Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Steve Stewart-Williams: The Ape That Understood The Universe

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Steve Stewart-Williams: The Ape That Understood The Universe · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Get a humans, welcome to Safe Space with Dangerous Ideas.
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Here's a dangerous idea for you.
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You are an ape.
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I mean that in the kind as possible way.
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You are an ape.
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I am an ape.
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We homo sapiens are apes.
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We are evolved creatures.
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We are mammals.
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So how much of what we do, how much of what we think, how much of the way we behave and
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act is caused by the evolutionary imperatives that we have inherited from tens of thousands
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of years as homo sapiens, hundreds of thousands of years as homo sapiens and millions, hundreds
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of millions of years as animals.
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Today's guest thinks quite a lot and it's fascinating because what seems to be culturally
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constructed are the facts of our own civilization, whether that's differences between the sexes
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or our propensity for jealousy or war or tribalism or whatever it might be, may in fact lie
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deep inside our bones and our genes and our meat.
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Steve Stuart Williams is a professor of psychology.
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He's the author of the book Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life and more recently the
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ape that understood the universe.
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Please enjoy this chat with the one and only Steve Stuart Williams.
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I mean, you say that like some differences, like the differences between the sexes, things
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that everybody knows except for social scientists, which is a funny way of putting it.
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Why is that?
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I think the main thing is that there's a lot of resistance in academia, I think, to the
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idea that certain sex differences are products of anything other than nurture environment, socialization.
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And I think the reason for that is that people worry.
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I think understandably worry but I think ultimately misguidably worry that excepting that there's
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a role for nature in shaping some average sex differences might set back the progress
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of the woman's liberation movement of feminism.
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And yet your claim is not that there are inferiorities.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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So what do we know about where the nature and nurture balance begins and ends?
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Yeah, it's hard to put an exact line where it is.
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I do think that there's good evidence for a strong role of nurture and a strong role
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of nature as well.
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And the evidence for a strong role of nurture includes, for instance, that the magnitude
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of different sex differences varies somewhat from culture to culture, nation to nation,
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and also from time to time, different periods within the same culture over time, you get
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some variance.
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At the same time, though, evidence, there's a whole bunch of different lines of evidence
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that nature plays a role as well and that it's not all just down to nurture.
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So the evidence, for instance, that, so some of the sex differences in aggression, for
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instance, various other things, they initially appear in a kind of nascent form really
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early on in the developmental process.
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A lot of them seem to appear across many different cultures.
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They seem to appear often actually even when the culture tries to push against them.
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And the sex difference in aggression would be an example of that and a lot of cultures
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we try to clamp down on male aggression.
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And so we're actually trying to work against the sex difference and nonetheless you find
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the same sex difference seems to appear to spy culture rather than because of culture.
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Another line of evidence, a lot of sex differences can be traced to some degree to prenatal hormonal
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exposure.
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Again, the aggression, sex differences, a good example of that.
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Even within sex as prenatal hormonal exposure, testosterone exposure specifically correlates
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with later propensity toward aggression.
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And then the final line of evidence, and I think probably the one that I find maybe the
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most persuasive is the fact that in a lot of other species, non-human species, a lot
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of the sex differences that we see in our own species are found in other animals as well.
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People that don't have culture to anywhere like the degree that we do.
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And I have heard it said that to the people who say that everything is just that we are
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a tabular raster and all of the differences between the sex is culturally constructed.
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If you go to a dog breeder and you ask for a female dog and you get at home and you find
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that it's a male dog, you don't go, oh well that's fine because male and female characteristics
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are just culturally constructed.
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I want it a female dog.
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Exactly.
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And they're not in the changing one.
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Yeah.
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I mean, you make the point that in physical differences, we don't find it so hard that if
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you line up every person in the world in order of height, we all understand that there's
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going to be a bias with women being on average shorter, they're going to be men who are shorter
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than some women and women who are taller than some men, but you're going to see a clear
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difference.
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And it then comes to psychological characteristics, we feel uneasy about making those sorts of
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generalizations.
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Yeah.
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And I think there's more scope to deny the role, to actually even just to deny that there
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are the sex differences in the first place.
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We can see in our everyday life, with our own two eyes, we can see sex differences in height
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and other physical features, whereas it's more abstract when it comes to psychological
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differences.
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There's more scope to deny that it is there in the first place, but then there's also
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more scope to realistically deny that there's any significant role of our nature.
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One of the simplest ways of getting our heads around some of the psychological differences
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between the sex is just the experience of childbirth.
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This is a mammalian reality that you go back to quite a few times to explain the different
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relationships that males versus females would have towards procreation and all of the other
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ripple effects that that implies.
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Can you sketch that for us?
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Yeah.
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So that's the difference in parental investment between males and females.
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And in all mammals, what's called the obligatory biological investment is higher for the females
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than for the males, because it's the females that get pregnant, that have to sustain the
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pregnancy, give birth, and it's the females that have to produce milk for the young.
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At least in natural circumstances, that's no longer, you know, that's negotiable these
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days.
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But for most of human evolutionary history, we were the same as all other mammals, and
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that it was the females that had to provide, that had to nurse the young.
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And that, and actually, on top of all that, there's also an average behavioural difference
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historically in terms of how much females versus males provide in terms of direct parental
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care.
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And what that means, the key thing there is that the maximum offspring number that females
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can produce is lower than the maximum number that males can produce.
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And that's the case, and most mammals, but also actually right across the animal kingdom,
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it's a very common pattern that a minority of males can, in principle, have many, many
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more offspring, that even the most reproducibly prolific female could have.
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And my favourite way of introducing that idea to students and the like, is to say if you
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imagine that a man or any male mammal actually would have, say, four mates in a single
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year, potentially at the end of that time, he could have four offspring, whereas if a
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female would have four mates within a year, then at the end of that time, she's going
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to have the same number of offspring, as she would if she'd only had one.
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Obviously, other things come into it and to how many mates people might seek, but what
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that means is that throughout the course of our evolutionary history, there would have
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been a stronger pressure, selection pressure on males, as opposed to females for a desire
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for multiple partners, a high sex drive, and that kind of thing, just because that maximum
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offspring number is higher for males than females.
