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“The Primate Myth” of modeling human nature wrongly · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:08
  Really, if we've learned anything from these past couple of years, my fellow narratives is that personal medical freedom and liberty are in prices.
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  Eastern.
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  I'm Dr.
• 0:40
  Randall Bach here to unpack myths, explore innovations and give you actual insights into the world of medicine and health.
• 0:45
  I'm honored today to have with us uh Jonathan Leaf, he's the author of The Primate Myth, Why the Latest Scientist Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature.
• 0:54
  Um this is an interesting topic, and uh it seems a little bit uh off the beaten track in general uh for what we might come across.
• 1:02
  And for you in particular, you know, I've read um uh a lot of your work, and we've talked about philosophy.
• 1:08
  Um you are uh a writer, and I wrote your read uh your mystery, the city of angles, and we've uh talked about a lot of philosophers you've written um kind of set piece uh 19th century middle uh Europe um with uh you know Heinrachine and uh you know, kind of esoteric educated aerodite um hyphalutant intellectual stuff, I guess, but on more of a you know, kind of talking basis.
• 1:35
  How did you get into the primate with myth and and what you know what is that exactly?
• 1:41
  Uh tell us a little bit more.
• 1:42
  Yeah, it it it people misunderstand uh the title, by the way, is not mine.
• 1:46
  Uh people think that it's it's a critique of or an attack on the theory of evolution or the idea that humans are descended from apes.
• 1:54
  It's not that at all.
• 1:55
  Um what the book is saying is that human evolution has deviated very wildly, uh, very dramatically from uh primate lineage, and we really shouldn't be classified with apes.
• 2:07
  We're really not much like apes.
• 2:09
  We're actually more like a herd or a pack animal.
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  And the book looks at an enormous amount of uh scientific evidence for this.
• 2:16
  So the book has over 50 pages of notes, hundreds of notes, uh, and it looks a lot of recent neuroscience and also genetics research showing that humans are not actually that closely related to apes.
• 2:26
  And it gets into some of the evolutionary reasons why this is.
• 2:29
  So apes, by definition, uh, in fact, all primates have what they call prehensile feet.
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  These are basically feet that are made for climbing trees.
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  And uh they're basically herbivores or fruitarians, and they have a certain type of uh social cast based on this.
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  Humans are totally different.
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  We're terrestrial animal.
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  We don't live in trees, we don't have prehensile feet.
• 2:51
  We've been we've evolved to be cooperative hunters, we're domesticated, which no primates are, um, and we use language, and these are all very different.
• 2:59
  So to understand humans, you really want to pay more attention to animals that are domesticated, that are cooperative, uh, that are hunters.
• 3:07
  Uh so animals like uh dolphins, wolves, elephants actually are probably more like humans in terms of behavior than uh, for instance, chimps are in the book presents a lot of evidence for this.
• 3:18
  And I would say it it directly relates to a lot of what your show is about, your programming, your podcast has been about.
• 3:26
  Your podcast has been about collective delusions, um, about uh the easy way in which people accept propaganda and false ideas, and this is consistent with a lot of what the book, the primate myth has been saying, and why a lot of people have been very receptive to it uh beyond the enormous amount of science it presents.
• 3:45
  I want to say parenthetically that two of the editors of Scientific Americans, so these are serious science people have written very laudatory reviews.
• 3:54
  In addition, um Angelsberg Ideas, which is a well uh influential British publication, um, named it one of the best books of 2025.
• 4:03
  Uh Joel Cotkin, well-known political scientists, named it one of the three books to read in 2026.
• 4:08
  Uh, it's been excerpted, it was a cover story in National Review, it's been excerpted in Spectator Magazine and the New York Post, um, and they're gonna other excerpts coming out in other publications.
• 4:19
  And it's attracting attention because it's it's questioning a lot of the basic ideas that primatologists have promoted.
• 4:25
  Uh, but again, this primate myth idea is the idea that we're a lot like chimps.
• 4:29
  Well, no, we're not a lot like chimps, we don't behave like chimps, and it even turns out that our genome has changed pretty radically from the chimp genome.
• 4:37
  Or that of our common ancestor, I should say, yeah.
• 4:39
  But yeah, you know, people you know use that kind of 90, uh, what are 98% or whatever it is, uh, you know, identical DNA.
• 4:48
  That's always a kind of a um misnomer.
• 4:51
  Uh it's a little bit of a false flag.
• 4:53
  You can find lots of commonality between your own DNA and that of a mouse, um, probably you know, a fair amount of it in between that and you and a cockroach, you know, because a lot of it's just kind of forming the cells and whatnot.
• 5:04
  A lot of things, a lot of your genome and so forth is not necessarily all used.
• 5:08
  The basic blueprint, you know, we we have we have you know, bones, uh, a mouse has bones, you know, our rib structure is not that different from a mouse and so forth.
• 5:17
  So this you know, this commonality, but you know, we diverge on a lot of other aspects from not just primates, but all you know, from the um ungulates and you've got a whole bunch of uh good biologic words in there.
• 5:30
  Um all the other classes we we diverge from as well.
• 5:34
  Yeah, and actually, in fact, the 98.6% figure has been known for a long time to be false.
• 5:40
  Um the way they came up with this, and it was about 25 years ago.
• 5:44
  Uh the first research that was done, basically what they did was uh the scientists who came up with that figure, they looked at the human genome, which they knew pretty well, and then they looked at uh chimps, and wherever they saw correspondence between our genes and chimp genes, they would say, oh, that's the same.
• 6:01
  Um and so they came up with this 98.6% figure.
• 6:05
  Well, there are several problems with that.
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  One was that they again they're using human genome as the reference.
• 6:10
  Uh there are several different chimp subspecies, but one of them has a hundred million more nucleotide pairs than or even in a human.
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  So that's like four percent of the genome.
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  So they just ignored this, the fact that the chimps have all these extra genes.
• 6:28
  They also ignored the fact that there's a lot of duplication of genes.
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  They thought this was important, unimportant and irrelevant.
• 6:34
  It turns out it can be very important.
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  For instance, it can be a cause of schizophrenia.
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  Finally, they ignored what they called micro-indels or uh micro-deletions, which turn out to be very important too.
• 6:45
  So if there were small changes in the genome, they'd say, well, it's pretty much the same.
• 6:50
  So within just a few years, um, a better study said, well, maybe it's about 5% the difference between a human uh genetically and a chimp.
• 6:59
  By 2020, another study said, no, it's about 10%.
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  And then last year there was a definitive study done by the leaders of the human genome project.
• 7:08
  These are the absolute experts.
• 7:10
  Um, and uh um 123 scientists, uh, also from the National Institute of Health and Howard Hughes uh medical center, and they concluded no, it's actually something like 13 and a half or 15% different, the genome uh that we have with chimps.
• 7:26
  So it's actually not that close, and there's really no reason why it would be.
• 7:30
  We split from chimps at least 300,000 generations ago.
• 7:34
  That's a long time.
• 7:36
  Um, and we've evolved to be totally different animals.
