Richard Wrangham: Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #229

The following is a conversation with Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard specializing in the study of primates and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture, and other aspects of ape and human behavior at the individual and societal level. He began his career over four decades ago working with Jane Goodall and studying the behavior of chimps. And since then, has done a lot of seminal work on human evolution and has proposed several theories for the roles of fire and violence in the evolution of us, hairless apes, otherwise known as Homo sapiens. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Richard Wrangham. You said that we are much less violent than our close living relatives, the chimps. Can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are and how violent our evolutionary relatives are? Well, I haven't said exactly that we're less violent than chimps. What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence. One stems from proactive aggression and the other stems from reactive aggression. Proactive aggression is planned aggression. Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive. It's reactive because it takes place in seconds after the threat. And the thing that is really striking about humans compared to our close relatives is the great reduction in the degree of of reactive aggression. So, we are far less violent than chimps when prompted by some relatively minor threat within our own society. And the way I judge that is with not super satisfactory data, but the 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, you know, as bad from the point of view of violence as an ordinary society can get. There's excellent data on the frequency with which people actually have physical violence and hit each other. And we can compare that to data from several different sites comparing we're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence. And the difference is between two and three orders of magnitude. The frequency with which chimps and bonobos hit each other, chase each other, charge each other, physically engage is something between 500 and 1,000 times higher than in humans. So, there's something just amazing about us. And, you know, this has been recognized for for centuries. Aristotle drew attention to the fact that we behave in many ways like domesticated animals because we're so unviolent. But, you know, people say, "Well, what about, you know, the hideous engagements of the 20th century? The the first and second World War and and and much else besides." And that is all proactive violence. You know, all of that is is gangs of people um making deliberate decisions to go off and attack in circumstances which, ideally, the attackers are going to be able to make their kills and then get out of there. In other words, not face confrontation. That's the ordinary way that armies try and work. And um And there, it turns out that humans and chimpanzees are in a very similar kind of state. That is to say, if you look at the the rate of death from chimpanzees conducting proactive coalitionary violence, it's very similar in many ways to what you see in humans. So, we're not down regulated with proactive violence. It's just this reactive violence that is strikingly reduced in humans. So, chimpanzees also practice kind of tribal warfare. Indeed, they do. Yeah. So, this was discovered first in 1974. It was observed first in 1974, which was about the time that the first major study of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall had been going for something like five years during of the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went. Until then, they'd been observed at a feeding station where Jane was luring them into um to be observed by seeing bananas, which is great. She had learned a lot. But, she didn't learn what was happening at the edges of their ranges. So, five years later, um 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 um uh chimps in this case shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders. But, dramatically, in addition to that, there is a second kind of interaction, and that is when a party of chimpanzees makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory silently and then search for members of neighboring groups. And what they're searching for is a lone individual. So, I've been with chimps when they've heard a lone individual under these circumstances, or what they think is a lone one, and they touch each other and look at each other and then charge forward, very excited. Um and then, while they're charging, all of a sudden, the place where they heard a lone call erupts with a volley of calls. It was just one calling out of a larger party. And our chimps put on the brakes and scoot back for safety into their own territory. But, if in fact they do find a lone individual and they they can sneak up to them, then they make a deliberate attack. They're hunting. They're stalking and hunting and and then they impose terrible damage, which typically ends in a kill straight away, but it might end up with the victim um so damaged that they'll they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later. So, that was a very dramatic discovery because it really made people realize for the first time that Konrad 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 and humans do it, too. Can they pull themselves into something that looks more like a symmetric war as opposed to an asymmetric one? So, accidentally engaging on the lone individual and getting themselves into trouble, or are they more aggressive in avoiding these kinds of battles? No, they're very very keen to avoid those kinds of battles, but occasionally, they can make a mistake. Um but, so far, there have been no observations of anything like a battle in which both sides maintain themselves. And I think you can very confidently say that overwhelmingly what happens is that if they discover that there's several individuals on the other side, then both sides retreat. Nobody wants to get hurt. What they want to do is to hurt others. Yes. So, you mentioned Jane Goodall. You've worked with her. What was it like working with her? What have you learned from her? Well, she's a wonderfully independent, courageous person, 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. I 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. You know, waiting until they mount up and you've really got a confident picture. Um 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 of Gombe, this particular community of Kasakela, about 60 individuals. Uh so Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika. She was there initially with her mother and then alone for two or three years of really intense observation and then slowly joined by other people. Uh what um what she discovered was that there were obvious differences in individual personality. And the difficulty about that was that when she reported this to uh the the larger scientific world, initially her advisors at at Cambridge, uh they said, "Well, you know, we don't know how to handle that because you've got to treat all these animals as the same, basically, because um there there is no research tradition of thinking about personalities." Well, now whatever it is, 60 years later, uh the study of personalities is is a very rich part of the study of animal behavior. Um so anyway, the 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 evolutionary biologist to think about what it means. Mhm. So, what is the process of observation like this uh like, observing the personality but also observing in a way that's not projecting your beliefs about human nature or animal nature onto chimps? Which is probably really tempting to project so your understanding of the way the human world works, projecting that onto the chimp world. Yes, I mean it's particularly difficult with chimps because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior that it's very easy to to make those projections, as you say. The process involves um making very clear definitions of of what a behavior is. Um you know, aggression uh can be defined in terms of a forceful hit, a bite, and so on. Um and writing down every time these things happen. And then slowly totting up the numbers of times that they happen, you know, from individual A towards individuals B, C, D, and E. Um so that you build up a very concrete picture rather than interpreting at any point and stopping and saying, "Well, you know, they seem to be rather aggressive." Uh so the uh the sort of formal system is that you build up a pattern of the relationships based on a a description of the different types of interactions, the aggressive and the friendly interactions. Um and all of these are are defined in concrete. Uh and so that from that you extract a pattern of relationships. And the relationships can be defined as um um you know, relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive, uh based on the frequency of these types of interactions. And so one can talk in terms of individuals having a relationship which on the scores of friendliness is two standard deviations outside the mean. I mean, you know, it's I mean, which direction, sorry? Uh both directions? Well, I mean, you know, that that that would be 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. Mhm. So, it's possible to define a friendship with a capital F in a very systematic way and and to compare that between individuals but also between communities of chimpanzees and between different species. Mhm. So that you know we can say that in some species individuals have friends and others don't at all. What about just because there's different personalities and because they're so fascinating, what about sort of falling in love or forming friendships with chimps, you know? Like really you know, um connecting with them as an observer. What what role does that play? You're tracking these individuals that are full of life and intelligence for for long periods of time. Plus as a human especially in those days for for Jane, she's alone observing it. It gets lonely as a human. I mean, probably deeply lonely as a human being observing these other intelligent species. It's a very reasonable question and of course Jane in those early years, I think she's willing now to talk about the fact that uh she regrets to some extent how close she became. Um and the 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 a ripe fruit Mhm. to a chimpanzee called David Greybeard. David Greybeard took it and squeezed her hand as if to say thank you. And then I think he gave it back, if I remember rightly. Yeah. Um No, thank you. Right. Um Oh, it's it's almost like thank you and returning the affection by giving the fruit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, it was a gentle squeeze. I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard as that occasionally has happened. Um some chimps are aggressive to people. Um and others are friendly. Uh 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 Jomeo 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 informal about it. So, uh all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted. And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda for the last 30 years, we try extremely hard to impress on all of the research students who come with us that it is absolutely vital that you do not fall into that temptation. Now, you know, we heard a story of one person who did reach out and touch one of our chimps. Uh it's a very very bad idea. Not because the chimp is going to do anything violent at the time, but because if they learn that humans are as weak physically as we are compared to them, then they can take advantage of it. Us. And that's what happened in Gombe. So after Jane had done the uh you know, very obvious thing when you're first engaged in this game of allowing the infants to approach her and then tickling them and playing with them, some of those infants had the personality of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later. And so you know, you had an individual, Frodo, who was violent on a regular basis towards humans when he was adult and he was quite dangerous. I mean, he could easily kill someone. In fact, he did kill on one person. He killed a baby that he he he took from a mother. Uh 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 uh you know, in many ways stronger than humans. So it's a uh you you've got to be careful. So in the full range of friendliness and violence, the capacity for these very human things. Yes, I mean, it's 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, they This is a long-lived individual. Obviously, these killings can't happen 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 specialized kind of food, the ripe fruits. Um So it doesn't happen all the time. With friendliness, um they are very strong to support each other. They very much depend on their their close friendships which they express through uh physical contact and particularly through through grooming. So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another and might present for grooming, a very common way of starting, turning their back or presenting an arm or something like that and the other just riffles their fingers through the hair. And that's partly just soothing. And it's partly looking for parasites. But mostly it's just soothing. Yes. And and the point about this is it can go on for half an hour. It can go on for sometimes even an hour. Mhm. So this is a Amazing. You know, a major expression of interest in somebody else. When did your interest in this one particular aspects of chim come to be, which is violence? When did the study of violence in chims become something you were deeply interested in? Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s, I was in Gombe with Jane Goodall and was studying feeding behavior. Mhm. But during that time, we were seeing and I say we because there were half a dozen research students all in her camp. Um we were discovering that chims had this capacity for for violence. Um the first kill happened during that time, which was of an infant in a neighboring group. Um 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 chims and humans. Now at that time, we didn't know very much about how chimpanzees and humans were related. Chims, gorillas, bonobos are all three big black hairy things that live in the African forests and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits. And walk on their knuckles. And they all look rather similar to each other. So they seem as though those three species, chims and gorillas and bonobos, should all be each other's closest relatives and humans are something rather separate. And so any of them would be of interest to us. Mhm. Subsequently, we learn that actually that's not true and that there's a special relationship between humans and chimpanzees. But at the time, even without knowing that, it was obvious that there was something very odd about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered they were making tools. She had seen that they were hunting meat. She had seen that they were sharing the meat among each other. She had seen that their societies were dominated politically by males, coalitions of males. All of these things of course resonate so closely with humans. Mhm. And then it turns out that in contrast to conventional wisdom of the time, the chimpanzees were capable of hunting and killing members of neighboring groups. Well, at that point, the similarities between chims and humans become less a matter of sort of you know, 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 you know, how can you resist just you know, trying to find out what's going on? So I have to say this. I'm not sure if you're familiar with a man, but fans of this podcast are. So we're talking about chims, we're talking about violence. My now friend, Mr. Joe Rogan, is a big fan of those things. I'm a big fan of these topics. I think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics. So as you're saying, why do we find the exploration of violence and the relations between chims so interesting? What can they teach us about ourselves? Until we had this information about chimpanzees, it was possible to believe that the psychology behind warfare was totally the result of some kind of um cultural recent cultural innovation. Right. That had nothing to do with our biology. Or if you like to discuss something to do with sin and and God and the devil and that sort of thing. But what the chims 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 as occurred in chimpanzees. And in both species, it has evolved because of its evolutionary significance. In other words, because it's been helpful to the individuals who have practiced it. And now we know that as I mentioned, other species do this as well. In fact, you know, wolves, um which this is this is really kind of ironical observation. Konrad Lorenz, who I mentioned had been the person who thought that human aggression in the form of killing members of their own species was unique to our species. He was a great fan of wolves. He studied wolves. And in captivity, he noted that wolves are very unlikely to harm each other in um 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 and the other might put their jaws on the neck, but will not bite. Mhm. Okay, so now it turns out that if you study wolves in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting for each other. Mhm. They are in fierce competition. And as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves is due to being killed by other wolves. Wow. Adult mortality. Wow. So it's a really serious business. The chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern of understanding animals in which you don't have an instinct for violence. What you have is an instinct, if you like, to use violence adaptively. And if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive. If the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be. So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent than others because of things like the frequency with which a large party of males is likely to meet a lone victim. And that's going to depend on the local ecology. But you know, so the overall answer to the question of what do chims teach us is that we have to take very seriously the notion that in humans, the tendency to make war is a consequence of a long-term evolutionary adaptation and not just a military ideology or some you know, sort of local patriarchal phenomenon. Um and of course, you know, his a reading of history, a judicious reading of history fits that very easily because war is so commonplace. Mhm. It's not an accident. So it's not a construction of human civilization. It's uh it's deeply within us, violence. So what what's the difference between violence on the individual level versus group? Is it seems like with chims and with wolves, there's something about the dynamic of multiple um chims together that increase the chance of violence. Or is is violence still fundamentally part of the individual? Like would would an individual be as violent as they might be as part of a group? If we're talking about killing, Killing. then um violence in the sense of killing is very much associated with a 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 arises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it. The the average number of chimpanzee males that attack a single male in something like 50 observations that have accumulated in the last 50 years from various different study sites is eight. Eight to one. Mhm. Now sometimes it can go as low as three to one. Mhm. But that's a that's getting risky. Mhm. But if you have eight, you can see what can happen. I mean, basically, uh you have one male on one foot, another male on another foot, another male on another arm, another male another arm. Now you have an immobilized victim with uh four individuals capable of just doing the damage. Mhm. And so they can then move in and tear off his thorax and tear off his testicles and and twist an arm until it breaks and and do this you know, pulling damage with no weapons. Mhm. What is uh the way in which they prefer to commit the violence? Is there something to be said about like the actual process of it? Is there an artistry to it? So if you look at a human warfare, there's different parts in history preferred different kind of approaches to violence. They had more to do with tools, I think, on the human side. But just the nature of violence itself, the sorry, the practice, the strategy of violence, is it basically the same? You improvise, you immobilize the uh the victim, and they just rip off different parts of their body kind of thing? Yeah, you you have to understand that uh these things are happening at high speed um in thick vegetation, Yes. mostly. So that they they've not been filmed uh carefully. You know, we we have have a few little glimpses of them from um uh one or two people like David Watts, uh who's got some great video, but uh we don't know enough to be able to to say that. It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles that vary between um communities, you have cultural styles, but you you know, it is possible. And and one thing that is striking is that the number of times that an individual victim has been killed immediately uh has been higher in uh Kibale Forest in Uganda uh than in in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It's conceivable that's just chance. We don't have a real numbers now, you know, but what is this? Um I can't remember the exact numbers, but you know, 10 versus 15 or something. Um So so maybe they damage to the point of uh expecting a death in one place and they just finish it off in the other, but most likely that sort of difference will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers. You know, human beings are able to conceive of the philosophical notion of death, of mortality. Is there any of that uh for chimps when they're thinking about violence? Is violence like what what is the nature of their conception of violence, do you think? Do they do they realize they're taking another conscious being's life, or is it some kind of like optimization over the use of resources or something like that? I I don't think it's I can't think of any way to get it an answer to the question of of what they know about that. Um I think that uh the way to think about the motivation is uh rather like uh the motivation in sex. So when males are interested in having sex with a female, whether it's say in chimpanzees or in humans, uh they don't think about the fact that what this is going to do is to lead to a baby. Mostly. You're right. Mostly what they're thinking about is I want to get my end away. Uh and um I think that that's a it's a similar kind of process with the chimps. You know, what they are thinking about is uh I want I want to kill this Yes. individual. And it's hard to imagine that uh taking the other individual's perspective and thinking about what it means for them to die is going to be an important part of that. In fact, you know, there's there's reason to think it should not be an important part of it cuz it might inhibit them and they they don't want to be inhibited. You know, the more efficient they are in doing this, the better. But you know, I think it's interesting to think about this whole motivational question because it does um produce this sort of rather haunting thought that there has been selection in favor of enthusiasm about killing. And in our relatively gentle and uh you know, deliberately moral society that we have today, it's very difficult for us to face the thought that uh in all of us there might have been uh uh res- residue and and a more than that, sort of an actively an active potential for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else. But I I think you know, 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 uh thoroughly hostile. But the pure enjoyment of violence. There's uh I don't know if you know this historian Dan Carlin. He has a podcast. He has an episode three, four-hour episode that I recommend to others. It's quite haunting. But he takes us through an entire history. Uh it's called Painful Atonement. The uh the history of humans enjoying the murder of others in a large group. So like at public executions were part of long part of human history. And there's something that um for some reason humans seem to have been drawn to just watching others die. And he ventures to say that that may still be part of us. For example, he said if it was possible to televise, to stream online, for example, the execution and the the murder of somebody or even the torture of somebody, that uh a very large fraction of the population on Earth would not be able to look away. They'd be drawn to that somehow. That's a very dark thought that we are drawn to that. So you think that's part of us in there somewhere, that it selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing and the enjoyment of observing uh those in our tribe doing the killing. Yes. I mean, and that that word you produced at the end is critical, I think. You know, because um it would be a little bit weird, I think, uh to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people in your own tribe being killed. Right. You know, I I I don't think we're we're interested in violence for violence's sake that much. Yeah. Um it's um it's when you get these social boundaries set up. And in today's world, you know, happily, uh we kind of are already one world. You know, we 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 uh ancient times, that would not have been true because in ancient times, there were lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers uh in which the appearance of a stranger would lead to an immediate response of shooting on sight. Mhm. Because what was human was the people that were in your society. Mhm. And the other things that actually looked like us and, you know, were were human in that sense, were not regarded as human. Mhm. So the there was a kind of automatic dehumanization of everybody that didn't speak our language or hadn't already somehow become recognized as uh sufficiently like us to escape the the new the dehumanization compact. And so hopefully the story of human history is that we are um that tribalism fades away. That our dehumanization, the natural desire to dehumanize or tendency to dehumanize groups that are not within this tribe decreases over time. And so then the desire for violence decreases over time. Yeah, I mean, that that that's the optimistic perspective. And and the the great sort of concern, of course, is that um small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts and then dehumanization happens and then violence is released. As Hannah Arendt says, you know, there currently is no uh known alternative to war as a means of settling really important conflicts. So if we look at the big picture, what role has violence or do you think violence has played in the evolution of Homo sapiens? So we are quite an intelligent, quite a beautiful particular little branch on the evolutionary tree. Um what part of that was played by um our tendency to be violent? Well, I think that violence was responsible for creating your Homo sapiens. Um and that raises the question of what Homo sapiens is. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So you know, nowadays people um begin uh they the so concept of what what Homo sapiens is by uh thinking about about features that very obviously different from all of the other species of Homo. Uh and uh our our large brain, our a very rounded cranium, a relatively small face. Uh these are characteristics which are developed in a relatively modern way by about 100 um 70,000 years ago, say. You know, that's one of the earliest skulls in in Africa that really captures that. But uh it has been argued that that is a um an episode in a process that has been uh started uh substantially earlier. And there's no doubt that that's true. You know, Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there. And it goes back to 300,000 years ago. Uh 315, naturally, is the is the time the the best estimate of a date for uh a series of bones from Morocco that have been dated uh three or four years ago I at that time and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens. Now, at that point uh they are only beginning the trend of sapienization. And that trend consists, basically, of gracilization. Of making uh our ancestors less robust. Um shorter faces, smaller teeth, uh smaller brow ridge, uh narrower face, um uh thinner uh cranium. Uh all these things that are um associated with um reduced violence. Okay, so that's that's saying what that's Homo sapiens beginning. So, it began sometime three three to 400,000 years ago. Cuz by 315,000 years ago, you've already got something recognizable. So, you're you're more on that side of things that those is gradual process. It's not 150, 170,000 years ago. It's it started like 400,000 years ago and it's just It started three to 400,000 years ago. And and if you look at 170, it's got even more like us. And then if you if you look at 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 three and 400,000 years ago to produce Homo sapiens? And I I think we have a pretty good answer now. And the answer comes from violence. And the story begins by focusing on this question. Why is it that in the human species we are unique among all primates in not having an alpha male in any group uh in the sense that what we don't have is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male. And the answer uh that um um has been portrayed most most richly by Christopher Boehm and whose work I've elaborated on uh is that uh 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 bonobo or an alpha baboon or anything like that any male who tries to do that in humans gets taken down by a coalition of beta males. Mhm. And that coalition Yes. That's a really good uh picture of human society, yes. Mhm. I like it. Okay. So, and that's the way all our societies work now. Yes. Um and because individuals try and be alpha and then they get taken out. Yeah, I mean, we don't usually think of ourselves as beta males, but yes, I I suppose I suppose that's what democracy is. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Um Okay, so well, so 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. Mhm. You see it all the time in in primates. Some beta male thinks he's getting strong and and uh you know, maturing in in wisdom and so on and he refuses to uh couch out to the alpha male. And the alpha male comes straight in and and uh charges at him. Or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes or and then take an opportunity to attack him. Mhm. The um all of these um primates have got a high tendency for reactive aggression. Mhm. And that make enables the possibility of alpha males. We don't. We have this great reduction as I talked about earlier. And the question is when did that reduction happen? Well cut to the famous experiments by the Russian biologist 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 uh reactive uh 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 um shorter face, smaller teeth, uh reduced maleness. Uh the males become increasingly female-like. Um and reduced brain size. Well, the changes that are characteristic of domesticated animals in general compared to wild animals are all found in Homo sapiens compared to our earlier ancestors. Mhm. So, it's a very strong signal that when we first see Homo sapiens, what we're seeing is evidence of a reduction in reactive aggression. And that suggests that what's happening with Homo sapiens is that uh that is the point at which there is selection against the alpha males. And therefore the way in which the selection happened would have been the way it happens today. The beta males take them out. So, I think that Homo sapiens is a species characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression as a kind of incidental consequence of the suppression of the alpha male. And and the story of our species is the story of how the beta males took charge. And have been responsible for the generation of a new kind of human. And incidentally uh for imposing on the society a new set of values. Because when those beta males discovered that they could take out the previous alpha male and continue to do so cuz you know, every generation there'll always be some male who says, "I I maybe I'll become the alpha male." And they you know, so they just keep chopping them down. In discovering that, they also obviously discovered that they could kill anybody in the group. Mhm. Females, young males, anybody who didn't follow their values. Mhm. And so, this story is one of um 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 was a two kind of values. There's one kind of value is things that are good for the group, like thou shalt not murder. Mhm. And the other kind of value is things that are good for the males. Such as, "Hey, guess what? When good food comes in, males get it first." Yes. So, I mean, it's fascinating that that kind of set of ideals could outcompete the the others. Do you have a sense of why or maybe you can comment on Neanderthals and all the other early humans. Why did uh Homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish and all the other ones all the other branches of evolution died out? Or got murdered out? nowadays when when Homo sapiens meets Homo sapiens and we don't know each other initially then conflict breaks out and uh the uh more militarily able group wins. You know, we've seen that everywhere throughout the age of exploration and and throughout history. So, I'm I'm rather surprised, you know, the uh conventional wisdom uh that you see nowadays in contemporary anthropology is very reluctant to point to uh success in warfare uh as the reason why sapiens uh wiped out Neanderthals within about 3,000 years of the sapiens uh coming into Europe 43,000 years ago. Mhm. And people are much more inclined to say, "Well, the Neanderthals were at low population density, so they just couldn't survive the demographic sort of sweep." Uh or that disease came in. And you know, maybe those things might have been important, but you know, far and away the most obvious possibility is that uh Sapiens were just um more powerful. Uh they had Everyone agrees they had larger groups. Uh they had better weapons. Uh they they had projectile weapons, bows and arrows, to judge from the little microlith, you know, bits of flake. Um which the Neanderthals 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 loved each other. They they made love, not war." I I think they made love and war. And uh you know, it wouldn't necessarily been too loving. I mean if you just follow through from typical ethnographies nowadays of when um dominant groups meet subordinate groups, they didn't know each other, then you can imagine that Neanderthal females would essentially be captured and taken into Sapiens groups. Maybe we can comment on this uh cautiously and eloquently. What's the role of sexual violence in human evolution? Cuz you mentioned taking Neanderthal females. You've also mentioned that some of these rules are defined by the uh by the male side of the society. What's the role of sexual violence in this story? I think you've got to distinguish between groups and within groups. Mhm. Um and um you know, I think we're the world has been slowly waking up over the last several decades to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war. And that to me says that um it's just another example of power corrupts because you know, when uh frustrated uh scared uh elated soldiers uh come upon females in a group that there's been essential dehumanization of uh then they get carried away by opportunity. Uh it is not always possible to argue that this is adaptive uh nowadays because you know, you get lots and lots of stories of um uh women being um abused to the point of of being killed. Uh you know, she'll be gang-raped and and then killed. There's lots of of terrible cases of of that reported from all sorts of different wars. But you can see that that could build on a a pattern that would have been a a adaptive if happening in under sort of much less extreme circumstances. Uh You know, the the war is is very extreme nowadays in the sense that you get battles in which people are sent by a military hierarchy into a war situation in which they do not feel what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt, which would have been that if we attack, we have an excellent chance of getting away with it. Nowadays, you know, you're sent in across the Somme or whatever it is, and there's a very high chance you will be killed. And that's totally unnatural and a a novel evolutionary experience, I think. Then there's sexual coercion within groups. And um so that takes various kinds of forms. You know, but nowadays, of course, I think people recognize increasingly that the principal form of um sexual intimidation and rape occurs within relationships. Mhm. It's not stranger rape that is really, you know, statistically important. There's much more um what happens uh behind the walls of uh a bedroom where people have been, you know, living for some time. And um just two sort of, you know, thoughts and observations about this. One is that it may seem odd that um that males should be uh should think it, you know, a good idea, as it were, to impose themselves sexually on someone with whom they have a relationship. But what they're doing is intimidating someone in a relationship in which the relative power in the relationship has continuing significance for a long time. And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual. You know, it's it's to do with domestic relationships. It's to do with the man getting his his own way all the way. Right. It's power dynamics and the sexual aggression is one of the tools to regain power, gain power, gain more power, and that kind of thing. Yeah. Exactly. And and in that respect um it's worth noting that although this wasn't appreciated for some time, it's it's emerging that in a bunch of primates you have somewhat similar somewhat parallel kinds of sexual intimidation. Where males will target particular females even in a group in which the norm is for females to mate with multiple males. But each male will target a particular female, and the more he is aggressive towards her, then the more she conforms to his wishes when he wants to mate. So a long-term pattern of sexual intimidation. So there's that aspect. The other aspect I would just just note is that males get away with a lot compared to females in the any kind of intersexual conflict. Um you know, so the punishment Here's one example of this. The punishment for a husband killing a wife has always been much less than the punishment for a wife killing a husband. Um and and you see similar sorts of things in terms of the punishments for adultery and um and so on. Um I bring this up in the context of of males sexually intimidating their partners, be be it wives or whoever, um 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 3 to 400,000 years ago. When the beta males took charge, and they started imposing their own norms on society as a whole, and they've continued to do so. And you we now look at ourselves and you know, Jordan Peterson says, "We are not a patriarchal society." Well, you know, it's true that the laws try and make it even-handed nowadays between males and females. But obviously we are patriarchal de facto because society still in many ways you know, supports um men better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts. So beta male patriarchal. If we look at at the evolutionary history. Okay. Is there maybe sticking on Jordan for a second? Is is there um So he's a psychologist, right? And what part of the picture do you think he's missing in analyzing human relations? Like what needs what does he need to understand about our origins and violence and the way the society has been constructed? Oh, I I I I don't want to go deep into into his missing perspectives, you know, but I just think that um that what he's doing in that particular example is focusing on the legalistic position. Mhm. And that's great that um you know, you do not find uh formal patriarchy in the law anything like to the extent that you could find it 100 years ago. And so on. You know, women have got the vote now. Hooray! But it took a long time for women to get the vote. And you know, it it remains the case that um uh the women suffer in in various kinds of ways. You know, we know a woman who is uh has lots of sexual partners is uh treated much more rudely than a male who has lots of sexual partners. Uh there there are all sorts of informal ways in which uh it's it's a rougher being a woman than it is a man. And uh if we look at the surface layer of uh law, we may miss the deeper human nature. Um like the the origins of our human nature that still operates, no matter what the law says. Yeah. Which which is you know, human nature is awkward because uh