are racing through to find a particular leaf that's got a drop of blood on it so they can lick it. I mean, they love it. But Yes. It takes them a lot of time to chew it. I mean, it's the same thing as cook food in general. So they are getting meat very slowly into their bodies. And sometimes comes a time when they just say, I've had enough of this, I need real food and they'll drop the meat and go off and eat. fruit again because they can get fruit into their bodies so much faster than they can get meat. So once they're cooking that problem is solved and they can eat the meat so just much more readily. So I think that meat eating would become important for two reasons with cooking.

Well, yes. The only thing I've modified that is that you have to ask, how is it that the beta males were able to kill the alpha male? Right. And we now know that although chimpanzees do kill males within their own group sometimes, it's not a process of killing the alpha male. It's taking advantage of opportunity when some male gets into a bad position, but it's not a systematic ability to kill the alpha male. And you can see why, you know, because they don't have language. And without language, it's very difficult to know how confident you can be of the support of others against a particular individual within your own group. Yes. When you're attacking someone from another group, that problem is solved. You know, we all hate the, yes, you know, those guys. But the alpha male has got alliances within his group. Some of those allies might be willing to turn against him. Some of them might be harboring deep feelings of resentment. But how does anyone else know that? So in other words, I think that you have to have some kind of language that is pretty good to solve the problems of gaining confidence that Five of you say, you know, or some, some number can trust each other in this final attack. And, you know, even nowadays, it's, it's difficult.

That's right.

Yes, I mean, once you have sufficient language to be able to have the beta males conspiring to kill the alpha male. then you have selection in favor of cooperation and tolerance as we spoke about and at that point there will be increased ability to communicate and the language will get richer and better and better. So yes absolutely positive feedback loop once you get the situation started.

Well, if the beauty of the human mind is the ability of us all to be creative, to explore, That's one kind of beauty. Another kind of beauty is the empathy that we can show. And we think of that as beautiful because it is a kind of rare and special. ability compared to the sort of ordinary selfishness that can commonly predominate. I suppose we have to think of different sources for those two types. I suppose a general answer is that There has been selection and favor of bigger brains which probably in general has been associated with increasing cognitive ability. And as that has happened, the complexity of life has increased because people have more and more complex, highly differentiated strategies in response to each other's more complex, highly differentiated strategies. And we get to a point where there is deception and self-deception. There is a manipulation of ideas through stories that we invent and stories that we pass on. I guess all I'm wanting to say is that there is a world of the mind that evolves in response to these platforms that are put there, you know, the platform of increasing brain size and therefore, cognitive ability made possible by increases apply. The platform of cooperation and tolerance in a world in which there remains a lot of conflict, and therefore, a need to respond to the conflict and manipulate your allies appropriately. you know I don't see beauty is coming either kind of beauty is coming sort of totally independently of these things you know I don't think there's a selection for staring into the sunset and creating poetry yes you know but I guess sexual selection you know males wanting to impress females in different ways will lead to they're wanting to

Well, yes, show off.

Yeah, I mean, we haven't spoken about sexual selection, but that is a really important part of it. You know, they trying to outcompete each other in, you know, normally without any physical conflict, just in order to be able to be chosen by mates of the opposite sex. And that is a certainly a major source of creativity.

In Africa, straddling the equator, there is a strip of rainforest that relies on the combination of high temperatures and rainfall that you get around the equator. That rainforest goes into about 22 countries. And throughout those countries, you have chimpanzees, although they've gone extinct into them. In just a fraction of them, but it's five countries, you've got guerrillas. where there are mountains. And in one country, on the left bank of the Great Congo River, you have bonobas. So in the African forest, you've got these three African apes, the only African apes, all of which are very similar in much of their way of life. They walk on their knuckles through the forest, looking for fruit trees and eating herbs when they can't find fruits. Gorillas represent the oldest chain. So about 10 million years ago, maybe as recently as 8 million years ago, the ancestor Gorillas broke off from the ancestor leading to chimps and penobos and humans. So they probably remained very similar now to what very similar to what they were then. They were probably the largest states living in montane areas and spending more time eating just herbs, stems, not so vitally dependent on fruit. And living in, if there was like the present, groups up to about 50 stable groups with one alpha male who was in charge. Gorillas are wonderfully slow and inquisitive compared to chimps and benobos. And I had the privilege of spending a week or two with guerrillas at Diane Foster's camp when before she was murdered. And I went out with two women, Kelly and Bob, to a particular group. And there was a young female in the group called Simba. and Simba approached us and stared at the two women and then she came towards me and she very deliberately reached out her knuckles and touched me on the forehead. She was watched in doing this by a young male who was quite keen on her and he was called Digit. And about five minutes later, Digit stood in front of us on the path. and Kelly was in front of me and then there was Bob and then there was me and he came charging down the path and he sidesteped around Kelly and he sidesteped around Bob and me he just knocked with his arm and sent me flying about five yards into the bushes and I loved the way that That was a very deliberate response. And I love the way that Simba had been so interested in me and held my eye. Chimps and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Well, I mean, I felt that digit was telling me, I don't want you messing with the Simba.