• 7:39
  They're wild animals, they live in trees in equatorial Africa.
• 7:42
  Uh they do uh they they rely on eating things that are in trees like tree leaves, nuts, et cetera, et cetera.
• 7:49
  We're cooperative hunters, we live all over the globe, we use language, we're domesticated.
• 7:54
  This is totally different.
• 7:55
  This is not similar.
• 7:57
  Yeah.
• 7:58
  Now, one little thing just for our listeners and viewers, I like to point out is that you know, people think we quote unquote come from chimps, and uh, or dogs come from wolves.
• 8:07
  You know, I like to make this one category uh change, which is that uh we c you know, say dogs and wolves come from some proto-wolf.
• 8:16
  The wolf of today is not the wolf of say 50,000 generations ago either.
• 8:20
  Right.
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  And the chimp of the is not necessarily the chimp of 300,000 generations ago, whatever the number is, either.
• 8:26
  Right.
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  And we don't we don't we actually don't descend from chimps at all.
• 8:29
  We descend from a common ancestor.
• 8:30
  So this is all wrong.
• 8:32
  Um, but it's been of great interest uh to people in the field of primatology to promote this idea to help them get research fundings, uh research funding.
• 8:41
  It also is a way that they can say, hey, we're doing really important work in terms of understanding people, but chimps don't really behave like people.
• 8:50
  They also, and this is an interesting point that's not often made.
• 8:52
  They don't do very well on intelligence tests.
• 8:55
  Um when uh the Emory National Primate Research Center did intelligence tests where they compared macaques, those are 15 to 20 pound monkeys with chimps.
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  The macaques outperformed the chimps.
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  Um tests were done at the Mox Planck Institute in Germany, where they compared dogs with chimps on basic intelligence tests.
• 9:13
  The dogs consistently outperformed the chimps.
• 9:16
  Um researchers in in the University of Stockholm did tests where they looked at uh whether chimps could interpret flashing lights and repeat in the pattern recognition uh of flashing lights.
• 9:29
  They found that chimps were outperformed by rats.
• 9:31
  They didn't know better than chickens.
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  They're wild animals.
• 9:34
  They don't pay attention very well, they don't learn very well.
• 9:37
  They can do some very simple um creation of uh tools, but so can crows and ravens.
• 9:45
  It doesn't prove much.
• 9:46
  They're really not like people.
• 9:48
  They're extremely violent, they're extremely dangerous.
• 9:51
  If you go to a zoo and uh a big cat escapes like a uh a cheetah or a tiger or a lion, they will try.
• 10:00
  Try to bring the animal in, they will use a dart gun that's to um retard its behavior and put it to sleep.
• 10:07
  With chimps and bonobos as well, when they escape, you're supposed to kill them because they're so dangerous.
• 10:14
  They're extremely violent, they're very dangerous.
• 10:15
  And that's true of bonobos as well as chimps.
• 10:19
  Yeah, there was um I thought it was a gorilla or some kind of ape, uh, got out of the Boston zoo uh a few decades ago.
• 10:28
  And uh I think there's maybe a different one as well that got shot, and everyone's all you know, broken up sad.
• 10:35
  Do you remember that episode?
• 10:37
  I this rings a bell.
• 10:39
  Um it does come with my book, but uh but actually less dangerous than chimps, gorillas, gorillas.
• 10:45
  You you can if you're doing you they give tours in Uganda and other places, you can get to about 20 feet from uh uh uh a gorilla that you don't know.
• 10:54
  And with relative safety, you probably should have a gun with you.
• 10:56
  Your tour guide should have a gun.
• 10:58
  Um, but chimps, uh, you know, unless you have really know the chimp, it's extremely dangerous to get near a chimp.
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  Uh they're very violent.
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  They also like to do things that are inconceivable for humans.
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  For instance, they engage in file cannibalism.
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  That is, they will eat their own young.
• 11:15
  Uh, both they will some cases even eat their own their own babies, but they'll also eat other babies within their troop or of other troops.
• 11:23
  Um, they're really, really vicious creatures.
• 11:27
  Yeah, I was looking into that.
• 11:28
  Uh, I was reading the book, and I looked into that um, you know, chimpancy uh phyllo infantile cannibalism, whatever you want to call it.
• 11:37
  Um, and it it was implying that some of the guys, um, maybe horny dudes, chimps, uh want some gal, they'll take that gal's baby, kill it, um, and definitively.
• 11:51
  So, and then thereupon, if she's not nursing or whatever, she'll go back into estrus faster.
• 11:57
  So it's um the sex kind of procurement and or the sign of mastery or whatever, and it's not your kid.
• 12:03
  But the the concept that you know, you will birth.
• 12:05
  I mean, you know, we're not like getting back to mice or rabbits or whatever, you know, they can reproduce massively.
• 12:11
  Now, the primates don't.
• 12:12
  I'm not sure what the normal brood is from a chimp, but I imagine it's relatively in the you know, low single digits, like you know, single or twins or whatever um per birth.
• 12:23
  Maybe you could inform me on that.
• 12:25
  But I imagine it's similar.
• 12:26
  They it's a little, maybe it's a very little uh they're not gonna come out with that many kids all at once.
• 12:32
  So it wouldn't be like literally productive or literally reproductive for them to be eating all their kids.
• 12:37
  I mean, there wouldn't be any chimps around if they did that, you know, excessively.
• 12:40
  Well, it's both males and females.
• 12:41
  In fact, two of the most famous cases of uh uh filio cannibalism involved uh one of the most famous cases involved uh a mother-daughter pair called Passion and Palm that Jane Goodall studied, and uh they killed 10 babies, they ate 10 babies from um uh of which three were from their own troupe.
• 12:58
  So it's not just males.
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  Uh they also chimps never know paternity.
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  They never form, uh they don't pair bond, that is, they don't um they don't actually fall in love with each other, they don't form couples.
• 13:11
  Um, they don't know whose child is whose, they're hypersexual.
• 13:16
  Uh the females are extremely violent as well and have very high testosterone levels.
• 13:20
  Um actually, oddly enough, the females tend to have deeper voices than the males.
• 13:25
  Uh they're really not like people, they don't behave like people in really very basic ways.
• 13:31
  They don't they can't even share food with uh unknown chimps.
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  Uh we call this co-feeding.
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  So uh if you put two chimps in a room and there's food and they don't know each other, they will not share the food.
• 13:42
  They'll just beat each other up until the bigger one gets the food.
• 13:45
  Not only that, there was a famous study done by uh some primatologists in England where they provided an uh contraption where uh a chimp could pull a rope and get food for himself, or he could pull a rope and get food for himself and another chimp, and they found this had no effect on their behavior.
• 14:02
  They actually didn't care whether they were helping another chimp and the parts of the brain that are associated with empathy, which are particularly the anterior cingulate gyrus, the supermarginal gyrus, and the amygdala, we know from uh functional magnetic resonance, imaging tests, and other other types of neuroscience, they behave completely differently in chimps than they do in humans and most other mammals.
• 14:25
  So, again, they're really not like people.