it includes some unpleasant features that uh when we sit back and reflect about them, uh we would like to um them to go away. Yeah. But it remains the fact that um men uh are um hugely concerned to try and uh have sex with um at least one woman and you know, often not the women. And so women are con- men are constantly putting pressure on women in uh 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 it just goes on because of human nature. So maybe looking at particular humans in history, uh let's talk about Genghis Khan. So is is uh this particular human who was one of the most famous examples of uh large-scale violence. Is he a deep representative of human nature or is he a rare exception? Well, I think that it's easy to imagine that most men could have become Genghis Khan. Uh it's possible that he had a particular streak of psychopathy. Um you know, it's it's striking that uh by the time you become immensely powerful, then uh your willingness to do terrible things uh for the interest of yourself and your group um becomes uh very high. You know, uh Stalin, Mao Zedong, uh 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 uh they do not follow the ordinary morality of considering the harm that they are doing to their victims. Uh you know, what kind of experiment would we need to discover whether or not anybody uh could fall into this position? I don't know, but you know, Lord Acton's uh famous dictum was power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And then the point that people often forget is the next sentence that he said, which is great men are almost always bad men. And that is right. It is very difficult to find a great man in history who was not responsible for terrible things. I think there's some aspect of it that it's not just power. I think men who's been who have been the most destructive in human history are not psychopathic completely. They have convinced themselves of an idea. It's like the idea is psychopathic. Uh Stalin, for example, I don't Hitler's a complicated one. I think he was legitimately insane. But I think Stalin has convinced himself that he's doing good. So the idea of communism is the thing that's psychopathic in his mind. Like it bred you construct a worldview in which the violence is justified. The cruelty is justified. So there um in in that sense, first of all, you can construct experiments, unethical experiments that could test this, but uh in that sense, anybody else could have been in Stalin's position. It's the idea that could overtake the mind of a human being and in so doing justify cruel acts. And that seems to be at least in part unique to humans is the ability to hold ideas in our minds and share those ideas and use those ideas to convince ourselves that uh proactive violence on a large scale is a good idea. So that I don't know if you have a comment. so. I mean, but but seems to me what really motivated my Stalin was not so much uh communism uh as uh the retention of power. So once he became leader uh and in the process of becoming leader, uh he was absolutely desperate to get rid of anybody who was a challenger. He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of of anybody uh even on his side uh who might possibly be showing a glimmerings of uh willingness to challenge him. So, you know, when he um apparently had uh uh Kirov uh murdered, uh Kirov was a great communist. Uh Trotsky was a great communist. Uh you know, all all the all his rivals uh and I mean, when he went into the towns and and and murdered people by the tens of thousands. They were all communists. A lot of them were commu- were explicit communists. That's right. But but what he was worried about was that they were rivals to him. I suppose the thought is I am the best person to bring about a uh a global sort of embrace of communism and others are not. And so we have to get rid of those others. Well, I suspect you're being very charitable here, but I mean, maybe you're you're a you know enough about Stalin to really Yes. Well, so the point I'm making I I do quite a bit is from my understanding and sense, of course, we can't know for sure, is he believed in communism. This wasn't purely a game of power. Now, he got drunk with power pretty quickly, but he really believed for I believe his whole life that uh communism is good for the world. And that I don't know what role that belief plays with the nat- more natural human desire for power. I don't know, but it just seems like As we As we agreed, he's killing a lot of communists on his on his journey. Hm. But it's not that doesn't that calculus doesn't work that way. There's humans who are communists and then there's the idea of communism. So for for him, in his delusional worldview, killing a few people is worth the final result of bringing communism to the whole world. But it was more than that again because I mean, he really wanted power for uh the Soviet Union and and uh so surely the reason that he um orchestrated the um export of wheat from Ukraine and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation was because he wanted to sell it on the market in order to be able to build up the power of uh the Soviet Union. You know, alternative view of a communism might have been, well, you know, let's let's just make sure everybody survives and 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 for the country. Well, I guess exactly. So that it's not even communism, this set of ideas or like Marxism or something like that. It's the country. I guess what I'm saying is um it's not purely power for the individual. It's power for a vision for this great nation, the Soviet Union. And it's similar with Hitler. The guy believed that this is a great nation, Germany. And like they it it it's a nation that's been wronged throughout history and needs to be righted. And there's some dance between the individual human and the tribe. Yes. No, that that absolutely. Yes. And so so just like chimpanzees, uh you know, we are fiercely tribal. And the tribalism uh resides particularly in male psychology. And uh it's it's very scary because once you assemble a a a set of males uh who share tribal identity, then they have power that they can exert uh with um very little concern about what they're doing to damage other people. Do you think this So Nietzschean will to power we talked about the corrupting nature of power. Do you think that's a manifestation of those uh early origins of violence? What's the connection of this desire for power and our proclivity for violence? You know, what we're talking about it is um tribal power, right? Power on behalf of a group. Yes. And I yeah, that seems to me to go right back to um a a a deep evolutionary origin because you see essentially the same thing in uh in a whole bunch of animals. You know, they that uh most uh of the sort of uh cognitively complex animals live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries. Hm. Uh and um so what you see in chimpanzees uh is echoed in almost all of the primates. The difference between us and you know, chimpanzees and humans on the one hand and other primates on the other is that we kill and they don't. And the reason they don't is because they never meet in the context where there are massive imbalances of power. So, two groups of baboons, you know, there's 30 on this side and 50 on this side, fine. Nobody's going to try and kill anybody else because the serious risks involved. Um but nevertheless, they are tribal. So, you know, they they will have fairly intense intergroup interactions uh in which everybody knows whose side is on who who is on whose side and um the long-term consequences of uh winning those battles, non-lethal battles, is that the dominance uh get access to larger areas of land, um more safety, and so on uh with chances are um better uh record of um reproductive success subsequently. Do you think this from an evolutionary perspective is a feature or a bug? Our uh natural sort of tendency to form tribes. So, what's a bug? Oh, sorry. This is a computer uh programming analogy. Um meaning like it would be more beneficial. Is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes from an evolutionary perspective? Yeah, yeah, but but but What does it What does it mean What does a bug mean? Yeah, it's right. I mean Well, yeah, cuz like where's evolution going anyway? It's It's beneficial from you know, it's beneficial in the sense that it evolved by natural selection to beat to benefit the individuals who did it. Yes. But if you if by bug you mean something that from the point of view of the species, it would be great if you could just wipe this out Right. because the species would somehow do better Yes, exactly. then yes, but but then you know, males are a bug. Uh come on now. It's uh we're There There's some nice things to males uh speaking as a male I The fact that there are some nice things to males doesn't mean that they're not bugs. You know, maybe they're quite nice bugs. But it'd be much better for the species as a whole not to have to have males who impose this violence on the species as a whole. Yeah. As somebody who practice controlled violence and doing a lot of martial arts, yeah, it uh I'm not sure. It It does seem kind of fun to have this kind of controlled violence, also sports. Also, I mean, the question of conflict in general, I guess that's the deeper question. Don't you think there's some value to conflict for the improvement of society, for progress? That that this tension between tribes isn't this like uh experiment a continued experiment we conduct with each other and to figure out what is a better world to build? Like you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas to go to war with each other. It's like the United States with the 50 states and the It's the laboratory of ideas. Don't you think that is again feature versus bug? Um it this kind of conflict, when it doesn't get out of hand, is actually ultimately progressive, productive for a better world. Well, what do you mean by conflict? I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of people have different ideas about the solution to a problem. And so, their ideas are in conflict. They can sit down and uh and uh on a log and and chat about it and then decide, "Okay, you're right or I'm wrong or whatever." Um but but if my conflict uh you mean uh great idea to build a nuclear bomb and set that off, uh then no, you know, I don't see why it's a good idea to have all this violence. Yeah, there's I I wonder I mean, it's not a good idea, but I wonder if human history would evolve the way it did without the violence. Oh, I'm sure you're you're right. It probably uh humans would not have evolved in in the sense that we have. But I would hope that uh the course of uh violence in evolution uh will continue in the way it has. So, you know, there's all sorts of indications um that the importance of violence has been reduced over time. And you know, this is made famous in Steven Pinker's book, but others have written about it, too. Um that the the frequency of uh death from violence in every country you look at uh has been declining. That's just great. And so, you know, the amazing thing about this is that even when you take the deaths due to the First World War and the Second World War, the 20th century appears to have been statistically, meaning rates of death per individual, um the uh least violent in history. So, we haven't got very far down the course to non-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 frankness, uh to to say that uh violence is a good thing. Mhm. Um I think that it would be a wonderful concept if we could evolve somehow to a world uh 3,000 years from now uh where violence is really regarded as uh simply appalling and that you know, they look back on our time and can't believe what we were doing. Yeah. Uh but of course, violence takes a lot of different shapes. As we start to think deeper and deeper about living beings on Earth, for example, the violence we commit and the torture we commit to animals and then perhaps down the line as we talked offline about as with robots and that kind of thing. So, there there's just so many ways to commit violence to others. And some people now talk about violence in the space of ideas, which of course to me at least is a bit of a silly notion relative to use that same V word for the space of ideas versus actual physical violence. But it may be that long time from now we see that even violence in the space of ideas is is is quite a manifestation of that same kind of violence. And so, it it is interesting where this is headed. And I think you're absolutely right. Uh a world a non-violent world does seem like a better world. I wonder if the constraints on resources somehow make that world more and more difficult, especially as we run out of resources. Well, it's going to be very very different from what we're doing nowadays. And And it's it's unimaginably different. If we could imagine it, then maybe we could work towards it. At the moment, nobody knows how to work towards it. Well, that's kind of the stories of humans as we we don't really know the future. We're trying to trying to ad hoc kind of develop it as we go and sometimes get into trouble. Yeah. That's the violence. But it you know, George Orwell's vision in 1984 was of uh of you know, two or three world powers each so powerful that nobody could could diminish the could could destroy the other. Um but the notion of uh an evolutionarily stable relationship among uh heavily armed world powers does does not seem uh as though it's it's reasonable at all. That is to say, uh you know, we've we've now got 170 or 190 nations in the world uh dominated by a few big ones uh all with arms pointing at each other. And the notion that we could just