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So I have friends who say that it's a bit of a myth that men are hornier than women,
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and actually women have a sublimated sense of sexuality, and once they're liberated
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from patriarchal ways of thinking, they're actually just as into sex with multiple partners
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as men are.
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What do you make of that?
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Well, I don't think it's right, but I do think in some cases when people made that argument,
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I think they're actually reacting to maybe a slightly mistaken understanding what the
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claim is, because the claim isn't that men have a really, really high sex drive, and
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women don't, they're just not really interested in sex, men are really interested in multiple
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partners, women are not, it's a much smaller sex difference than that, it's a difference
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and degree rather than kind.
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Not only that, we're also talking about overlapping distributions, just that the average
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is higher for males than females, but lots of variation in both sex.
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It's exactly the same as the height of sex difference, actually.
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Lots of variation within both sexes and lots of overlap between the two sexes.
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So I think in some cases, the claim gets people's backs up because they think it's making
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a more polarized claim, men are like this and women are like that.
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I think there is a lot of evidence that there is this average sex difference though, and
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that is not the case that women deep down are just like men.
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And that if they were just, if we could take off a patriarchal barriers and the like,
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that men and women would be interchangeable and the sexuality department.
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Lots of evidence, including the fact that you find these same sex differences across
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every culture that we have good data for, there are no cultures, for instance, where you
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find that actually, rather than men being more interested in pornography than women, they
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actually women are the main consumer of pornography.
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No cultures where women pay men for sex much more often than the reverse.
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You just find the same pattern across culture at the culture.
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You have a similar pattern in other species as well.
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Other species where the maximum offspring number is higher for males than females, same
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pattern.
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And it's not that females are not interested in sex, I think maybe a better way to capture
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it would be to say that they're choosier about their casual sexual partners in particular.
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So I've been saying so women are so different from men, but also let me bring in what I
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said about men.
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I don't want to get the impression that men are only interested in short term sex and
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multiple partners.
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I think we're quite atypical actually as a species in that we typically form long term
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pair bonds and whereas most male mammals are deadbeat dads and have nothing to do with
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the kids and don't know who the kids are, we're not like that, that's a rarity in our species.
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Most male and most cultures do invest in the kids as well, we have a strong paternal
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streak, so we're not just horn dogs or whatever.
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And what would be the evolutionary imperative for that?
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Wouldn't we just be better off from the genes perspective going out and selling our wild
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oats as much as possible?
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I think that the main reason is that we have these big brains and big brains had a number
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of consequences in terms of how much parental investment was needed for kids.
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So when I was spring a born, they're extremely dependent, much more so than as the case
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for mammalian species, very, very dependent for several years.
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And then they need input, they're not what biologists call nutritionally independent until
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18 to 20 years of age, even in a traditional society.
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So they need tons and tons of investment and whereas in most other rapes, the females alone
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can provide all the investment that the kid needs, that's not the case in our species.
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So I think what's happened is cause our offspring is so expensive and require so much care.
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We've evolved various forms of what's called allowing maternal care.
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So that's care from individuals other than the mother, that includes like grandparents
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and siblings and unrelated friends, but it also often includes males.
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And because our offspring needs so much investment, the fitness payoff of forming peabons,
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falling in love, falling in love in effect with a kid and wanting to invest in the kid,
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the payoff of doing that was much greater for males in our species and somewhat reduced
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the extent to which males just wanted to sow their wild oats.
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And so these sex differences just spell out for us the mechanism of natural selection here.
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So it's clearer.
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Let's hypothesize that there's a type of man who is slightly less enthusiastic about having
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multiple partners and a type of woman who is slightly more enthusiastic.
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What are the consequences for each of those candidates that nudge the population as
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a whole in one direction or another?
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Well, the consequence is that male who is slightly more toward seeking multiple mates
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potentially could have more offspring and the male offspring would then inherit that tendency.
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So that tendency would slowly and effect go viral and the gene pool become more probable.
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We're going through the population, right?
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Yeah, exactly.
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For the female on the other hand, there will be a stronger selection instead of for multiple
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mates for choosing us about mates.
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Like because the ceiling number of offspring that females could have is lower than that for
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the males.
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Females best bet for maximizing the number of surviving offspring that they have is to
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make better choices rather than seeking more mates, seek better mates.
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Is the operative question there about the surviving offspring?
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Is that why I'm trying to get my head around like what's the downside for the woman in
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our pre-encessory and on the savannah for being really promiscuous as well?
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Yes, there's a lot of energy in having lots of babies, but is the suggestion that if
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she's having a baby every year, those babies are less likely to survive than if she only
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has one baby every four years?
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Well, it's a few things actually, but yeah, so I think in natural environment, natural
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environment, it's quite difficult to have one baby a year and one every three or four
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years is much more sustainable.
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But I'm not sure that feeds so much into the sex difference and interest and casual sex
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and multiple partners.
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I think that's more about the fact that it just doesn't pay off as much as it does for
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males in such an obvious way.
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There are actually other ways in which it might do.
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There are certain ways, for instance, if a female has a partner who is infertile or the
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couple is infertile together, that's one reason why seeking multiple mates might be good.
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Multiple mates means that you might have several investing for males.
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There are various reasons why it is possible that there would be some advantage for more
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than just one mate at a time, but the payoff is not so great and therefore it's pulled
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away further.
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The distribution has been pushed up further for males and for females.
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Right, I see.
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Yes, because if you are a woman who has a propensity to have lots of sex, then the best that
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you're going to be able to do is that one baby a year or whatever it might be and those
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are going to be poorly cared for children because it's going to be chaos in your life.
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Yeah, you're likely to die during childbirth and all those other things that men don't
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have to endure.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Women tend not to have to anymore, but just through a massive human evolutionary history
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they did.
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The idea is that that is when these tendencies were forged.
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You just pointed to one common criticism of evolutionary biology, which is, yes, this
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all may have been relevant back on the savannah, but the reason why I am aroused by pornography
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today is a totally different context.
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There are all kinds of cultural cues.
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There's all kinds of free will that comes into play.
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I'm not just being driven by banal, mundane, evolutionary forces.
