Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life | Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying | EP 216

to recognize that so much of modernity has been amazing for humanity and has given us the level of comfort and productivity and connection that we have and that is we do not forget that when we also point out that the amazing rate of change that we ourselves have created is itself deranging us and making it very difficult to understand how to be human and how to remember how to be human [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased today to have some friends of mine on heather heing and brett weinstein they're evolutionary biologists who've been invited to address the us congress the department of justice and the department of education and they've spoken to audiences across the globe they both earned phds in biology from the university of michigan where their research on evolution and adaptation earned awards for its quality and innovation they have been visiting fellows at princeton university and before that were professors at the evergreen state college for 15 years they resigned from evergreen in the wake of the 2017 campus riots that focused in part on their opposition to a day of racial segregation and another college equity proposal they co-host weekly live streams of the dark horse podcast and are both quite well known to many people in my audience it's a pleasure to have you guys here today i just read your new book i'm very much looking forward to talking about it i you have a copy maybe we could see it it is a pleasure to be with you jordan thank you yes thank you great to see you again jordan and great to be back on your podcast thank you a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century so let's talk about that i've got some questions uh well first of all maybe we should maybe we should ask why why did you write it what was your purpose well uh in the many years that we were teaching at evergreen we were deploying what we called the evolutionary toolkit which was a set of concepts that allowed people to understand the nature of biological creatures and the nature of they themselves and many of our students asked us if there was not some way some form in which we could provide them the toolkit so that they could hand it off to people who weren't in our classes and events have conspired so as to allow us to to write that book and we've now done it we're very excited to finally have the toolkit in the world so there was a broad question that was popping around in my mind while i was reading this i mean you you do state in the book that it's very difficult to derive shoulds so pathways for behavior from scientific facts and scientific data but in some sense the book is an attempt to uh what would you say extract out from biological knowledge certain guidelines for behavior guidelines for thinking and so it looks like it's in part an attempt to bridge the ought the is ought gap to speak philosophically and did you did you think about that explicitly when you were writing the book well it is you know we we do we point out that the naturalistic fallacy is something to be avoided exactly as you just alluded to you know we what we know to be true does not necessarily mean that that's what ought to be true or what we ought to aspire to but i think what we what we do consistently in the book and in our teaching and in our lives is try to understand what we've been who we are and not just you know what we are evolutionarily from an anatomical and physiological perspective but from a behavioral perspective and a cultural perspective and thus make the most meaning that we can from what we've been to what we can be yeah well you talk about human universals for example and and you speak about them biologically sets of emotions we have language the use of shelter the fact that we all live in groups that we imitate that status is part of our what would you say psychological concern existential concern the division of labor artistic production and and so and so you know you could you could think in some sense that if that's what human beings have always done that there's some and and that's what we are in some sense that there's some utility and having some respect for that and that seems to be at least a tentative bridge between the is ought chasm um for what it's worth i don't think there's really any conflict between what we've tried to do here and the obvious difficulty of extracting extracting an offerman is the fact is we have values ultimately they may not be defensible from a scientific perspective in fact if you take it to an extreme it's difficult to establish a reason that existing is better than not existing in some sense that's a subjective preference and it's one that it's not surprising we all share because we are the descendants of many creatures who have preferred it but in an absolute sense it may not be defensible so what we do in the book is we inform the question of what ought to be with a scientific understanding and we believe that any credible ought needs to be informed in this way at least in modern times and where we arrive is at the conclusion that we cannot in fact go back there is no place for us to return to that would be sensible from the point of view of modern people and we cannot go forward in a chaotic way we have to recognize that there are many things about what we were that need to be preserved and updated there are other things that need to be jettisoned and that it is that renegotiation of our relationship with each other and with the planet that is the um the focus of where we must go and you talk at the beginning about uh the new landscape that sits in front of us and you also discuss that in relationship to the human niche and so one of the issues you confront very early in the book is this notion of hyper novelty and i mean i i i've been very ill for a long time and so i've sort of woken back up and i have all this new electronic stuff around me that i don't know how to use and it's it can do so much and it but it's very very hard to figure out how to make it work and i know perfectly well that that problem is not going away like it's going to be twice as bad in a year and twice as bad again a year after that and so what what's this idea of hyper novelty in more detail well at one level and i'll let brett finish continuing on after i answer but at one level the book is an invitation to consider trade-offs in all things to recognize that so much of modernity has been amazing for humanity and has given us the level of comfort and productivity and connection that we have and that is we do not forget that when we also point out that the amazing rate of change that we ourselves have created is itself deranging us and making it very difficult to understand how to be human and how to remember how to be human so i would add that the the fact of novel technology