carry on having peace talks and making sure that uh these arms uh don't get uh involved in some kind of massive conflagration uh seems incredibly uh some kind of major change has to happen uh whereby you know, and some people would like to see all the weapons go. That'd be great. You know, I'm a member of that that sort of group that tries to to see that happen. It's going to be very difficult to see it happen. Um another kind of concept is uh the nations themselves will dissolve and will become uh one 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? Mhm. So, you know, at the moment we we have no reasonable kind of future in mind, but I'm sure it's there somewhere. It's just that we haven't yet to find it. And a lot of people like in the cryptocurrency space argue that you can create decentralized societies if you take away the power from states to define the monetary system. So, they argue like if you give if if you make the monetary system such that is disjoint from anyone the control of any one individual, any one government, then that might be a way to form sort of ad hoc decentralized societies. Just they just pop up all over the place. That's a really interesting technological uh solution to how to remove the overreach of power from governments. Yes, right. Absolutely. And And it may well be that the the future will emerge out of some sort of quite surprising direction like that. Is it Nevertheless surprising to you that we have not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons? So the mutually assured destruction that we've had for many decades from somebody who studies violence how does that make sense to you? Well, I mean I'm I'm surprised only in the sense that accidental the the the fact that we have not had an accident yet has been quite remarkable. Yeah, because all the accounts are that we've come very close to having very serious accidents where people either side of of misread intentions or or apparent launches and so on. So yes, I think it is remarkable. There's a a nasty um generalization that can be made that the longer that um powerful states go without having wars then the worse the war is afterwards. I and you know, you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense because basically what's happening with these tribal groups that the nations are at the moment is that after a big war like the Second World War they establish new kinds of dominance relationships. And then during the periods of peace what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships change because some nations become poorer some become richer some become more militarily powerful and so on. Generally economy and military goes hand in hand. So you know, right now China emerged from the war as a relatively low status 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 readjustment of the formal dominance relationships to recognize the 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 dominance relationships build up. And the longer they take to occur then the more challenging are going to be the conflicts. That's a terrifying view cuz we've been we've been out of conflict for quite a bit. That's right. Maybe it's building up. So so it's a scary view but on the other hand, you know, things have changed hugely with the advent of nuclear weapons because at least that conforms to this psychology that is very clear in other animals which is you don't want to get into a fight if you are going to get hurt. So that's the whole principle of MAD mutually assured destruction. And it's doubtless been why powerful nations like America and and Russia have not used their nuclear weapons since 1945. The you know, 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. You know, I mean the Soviet Union collapsed because of the poor economy but with China, you know, desperate to take back Taiwan and America shifting its focus on the Pacific the potential for something going wrong is is clearly very high. So what's the hopeful case that you can make for a long-term surviving and thriving human civilization given all the dangers that we face? Well, I I can't really exactly make one. I would just say that we're talking about the dangers. You know, obviously the dangers are there. Yeah. But but what I would sort of think about is um the notion that that surprises come from all sorts of different directions. You know, and I mean you're you're you're you work in robotics and you know, I could well imagine that there will be advances in robotics that in some way I can't even conceive will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict. Something about 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. the conflicts but keep some of the magic the beauty of what it means to be human. So like still be able to enjoy life the richness of life the full complexity of life cuz you can remove conflict by giving everybody a pill and then they go to sleep, right? You still want life to be amazing exciting, you know, interesting. And so that's where you have to find the balance. Well, it's Yes, I mean it's all science fiction stuff and and so how it's going to work out totally unclear. Um I don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing. I mean first of all, you somehow get rid of males. I think I think you really need to get rid of males cuz males are the source of uh of a of a major problem which is the lust for power uh and the resulting conflict. But you don't think the males are also source of beauty and creation? I mean I I don't I don't have anything against males as you know, as individuals that sort of thing. And and and males have clearly done a lot. I mean they've been incredibly exploratory and creative and what they've done in in art and music has been wonderful and that sort of thing. On the other hand I'm not sure there's anything particularly special and I think that probably females could do the same thing just as well when given the chance. Yes, including the dark stuff. I I I mean a part part of me is not understanding the So there is a evolutionary distinction between men and women but I tend to believe both men and women if you look out into the future can be destructive can be evil can be greedy can be corrupted by power. So if you remove males from the picture which are historically connected to this evolution of that we've been talking about that women are going to fill that role quite nicely. And then it'll be just the same kind of process we not the same but it'll be new and interesting. It There's a There's a sense that the the will to power craving power committing violence is somehow coupled with with all of the things that are beautiful about life. That if you could remove conflict completely if you remove all of the evil in the world it it it seems like you're going to um you're not going to have a a stable place for the beauty for the goodness. Like there's always has to be a dragon to fight. For the way if you look at human history now you can say the reason I'm nervous about a sort of utopia where everything is great is every time you look through human history when utopia has been chased you run to a lot of trouble where again sneaks into this evil this craving for power. Now you could say that's a male problem but I just think it's a human problem and it's not even a human problem. It's a chimp problem too. It's life on earth problem intelligent life on earth problem. So like it's better to um not necessarily get rid of the sources of the darker sides of human nature but more create mechanisms that the kindness the the goodness as the goodness paradox your book that that is incentivized and encouraged and empowered. Well Look, I I don't think it would be utopia if you got rid of males. Right. Um and certainly females are capable of conflict. I just think it's a gamble worth taking if you could actually do it. You you can certainly find females in history who done unpleasant things. But nevertheless you know, we have a very strong evolutionary theory which explains why males benefit more by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do. And so if we want to talk about reducing conflicts then it would reduce it to get rid of males. Now I understand this is a fantasy and it it I think it's a fantasy that people would be able to talk about fairly soon because reproductive technology is getting to the point where it's quite likely that human females could breed without the use of males. And so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies. It's a it's a really interesting thought experiment. I will agree with you that if given two buttons one is get rid of all women and the other button is get rid of all men um realizing that I have a stake in this, uh, choice. I you're probably getting rid of all men. If I wanted to preserve Earth and, uh, the richness of life on Earth, I would probably get rid of all men. I don't know. think you have a stake in it. You know, I mean, but you're 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. Mhm. Well, my problem is I'll have to die. Well, that's going to happen anyway. I know, but like I prefer to die tomorrow not today, you know, I you know, I prefer to snooze hit the snooze button on the on the whole mortality thing. But it's interesting But but this is not suggesting that males have to die in order to make room for females. It's just You know, you you you you you all you have to do is just say don't let's have any more males born. Interesting. Of course, you know, the difficulty is that that because we're tribal you know, some country somewhere would say, "Well, we're not going to do that." Yeah. And then guess what? They'd take over, you know, because they're males. So, that's why it's impossible to imagine actually happening. I you know what? I'm going to I'm going to take that and actually think about it. I I don't know. I'm uncomfortable. There's, uh there's a certain kind of woke culture that I've been kind of uncomfortable with because it's not women necessarily. It's more just There's a lot of bullying I see. There's a There's a lack of empathy and a lack of kindness towards others that's created by that culture. So, but you're speaking about something else. You're speaking about reducing conflict in this world and looking at the basics of our human nature and its origins in the, uh, evolution of Homo sapiens and thinking about which kind of aspects of human nature if we get rid of them will make for a better world. It's an interesting thought experiment worth But it is only a thought experiment. I mean, you know, it's got no practical meaning uh right now. And and I take your point that um you know, males get a hard rap nowadays uh in some ways because uh the balance of social power is moving uh against um I mean, you know, quite rightly in the strong sense of course against all the the nasty things that males do. But what people sometimes fail to remember is that um life is very hard for males who don't have the power who don't have money who don't have access to women. Um you know, I'm sympathetic to incels. I 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 um well-off um feminist um middle-class people uh that you shouldn't behave like this or you shouldn't feel like it because you do. Yes. It's who you are. I mean, that that in general just empathy and kindness m- male or female I have I believe will be the thing that builds a better world. And that that's practiced in different ways from different backgrounds, but ultimately you should listen to others and empathize with the experience of others and put more love out there in the world. Now, that's hopefully is the way to reduce conflict uh reduce violence and um reduce that that whole psychological experience of being powerless in this world, powerless to become the best version of yourself. And that, you know Well, no one's going to disagree with all those fine sentiments. Right? But that y- yes, but that's that's an actionable thing is actually practice empathy. Right? Like s- saying that um somebody should be silenced or just like this group is bad and this group is good. I just feel like that's not empathy. Empathy is understanding understanding the experience of others and like respecting it. Like mean that that's that's what it that's what a better world looks like. That's what the reduction of conflict looks like. It's like as opposed to, uh, saying my tribe is right, your tribe is wrong. Uh forget the violence and non-violence part. That just that act of saying my tribe is right, that tribe is wrong, removing that from the picture. That's the way to make a better world. Like that's the way to reduce the violence, I think. Um not necessarily removing the people who are causing the violence. You have to get to the source of the problem. I don't mean the evolutionary source, but the just the the mindset that creates the violence is usually just a lack of empathy for others. Yeah, but you know, I mean, you can't just teach that because there's our evolutionary psychology puts us in particular directions. So, you don't think do you think it's possible to learn through practice to resist the basics of our evolutionary psychology, the basic forces? Yeah, I mean lots and lots of training, you know, lots and lots of education uh can do it. They the the famously most peaceful society uh um of teaching uh including some punishment. You know, it's a society in in Thailand. Mhm. Um you you have to beat it out of children to make them nice. So, it's carrot and stick. You know, the point is that you do not find societies in which uh people are spontaneously um showing the kinds of behaviors that we would all love them to show. It requires work. It requires work. What is your book titled Goodness Paradox? What are the main ideas