• 14:27
  They're very poor examples for people, and trying to study them as a way of understanding people is mostly a waste of time.
• 14:34
  Yeah, that's incredible.
• 14:36
  Um, I uh I found your book compelling.
• 14:39
  I was wondering, you know, how did how did you get there?
• 14:42
  I mean, uh did um, you know, what's the thing that prompted you to hunt down this alley?
• 14:49
  Well, there were many things.
• 14:50
  One of the things I talked about in the book is that um I have a good friend um who's a uh wealthy retired writer, he made a good deal of money in the apparel industry.
• 15:00
  And um, he loves dogs, he loves dogs.
• 15:04
  And I was with him and his German Shepherd one day in Stopson Park here in New York, I'm in New York City.
• 15:09
  And um he his wife was uh in Pennsylvania with his daughter, and uh he turned to me and he whispered in my ear that he was going to get Miss Carr who's gonna drive to Pennsylvania, and so I asked him, you know, why are you whispering?
• 15:25
  Why are you whispering?
• 15:26
  Yeah, and the reason is the dog knows the word car, and the dog gets very upset when he leaves.
• 15:32
  Uh leaves him with that, was leaving the dog with a housemate, actually.
• 15:35
  Uh he's wealthy, and uh he's rich.
• 15:38
  And um the point is you would never get this kind of response from a chimp.
• 15:43
  Chimps don't learn words that well, contrary to what we were told in the 1970s, not nearly as well as uh dogs do, but they also don't have the kind of feelings of reciprocity and love and affection that you get in dogs, and to a lesser extent, people.
• 15:59
  So trying to understand human behavior, it would make more sense to study dogs than it would make study chimps.
• 16:06
  And that that did strike me at the time.
• 16:08
  Um, you know, if you think that we're a language animal, we're an animal that's cooperative.
• 16:11
  These are these are traits we associate with dogs, these are traits we say associate with dolphins, these are traits we associate with elephants.
• 16:17
  They're not traits that we have ever observed in any significant degree among chimps.
• 16:22
  So clearly they're a bad model.
• 16:25
  Um then I started to learn about you know recent neuroscience, which questions a lot of the models that the primatologists have thrown forward, that there's more and more genetic research that we're not that closely related to them, et cetera.
• 16:37
  So that got me interested in writing this book.
• 16:40
  No, it's an incredible journey.
• 16:42
  And um, you are uh I suppose you're the example of humanity because you are hyperliterate and you research well and you uh cooperate, uh collaborate.
• 16:53
  I'm not sure how much collaboration, cooperation there was in writing this book, but certainly uh on a meta level you are because you're you're connecting with a lot of people in their thoughts and so forth.
• 17:01
  And um, you know, the there's I I so let me just um kind of give a few query pushbacks that I had as I was reading.
• 17:11
  Um, you know, I was wondering how much of the Heisenberg uh principle might be applicable to our observation of chimps, and which is that you know, by observing something, you're perturbing it.
• 17:20
  You're not necessarily seeing things in its natural state.
• 17:23
  I mean, obviously Heisenberg's talking about say things on the photon uh electron level or whatever.
• 17:28
  If you get close enough, the thing you're observing it with is that same thing.
• 17:32
  So if you want to observe electrons, you can't just see them because you can't suss them out unless you're like noticing electronic force and you need electrons or whatever to do that and did a everything on that micro level.
• 17:43
  So when you start observing something, you're changing it.
• 17:45
  So if you wanted to see uh what two twins are doing in the next bedroom, whatever they got like two-year-old twins or whatever, and you want to see how they're playing.
• 17:52
  Maybe you could use video cameras, they don't notice.
• 17:54
  But if you walk in there, you say, wow, I'm wondering what you guys are doing, you know, they're gonna be acting differently because you're in the room.
• 18:00
  And so can we, you know, genuinely observe chimps, you know, especially in kind of the Jane Goodall era, uh, when presumably there weren't video cameras, maybe now there are, and so forth, and or have we changed their habitat and their ethos enough so that they're not necessarily the same chimps.
• 18:15
  We're not necessarily the same people as we were, say, a thousand years ago.
• 18:18
  I think physiologically and genomically we are, but societally we we change.
• 18:22
  We we change over time.
• 18:24
  We're you you know sitting here talking on a computer, and that would have been say inconceivable, you know, say two, three thousand years ago, whatever, to have this whole kind of interaction, whatever.
• 18:33
  And you know, whether, you know, even Alexander Hamilton, bright as he is, would understand cryptocurrency or not.
• 18:38
  I I don't know.
• 18:39
  So we are genuinely morphing, whatever, as as species, not even you know, genetically, but but socially.
• 18:46
  And so if we can do that, are chimps somewhat changing socially because there are people in impinging on their their zones, they don't necessarily have the same food thing.
• 18:54
  I mean, how much are we observing them in A in their natural state?
• 18:57
  And B, are we perturbing their natural state such as it is by observing them?
• 19:02
  So we're gonna hold that thought for a second and return with our guest Jonathan Leaf on the primate myth.
• 19:08
  Please stick with us for the next segment.
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• 21:07
  Hi, so we're back with Jonathan Leaf talking about the primate myth.
• 21:12
  And we left hanging the question of how the primates were observed, whether they're in the wild or captive, and whether that alters the decisions and observations made.
• 21:23
  So Jonathan, come on, please elaborate.
• 21:27
  Well, the person who's the most influential in promoting the idea that we can understand people by observing chimps, this guy named Franz deval.
• 21:33
  And he wrote a book called chimpanzee politics that had enormous, enormous influence to in promoting this idea.
• 21:39
  And he was working with uh captive chimps.
• 21:42
  So that's clearly the case with for what you're talking about.
• 21:44
  And I do talk about that in the book.
• 21:46
  Um Jane Goodall did work with uh chimps in the wild, and their habitat has changed some, but a lot of the work, not that she so much did, but uh many of her associates did, and then some other people worked with chimps um in West Africa.
• 22:00
  She worked in East Africa, like uh a guy named Christoph Bosch and his his AIDS.
• 22:05
  They were usually using binoculars.
• 22:07
  So they were seeing the chimps at a distance, and they were seeing um them regularly kill each other and things like this, and the filial cannibalism, and uh they're stealing babies from baboons and attacking gorillas and all this stuff.
• 22:19
  They were doing this at a fair distance.
• 22:20
  I think this is a pretty good indication of how these animals really are, and that they're extremely violent.
• 22:25
  Um I wanted to uh uh uh uh take a little bit of left turn or right turn here, depending on how you want to interpret it.
• 22:32
  Um the book has big interpretations, and what the book is saying has big interpretations in terms of things like the causes of war, why uh marriage might or might not be their book or is important in terms of human relations, et cetera, et cetera.
• 22:47
  Um I wanted to specifically relate it to those something that you've written about.
• 22:51
  You wrote a terrific book about the hyping of the Zika, so-called Zika virus, which it turns out is actually really uh just a variant of dengue fever, correct?
• 23:01
  Yes, a mild non-human version.