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We do all kinds of things that our evolution doesn't drive us to do.
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Evolution had no say in a way we went to the moon or why we invent cars or whatever it
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might be.
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What relevance is they really haven't we upgrown it?
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Well, I agree that in lots of ways, like it's not all down to banal evolutionary pressures
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and that kind of thing.
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There are cultural pressures that come in and shape our behavior as well.
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I think really just the question is, is it just down to those cultural factors?
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In terms of whether we've outgrown it, I think we might have, but we still might have
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the imprint from this past selection pressures.
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If some folks decide, I don't want to have any kids in my life, I'm happy I'm not having
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kids, so I'm going to be child free in a certain sense you can say that, in that sense they
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have outgrown the need for genitals and for reproductive functions, but they still
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have them because in our evolutionary history, those things evolved.
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We don't have any problem with that when it comes to physical things like genitals and
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worms and the like, but I just think that the same is true of certain psychological
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tendencies as well, is that even if we have in a certain sense outgrown them, we do still
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have a push from our genes, genes that were pieced together in the human genome from
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earlier selection pressures.
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If our genes are driving us to propagate them into the next species, why don't more men
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go to sperm banks and try to spread their seed as far as they can?
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Yeah, well, if we devolved to consciously and deliberately try to have as many offspring
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as we possibly could, then we probably would do that, right?
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That would be a good way to do it.
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We haven't evolved to think, okay, as many of my genes as possible to go into future generations
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and in my current environment, completely evolutionarily, unprecedented environment, that
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would be the best way to do it.
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Instead, we've just got a bunch of motivations and desires and drives that typically at
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least throughout most of our evolutionary history, let us act in ways as if that's what
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we were thinking when we weren't actually thinking about that at all.
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Maybe more than any other animals thinking about, I need to pass my genes on so I'm going
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to have sex with as many, with this individual hair.
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Other animals aren't thinking about that.
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We didn't evolve to think about that either.
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We just have certain desires that push around our behavior even today, even in a very different
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world.
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Why do you think we have non-reproductive fetishes?
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Why do you think homosexuality exists?
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Why do you think people get off on feet or chairs or whatever?
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That's not all about.
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No idea.
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I don't think that any of those things can easily be traced to evolution though.
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I really don't have a clue with things like foot fetishes where they might come in.
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So I don't think there are adaptations or anything like that.
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I guess my best guess would be that we have quite a flexible sexual nature and we do have
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a capacity to learn, not everything is pre-programmed.
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We do have a capacity to learn, to find certain things attractive and maybe with feet fetishes.
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That capacity just happened to focus on something that is sort of not obviously reproductively
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relevant.
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And with homosexuality?
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I suppose it may be the case that, well, just to sort of speculate from a lay person's
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perspective, it may be the case that if you were to turn down the dial of the libido
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to such an extent that you were raised aberrations like foot fetishes, then you would also lower
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the propensity to spread your seed in useful reproductive ways as well.
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Maybe fetishes and kinks just come along for the ride if you hit the right setting of
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having a high enough libido to be optimal about spreading your genes.
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That's interesting.
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Yeah.
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I think that's quite possibly the case.
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It's just a kind of byproduct of having a high sex drive.
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And so then you were going to say homosexuality, is there a similar explanation for that?
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It's a similar kind of one, I think, though, similar in the sense, like I don't think
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that homosexuality is an adaptation, I think.
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So it has been argued, there was one argument, for instance, that it is an adaptation shaped
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by what's called kin selection.
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And the idea there is that...
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Kin selection.
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Kin selection, yeah.
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I'm just correcting your terrible New Zealand accent, but yes, kin.
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Yeah.
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So kin selection, what kin selection is?
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So kin selection, so usual natural selection is when a trait is selected because it boosts
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the survival or the number of offspring of the individual with that trait.
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Kin selection is when a trait is selected because it boosts the survival and the number
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of offspring of genetic relatives of the trait.
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So tendency to care for ones, offspring to care for siblings, nieces and nephews and
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that kind of thing.
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And the argument that EO Wilson and several other people made was that maybe homosexuality
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is a product of kin selection and that some individuals boost their, what's called their
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inclusive fitness, so their overall fitness, that means like the extent to which their genes
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go forward to future generations, by instead of having offspring of their own, they instead
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care for the offspring of siblings, so in other words, nieces and nephews.
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And it makes sense, it's got a logic to it, it doesn't seem the case though, it doesn't
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seem that they do, that gay people do disproportionately look after nieces and nephews compared to non-gay
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people.
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Yeah, and the amount that they would have to do it would be enormous, I mean Richard Dawkins
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has made the point that, yeah, you'd have to be twice, the nieces and nephews would have
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to be more than twice as likely to survive than those who didn't have gay uncles, because
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only half of the genes from the gay uncle are in the child.
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So if we rule out that as not a very plausible explanation, what are we left with?
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We are left with, there is probably a nonadaptive byproduct of some sort.
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So it's partly down to genes.
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So same-sex sexual orientation is partly heritable.
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And then so the question is, how do those genes stay on the gene pool?
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And just explain heritable there, because a lot of people hear that and go, well hang on,
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does that mean that gay people are more likely to have gay kids, but that's not what heritable
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means.
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No, no, it just means it doesn't mean that you have the same, I'm forgetting my genetic
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terminology, but like the same presentation of the same phenotype, thank you very much,
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the same phenotype as the parent.
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No, no, indeed, but it does mean that it's partially determined by genes.
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So a trait is heritable to the extent that individual differences and whatever trait
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it is, are partly due to individual differences and the genes that people have.
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So there are some genes that do somewhat increase the likelihood of somebody having a
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same-sex sexual orientation.
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And why would those genes get weeded out of the population?
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Yeah, that's the mystery, I don't think it's known for certain, but there are a bunch
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of interesting ideas about why it is.
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One of which is, so if you find those genes in an individual who doesn't happen to actually
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develop a same-sex sexual orientation, there's some speculation that those individuals
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are actually have higher fertility and more offspring with those genes to a sufficient
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degree that it is a counterbalance to the fact that individuals who do develop a same-sex
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sexual orientation likely have fewer offspring.
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But I'm not sure we really know, and also it's not completely down the genes.