in this book? Well, the paradox is the fact that humans uh show extremes in both in relationship to both violence and non-violence. And the violence is that we are one of these few animals in which uh we uh use coalitionary proactive violence to kill members of our own species and we do it in large numbers just like a few other species. And they uh non-violence is where particularly extreme in uh how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence. And I I told you the story of of how we get there. You know, so what's so extraordinary about this is that um most animals uh are either high on both or relatively low on both. Uh so, chimpanzees are high on proactive violence and reactive violence. Bonobos are less uh than chimpanzees on both of those, but still hundreds of times more um reactively aggressive than than humans are. What we've done is retain uh proactive violence being high and got reactive violence really being low. And so, we have these wonderful societies in which we're all so incredibly nice to each other and tolerant and calm and and can meet strangers and have no problem about um uh leading to any kind of conflict at the same time as uh we are one of the worst killing machine species uh there's ever existed. So, what's so extraordinary about this is that if you look at the political philosophers of the last few hundred years you've got this fight famously between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau or literally got the fight between their followers. Mhm. You know, so the followers of Hobbes say, "Well, Hobbes was right because he says that we are naturally violent and you need a leviathan or 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 and horrid ideologies come in that we become uncivilized. And so, people have have had this endless fight between are we naturally corrupt or are we naturally uh kind? And and that has gone on, you know, for years and it's only in the last two or three decades that anthropologists like Christopher Boehm and Bruce Knauft 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 uh both of animals and of each other. I think you've got to include that, you know, as almost certain from the past. And um and then now we've we've taken our reactive aggression and we 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, um are able to interact in ways that enable them to share looking at a tool together, or share their food together, or pass ideas from one to another, or support each other when they're ill or whatever the issue is, cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective. So, you asked earlier, you know, what did I think about why Sapiens was able to expand at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically around 40,000 years ago. And the answer is uh that whatever it was, it had something to do with the Sapiens ability to cooperate. Yeah, that was what gave them bigger groups. That's what enabled them to um have a far more effective way of living. And I suspect it was to do with their weapons and and the military aspects. But even if it wasn't that, the the greater cooperation that Sapiens were showing uh would have been hugely important. So, Sapiens then had groups of uh I you know, who knows exactly how big they were, but um I I scores of of people uh to judge from their remains. Uh whereas Neanderthals were living in um widely separated small groups of, you know, maybe maybe as many as 15 or 20 people sometimes. Um where they saw others so rarely that they were inbreeding at uh high levels, you know, fathers uh having babies with their daughters. Mhm. Very different world. Very different world. And that's probably what our world was like before we got Sapiens. Before we got Sapiens. And it's fascinating that there was that kind of violence against so the once you get the get rid of the alpha males, you have now the freedom to uh have kindness amongst the beta. The beta males. Like not not kindness, but collaboration that's the better word. Yes, right. Not much more cooperation and not just among the males, but among the beta males, but also among the gamma males and the uh and the females. Yeah. I don't know what a gamma male is, but I imagine there's a whole alphabet. Well, I don't know about whole alphabet, but I think the the big lads are the married men Yeah. and and the and the unmarried men. Ah. You know, because the the married men were had a problem with the unmarried men. Right? I mean, you you you see it in ethnographies of hunters and gatherers recently, where uh the unmarried men would be given rules. Such as, I mean, the very extreme rule in northern Australia was uh you cannot come to the camp uh for months. You have to go away and live uh somewhere out in the bush. Yes. Cuz we don't want you anywhere near our wives. And uh and then another kind of, you know, rule is um 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. You see, it serves a really purpose to control them because, the men who had lots of wives did not want those horny bachelors sneaking around the place. I love this. You also wrote the book titled Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human. What's the central idea in this book? The subtitle, How Cooking Made Us Human, refers not to Homo Sapiens, but to Homo Erectus. So, human there means the genus Homo. Mhm. And uh Homo Erectus is the first full member of the genus Homo in the sense that uh it looked like us, just with a sort of slightly robust, more robust build and a smaller brain. Uh and the central idea of Catching Fire is that it was the um control of fire that was responsible for the emergence of Homo Erectus and therefore the genus Homo, which happened 2 million years ago. And it was uh a an evolution from a um a line of Australopithecines. And Australopithecines are the creatures from whom uh we evolved. They were present uh in Africa from something like 6 or 7 million years ago up to uh 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 Australopithecines is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright. So, they were erect bipedal walkers. Um they were like chimpanzees in the sense that uh they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee. They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee, a little bit smaller actually. Uh and uh they had big jaws because they were still eating um raw food. They had uh big teeth and big jaws. And then, around 2 million years ago, the line of Australopithecines, which ended with a an intermediate species, a kind of missing link area cuz it's not missing, called um habilis, uh sometimes called Homo habilis, but more properly, I in my view, called Australopithecus habilis. Uh that gave rise to Homo Erectus. And Homo Erectus, here's how different it was. It had a a smaller mouth, uh smaller jaw, smaller teeth, and to judge from its ribs and pelvis, smaller gut. Mhm. In addition, it had lost what Australopithecines all had, which was adaptations for climbing in the trees. And that meant that Homo Erectus must have slept on the ground. Mhm. And since it slept on the ground, it should have been able to defend itself somehow against predators. And I can't think of any way they could have done that unless they had fire. So, there are two major clues to why it was with Homo Erectus that our ancestors first acquired the control of fire. One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos and all the other primates do. Uh and the other is that there was this striking reduction throughout the gut. Reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus uh and in the gut itself. And that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans, which is that our guts are about 2/3 of the size of what they would be if we ate raw food, Mhm. 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 2 million years ago and the present do we see any changes in our anatomy that can, as it were, justify uh the enormous change that happens when uh you are an animal that learns to control fire. But at 2 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, commitment to sleeping on the ground, which I think you'd be absolutely crazy to do nowadays uh on a moonless night uh in the middle of Serengeti unless you had fire. I've slept out quite a lot in various parts of Africa uh in the bush, and you will not catch me just lying on the ground um in an area with lots of predators unless I got a fire with me. You're going to get eaten. You're going to get terrified and you're going to get eaten. Okay. So, there's a million questions I want to ask. So, one is is it very naturally coupled the discovery of controlled fire and cooking with fire? Is that an obvious leap? Well, what here's what we know. We know that um all the animals that we've tested like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw. Okay. So, this is true for all the great apes. You know, we've tested them. Um and by the way. Why is that? That's just like a property of food, I suppose. Yes, I think what it is is that um uh 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 cuz the amino acids can be tasted. Um and uh the physical qualities of the food be particularly important, how tough the food is. Always prefer softer food provided it it feels safe, you know, it tastes safe. And these kinds of uh sensory cues uh are all there in cooked food. You know, it's uh it's soft, it doesn't have so many uh toxins, it's it's not so noxious to taste, um easier to chew, uh so everyone loves it spontaneously. Your dogs and your cats prefer cooked food to raw food. Well, maybe you can say that's a consequence of domestication, but even, you know, as I say, all of the great apes you test naive ones and they prefer it cooked if they can. So it's an obvious once you have fire, you're going to accidentally discover that food changes when you apply fire to it and then there's going it's going to be the crazy the big crazy new fad. Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth. I mean, if if they have fire at all and you know, their food rolls into it, 5 minutes later it tastes better than it did before. Yeah. How big of an invention from an engineering perspective do you think is the discovery of fire? Do you Do you think um for the uh for Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, do you think it's the greatest invention ever? Yeah. I think I think that the uh the control of fire has been ultimately responsible for essentially uh how grandiose do I want to be here? You know, the entire human story uh going going back to to Homo. It is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal. And uh perhaps the biggest way in which it is likely to have changed us is it reduced the difficulty of making a large brain. So uh you know, the story here is that uh the constraints on brain size are energetic. You and I have brains that are something like 2.5% of our body weight. Mhm. Uh 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. Um and uh 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, uh we also have reasons for wanting to have an even bigger brain, whereas we don't want an even bigger heart. Mhm. So what those reasons are is unclear, but um with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain, cooking makes it possible because it's supplying more calories and it is enormously reducing the amount of time that it takes to chew your food. So if you were a gorilla and you wanted to have a bigger brain, you might say, "Okay, well, let's just eat some more." Mhm. But gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day in the sense that they are eating for maybe 7 or 8 hours a day in in some seasons. Uh 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. Mhm. So how does a gorilla get a bigger brain? It doesn't. It's actually got a smaller brain relative to its body size than a chimpanzee does. And um and that's the the basic problem for our ancestors. Then you come along and cook and all of a sudden you can get an increased amount of energy from your food. Uh you are spending much less energy on digesting your food. Uh you know, there are 25 bodily processes or more that are involved in digesting your food, making the acid that uh takes the proteins apart, uh um maintaining the brush border where uh the um 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 uh from uh in our case of our ancestors, probably around 50% of the day chewing to nowadays 1 hour a day chewing. Mhm. So all of a sudden you've got hours a day in which to do other things and to use those those brains that you've now enabled to grow. So with Homo erectus, 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. Mhm. Until right at the end when it actually gets smaller, but that's a different story. Which end is this? Which Are we talking about Homo sapiens? Yeah, in with Homo sapiens, you got a smaller brain from um people haven't got it exactly down, but at least 30,000 years ago it starts declining. Mhm. And so the fascinating thing about that is that all domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild ancestors. Mhm. And I The domestication is intricately connected to this brain size, you think? And do Exactly. I So I I think what we're seeing in humans is is that same manifestation and then the fascinating question is is why and and the only point I would want to make about this is that there is no evidence that in the small brain domesticates, they're losing, say, an average of about 15% of brain size. In the small brain domesticates compared to their wild ancestors, there's no indication of a loss of cognitive ability. Mhm. So I think what's going on is that it's a it's a younger brain. It's a more pedomorphic brain, you know, looking like the juveniles of the ancestor, but just as our kids are very smart and can learn amazing things compared to adults. You know, all they lack is wisdom and maturity, but they in terms of sheer cognitive ability, they got it. And I think that's the same with domesticated animals compared to their wild ancestors and probably therefore with Homo sapiens, say, 30,000 years ago compared to to their ancestors. So we have we have smaller brains than the Neanderthals. Size, Richard, isn't everything. Exactly. Uh what's the connection between fire, cooking, and the eating of meat? Do you Which came first, do you think? Humans starting to enjoy the eating of meat or the the invention of fire and the use of fire for cooking? I think that fire increased the using of meat, but um but the fact that chimpanzees uh really like to hunt and kill meat as do bonobos, uh certainly puts us in So they they those two species have a common ancestor with us going 6 7 million years ago and it was from that common ancestor that you get the australopithecine line. It's very likely therefore australopithecines were eating meat when they could get it, which wouldn't be very often cuz they wouldn't be very good sprinters, but nevertheless, they would occasionally be able to get some meat. And I bet they loved it all the time and basically all primates like meat if they can get it, almost all of them. But I think fire would have been very important um for a couple of reasons. Uh one is that once you eat fire once you eat your food cooked, then you're saving yourself time. Mhm. By saving yourself time, you can free up uh the opportunity to go and hunt more. Cuz hunting is a high-risk, high-gain activity. Uh there's every risk that you will get nothing on one particular afternoon that you go off looking for opportunities to kill. Mhm. 