• 23:03
  Yeah.
• 23:04
  Um and the question is, you know, why why were people, based on so little evidence persuaded towards really a real public hysteria about this?
• 23:12
  And one of the points my book is making is that um as we became a domesticated animal, as we became a language-based animal, as we became a cooperative animal, we really became an animal that was dependent to an extraordinary extent on being part of the group.
• 23:28
  And our identity comes from part of the being part of the group.
• 23:31
  And because of that, we're we're susceptible to we can get so depressed about not being part of the group.
• 23:36
  We'll commit suicide.
• 23:37
  Teenagers with their whole lives in front of them will commit suicide.
• 23:40
  People who are arrested for minor offenses will, you know, grab a bed sheet and kill themselves in their in their jail cell.
• 23:46
  So identity becomes a very big thing.
• 23:48
  Being part of the group becomes very big thing.
• 23:51
  And a lot of human thinking is based on this.
• 23:53
  It's not really logical thinking.
• 23:55
  We like to tell ourselves that we're logical, but we're often very illogical.
• 23:59
  And it makes sense given that we're such a social animal.
• 24:02
  You know, what's the cruelest thing you can do to a person worse than the torture of, you know, like uh of uh, you know, cutting someone is to put them in isolation.
• 24:12
  Yeah, it's brutal, brutal torture for humans.
• 24:14
  We need to be part of the group.
• 24:15
  So we accept ideas from other people because we want to be part of the group, and we're often very intellectually passive.
• 24:22
  And one of the ironies is that while most primates are not very intelligent, you know, basic intelligence has they actually don't do, as I was just saying, they don't do very well on, they are very egocentric and they do think for themselves, they do act and think for themselves.
• 24:36
  And humans really aren't that great at it.
• 24:38
  So somebody in Brazil says, oh, there's this terrible new disease, and it's it's causes uh microcephaly and blah, blah, blah.
• 24:44
  And people uncritically accept this.
• 24:46
  They don't think through, is this true?
• 24:49
  Oh, we need a vaccine.
• 24:50
  Well, okay, we need a vaccine.
• 24:52
  We got to do something about it.
• 24:53
  It's going to be terrible.
• 24:54
  Terrible if we don't get a vaccine.
• 24:55
  And if people haven't read your book, they should read it, they should go out, they should buy it.
• 24:58
  It's on Amazon.
• 24:59
  But in a way, the subjects that you're talking about, both specifically in that book and in my book, they're very much um attached to one another.
• 25:08
  That's one of the things I really wanted to try and emphasize.
• 25:11
  There is the concept of, you know, her herd thinking.
• 25:14
  Uh there's also herd immunity, you know, that that word refers to a herd.
• 25:19
  And there's, you know, strength in numbers.
• 25:21
  I I point out oftentimes that you know, everyone thinks when they're wealthy, they they want to, you know, get a buy a mountaintop and ski by themselves or or get some little island and be away from everybody and so forth.
• 25:33
  Uh, but in point of fact, people seem to be the happiest when they're in a mosh pit.
• 25:37
  You know, they go to some concert, and it could be there, it could be age-related, it could be you know, Barbara Streisand comes back for her, you know, fifth uh you know, farewell tour, or Bruce Springsteen, I guess, more apt, or Taylor Swift, whatever your age group is, or you know, groups I don't know about, or whether it's you know, revival of Green Day or rap, whatever.
• 25:54
  You know, it doesn't really matter the stylings.
• 25:56
  Uh humans will will glom onto any of those things.
• 25:58
  It's doja cat, it can be rave, and they can be go out to the desert, whatever.
• 26:03
  They can go someplace that's not really comfortable.
• 26:05
  Uh and why do they do all that?
• 26:06
  So that they have that moment of of kind of namelessness and face, you know, being part of a herd.
• 26:11
  So they can all yell together, and I think a fair amount of political parties and maybe uh Trotsky, Trotsky and Lenin, whatever got started, you know, you know, big rallies, that you know, I don't know if they were a couple hundred thousand in Moscow, you know, protesting wages or whatever, and that can turn into a huge movement.
• 26:27
  We can do a stampede, you know, just like other herds, you know, buffalo get together, they stamped, they can go wherever they want.
• 26:33
  And obviously, you know, we can be forceful that way, and we are threatened by that.
• 26:37
  Uh, you know, you you talk about like uh politeness coming out from the sphere of uh being you know brutalized by somebody else, and a lot of our civic and civil behaviors are not just because we're nice, but because we understand threat, and we're relatively fleshy and unprotected versus your other predator animals.
• 26:55
  You mentioned tigers and um, you know, the whole panoply of uh hyenas and dogs and whatnot, you know, the the bears and all that kind of stuff.
• 27:05
  You know, they they tend to have I mean, we I think our we have a predator face, you know.
• 27:09
  We we are we stare up, you know, we have you call stereo optic in the book.
• 27:14
  I call stereoscopic, whatever.
• 27:15
  You know, we have we have every animal with the eyes in front of him is a predator, almost abso facto.
• 27:20
  And whether, you know, you look at birds, you know, a bunch of these robins, whatever, they're picking out worms where, and a lot of other birds have their eyes on the side, the deer, the elk, they're they're looking out to so somebody doesn't eat them.
• 27:31
  The rabbits, you know, whenever I drive down my driveway, I see like three rabbits, you know, flurry off in every direction.
• 27:37
  And the other day, uh, you know, there was a rabbit not moving at all, but he was in the mouth of a of a coyote we have locally.
• 27:44
  And so, you know, the predator, you know, he's got the the coyote uh coi wolf or whatever he is, he's got eyes in front of him.
• 27:50
  He tracks down the rabbit, the rabbits trying to look on the side, not get eaten, and obviously now and then it happens, you know, the certain rate of which they get eaten.
• 27:58
  So I think the primates in general, we are, you know, some type of of predator animal.
• 28:03
  But you you point out in a lot of ways that we have adapted from that.
• 28:07
  Uh, have the primates as well.
• 28:10
  Well, there are a lot of different primate species here.
• 28:12
  There are like 500 different, something like 500, depending on how some people claim it's as small as 89 to the number of total number of primate species, but um, there are probably about 500.
• 28:22
  So it's hard to generalize.
• 28:24
  But they do have this consistent thing that they live in trees, they climb trees, they sleep in trees, they sleep a lot.
• 28:31
  Uh, humans don't fit the pattern of the primate order in certain very basic ways.
• 28:35
  One is our diet.
• 28:36
  Another is that we don't sleep much.
• 28:39
  Um, you know, because we're a terrestrial animal and we can be uh uh source of prey for other animals.
• 28:46
  Um that's more characteristic of a herd animal.
• 28:48
  It's not characteristic.
• 28:49
  Primates sleep anywhere from nine and a half to 19 hours a day or 10 and a half to 19 hours a day, depending on which source you look at.
• 28:55
  Humans sleep about seven hours a day.
• 28:57
  That's more like uh like a horse or a hippopotamus or something.
• 29:02
  Um, you know, they're very basic um metrics which tell us we don't really fit the primate order.