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So there's a non-genetic component as well.
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And one idea about what might be contributing there, have you heard of it?
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It's called the birth order effect.
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Yeah, explain it.
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So the idea is that having, I guess, so the original idea, anyway, it's got a bit messy
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actually over the years, but the original idea applies to men specifically as the more
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older brothers an individual has, the greater their chance of being gay.
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And this is not a cultural effect because it even withstands children who are adopted,
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right?
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So if the fourth son is adopted at birth, they still show the higher likelihood of being
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gay, even if they're the eldest in the new foster family, which implies that there's
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something in utero that's going on.
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Yeah, exactly.
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So it seems to be a biological effect, but a non-genetic biological effect.
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And I think that even though the effect's been demonstrated quite plausibly, I think
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we're not completely sure what creates the effect, but the main idea is that it's an immune
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system response, and that the mother's immune system over subsequent pregnancies with
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male specifically starts to, the immune system starts to react to the male fetuses.
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Developing an allergy to male owners, and somehow that affects the masculinization of
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the brain, not in general, but specifically related to sexual orientation.
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First of all, let's talk about some of the psychological differences that there might
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be between men and women, as well, there's a lot of talk at the moment about getting
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more women into STEM that we all know stories like the James De Moore, the Google engineer,
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who was fired after having been invited to contribute to the question of how to get
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women more involved in STEM, wrote an essay that proposed that maybe females are less
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interested in such things, and was fired for articulating that point of view.
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There are various studies whose credibility I don't know where you get 1,000 men in
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a room and 1,000 women in another room, and you say to each of them, do you want to
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spend your day taking a part of machine and putting the widgets back together, or coaching
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a family that's having problems through their emotional issues, and more women tend
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to go for the latter and more men tend to go for the former.
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There are those who say that that's because we live in a culture that encourages people
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to think that way, but would there be an evolutionary explanation for those sorts of differences?
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Possibly an evolution could impinge on those things, so this is like a real minefield
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of an area, so I think the first thing to say going into this area is that it's not necessarily
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the case, depending on how you define STEM, it's not necessarily the case that there are
28:03
more men than women in STEM, if you include, since the health sciences, it's actually reasonably
28:10
even, especially among younger generation, it's pretty even overall, so it's not so much
28:16
just...
28:17
And there are vastly more women in young women in going into health science.
28:21
Exactly, miles.
28:22
Exactly, so rather than the difference to be explained being, men do STEM and women don't,
28:28
it's more men than women go into certain STEM fields, more women than men go into others.
28:33
And I mean, it is consistent with the preconception that the fields of STEM that men would be more
28:39
interested in would be the engineering widget side, and that women would be more interested
28:44
in the health science side, which has more to do with human beings, rather than widgets.
28:50
Yeah, exactly.
28:51
So the cliche is still stand.
28:53
The cliche does still stand, yeah, exactly.
28:56
And then the usual explanations for those differences, the ones that are emphasized the
29:00
most are discrimination and socialization.
29:03
And I think discrimination and socialization are certainly part of the story.
29:08
But I do think, on top of that, though, there is what you say as well, they do seem to
29:12
be for whatever reason, they do seem to be average sex differences in interest in objects,
29:19
widgets, gadgets, and things.
29:21
So more men than women are interested in that cluster of stuff.
29:26
And then interested in people and working with people and helping people.
29:32
Both sexes are pretty interested in that, but on average women seem to be more interested.
29:37
And I think it's quite plausible that that is part of the story in determining the fact
29:41
that more men go in one direction, more women go in other directions.
29:46
And in fact, it's not just plausible, I think it'll be surprising given that there are
29:48
those differences, if that weren't part of the explanation for the choices that people
29:53
make.
29:54
Right, but how does 100,000 years on the savannah influence that?
29:58
No, I'm not too sure.
30:00
So I think there's pretty good evidence that, first of all, that these differences do
30:05
exist.
30:06
I think the research is pretty strong on that count, and if there's also pretty good evidence
30:10
that it's not 100% down to learning, I think it does seem to be in a net push as well.
30:16
But unlike sex differences and aggression and sexuality, where we have, we have precedence
30:22
for that in other species and we have really, really strong theories and evolutionary biology
30:26
that explain those differences, I think there's a bit of a question mark over why it might
30:32
be that the people versus things, sex difference evolved.
30:36
Somebody hasn't been put forward, but I don't think that they're, but if I'd any click
30:41
into place in the same way that the evolutionary explanation for sexuality and aggression
30:46
does click into place.
30:48
What are some of the explanations proposed?
30:50
The explanation, well, I guess the more plausible one is the explanation for women's greater
30:55
interest in people.
30:58
And people have tied that to two main things.
31:01
One is motherhood, so the fact that female mammals in general are more involved with offspring
31:07
could create a selection pressure for a stronger interest in an ability to read people and
31:14
add greater social skills, basically, in that role with the mother and child bond.
31:24
And also, another argument is that throughout most of the course of our evolutionary
31:28
history, women were more likely than men to leave the natal group and to set up shop with
31:36
the husband's natal group.
31:37
So the husband would stay with his family and the woman would move to his can group more
31:43
often than the reverse.
31:45
Not a massive difference.
31:46
I think it's like two thirds of the time it was that way perhaps versus a third of the
31:50
time and other way around or something different.
31:52
But enough that the argument goes, there was a stronger selection pressure on women to
31:56
have the social acumen to be able to get on with unrelated other women in particular,
32:03
but unrelated individuals in general.
32:06
Right.
32:07
And then the object, the argument for the sex difference in objects relates to tool use
32:13
specifically in the context of hunting and warfare.
32:16
So hunting, mainly done by men, some of it was done by women, but mainly by men.
32:22
So the tools used for hunting were built more by men and by women and used more by them.
32:28
And likewise, weapons for warfare as well.
32:33
And that all seems to me, okay, maybe could be true, but I just don't, I don't know,
32:39
one about my life savings on those measures for true explanations.
32:44
And you also write about jealousy and sexual jealousy and possessiveness between people.