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. Mhm. So chimpanzees, they hunt maybe two or three times a month and the average hunt length is 20 minutes. With humans, they uh hunting maybe uh 20 times a month and the average hunt length is 6 hours. Yeah, so it's it's a huge difference. Yeah. So and that's possible because the time was available because they they were cooking. Less chewing, more hunting. You got it. The other thing is that their meat is so much nicer. Yeah. Yeah, 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 uh when they make the kill, then there's screams everywhere and some like to seize it and capture it and take it away from the others and eventually the strongest one has it and uh the others sit around begging and trying to get some and tear it off and so you know, they all love it. Mhm. 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 uh while he's there, he uh drops of blood or little scraps will fall down to the bottom and uh the junior members of society, you know, the females and young and that sort of thing, um they 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 it's the same thing as for cooked food in general. So, um they are getting meat very slowly into their bodies. And there sometimes comes a time when they just say, "I've had enough of this. I need real food." And they'll drop the meat and go off and and eat fruit again because they can get fruit into their bodies so much faster than they can get meat. Um So, once they're cooking, that problem is solved. And they can eat the meat so it's just much more readily. So, I think that meat eating would become important for two reasons with cooking. So, the key uh not to over simplify, but the key moments in human history are with the Homo erectus, the discovery of fire and the use of fire for cooking. And then with uh Homo sapiens, the the beta males killing off the alpha male so that the cooperation can exist. And cooperation leads to communication and language and ideas, the sharing of ideas, that kind of thing. Well, yes. The The The only thing I'd modify on that is that you have to ask uh 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 see see why, you know, cuz 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 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 um can trust each other in this final attack. And you know, even nowadays it's it's difficult. Uh you know, when mentioned Stalin. It's like why was everybody terrified? Any dictator that takes control, why is all of us as individuals terrified when you know there's millions of us? That's right. And so like that, we lack the language because our basic psychology of fear overtakes us. Like who can we talk to? Who can we talk to and not get killed ourselves? Exactly. That's right. But you're Yeah. Do you have this intuition that some kind of language was developing along with this process of beta males taking over? Yes. Yes. I mean, the once you have sufficient language to be able to have the beta males conspiring to kill the alpha male, uh then you have selection uh in favor of uh cooperation and tolerance as we spoke about. And at that point, there will be uh increased ability to communicate and the language will get richer and better and better. So, yes, absolutely. Positive feedback loop once you get the the situation started. Can you maybe comment on um the full complexity and richness of the human mind through this process? We've been casually saying cooking uh fire and uh beta males leading to cooperation. But how does the the beauty of the human mind emerge from all of this? Is there other further steps we need to understand? Or is it as simple as this language emerging taking over the alpha male and the cooperation? Or am I also over romanticizing how amazing the human mind is? Is it just like one small step in a long journey of evolution? Well, if the beauty of the human mind is um the ability of us all to be creative, um to explore. Uh That's one kind of beauty. Uh another kind of beauty is um the empathy uh that we can show. And we think of that as beautiful because it is a kind of rare and uh and special ability compared to uh the sort of ordinary selfishness um that can commonly predominate. Um I suppose we have to think of, you know, different sources for those those two types. Mhm. I suppose, you know, a general answer is that there has been selection in favor of bigger brains, which probably in general has been associated with increasing cognitive ability. And as that has happened, I the complexity of life has increased because people have more and more complex, highly differentiated strategies in response to each others' more complex, highly differentiated strategies. Uh we get to a point where there is deception and self-deception. Uh There is some uh a manipulation of ideas through stories that we invent and stories that we pass on. Um You know, 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 um increased energy supply. The platform of uh 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 as coming either kind of beauty as coming sort of totally independently of these things. Um you know, I don't think there's selection for staring into the sunset and and creating poetry. Yes. You know, but um I guess sexual selection, you know, males wanting to impress females in different ways will lead to um them wanting to Write poetry. Well, yes, you know, show off. Yeah. In all the different ways. So, all of these are natural consequences of just coming up with strategies of how to cooperate and how to achieve certain ends. So, that's just like a natural Yeah. I mean, we haven't spoken about sexual selection, but but that is a really important part of it. You know, the trying to outcompete each other in um you know, normally without any physical conflict uh just in order to be able to be chosen by mates of the opposite sex. And And that that is a certainly a major source of uh creativity. So, you've studied chimps. You also all the other relatives, gorillas. What do you find beautiful and fascinating about chimps, about gorillas, about humans? Maybe you can paint the the whole picture that evolutionary that little local pocket of the evolutionary tree. How are we related? What is the common ancestor? What are the interesting differences? I know I'm asking a million questions, but um can you paint a map of what are chimps, gorillas, and humans, like how we're related, and what you find fascinating about each? In Africa, straddling the equator, there is a strip of rainforest that relies on the combination of uh high temperatures and rainfall that you get around the equator. That rainforest goes into about 22 countries. And throughout those countries, uh you have chimpanzees, although they've gone extinct in two of them. I in uh uh just a fraction of them, but was it So, five countries, uh you've got gorillas where there are mountains. And in one country, on the left bank of the Great Congo River, you have bonobos. So, in the African forest, you've got these three African apes, the only African apes, all of which are very similar in much of their way of life. They walk on their knuckles through the forest looking for fruit trees and eating herbs when they can't find fruits. Gorillas represent the oldest chain. So, about 10 million years ago, maybe as recently as 8 million years ago, the ancestor of gorillas broke off from the ancestor leading to chimps and bonobos humans. So, they probably remained very similar now to what very similar to what they were then. They were probably um the largest apes living in mountain areas and spending more time eating just uh herbs, stems uh not so vitally dependent on fruit. And uh living in um if was like the present groups up to about 50 stable groups with one alpha male who was in charge. Uh gorillas are wonderfully slow uh and inquisitive compared to chimps and bonobos. Yeah. I had the privilege of um spending a week or two with gorillas um and at Dian Fossey's camp when before she was murdered. And I I I went out with two women uh Kelly and Bob to a particular group. And uh there was a 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 uh 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 5 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 side stepped around Kelly and he side stepped around Bob and me he just knocked with his arm and sent me flying about 5 yd into the bushes. And I love the way that that was a very deliberate response and I love the way that Simba had been so interested in me and and held my eye. Chimps and bonobos never hold your eye but gorillas really look as though they're trying to sort of figure out what are you thinking about. That was a species that is goes back for something like 10 million years. In that situation was there a game being played? Um Well, I mean I felt that Digit was telling me I don't want you messing with with Simba. But was Simba using you? Oh, I see. Well, that's a fun idea. I don't see why she should be using me. What do you mean testing how strongly affection preferred to intervene to Yeah, exactly. That's That's come straight out of the adolescent to high school playbook. All right. Well, that's that's all no. There's nothing wrong with it for the for that. Um yeah, I don't know. I never thought of that and you never know. So, it's possible. So, so yeah, so okay. So, this is an ancient branch of the evolutionary tree gorilla that led to gorillas. Gorillas. Um so, then the next thing that happened on the evolutionary tree was 6 or 7 million years ago when um you have the line uh between chimps and bonobos on the one hand and humans on the other splitting. And basically what happened is that at that point a chimp-like ancestor leaves the forest gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts and that becomes the australopithecines and meanwhile the chimpanzees uh and bonobo ancestor continues in the forest. And later what happens is that one branch of that crosses the Congo River and becomes the bonobos. That was really about 2 million years ago, maybe 1 million years ago. Now, the chimps that remained in the forest throughout this time and occupied all the countries across from east west to east Africa now um again we assume that they're pretty similar to the ones that live nowadays uh with some variation from from west to east. And these are animals that live in social communities of between say 20 and 200. They can have a lot of them in one group but they never come together in a single unit. These are they share an area community territory and that area is defended by males and within it females wander and bring up their young independently. And the females are very scared about um 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 mated you so I'm not going to be mean to your baby. Mhm. So, what's wonderful about chimps? Well, you know, as we've spoken about them you know, they are creative and and sort of amazingly human-like. But I love the the sort of you know, the quiet moments and and here's one. Um I've got two chimps who are grooming each other on a day when they are utterly exhausted. They've walked 11 km 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 yd and they go back to sleep in the nest in which they woke up. So, they're utterly exhausted and they're just eating non-stop because they're trying to recover their energy. And this is Hugh and Charlie and we think they were probably brothers though we never actually got the genetic evidence to to prove it. Well, I never remember now who it is but let's say that um uh they both come down from the tree and they're both carrying branches of the food they're eating actually seeds from these branches. Uh and they're both engaged even in the midday sun when they want to come down and and shade themselves for a bit on the ground um they're still eating. But then Charlie finishes his branch and he starts grooming Hugh. And Hugh continues eating from his branch. Charlie eventually gets bored with this after