• 29:08
  Uh also all primates have explosive strength.
• 29:11
  They're very fast and uh they have incredible strength in their arms and upper body.
• 29:16
  We have amazing endurance.
• 29:17
  We're one of the best animals uh of all species in terms of our endurance, but we don't have explosive strength compared, you know, a chimpanzee is at least three, if not five times as strong as a human in terms of its upper body pulling strength.
• 29:31
  Um, but they don't have much endurance.
• 29:34
  So that endurance pattern, that's also characteristic of herd animals.
• 29:37
  So we've evolved to be this animal that can communicate, that can work together, and that's how we survive.
• 29:43
  I mean, we you know, we were able to hunt down woolly mammoths in prehistorics.
• 29:49
  These are gigantic animals, and we didn't have, you know, we don't have big teeth, we don't have speed, we don't have great agility.
• 29:56
  How do we do it?
• 29:57
  We work together.
• 29:57
  We were able to use very primitively.
• 30:00
  Weapons and um and attack very big animals, animals that were up to 20,000 pounds, bigger than any elephants that survive in the world today.
• 30:10
  Yeah, no, my my uh men, my when they were kids, uh maybe still, I don't know, um, they were gamers, and you know, one of the games, I mean, a lot of there's a whole series of Nintendo games, and I'm not gonna bore you with all those, but uh a lot of them involve getting the boss, there's the boss level, and it's a little bit like the mammoth thing.
• 30:28
  And then a lot of the games get adapted and adopted into um these multi-tacronym they have for them, but they're multi-player multi-role positions.
• 30:38
  So it's like World of Warcraft, the whole series of genres of those things, Fortnite, whatever, where people are kind of grouping together, just like your guys against the mammoth.
• 30:46
  So it's it's exciting and it's interesting, kind of as a reverse template.
• 30:50
  I don't think it's random that that's what the guys wind up spending their time doing.
• 30:54
  They're they're basically hunting and they're hunting in groups.
• 30:56
  If you go to these games, they're they're gaming and they're all organizing, and the way the way they do it is they have to kind of in the Nintendo games, you know, you basically get to the back of the animal.
• 31:05
  If you can never like distract them and do enough, you know, things and throw whatever you get to his back and you pop them in the back where he's uh you know vulnerable.
• 31:13
  Hyenas uh apparently hunt that way as well.
• 31:16
  They they they they will, you know, 20, they're they're not necessarily the fastest and the strongest, they got great mouths and whatnot, uh, but they will get bigger animals by, you know, one will decoy on the front, um and uh you know, distract whatever, maybe nip at the heels, whatever, and so they can get that animal turned around, and then the other ones will go from the back.
• 31:36
  And so once once the animals is hit on the hind quarters, they get incapacitated, and it must hurt like a son of a bitch, whatever.
• 31:44
  And so that then, but they'll they'll group hunt.
• 31:46
  And I think there's an interesting template for how we work.
• 31:50
  Uh, you know, if we let me know if people you know think of laughing hyenas, but they're probably not laughing unless they get some food, and neither are we.
• 31:57
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 31:59
  So, yeah, again, we're a social animal in a way that um, you know, uh uh uh primatologists lost and often claim that uh primates are social animals, but in terms of what we mean, which is the ability to cooperate to work together, to come up with plans by which you could put a man on the moon or you can make a cell phone or other they're not cooperative animals.
• 32:19
  Uh they're animals that mostly fight with each other and are very self-centered.
• 32:23
  Um, so they're they're really again, they're really different than us.
• 32:26
  So this this this uh this model doesn't work very well.
• 32:30
  It's interesting, you're talking about war.
• 32:32
  Um, you know, one of the really interesting questions about war, and and as you know, the book talks a fair amount about the causes of war and how to deal with war and why humans engage in war.
• 32:42
  But one of the interesting questions about war is why do so many soldiers, after they come back from combat commit suicide.
• 32:48
  And um, there's a lot of research that one of the problems is that uh, as horrifying as war may be to engage in it, there is an enormous feeling of camaraderie that soldiers experience.
• 33:00
  And when they come back, they've lost this and they really they're depressed, they're often very depressed because they've lost this feeling of camaraderie, and they really have no sense of, you know, who am I if I'm not part of the uh the unit, the company, uh, and if I'm not doing something that I think is important and worthwhile, and I'm not engaged in self-sacrifice.
• 33:20
  Well, this is just totally different than the outlook of a primate, but it's it's very serious.
• 33:26
  Another of the points the book makes is that the primatologists tried to sell people on the idea that wars take place because we're primates and primates are naturally aggressive and violent.
• 33:37
  But the interesting thing is that all the animals that we use in war, um, horses, uh, camels, dogs, pigeons, dolphins, sea lions, you know, you can go on and on.
• 33:49
  Elephants, they're all uh domesticated animals.
• 33:53
  That's in fact we are.
• 33:54
  And it turns out that the most warlike of all animals, the animal that is most inclined to war and engages in the most brutal wars, is the ant, which is a super obedient animal.
• 34:05
  So it seems that actually war is a problem, not primarily of uh primate aggression, it's a problem of obedience.
• 34:11
  And one of the points I make in the book, which is unbelievably important, and people seem to have missed this, uh, despite the fact it's an issue of the last 100 years, is that we don't have a single case of two democratic societies in which women vote.
• 34:27
  It's never happened.
• 34:29
  Going to war with one another.
• 34:31
  Wars seem to be a phenomenon by which uh autocratic leaders, dictators, psychopaths of various kinds, they find young men, and they use propaganda to get them to go off and start wars.
• 34:47
  But if you look at like France and Germany, they've had so many wars over the centuries, they don't even have troops on the border anymore.
• 34:54
  We don't have any troops on the border with Canada, notwithstanding the conflict between uh President Trump and uh Mark Carney uh or Pierre Trudeau.
• 35:04
  You know, nobody actually thinks a war is going to break out.
• 35:07
  Uh in spite of the cartels in Mexico, nobody thinks a war is going to break out between the United States and Mexico today.
• 35:13
  It's not going to happen.
• 35:14
  And nobody thinks it's going to happen.
• 35:16
  It turns out that uh women tend to, for various reasons, and the book talks about some of the neuroscience, they tend to be um somewhat more empathetic than men.
• 35:26
  And it turns out that when you give women a certain level of political power, um, the impetus towards war really really fades away.
• 35:34
  And that was even true to a significant extent when we we went to manhood suffrage when we we went to a system where uh every man could vote, but when we got gave women the vote, it changed our political system a lot of ways.
• 35:46
  Probably led to an expansion of government, uh that not everybody's in this in taxes, which not everybody's enthusiastic about, but it also led to uh basically an end to war between the countries that have uh democracies in which women vote.
• 36:01
  And um, we really have to understand that because a lot of people in our society want to blame us for the fact that we're in conflict with countries like China and Iran and Russia.
• 36:12
  We're in conflict with these countries because they're run by psychopaths who uh are interested in fomenting conflict, and it's not a function of our government.
• 36:23
  Yeah, interesting point.