Oh, I see. Well, that's a fun idea. I don't see why she should be using movement. You mean testing how strongly the effect was referred to intervene too.

Oh, that's come straight out of a sort of adolescent high school playbook.

Well, that's not wrong with it for that. I don't know. I never thought of that. You never know.

So then the next thing that happened on the evolutionary tree was six or seven million years ago when you have the line between chimps and bonobas on the one hand and humans on the other splitting. And basically what happened is that at that point a chimp-like ancestor leaves the forest gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts. And that becomes your struggle with the scenes. And meanwhile, the chimp-tanzies and Benobo ancestor continues in the forest. And later what happens is that one branch of that crosses the Congo River and becomes the Benobos. That wasn't really about two million years ago. Maybe one million years ago. Now the chimps that remained in the forest throughout this time and occupied all the countries across from east west to east Africa now. Again, we assume that they're pretty similar to the ones that live nowadays, whether some variation from West to East. And these are animals that live in social communities of between, say, 20 and 200. They have a lot of them in one group, but they never come together in a single unit. These are they share an area at a community territory and that area is defended by males and within females wander and bring up their young independently and the females are very scared about the possibility that males will be mean to their infants. And in order to avoid them doing that, they do their best to mate with every single male in the group multiple times as if to give a memory in that male of, yeah, yeah, I already made you do, so I'm not going to be mean to your baby. So what's wonderful about chimps? Well, you know, as we've spoken about them, you know, they are creative and sort of amazingly human-like. But I love the sort of, you know, the quiet moments. And here's one. I've got two chimps who are grooming each other on a day when they are utterly exhausted. They've walked 11 kilometers the day before, up and down hills, and on this particular day, all they do is they get to one tree, and they eat from that tree, and other than that, they only walk about 100 yards, and they go back to sleep in the nest, in which they woke up. So they're utterly exhausted, and they're just eating nonstop, because they're trying to recover their energy. And this is Hugh and Charlie, and we think they were probably brothers, they've never actually got the genetic evidence to prove it. Well, I never remember who it is, but let's say that they both come down from the tree and they're both carrying branches of the food. There are actually seeds from these branches. They're both engaged even in the midday sun when they want to come down and shade themselves for a bit on the ground. They're still eating. But then Charlie finishes his branch. and he starts grooming you and he continues eating from his branch. Charlie eventually gets bored of this after a few minutes and he reaches out and he lifts the branch from which he is still taking seeds. and put it over his head and put it behind his back as far as possible away from Hugh. Hugh doesn't do anything. He just finishes his mouth full and then he turns to Charlie and grooms him. So this very polite way of saying will you groom me please? Has worked. Then Hugh grooms a round Charlie's back and a round to the right side and then down his arm to what point where he can reach the branch again and then he picks up the branch. and continues naturally. Right. Yeah. So in other words, you know, they're very sort of simple little strategy. Yeah. But it just shows the courtesy with which they can treat each other. And you know, the days I love with Jim, so when you see that sort of thing or when you see mothers just lying in a sunlit patch in the forest with their babies bouncing on top of them, just having a wonderful peaceful time. And that's, you know, that's what most of their lives are like. So chimpanzees are the species that kind of unites the rest of the apes because a gorilla is, in many ways, just a big version of a chimpanzee. If you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee in your mind to be bigger, it basically turns into a gorilla. And then, but no was on the left bank of the Congo River, are they like a domesticated form of of chimpanzee, but obviously humans didn't domesticate them, so they're self domesticated. They are less aggressive and they show all the marks of domestication that domestication animals do in compared to wild animals in their bones. So they have reduced differences between males and females in which the males are more like females, they have smaller brains, they have shorter faces, smaller teeth and smaller bodies. all the things that domestic animals show. And Bonobos live in this environment in a strikingly peaceful way compared to the chimpanzees. There's no indication that they will have these aggressive kills. and enough data now to show that there's a statistical difference in the frequency of which it would happen. And Benobos are famously erotic. The females have enlarged sexual parts, which swell to particularly large size compared to the female chimpanzees. And the females have a lot of interactions with each other in which they excitedly rub their cuteruses together. And so Peter have orgasms. These occur in the context of some kind of social tension. And they sometimes happen before, they sometimes happen after the social tension. And they seem to be devices, these interactions for ensuring that everyone's friends and reducing the chances that they're actually going to get into a fight.

Well, it's often characterized as make love not war. Let's make love not war.