32:51
There's a long-running anthropological argument about whether this is a cultural artifact
32:56
of modern Western male-dominated societies, Margaret Meade famously went to the Pacific
33:02
and found that there were these societies that were free from sexual jealousy, supposedly,
33:10
she found this and was later brought into question.
33:15
To what extent are we hardwired to be jealous?
33:17
Well, I think to some extent we are, I do think that it's not just an invention of culture.
33:22
And I think actually it might have been one of your countrymen.
33:25
Derek Freeman, I think, was one of the people who...
33:28
That's true, yeah, yeah, claim to...
33:30
For David Williamson wrote a play about that controversy, I wanted our greatest playwright.
33:35
Yeah, it was called heretic.
33:36
Oh, I did not know that, interesting.
33:38
I had to look that up.
33:39
Yeah.
33:41
Yeah, so that claim claims along the lines of what Margaret Meade said,
33:46
that there are some idyllic cultures where people are immune from jealousy
33:51
and everyone just shares the shares alike and not too fast if the person,
33:56
a person that they're involved gets involved with somebody else.
33:58
That's been claimed, Margaret Meade claimed that various other people have claimed that.
34:02
Most of the time, however, when you look more closely at the claims,
34:05
that seems not to be the case.
34:07
So if you look, for instance, at rates that...
34:11
Like the causes of domestic abuse and the causes of spousal homicide and that kind of ugly stuff,
34:17
you do find that even in those societies, we're supposedly,
34:21
according to Westerners, idyllic paradigms with no sexual jealousy.
34:25
Sexual jealousy is the major cause of domestic abuse and spousal homicide in those cultures.
34:33
And what's the evolutionary reason for that?
34:36
The evolutionary reason...
34:39
So for both sexes, there's some overlap for both sexes.
34:42
So, you know, I mentioned that we evolved to form pair bonds
34:49
and those are primarily like a context for looking after kids.
34:52
The fact that we evolved to form pair bonds means that pair bonds were useful for males and females.
34:57
We evolved to fall in love with each other because it was useful for both of us.
35:01
And jealousy, I guess, so lovers like the carrot that entices people
35:05
into relationships, jealousy is like the stick where you protect a pair bond
35:11
from, you know, the good-looking, good-looking next door neighbor
35:14
or whatever are some potential threats to the pair bond,
35:18
threats to, in the sense of, like, your mate being pushed away from you.
35:23
So I think that's the reason for both sexes to have jealousy, to preserve the pair bond.
35:29
There's also a reason that's unique to males only.
35:33
And that's the fact that in species like mammals, you have internal fertilization
35:39
and where you have internal fertilization, there's a major sexual asymmetry
35:44
and the likelihood that you're going to end up looking after your own offspring.
35:48
So like, the way I put it in the book and I borrow this, this is the way they've
35:53
a bus likes to put it, they've a bus, the evolutionary psychologist, it points out
35:57
that there's never been a woman in the history of the world who's given birth
36:01
and then thought, wait a minute, how do I know that this is my kid
36:05
and not some other woman's kid? That's never happened.
36:09
For me, on the other hand, if a man's partner gives birth to a kid,
36:16
it's probably his kid, odds are that it is, but there's always some possibility
36:20
that it might not be. And if it's not, if it happens to be the good-looking
36:23
next door neighbor's kid, then he's going to be investing as time and energy
36:28
into putting forward the genes for someone other than himself.
36:33
So males who had a problem with their female partners, possibly cheating on them,
36:41
tended to do better than ones who thought it would be cool with it.
36:46
Exactly, from a genes high point of view, they tend to pass their genes on more.
36:51
Yeah, right. So they pass their genes on more than a guy who thinks,
36:55
well, I'm an enlightened guy, and that's just fine with me if I don't mind if I partner
36:59
with other people. So how does it feel to you to be witnessing, I guess, over the past 10 years,
37:08
the russians in what it means to be male and the sort of, I guess, eruptions of toxic masculinity
37:17
in forms like Andrew Tate and visions of hyper-sexist, hyper-misogynistic masculinity.
37:26
Do you look at that through your lens as an evolutionary biologist and go,
37:30
like, what do you make of that? Yeah, so a lot of that stuff is easy enough to trace it to
37:37
evolve tendencies, but of course the fact that something is evolved doesn't mean that it's good,
37:45
and I think one of the great accomplishments of civilization has been to tame the bad side
37:52
of human nature to a great extent, and especially male nature and aspects of
38:01
things that are more common in males and females, like aggression. I think we have really succeeded
38:05
in taming those to a great extent, as Stephen Panker has documented them. And I think that's
38:12
the overall trend. And then the kind of stuff you're talking about is, I guess, a bit of a retroactive
38:17
tendency within that overall trend of managing to push down these levels. And so, yeah, I think
38:25
that it's not good. It's a bad stuff, even if it could be traced to human nature, or as it was
38:30
maybe sort of emphasising a side of human nature, because human nature is not just necessarily
38:35
exactly going to be at one, any trait like aggression is not going to be at one particular volume.
38:39
Culture can turn up the volume or not, or turn down. And overall, we've been turning it down,
38:44
but the undertates of the world, I think, can turn up some of the ugly sides of
38:47
the ugly potentialities in human nature. I mean, as someone who's a journalist and not a
38:53
scientist and who is interested in the kind of sociology of all this, I am interested in what
38:58
provokes perverse backlashes. And when you said, you know, this idea that I'm an enlightened guy,
39:05
I'm free from sexual jealousy. I am cool with my female partners doing whatever it is that they
39:11
want to do. I'm on board the train of whatever it is that is going to get me the, I guess, the
39:19
highest status virtue signalling to my female colleagues, which I think there's a whole other
39:24
thing going on of like the wolf in sheep's clothing component of particularly sensitive new age
39:30
guys who, who loudly profess how, how free they are from the impulses that you're talking about,
39:38
that that may have provoked this backlash of people saying, well, hang on a second, that's not
39:46
right or natural or that's not me or these guys are full of shares or whatever it might be.
39:50
Maybe that creates a space for it. Yeah, it could well. I think that's entirely plausible.