• 36:24
  Uh, I'm not I I don't want to like debate that point too much.
• 36:29
  You know, I I I kind of would push back.
• 36:31
  I think there are obviously a lot of the war's been going on forever.
• 36:34
  Um I think there has to do with kind of the divergence between what I call in my own George Gilder uh adaptation of economy 1.0 and 2.0 and 1.0 is you get stuff a little bit like the chimp analogy, you get stuff by taking from somebody else.
• 36:50
  The 2.0 economy is that of making things and having the Adam Smithian virtuous circle so that I don't need to know how to make computers in order to talk on them.
• 37:02
  I just need to know how to you know fix um people's sore throats and and diabetes, and then I can get that coin of the realm so I can have somebody fix my computer, and the guy fixes my computer, he gets his shoes done, and the you know, the what I said so it's like you we we have basically isolated and segregated and um um you know mutated our our individualized our tasks and you know that happens over time and it's in those groupings that I think probably humans more than other any other animal has been able to individualize uh talents and specialize them.
• 37:38
  I watched the NFL and uh you know I've I coached uh you know uh the other football, I coach soccer for decade or more.
• 37:47
  And you know, there's different there's a bunch of kids and they're they'll form a team or a bunch of adults and they form a team, um, but they all have individual kind of special talents, like the Fantastic Four or whatever.
• 37:57
  And so some guy, you know, who's uh, you know, kind of in this ADD mode, whatever, might be better on defense because he doesn't have one to learn the stuff, but he's good at reacting to stuff.
• 38:06
  And there's all different kinds of of physical as well as mental traits that get played out on the field.
• 38:11
  Some people are inherently more defensive, some people, anyway.
• 38:14
  I don't want to get too too far down that road.
• 38:16
  Uh but the way I break in about that.
• 38:18
  And I think you're I mean, I 100% agree, obviously.
• 38:22
  Yeah, but I think you're also getting to another another important point about why humans are not like primates.
• 38:28
  Many species have division of labor.
• 38:29
  It's not unique to humans.
• 38:31
  Um, but primates don't.
• 38:34
  Humans have division of labor.
• 38:36
  Um, but we actually can see it in other species.
• 38:38
  You can see it in some uh rodent species.
• 38:40
  You can see it many uh insect species.
• 38:43
  It's not unusual in the animal world.
• 38:47
  But it's not found in primates, it's found in humans.
• 38:49
  And yeah, it is a real key to our success that we have division of labor.
• 38:52
  I mean, Smith got that.
• 38:54
  I think we all agree.
• 38:55
  Smith got that right.
• 38:56
  Yeah, I think we differ because we, you know, the ants will have division of labor, and the bees, you know, there's a Queen Bee, there's drones, all different kinds.
• 39:04
  They have division according to category.
• 39:06
  They don't have division.
• 39:07
  I don't think the other species have division according to personality or you know, these kind of very refined capabilities.
• 39:13
  No, but they they will take on successive tasks.
• 39:15
  Not only will they assign tasks, they'll take on successive tasks.
• 39:20
  Again, with that, we're gonna have to leave you hanging, but not for long.
• 39:24
  Stick with us for our third and final segment with Jonathan Leaf discussing the primate myth.
• 39:29
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• 40:30
  So Jonathan, give us an example of where we might apparently be going wrong with taking the equation between ourselves and some of the other primates, apes, gorillas, bona bows, chimpanzees, and whatnot.
• 40:42
  How does that actually play out in the way we look at ourselves in society?
• 40:45
  Again, back to the subject of marriage.
• 40:49
  You know, primates are uh particularly chimps and bonobos are extremely promiscuous.
• 40:54
  You know, they never know paternity, they never know who the father is, et cetera, et cetera.
• 40:57
  Um they don't parabond that is they don't, they're not monogamous, which many mammal species are.
• 41:02
  There are over 200 mammal species that are monogamous, many bird species are monogamous, lobsters are monogamous.
• 41:07
  Um it seems from there are various reasons to think that humans are naturally monogamous, and we also know that the human societies that have attempted um have that have scrapped monogamy have not been successful.
• 41:20
  And I I point to a natural we know from, for instance, uh what's called sexual dimorphism is basically the difference between men and women that humans are naturally reasonably monogamous, reasonably monogamous.
• 41:32
  Um also getting back to this issue of identity.
• 41:35
  Uh, you know, it's an old idea of primatologists, you know, if men try to gain power because then they can have as many mates and children as they want.
• 41:42
  But I point out, you know, you look at people who gain enormous amounts of power, like Hitler, Stalin, the Ayotel Homani, they didn't have a lot of children, they didn't have a lot of mates, they may have only had one.
• 41:51
  Uh they were much more interested in ideology, uh, their identity, their role, et cetera, et cetera.
• 41:57
  So this is this idea is kind of ridiculous.
• 42:00
  I mean, it's certainly true that that's a reason that men pursue power, but it's just a gross simplification of you know why people do things.
• 42:07
  It's not really an understanding of human behavior in any consistent way.
• 42:12
  Um, I think it I think it varies far as far as the kids go, but I mean Hitler, I think, had zero.
• 42:16
  Having Malay has zero, um, Gandhi has zero.
• 42:20
  Um, but you know, I think some of them have to do with their own, you know, sexual interests and whatnot.
• 42:26
  Uh, you know, there's things brewed about Adolf and whatnot.
• 42:29
  But uh, no, no, but that gets to another point, which is human sexuality is very different than than uh primate sexuality.
• 42:35
  It's very complicated.
• 42:37
  Um humans are inclined towards preferential.
• 42:39
  There are cases, many cases we all know of preferential homosexuality.
• 42:43
  There's humans who are naturally drawn to their own sex, which uh it seems to be a contradiction to Darwinian theory, but the book presents some theories as to some reasons as to why that might be.
• 42:53
  Interestingly, the other species we know that we've observed for preferential homosexuality, and again, they're herd animals, they're not primates.
• 43:01
  So uh I just I dispute that a little bit.
• 43:04
  You know, the example you gave in the uh sheep world um is a is kind of a genetic anomaly uh from being you know born as uh you know fraternal uh you know twins, you know, boy and girl in the womb and kind of getting a wash with male hormone and they form this uh free Martin uh but why doesn't that happen with chimps?
• 43:22
  Why doesn't it?
• 43:23
  There are chimp twins, there are champ fraternal twins, but we've never seen this among chimps.
• 43:27
  Yeah, and I don't think that happens with humans either.
• 43:29
  I mean, they're they're they're talking about kind of like a sexual neuter, like a not quite a donkey or an ass kind of thing, but um I don't want to get too much.
• 43:36
  No, there actually are some similarities.
• 43:37
  They found, for instance, with male homosexuality among uh humans that um men are more likely to be uh preferentially homosexual if they are born uh they have older brothers and they're left-handed.
• 43:54
  And there's some research suggesting that the reason this is is that as a mother has more children, uh particularly more male children, she starts having problems identifying um she starts seeing that the fetus to some extent is non-self, and this actually leads to um non-antrogenizing hormones, just as with the sheep being exposed to the child in utero.