a few minutes. And he reaches out and he lifts the branch from which Hugh is still taking seeds and puts it over his head and puts it behind his back as far as possible away from Hugh. Hugh doesn't do anything. He just finishes his mouthful and then he turns to Charlie and grooms him. So, this very polite way of saying will you groom me, please has worked. Then Hugh grooms around Charlie's back and around to the right side and then down his arm to what point where he can reach the branch again. And then he picks up the branch and continues. Nonchalantly. Right. Yeah. So, in other words, you know, they a very sort of simple little strategy but it just shows the the courtesy with which they can treat each other. And you know, the days I love with chimps are when you see that sort of thing or when you see mothers just lying in a a sunlit patch in the forest um with their babies bouncing on top of them um just having a 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 a just a big version of a chimpanzee. If you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee in your mind to be bigger, it basically turns into a gorilla. And then bonobos on the left bank of the Congo River are a 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 domesticated 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 domesticated animals show. And 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 uh and enough data now to show that there's a statistical difference in the frequency with which it would happen. And and bonobos are famously erotic. Uh the females have uh 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 clitorises together and and seem to appear to have orgasms. Wow. These occur in the context of um some kind of social tension. And they sometimes happen before, they sometimes happen after the social tension, and they seem to be devices uh these interactions for um ensuring that everyone's friends and uh reducing the chances that they're actually going to get into a fight. So, it's a kind of uh conflict resolution through uh through through sex or some kind of pleasurable sexual experience. Well, it's often characterized as make love, not war. That's Make love, not war. Okay. Uh you uh mentioned to me offline that you you have a deep love for nature. If we look at the world today, how can we ensure that the beautiful parts of nature remain a big part of our lives as human beings and in the way we think about it, in the way we also keep it around, preserve it. You know, we keep it part of our minds and part of our world. It's a very difficult question because every time there is a conflict between conservation of a natural habitat and allowing people to get that 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 a continuing steady erosion of habitats and all the species, and the numbers are always in the wrong direction. Occasionally, you get sort of wonderful little examples of something being saved, but uh the overall trend is clear. And it's very difficult to see how one can ever escape that because uh it's not human. I know that we are essentially a single tribe to uh want to save an elephant if it means killing 20 humans. So, I think the only way in which we can uh really conserve is if we uh 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 it 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 uh my colleagues and I have taken in Uganda where uh we want to uh keep the Kibale National Park alive, which has got the largest population of chimpanzees in Uganda, and it's got elephants and wonderful birds and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on. And um 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. Mhm. In other places, you will uh keep nature there because it's useful for um maintaining the climate, uh you know, bringing rain, uh uh maybe uh you can in some places uh convince people of the sheer sort of aesthetics of keeping nature that even over the long term, presidents whose job it is uh to look for the future of the country will be persuaded that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons. But overall, um what is required is for people in the rich countries to do much more investment than uh they have so far in maintaining both the natural places in their own countries and in the tropics. And if you look at Africa, you know, I mean the population trends are that Nigeria um may become the most populous country uh in the world, I think, uh within a century. Um 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. Uh I heard Ed Wilson speak years ago about the prospect of uh the entire globe being turned into a single human feedlot. It's going to take a lot to avoid that. He is out there calling for uh 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. Yeah, I mean, there's something um to me like when I visit New York and I see Central Park, and then somehow we constructed a situation where you preserve this park in the middle probably some of the most expensive land in the world. The fact that that's possible gives me hope that you can do this kind of preservation at a global scale. Uh perhaps for just the aesthetic reasons of just valuing the beauty and um just respecting our origins of having come from the earth. We are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas as our um close relatives still living on the earth. You know, we're unlucky that we don't have australopithecines and other species of Homo, but we're still lucky to have those because they are incredibly closely related to us compared to what most animals have. You know, there are many animals that don't have any close relatives to them on the earth. But not only are they 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. Mhm. 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 Mhm. of these close relatives. Yeah, that we can meet. There's something um like space tourism when you go out into space and you look back down on earth. That's to a lot of people, including myself, is worth a lot. But why is that worth a lot? Is because you uh it's humbling and beautiful in the same way that meeting our close evolutionary relatives is humbling and beautiful. That just to know that this this is what we come from. This is who we are. Not just for the understanding or the science of it, but just like something about just the beauty of witnessing this. Um and it's again, it's both humbling and empowering. That this place is fragile and we're damn lucky to be here. Yes, and unfortunately, the problems are incredibly difficult to solve, and there is no one solver. You know, it has to happen from a network of of potentially cooperating people. But but I mean, you're so right about it being daunting to to think about what it it looks like from space. And I love the view that Hermann Müller expressed of uh of being able to go out from space, and he said, "The whole of life uh would look like a kind of rust on the planet." Yeah, if so the aliens were to visit, I'm not sure they would notice the life. They would probably notice the uh trees or um ocean. It's it's it's a kind of rust. But let me ask the big ridiculous philosophical of what is the meaning of this rust? What do you think is the meaning of life on earth? What is the meaning of our human intelligent life? Well, I think it's very clear that um we have an evolutionary story uh that uh is only getting challenged around the edges. You know, we we have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life. And um the meaning is, you know, we are here as a consequence of um materialistic processes. Uh that um you know, began uh in our sense, uh you know, with the establishment of the earth 4 and 1/2 billion years ago, whatever it was, and then water and oxygen and and so on. Um And uh you know, we are the astonishing uh uh consequence uh of um the evolution of of cells and and multicellular organisms. Uh The word random is the wrong word to use unless you understand what it means. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't happen by chance, but a lot of random events had to happen to make this possible. Mhm. And those random events, of course, are are the production of appropriate mutations. But the um you know, The of life is there is no meaning. It's it the you know the the really big mystery of life is why is there a universe? And that same why propagates itself through the whole of it. Through the whole process of it for the emergence of planets, the virgins first of all galaxies of uh star systems of planets of the proteins required to construct the single cell organisms and the single cell organisms becoming complex organisms and uh some of the clever fish crawling out onto the land and and and the whole of it. And then there's fire. Some some clever uh clever guy or lady invented fire and then now here we are. Um it just does seem speaking as a human kind of special that we're able to reflect on the whole thing. We're the whole story. It's so much more interesting than the stories produced by religion. Yeah, it is. It is beautiful, but it just seems special that us humans are able to write religions and and construct stories. Yeah. And and also do science. That seems um that seems kind of amazing. It seems like the universe is such that it it um it creates beings like us that are able to investigate it. And that that and that that's why there's this longing for why. That's just a that's such a beautiful little pocket of complexity created by the universe. It seems like um it seems like there should be a why, but maybe there's just an infinite number of universes and this is the one that uh led to this particular set of humans. Even without an infinite number of universes, I bet there's an infinite number of intelligent beings. Throughout this universe. Yeah. Now that we know how many planets are have the right sort of conditions. You know, which is what I can't remember a lot. You know, it's it's some significant percentage of all planets. Um then uh then there are apparently billions of planets. And uh there's every I mean things happen so quickly on Earth. You know, once you got water then uh you got life and um uh it did did not take long for for life to evolve in in the big scheme of things. And you if you think you look out there, say there's uh nearly infinite number of intelligent civilizations, one dimension you could look at is the proclivity to violence they have. It's interesting to think what level of violence is useful for um extending the life of a civilization. So, we have a particular set of violence in our history. Maybe being too peaceful is a problem in the early days. Uh maybe being too violent quite obviously is is a problem. So, you look at viruses. What kind of viruses on Earth propagate and succeed? If you're too deadly, that's a big problem. Uh if you're not deadly enough, that's also a problem. So, so that is a fascinating exploration of I don't see any evidence. I don't see I don't see where you're coming from when you say that being too peaceful is a problem. Well, because so so I'll I'll say it this way. Death is a way to get rid of suboptimal solutions. So, violence But there's lots of ways to die without violence. Right. To me, death in itself is violence. And you you you you can I mean a lot of people that talk about for example longevity and and disease and all that kind of stuff, they see death is a this is the way they they talk about it. And it's interesting to philosophically think of it that way. It's just it death is it's like mass murder that's happening. And it's like people that try to from a biological perspective help extend life, they see that you're you're helping the most the biggest atrocity in the history of human civilization from their perspective is not allocating all our resources to solving death. Right? Because death is a kind of violence. It is a kind of murder that we're allowing uh to be committed on us by nature. And so so the flip side of that is death makes way for new life, for new ideas. And so that Yes, but but that's got nothing to do with peace versus war. You know, I mean you you have animals that are very very peaceful, but but they evolve just in the same way as as other animals do. They just don't do it with with death caused by violence. And violent death is premature death surely. I mean, you know, I don't mind about people dying. Um you know, what what I mind about is people dying in the in in their youth. middle age Prematurely. But some people would say all death is premature. Certainly feels that way. It's uh died too soon. Anyone who's ever died died too soon. Yeah, well, I mean if if we can become like sequoias, you know, and and and live for hundreds of years and thousands of years, that'd be great. Do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death? I don't think I'm afraid of it. Um you know, I'm I'm reconciled to the fact it's going to happen. Um I I just feel frustrated because I enjoy life, you know, and I don't want to to leave the party. Yeah. It's kind of a fun party. I don't want to leave the party either. So, however we got here, we made one heck of an awesome party. And you're right. Uh having a party with a little bit less violence in it is an even more fun party. Richard, I'm deeply honored that you spent time with me today. Your work is amazing. It's includes some of the deepest thinking about our human history and the nature of human civilization. So, again, thank you so much for talking today. It's an honor. Oh, thanks for your great questions. It's really fun conversation. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wrangham. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Jane Goodall. The greatest danger to our future is apathy. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.