of course exists in obvious forms in the types of devices that you're referring to but it also uh fits well with many other things novel molecules that we encounter novel ways of socially interacting and the problem is that although we are the most flexible creature that selection has ever produced our level of flexibility is not up to a rate of change where we literally do not mature into the same world in which we were born by the time we become adults we live in some different context and what this means at an intuitive level is that we do not know what to do our intuitions are badly tuned for the kinds of things that we encounter and this is made particularly bad in the context of markets where our our intuitions can be hijacked to get us to engage in behavior that benefits the people producing the content but at some cost to us so we have to become aware of this hazard and we have to learn to apply the breaks to it it's not that progress is bad progress is often tremendous but it almost always comes with important unintended consequences and being aware of them is uh an important feature right right so so that's a permanent part in some sense of the proper political debate right and so you think we face a horizon of of genuinely and truly unpredictable change no one knows what's going to happen in the next 10 years at all and so the cons the liberal types who think more would you say loosely and in with more associations more creatively they're going to produce solutions hypothetically to those unpredictable problems but the conservative types are always saying yeah but be careful guys because your damn solutions might be worse than the problem and so and you can never say that one side of that argument has the floor properly you never know because it really is unpredictable and so if that debate between the liberals and the conservatives isn't allowed to exist in an untrembled manner we actually interfere with our fundamental problem-solving uh what would you problem-solving ability both individually and collectively and when you talked about our our niche being niche switching you know that we and that's i mean part of the reason that i thought that the hero's story in some sense is at the top of the value hierarchy is because the hero story is about niche switching it's about the transformation of viewpoints and so well what should all viewpoints be subject to the transformation of viewpoints when necessary it's something like that and i thought that dovetailed with this idea of niche switching being one of human beings prime so maybe you could explain that niche switching idea and the niche idea too because lots of people don't know what that is yeah well so in in ecology the idea of a niche is that part of the environment to which an organism is best adapted and most organisms have a relatively narrow set of environmental conditions which includes both the plants around them the soil the you know the the climate and the weather all of these things the geology to which they are best able to exist and as they extend towards the borders of that uh of that niche they do less and less well and there's some area outside of it that they don't do well and humans of course as is widely understood have managed to excel in on every continent of the planet that has plants right you know we we have explored everything successfully and so we argue in the book that while um it is well understood in ecology and evolution that every organism has a niche the human niche is in fact niche switching that is what we do that we are able to move from you know hunting marine mammals on the coast inland to hunting salmon inland further to hunting large large terrestrial mammals and that's just an example from a pre-industrial pre-agricultural moment right we can imagine any number of transformations that humans have have been involved with and this implies that we have a mechanism for swapping out our programming which we we clearly do if you think about what happens as a population moves through time and changes what it does for a living there's a mechanism for getting there it's not a haphazard process and we argue that this process will have unfolded very frequently around campfires as individuals come to consciousness of a collective kind what they do is they pool their cognitive resources they do a kind of parallel processing asymmetric parallel processing where they share ideas and individuals with very different strengths and blind spots engage the same question and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts that process allows human beings to literally bootstrap a new software program for their population and that is the key to human success okay so when i was reading jung's thoughts so his conception of the self was an underlying mechanism that allowed ego frames to be transformed so imagine at any point it's like this niche idea at any point you're identified with your adaptation to a certain niche but now and then the niche transforms and so you have to transform or die and so but you're identified as you with that adaptation and so that's experienced in some sense as an ego death and then the the question is well when that ego death occurs what does it collapse into and jung's idea was there's an underlying structure that he called the self that is there stably across across transformations of proximate identity he also associated that at least in part with the voice of conscience which was a voice that was telling you that your current adaptation despite your identification with it wasn't optimized it wasn't optimized i suppose that's the right way of thinking about it so yeah and many moderns especially those of us who are spending so much of our time on screens and in social media now too often conflate those two things right conflate the ego identity with the self if i'm remembering your use of jung's terms correctly um and you know this this is exactly the problem and that is exactly the problem right that's a really interesting you wrote an essay called relations between the ego and the unconscious which is one of the most brilliant things he ever wrote that is exactly discussing that problem and it's catastrophic danger it's brilliant but it's very hard to figure out what it's about if you don't have this initial conception yeah and so not only so it's exactly the problem for individuals and also for one individual assessing another and so you know the way that we would we used to frame it in our classrooms without the jungian framing was we're not going to conflate uh a person's idea that you may find objectionable with a dislike of the person themselves the person's ideas is skating on top are skating on top of what their actual self is but it's it's very easy to fall prey to that conflation so uh the parallel you point out is actually reflective of an overarching similarity an analogy between developmental progress and