It's a very difficult question because every time there is a conflict between conservation of a natural habitat and allowing people to get that a little bit of extra food for their babies, then naturally the tendency is for the humans to win. So we have this steady erosion in the face of tremendous efforts to conserve nature. We have that continuing steady erosion of habitats and all the species. And the numbers are always in the wrong direction. occasionally you get sort of wonderful little examples of something being saved, but the overall trend is clear. And it's very difficult to see how one can ever escape that because it's not human. Now that we are essentially a single tribe to want to save an elephant if it means killing 20 humans. So I think the only way in which we can really conserve is if we put tremendous effort into conserving the very best representative areas of nature. often this will be the national parks that already exist and what we have to do is to make them so valuable that it actually is worth it in terms of human survival to be able to keep those sorts of places. And, you know, that's the attitude that my colleagues and I have taken in Uganda where we want to keep the Kibali National Park in life, which has got the largest population chimpanzees in Uganda, and it's got elephants and wonderful birds and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on. And, and visitors and lots and lots of visitors. It may be that we're going to have to have huge increases in the amount of charges that you pay for ecotourism and you need to make sure that ecotourism is done right. In other places you will keep nature there because it's useful for maintaining the climate, you know, bringing rain. Maybe you can in some places convince people of the sheer sort of aesthetics of keeping nature that even over the long term, presidents whose job it is to look for the future of the country will be persuaded that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons. But overall, what is required is for people in the rich countries to do much more investment than they have so far in maintaining both the natural places in their own countries and in the tropics. And if you look at Africa, the population trends are that Nigeria may become the most populous country in the world, I think, within a century. The future of African habitats, you know, it's clear what's going to happen in general. There's going to be a huge conversion towards agricultural land. I heard Ed Wilson speak years ago about the prospect of the entire globe being turned into a single human feedlot. It's going to take a lot to avoid that. He is at the calling for half the earth to be devoted to nature. It's incredibly ambitious and incredibly optimistic, but unless you have really exciting goals, probably nothing will be achieved.

We are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas as our Um, post relatives still living on the earth. You know, well, unlucky that we don't have a scholar put the scenes and all the species are homo, but we're still lucky to have those because they are incredibly closely related to us compared to what most animals have. You know, there are many animals that don't have any close relatives to them on the earth, but not only are they, they relatively close, but they teach us so much about ourselves. You know, they, the similarities between them and ourselves raise questions that we can then test. about the extent to which our own behavioral propensities are derived from the same evolutionary stock as in those great apes. Well, how much is that worth? You know, I mean, we could spend billions going to the Mars to find evidence of bacteria there. And that's fascinating too. But we should be spending billions on this earth in order to make sure that we have I don't know how to say it, you know, substantial, representative populations of these close relatives.

Yes, unfortunately, the problems are incredibly difficult to solve. And there is no one's solver. It has to happen from a network of potentially cooperating people. But I mean, you're so right about it being daunting to think about what it looks like from space. And I love the view that Herman Mueller expressed of being able to guard from space. And he said, the whole of life would look like a kind of rust on the planet.

Well, I think it's very clear that we have an evolutionary story that is only getting challenged around the edges. We have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life. And the meaning is we are here. as a consequence of materialistic processes that began, in our sense, with the establishment of the earth, the four and half billion years ago, whatever it was, then water and oxygen and so on. And we are the astonishing consequence of the evolution of cells and multisel organisms. The word random is the wrong word to use unless you understand what it means. It didn't happen by chance, but all around them events had to happen to make this possible. And there's random events, of course, are the production of appropriate mutations. But the meaning of life is there is no meaning. The really big mystery of life is why is there a universe?

Even without an infinite number of universes, I bet there's an infinite number of intelligent beings.

Yeah. Now that we know how many planets have the right sort of conditions. You know, which is what, you know, I can't remember a lot, you know, it's some significant percentage of all planets. Then there are apparently billions of planets. And there's, I mean, things happen so quickly on Earth, you know, once you've got water, then you've got life and it did not take long for life to evolve in the big scheme of things.

It doesn't see way of coming from. When you say that being too peaceful is a problem.

So violence, but there's lots of ways to die without violence.

But that's going to do with with with peace versus wool. I mean, you have animals that are very, very peaceful, but they evolve just in the same ways as other animals do. They just don't do it with death caused by violence. And violent death is premature death, surely. I mean, I don't mind about people dying. What I mind about is people dying in the in their youth prematurely.

Yeah. Well, I mean, if we can become like sequers and live hundreds of years or thousands of years, that would be great.

I don't think I'm afraid of it, you know, I'm reconciled to the fact it's going to happen. I just feel frustrated because I enjoy life, you know, and I don't want to to leave the party.

No thanks to your great questions. It's a really fun conversation.