39:55
Yeah, and maybe some of the negativity that is directed toward males, I think quite plausibly,
40:03
you know, some, some young guys might just think, well, it's screw you to the world and then be
40:12
open to, you know, the negative influences of those kinds, I think that's probably
40:19
plausibly contributing as well. What do we know about the instinct to tribalism?
40:25
Well, I think that that is also something that sadly is part of human nature and one line of evidence
40:32
for that is that you find that in many species, in many species that live in groups seem to have
40:37
kind of built in in group out group biases. And even the, this is a really interesting paper.
40:43
One of my favorite papers is actually that points out that even that the neurophysiology
40:48
underpinning in group out group biases are quite common to vertebrates in general.
40:54
So it seems to be quite a deep-seated tendency. I also vertebrates. Yeah, not just mammals.
40:59
Not just mammals, yeah, like fish have in groups. I'm not sure about fish.
41:04
Lizards? I think it's a group, yeah, group living, group living lizards,
41:13
perhaps let me think. Group living birds as well, I think, like colonial birds. Yeah.
41:21
So I think it is, it's really deep-seated. And does that come back to a concept of kin selection
41:27
or something? I think it's the evolutionary reason. I think it's beyond that. I think it's
41:32
because our tribe is broader than just the kangaroo, but I think it also embraces unrelated individuals.
41:39
So I think we're all related in a tribe, aren't we?
41:41
True, but not just closely related, but individuals who are dissonally
41:47
enough related, that they are non-related. They're non-relations.
41:52
Right, so there wouldn't be a genetic imperative for them to help each other?
41:56
Yeah, exactly. I think it's more a cooperative kind of thing. They're all in this together,
42:01
and they cooperate with each other, which is nice within the group,
42:05
and group cooperation is nice, but it also often the sort of dark flip side of them is
42:11
negativity toward other groups and a propensity toward aggression for other groups.
42:15
I think there's another thing though that we have managed to tame with culture to quite some
42:19
degree, not completely, of course, and keep having flare-ups of, of, and group,
42:24
our group biases and nationalism, etc. But I do just think that the idea that we think
42:30
other groups matter as much as as our own group, and I happen to be born in this nation,
42:35
but other nations are non-farrier. All those kind of ideas, I think, don't come naturally to us,
42:41
but culture has kind of pushed us in that direction.
42:45
But what does come naturally to us is I can't remember exactly how you articulate the distinction,
42:50
but a tendency to be generous and inclusive towards our own kind, and then to sharp
43:00
ly demarcate the boundary between us and them and be vicious and hostile towards the other.
43:06
How does that dynamic work?
43:10
Like I think that's right, and I think I guess it's not automatic hatred, I think probably it's
43:15
weariness, but neighboring tribes, I think, were often quite hostile to each, to one another,
43:22
throughout the course of evolution, and people had to be very, very careful of them,
43:25
and so I think just we haven't evolved weariness, and evolved tendency to just very, very easily
43:33
divide the world into us and them, and decide that us is great and superior, and then
43:38
they're bad and inferior, and they're out to get us, and so we need to defend ourselves.
43:43
And meanwhile, they have the same propensity, they're thinking the same thing that they're great,
43:48
and that the other side is the bad side, and that they're plotting against them,
43:53
and that they need to protect themselves from that.
43:57
And that tendency worked in our evolutionary history because of scarce resources,
44:03
and there wasn't, because you can imagine a universe of infinite resources in which that is
44:08
a dysfunctional characteristic, and you'd be better off just being nice to everybody.
44:12
Yeah, I think it probably did, I guess, I guess, scarce resources, but I guess just the fact that,
44:18
so yeah, there are like tribes, even today, well, sometimes, and vader, the tribes,
44:24
to take resources, but actually also to take females, so groups of males will sometimes
44:30
take hostage, females. A lot of it apparently is about that, and yeah, so in a world where
44:38
resources are scarce, and other groups are potentially dangerous, I think it was,
44:42
probably adaptive on average, even if not in every case, like I do take your point,
44:46
that having that mindset would sometimes provoke conflicts that wouldn't necessarily
44:52
have happened otherwise, and could lead individuals to lose their lives, et cetera.
44:57
But I guess the thing is that it must have been useful enough on average to have persisted.
45:04
Yes, and it's very easy to stoke, as we can see, not just in the culture wars in our own
45:11
naval gazing countries, but also writ large in Russia and Ukraine and so many other places.
45:17
Exactly, yeah, and I was going to ask, actually, I was wondering, so what sort of stuff do you
45:21
have on your mind when you're asking about those things? Yeah, I was thinking about Russia and
45:24
Ukraine, but I was also thinking on a more micro level at the deterioration of sensitive
45:32
universalism in Western societies, I think, both the rise of the far right and also the descent
45:39
of the left into a much more identitarian outlook and a much less universalist
45:46
vision of common humanity for everybody, but more about this is my tribe. This is a tribe that's
45:53
been historically persecuted. Now it's our time to get some kind of come up, and it's very much
46:00
more a finite pie that's being divided at the moment culturally, I think, rather than the
46:06
the universalism of the left in the 20th century. I think you're right, and I think that overall
46:12
it's real shame, because I think that that universalism was a real accomplishment of culture
46:19
and going against some of the worst angels of our nature, and it was obviously a fragile.
46:24
Two white males would say that. Exactly, so I suppose that we should add that some of the
46:31
issues that are being raised are perfectly legitimate, and so I guess the question is like,
46:34
how can we reconcile that universalism with giving due consideration to some of the specific
46:42
problems that have faced? Yeah, and asking whether or not the current trends actually do achieve
46:47
the stated goals, I mean, I've always just tried to keep in my mind Martin Luther King and Gandhi,
46:54
and Nelson Mandela, and try to think of where they were shooting, and I think not to
47:02
big note myself, I think my worldview is closer to where they were aiming for than the worldview
47:06
of many of the people who claim to be on the side of social justice today. I agree, and me too.
47:13
Those three are great individuals, and I'm much prefer their way of approaching them.