• 44:16
  So there are there do seem to be some kind of uh neurochemical similarities.
• 44:21
  Yeah, I mean I we don't we have maybe 10 minutes left, and I don't want to like go down a rabbit hole.
• 44:27
  We've already had some rabbits and they go down their rabbit holes.
• 44:30
  But you know, I I think that you know homosexuality rates have hugely increased in the last few decades, and they're not the same in every society on earth.
• 44:38
  Um you know, monogamy we might think is successful, but obviously Europe is going down the drain uh demographically, you know, they're having you know 1.3 children and that point thirty three of a child, you never want to see that.
• 44:50
  Um I'm just joking, but you know, having fewer than two replacement kids, whatever.
• 44:54
  So societally, you know, the sightings that that match up differently with with um kind of the alpha-ish male taking on kind of the the like the sea lions and um whatnot, having the harem uh of women, you know, the strongest brutish guy takes on multiple uh brides impregnates them, you know, is it it on a mathematical basis?
• 45:14
  If you wanted to like reproduce your society numerically, um, you know, you keep all the women pregnant, and the the you know, the the alpha guy, whatever has that passes a seed along, uh the other guys are out working and warring and manning the fields.
• 45:28
  What you know, if you wanted to do that kind of in a you know, fascistic way, that's the way you would organize it for reproduction for numbers.
• 45:34
  So can I break in?
• 45:37
  I actually have a question.
• 45:38
  One of the points I make in the book is that we actually have a natural experiment on the success or failure of societies, which is Mormons.
• 45:45
  Um there are there are a small number of Mormons who continue to practice polygamy, and their societies are disastrous.
• 45:51
  They're the exact opposite of everything we stereotypically think about Mormons.
• 45:55
  We you know, we think of Mormons as industrious, as productive, as capable, um, as polite.
• 46:01
  Um, and they're not any of those things.
• 46:03
  They're very into crime and they're very messed up, and you know, so we know that polygamous societies don't function very well, and and um uh one of the reasons I'm sure that there are so many problems in the Middle East, uh, not that uh multiple marriages actually that common in uh the Arab world, but it's sufficiently uh common and accepted that maybe one of the reasons, along with what they call consignates marriage, why there's marrying your cousins, uh why there are so many problems in the Middle East today.
• 46:32
  Yeah, well, open thought, but um, but on a numerical basis, they're producing you know more humans than certain certain of those societies.
• 46:40
  And if some societies which are hugely successful and they are have adapted to, say, the more feminized um, you know, concepts of uh communality and kumbaya and whatnot, but they they you know wind up getting overrun, which may in fact, you know, if you go to places like Hamburg or whatnot, uh you don't see that that many, you know, Germans kind of in in the elementary school.
• 47:02
  We were in Vienna uh a few months ago, and uh it's not as the same as Germany per se, it's the same language almost, uh, pretty much.
• 47:10
  And uh in the I saw the elementary schools come out, and you know, there were very few dramatic kids that will from say what you expect from two generations ago, and even from the 70s or 80s.
• 47:22
  And so it's like, you know, there's something there about societal cohesion and whatnot.
• 47:27
  And the Mormons who are not doing that are you know reasonably reasonably successful.
• 47:31
  I was just in Utah a few months ago, and it's a beautiful place, civil and whatnot, and you know, people wind up managing those things.
• 47:37
  So I think humans have that adapt uh, you know, adaptability, and we will um kind of form the mold um such as it is.
• 47:46
  And they're very very, you know, hugely number of different uh molds have been tried over time.
• 47:50
  So we've gone through all different kinds of ways of of figuring out society, and we um, you know, we basically are successful.
• 47:58
  We take we've taken over the world.
• 47:59
  Um, but there are a couple of things that I just had a few queries about um reading your book.
• 48:04
  You talk about language, and you talk about some of those animals having language.
• 48:07
  And I um, you know, I I'm I kind of particular about words and whatnot.
• 48:13
  And I wonder about this word language.
• 48:16
  Um, you know, we are we you and I could could talk about something.
• 48:19
  You'd probably know when I'm sarcastic about something.
• 48:22
  You know, if I say, wow, this table is is really awesome.
• 48:27
  You know, I you actually mentioned the Philadelphia story, the same line said twice.
• 48:32
  And you can come up with the line, um, you know, women should behave.
• 48:36
  Women should behave naturally, and a woman should behave naturally.
• 48:40
  Whatever.
• 48:41
  And so that's something that a dog and a cat that I can't figure out, and and whales and whatnot.
• 48:46
  They might have they might have symbols, they have symbolic sounds, so certain barks or mules or whatever will mean something at that moment, like I'm hungry, or there's danger, whatever.
• 48:57
  But they they can't have nuance, they can't have kind of recursive thought that that is working on topics that are not in evidence, not visible.
• 49:06
  We we don't think so.
• 49:07
  I mean, uh yeah, uh bottlenose dolphins probably have the most advanced language other than humans.
• 49:12
  Um, and they have been attempts using uh, you know, machine language interpretation, computer interpretation to figure out what they're saying.
• 49:20
  We haven't really gotten very far.
• 49:21
  They do seem to be communicating something, what it is we don't know.
• 49:25
  I don't think most people think it's as you say, it's it's comparable to human language.
• 49:29
  But the fact that human language is so complex is really important because again, these models are saying, you know, we're like chimps, we're like gorillas.
• 49:37
  Language is so important in terms of understanding humans.
• 49:40
  And uh if you miss that, you really miss a lot of what it is to be human.
• 49:47
  Absolutely.
• 49:48
  Um this is one of my uh little pet peeves.
• 49:51
  I don't I I really am enjoying the book, and you know, I hugely recommend it.
• 49:56
  It's called the primate myth.
• 49:57
  And can I show a picture of it?
• 50:01
  I can do that for you.
• 50:02
  Oh, okay.
• 50:06
  But I had Paul Mangaron.
• 50:08
  It spelled like manger.
• 50:10
  And he's from South Africa and he's um zoologist of type.
• 50:15
  And I pursued him because uh I've had this theory for a while that dolphins and and whales are not that smart.
• 50:21
  Uh they're they're smart enough, possibly, you know, they're smart enough to be whales and dolphins.
• 50:25
  Um, but as far as all this kind of things we have anthropomorphized them into this thought and language and conversation, they they you know, understand jokes or whatever, they're convivial, um, is a little bit exaggerated.
• 50:37
  And the the size of their brain is one of the things people talk about.
• 50:39
  But the size and the shape of the brain, and I I you know, I remember Uless Ulysses S.
• 50:43
  Grant, I read a biography when I was in elementary school.
• 50:46
  Uh somebody, you know, he as a child or something, a teen, he went to a phrenologist.
• 50:51
  Those are people who examine uh your skull and tell of the future, it's a little bit like reading your palm or whatnot, and like, oh, he's gonna be a great man, he's gonna whatever, gonna be a general, and that stuck with Ulysses S.
• 51:02
  Grant, and and lo and behold, all that came true.
• 51:04
  But obviously, we are hearing about in retrospect, because we don't know how many people the phrenologists said that to, maybe everybody, so she get paid, or you get paid and whatnot.
• 51:12
  But um, you know, this kind of I think we have a little bit of anthropomorphization to the brain size, whatever, the or even the curving modulation.
• 51:21
  You know, the fact that the rodents don't have, you know, say the curvy brains we do and the dolphins do, doesn't necessarily mean the dolphin's smarker.
• 51:28
  You know, some of that, mind you, is just the the size and shape of the dolphin and cetacean head is because they're in cold, cold water, and they basically need heating elements, you know, that that's some of it's just kind of fatty insulation, and some of it is kind of this glial stuff that's that's that's you know, implying, you know, keeping cellular activity so the thing doesn't freeze.
• 51:47
  You don't like literally get brain freeze, you know, because you're in, you know, what is like sub zero or so, you know, or sub 32 degree water because it's salt water, it's colder than whatever.
• 51:58
  And so, you know, you you you and I would freeze in a few minutes under in water like that, and our brains and so forth.
• 52:04
  Um, so I just wonder, you know, whether we're kind of making the right applications.
• 52:08
  Um, but but you know, leaving that aside, you know, it's kind of a hugely uh fascinating book, and I think you're making a great uh kind of discernment and and category uh change between some of our other you know, otherwise romanticized um um monkey uh you know brothers and whatnot.
• 52:25
  So we just have uh you can either respond to that or I'll pull up the uh image for you, but um uh you can tell us you know, kind of final thoughts of where this is going and how uh you know what the reception's been.
• 52:38
  I know you mentioned reviews and whatnot, uh, but tell us a little bit about that.
• 52:42
  Well, I hope people read the book.
• 52:43
  Um yeah, um, and I you know, there's so many subjects in the book I think people find interesting.
• 52:49
  Um, and I think people find that it really answers a lot of questions having to do with you know why people joined cults.
• 52:54
  Again, it's related to this issue of identity that is we we need to be parts of groups, and that's more powerful as as an influence uh often than our logical desires.
• 53:04
  So, you know, people can believe totally ridiculous ideas, you know, Marxism, Scientology, whatever it is, uh, because they need to be part of a group, and that's really a very powerful influence.
• 53:14
  And and understanding you know, the evolutionary roots of that, um, you really have to begin to throw out these traditional models of humans as uh primates.
• 53:23
  And I just actually one final thought about that.
• 53:25
  So I've been talking about reasons why we don't really fit in the primate order.
• 53:28
  Let me oh, thank you.
• 53:29
  One one point to related to that.
• 53:32
  In your lifetime and mine, Randy, um, there were originally six families of primates.
• 53:39
  Today there are five.
• 53:40
  Well, why was one was kicked out?
• 53:43
  Those are the tree shrews.
• 53:44
  Um so to be a primate, you're supposed to have uh pre-hensile feet, these feet that are basically hands that help you climb trees, and you're supposed to have flat nails, which humans actually do have.
• 53:54
  We do have these flat nails, we don't have claws.
• 53:57
  And um at some point it was noticed that tree shrews have claws.
• 54:02
  So they were removed and they were put in a separate order called Scandantia.
• 54:06
  But what the primatologists haven't acknowledged is that we also don't fit the primate order because we don't have these defining charactering characteristics, these uh trees, uh these uh feet that are used to climb trees, and that you can use when you don't want to use, you know, these two hands.
• 54:23
  Um, but they've just ignored that because you know, of course, it would question it would question their own identity as primatologists, it would question it would be an issue with their research funding, etc.
• 54:32
  etc.
• 54:33
  So I hope people read the book.
• 54:34
  I think people should read the book, and I'm very grateful to be on your show.
• 54:38
  I every time I talk to you, I think, wow, uh Dr.
• 54:40
  Bach is so smart, and I learned so much.
• 54:43
  And um thank you.
• 54:46
  Well, appreciate that.
• 54:47
  So and and vice versa, you're one of the brightest guys.
• 54:49
  And and when I read your book, it's just like I'm thinking, oh my god, this guy is not a biologist, he's not uh any of those allogists, you know, zoologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, whatever.
• 55:00
  You're coming upon this as a playwright, and I I'm I don't want to diminish your other talents and whatnot because they're enormous, uh, but you have a way with words, obviously, and you have a comprehensive intelligence.
• 55:11
  You know, the the it's it's just kind of ironic.
• 55:14
  I'll bring it up, you know.
• 55:15
  A while ago, I kept hearing this term prehensile, you know, the um and uh you know, referring to our prehensile grasp, whatever it differs.
• 55:24
  And I always, you know, I just thought it was pre-something, like there used to be something we used to be hensile or somebody was hensile and we're before them, prehensile.
• 55:33
  And then, you know, I gosh, I mean I I looked looked it up, and it it actually uh comes from the the um it's like uh the French word contact, the same thing, pre.
• 55:45
  So we have the word comprehend and apprehend um as the same word pre-hend is to grasp, and so you know, we we have taken that in the meta form.
• 55:57
  So in order to comprehend something, you're taking you're basically doing that grasp.
• 56:02
  So the prehens is the grasp, and then and and just the French verb again, it's the same thing, P-R-E-N-D-R is pre pre, it's basically the same Latin word, prehen is to take, literally to take something.
• 56:16
  But it but then it's in French also, it's at Ponta, you you learn something, component is to understand something.
• 56:22
  So we've taken that um, you know, I reminded like babies when they you talk about the the length of time they learn to to um they they need separate to take language in because that's the single most important task, more important than walking and whatnot.
• 56:36
  We have these enormous childhoods, relatively speaking to our lifespan and and whatnot than other animals, and that's childhood and the gaming part.
• 56:44
  We need all this kind of comprehensive thing.
• 56:46
  We are basically gamers in in soft fleshy bodies, um, uh unlike lions and tigers, which have really short childhood whatnot, so that we can prehend, you know, our grasping is to comprehend and apprehend information and study and whatnot.
• 57:03
  And you certainly did that.
• 57:04
  You have grasped the topic, no pun intended, or pun intended either way.
• 57:08
  Thank you.
• 57:10
  Thank you.
• 57:10
  Thank you again.
• 57:11
  Thank you to you, and thank you to your listeners.
• 57:13
  Well, I appreciate that.
• 57:14
  So uh that's pretty much gonna do it.
• 57:16
  Um, and I'm gonna ask you to just stick around a little bit afterwards so we can check.
• 57:20
  But this is gonna be all for our viewers and listeners.
• 57:22
  I'm gonna put up the book one more time, uh, so people can find it.
• 57:25
  Uh, here it is on Amazon, uh, easy to spell.
• 57:28
  Uh, both your name, Jonathan Leaf, and hopefully you're not one of the leaves that the uh chimp eats.
• 57:33
  Um you're just gonna be the Jonathan type, that's the primate myth.
• 57:37
  Um, and and I I have I'm having a great time with it, and I think you will as well.