47:19
One fascinating way that you start the book is by writing as if you were an alien coming down
47:26
to Planet Earth and observing homo sapiens. Where did you get that conceit from, and can you just
47:32
summarize for us the, I guess, the gist? Yeah, where I got it from, I can't remember. I have seen
47:39
it around the place here and there. People have done it in books, I guess, a little bit of it here
47:44
and there, so I just hadn't mind in my old notes somewhere. Maybe this would be a fun way to
47:49
start a book. And yeah, so the basic idea is an alien comes down to the planet. The alien is from
47:55
Beetlejuice 3, and it's an alien from a very different species than her own. It doesn't have
48:01
males and females, it doesn't fall in love, it doesn't get jealous, it doesn't have children,
48:06
so it doesn't have special relationships with its children, doesn't listen to music, it doesn't
48:10
have art, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know what does have, but all that stuff it doesn't have.
48:15
And then it comes to our planet and encounters this strange being, these human beings,
48:20
and we're just a complete mystery to it. So for some reason, we do have males and females,
48:24
and most people are either of one type or the other, the males and females differ from each other
48:31
on average. They don't differ as much though as a lot of the other animals that the alien spots,
48:35
like gorillas and orangutans and elephant seals, we fall in love with each other,
48:41
we get jealous when the person that we're in in love with gets involved with someone else,
48:46
that's generally the case. We hypnotize ourselves with pitch, like rhythmical pitches,
48:52
of different durations, entertain ourselves with moving flickering lights on two-dimensional
49:02
screens, et cetera, et cetera, and the aliens just mystify. And it's basically just two things,
49:07
one I just find quite amusing to play with that forward experiment, and the other is just a way
49:13
to introduce the questions that I try to tackle in the book. Some of which, so the ones we've been
49:18
talking about so far have involved evolutionary theory applied to biology. I'm not sure how much
49:24
we've mentioned this already, I think maybe we haven't, but I also, at the end of the book,
49:29
I think evolutionary principles and try to apply them to culture instead.
49:35
That was the next chapter of this conversation. So let's talk about culture.
49:40
Yeah, because I mean one of the points that you make in that initial passage is about how
49:44
weird it is that we spend so much of our lives looking at stories of other, made-up stories that
49:50
we know are made up of other fictitious characters doing things and acting out our struggles,
49:57
and we listen to music, and we talk, we spend an enormous amount of time just opening this
50:03
hole in our face and barking noises at each other. And we are alone amongst the animal kingdom
50:11
in spending our time this way. Why? Well, it's weird, isn't it? I think, so some people argue that
50:19
things like music and art and storytelling and that kind of thing are adaptations. And I kind of
50:24
think my own view is that they're not. I think they're cultural inventions. I think the adaptation,
50:30
I think we did evolve our abstract intelligence. That human beings have, we have more of it than
50:36
any other species. So our big brains, the reason that we have our maternal care and paternal care.
50:43
There's big brains and intelligence and involving those intelligence and also our cultural capacity.
50:48
So our capacity to learn from each other. Pass on culture down the generations. It kind of
50:54
became an open system. And I think doing that, we managed to just invent novel, unique, and
51:04
evolutionarily, non-adaptive, just not adaptive ways to amuse ourselves, ways to stimulate our brains
51:12
and ways that we just happen to find enjoyable. So I think that's what music is for the most part,
51:16
it's just some trick we've invented to amuse ourselves, I think, stories.
51:23
They push evolved buttons. So we are interested in other people. We pay a lot of attention to
51:29
this, this person is attracted to that person and those two, they're in love and this person is
51:34
cheating on that person and these two hate each other and they're going to fight that kind of thing.
51:38
We're involved in interest in that kind of thing in real life. But stories can piggyback on that.
51:45
And stories can be interesting and they can be stimulating because we have that evolved interest.
51:50
And we found a way with our stories to amuse ourselves, basically.
51:56
In addition to amusing ourselves, we also love understanding things and only fairly recently
52:03
really have we gotten good at that in a rigorous way since the enlightenment have we figured out
52:07
systems of understanding the world that were more than just scattershot. But let us towards
52:13
incredible breakthroughs, I mentioned landing on the moon. It's no small feat in a couple hundred
52:18
years to go from not really understanding that the planet is even a planet to being able to land
52:23
on the moon. So something went right with the scientific revolution. What's the basis of that?
52:29
I mean, that seems like we've evolved into becoming gods.
52:33
I know, it's incredible, right? It's absolutely unbelievable that we got to the moon,
52:38
let alone all the stuff we're doing, AI. I didn't even mention AI in the book because
52:44
it was only a few years ago that I wrote the book, but already that's just jumped ahead massively.
52:49
Yeah, and I think so we do seem to have, we have an interest in how things work and that kind of
52:53
thing. And I think probably throughout my evolutionary history, that was useful just within the
53:00
context of everyday life and figuring out how to make a trap that works and how to process food in
53:05
a way that gets rid of poison and makes it easier to eat and digest. Things like that, I think we
53:10
did get right. But we just evolved this open-ended interest that we basically got wrong most of the time
53:17
outside the scope of everyday life. Like you say, until recently when suddenly we just sort of
53:22
figured out the scientific method and how to get it right even in areas outside everyday life.
53:28
And then it just completely came off the leash and just completely went well beyond
53:34
what our observing alien would expect from intelligent, but not you can imagine a vastly more
53:41
intelligent species. The alien is a vastly more intelligent species. We're not cognitively
53:46
impressive at all to this alien and yet somehow we've gone to the moon and we've done all these
53:50
other things. And how does the evolutionary biologist explain that drive? How does the evolutionary
53:56
biologist explain Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos being infatuated with going to space? Is there
54:02
that we evolved to like tools? I think probably I would probably explain it in more general terms
54:08
of just an evolved tendency to just want to figure out how things work in everyday life including
54:13
tools, but just more than that. And I think what the evolutionary biologist would do would say,
54:18
so that's the starting point. That's what gave us our intelligence, our ability to understand
54:22
cause-and-effect relationships, our interest in trying to figure out stuff. But then the evolutionary
54:27
biologist I think would hand over the task to cultural evolutionary theorists to explain how we
54:32
got so far beyond that and into areas that are not immediately related to evolutionary considerations.
54:41
And then the cultural evolutionist would say that what's happened is that because we evolved
54:47
as intelligence and as cultural capacity, we basically evolved the capacity to stockpile knowledge
54:53
and then to add to this common pool of knowledge over time, slowly tinkering with it and slowly
54:58
improving it over time. In such a way that it just slowly adds up and adds up and adds up,
55:03
and so we suddenly had knowledge that no single individual could possibly have pieced together
55:07
by himself or herself. And that results in us having ideas in our head. In our heads that are
55:15
many, many times more vastly smarter than we are as individuals.
55:21
And why do we need to reach further heights of a symphony or an incredible piece of literature,
55:27
you know, just shift back from science to pure culture again with a capital C. What's opera all
55:33
about? I guess I said two things in response to that. So like a biological thing, an evolutionary
55:43
biological thing and just a cultural thing. One thing is because we developed these ways of
55:47
stimulating ourselves. It becomes almost like an independent motivation somewhat disconnected
55:53
from evolutionary impulses like opera or rock music or whatever people happen to like
56:03
is just appealing in itself. And so people are motivated to do it just because it is stimulating.
56:08
It stimulates our brains in ways that won't evolutionarily sort of sketched out for us but are
56:14
still pleasurable. But I do think on top of that a more basic impulse. We do have an impulse,
56:21
most people, to impress each other. And the specifics of how we do that vary from culture to culture
56:28
and it depends on what's available in the culture and some cultures that might be opera and others
56:32
might be other stuff. But I think we do have that impulse. And maybe to get back to sex differences,
56:39
maybe on average, stronger impulse to show off among men than among women.
56:46
And there may also be an in group out group thing there as well, right? Like I was into this band
56:50
before you heard of them or you know, I'm into Guns and Roses, we're all here together,
56:55
we love Guns and Roses, we're all chanting along to Guns and Roses, that's very tribal.
56:59
It was the Etrox board. Yeah, true. And like the punk's hate all the non-punks and the heavy
57:03
metalers. Right. Yeah. I also wonder when I was reading your book and thinking about culture,
57:10
whether there's an analogy a little bit to what I was saying about sexuality, where you need the
57:14
dial turned up high enough that you get these artifacts that are unrelated to the original
57:22
core purpose of the sex drive. And similarly, maybe our intelligence, we've maximized our
57:29
sheer brain power and that has weird little sparks that branch off the utility of our
57:36
intellect and into these other curious realms like Proust and whatever else it might be that
57:43
are kind of, there's no direct evolutionary reason for them, but they're a byproduct of having
57:50
really big brains that are useful for other things. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think
57:54
it's quite a byproduct, right? Human culture. Yeah. It's just a byproduct, it's incredible.
57:59
I wonder if, you know, so there are other species with some degree of culture, like chimpanzees,
58:03
they have little bits and pieces of culture, they fish for termites and various other things
58:08
crack open nuts. And I wonder if they have a little bit of that, a little bit of overflow from their
58:15
cultural capacity. In fact, I think they probably do, right? Actually, I can think of an example
58:20
with orangutans. Apparently, there are some orangutans where they as they're nesting down to go to
58:26
sleep, they blow raspberries at each other, just in one group and they don't know how to do that,
58:30
just for just some do. And that's probably an example of that.
58:35
The highest form of culture for me is a goodie, an only bit of goodie, transpecies,
58:43
humor, always commonalities between species. Yeah. You mentioned AI.
58:50
Some people think that, you know, the next phase of human evolution or the evolution of life
58:56
will be us giving birth to sufficiently complicated systems that they, that it feels like
59:02
something to be them. And that they could develop some kind of culture, some kind of instincts,
59:09
some kind of sense of life beyond ourselves. What do you make of that?
59:16
I think a year ago, I would have been a lot more skeptical about all that kind of stuff
59:21
than I am today. I've just been stunned by what GPT and the like has done
59:27
in that space of time. And like, I, so sometimes a consciousness, right? So that's one thing
59:33
you're talking about is like, could, could machines have consciousness? Could there be something
59:38
that it's like to be a computer or an AI? And I think I've always thought that like,
59:43
in principle, there's no reason why not. So, so we're basically biological machines and we're
59:50
conscious. So there's no, in principle, I don't, I don't believe we have souls or anything
59:54
that make us conscious. I just think that we matter and matter, organized in certain ways,
59:59
can be conscious. Where examples are that? I can't see the particular, in principle reason to
1:00:05
think that matter in the form of computers couldn't be conscious. I can't see why that would be the case.
1:00:11
So in principle, I think it could happen. You can have conscious computers. Yeah, could they evolve
1:00:16
their own culture? I don't see why not. I don't see why not. What do you think? What are your thoughts
1:00:23
on that? Because it's a very, very tricky question. I don't want to be too. Well, I honestly
1:00:29
haven't thought about the culture question until this very instant. But it depends on how you
1:00:35
define culture. But if you define culture in the broadest possible sense, then any intelligent
1:00:42
being is capable of culture. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of a consequence of curiosity. And if
1:00:49
if a machine is truly aware, if a machine feels conscious, sentient, then it will have curiosity
1:00:56
and that will lead to ideas about things and ideas will lead to putting those ideas together,
1:01:03
which is a form of writing. And that is a form of literature and that will build a culture.
1:01:08
Yeah. And I wonder, so I guess you could, I guess it'll be culture if you have multiple AIs,
1:01:16
creating, creating those stuff and then sharing it with each other.
1:01:20
And it's kind of a selection process that some of that has passed on to other AIs.
1:01:26
And so they have a cultural evolution between different AIs. I guess that would be most
1:01:30
analogous to human culture. That's right. Yes. And some of them would have to be sticky
1:01:34
at the others. So the AIs would have to be exerting some kind of selection pressure on the various
1:01:43
memes to make some succeed and others not. Yeah. It's scary thought.
1:01:48
Scary thought. It's just crazy. Yeah. Let's leave it dangling there, Steve. Thank you.
1:01:54
Thank you for chatting with me. It's great to talk to you.
1:01:57
Yeah, thank you. Is there anything that we haven't touched that is such a juicy piece of fruit
1:02:02
that you want to throw it in? I don't think so. I think that was actually quite a nice place to
1:02:07
stand at one with our random speculation. Don't ruin it. Don't ruin it. Excellent. Thanks, Steve.