evolutionary process and so what jung is focused on there is a developmental analog of what we talk about with respect to lineages transforming what they do an individual coming to do something different than they did before is involved in a process that looks very much like that and will have many of the same features as they well okay so while you could think about that too is you know the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex and so what that means is the prefrontal cortex has basically evolved to abstract out patterns of action in abstraction so that they can be assessed and killed dispensed with with before being instantiated in behavior and so that is that is in fact a replication of the evolutionary process in abstraction so that we can have our ideas die instead of us and we do that in the political landscape if we're smart right because part of the debate is well here's a bunch of good ideas we should act them out it's like wait a minute some of those might kill you and you do a lot of that kind of warning in this book right because you talk about the necessity of creative adaptation but the book is full of cautions about unintended consequences and so for example you talk about and i hate this all these gadgets we have around us it's engineers hey they're all autistic and obsessed with blinking light so every damn thing you have has to have a light on it and i finally bought a router where you could shut off the lights it's like more power to them but it's not trivial you point out for example that we're not well adapted to sleep if there's any blue light around and so we have these gadgets we're very sensitive to even dim light and so we have these gadgets around that are polluting the darkness and well that's not nothing and that's a good really good example of an unintended consequence yeah it's really it's it's not nothing at all and i think you know we see we have been lucky enough to live in a space for many decades now where we could make a totally dark and mostly silent nightscape for ourselves but whenever we travel the the presence of at least one blue led blinking somewhere in the room in which you're supposed to sleep is almost ubiquitous in pretty much every other room that we have been exposed to and that suggests that uh right there we have a likely explanation for at least part of the derangement of moderns right there sleep disruption we know we need sleep you know we argue in the book we're aliens to land here with the technology to have gotten here they would not be confused by the fact that we spent a third of our lives in apparent dormancy because they too would sleep sleep is sleep is necessary now well one of the first things you do as a clinician to treat people with depression is to try to regulate their sleeping because it's such a basic biorhythm that if it's fouled up then your entire your your emotional regulation deteriorates tremendously and so these small hypothetically small changes and of course light at night is not a small change night is dark and and we didn't have light except fire and you point out in the book that you know and this is rangham's work a lot of it which you cite you know that we've probably been messing about with fire for something approximating two million years and so nighttime fire that's a whole different thing that's the right kind of light but and well you know one of the things that's interesting about your book and the way you think is that you're using biology in some sense also to point out what we should be wary of because it's going to disrupt us our biological function in ways that that might not be so good for us and so it's health advice in some sense even though a lot of it seems to be behavioral so well it's health advice in the sense that we are unhealthy because of all of this hyper novelty at virtually every scale and so when you say that light in the middle of the night is not a small matter we point to the possibility in the book that in some sense wavelengths of light that tend towards day that include a lot of blue misinform us about when we are active and for many of us we may be able to tolerate that if we can get past the simple sleep disruption but for some of us it may be activating the dream state while awake and that the degree to which simply activating the dream state while awake would mirror the kinds of symptoms that come along with schizophrenia is conspicuously simply rightly activating the dream states simply activating the dream state also there's a question about given that we have these cycles of sleep and that we wake very differently under natural circumstances than we do under modern circumstances it is uh an open question as to how much cost there is to awaking arbitrarily as a result of your alarm suddenly triggering your ability to interrupt these cycles immediately if there's an emergency right that can't possibly be good for you and we are built not to do it and so the idea that oh i'll just put an alarm clock by my bed and i'll get up at 6 30 at what cost and i think we simply don't know no that's that's so interesting that so many of those technological innovations well this is the conservative speaking again it's like you think you know what that thing is but don't be thinking you do that the existentialists called that alienation taking a page to some degree from the marxists and par but in a much broader conception which was well you're alienated from your creation in some sense because it has a life of its own because it it contains way more possibility than you thought you packed into it and that damn possibility is going to unfold across time in ways that you can't possibly predict and so that's wonderful because everything is so deep and mysterious because of that but it's also it's like that's a genie and you can't put the genie back in the bottle and you don't even know where the damn things are it's amazing we've actually managed to survive all this technological revolution you know and it's it's really something that we've been able to adapt to it so far god only knows what twitter is doing to us for example you know it points to the hubris that we have right the arrogance of of all of us not just creating but accepting all of the hyper novelty into our world as if we already have a complete understanding of what humans are and what we need and you know we point as you know in the book to many passing examples that now look laughable you know to doctors at in the early 1900s deciding that not only was the appendix unnecessary but so was the large intestine let's just cut those out of people right this is going to be a lot more space in there a lot of space yeah we probably need more space and our that's right what could it possibly be doing no so this is easy right it's easy with hindsight of 100 years but we have to ask are we so certain that we've attained god-like knowledge now that we're not making any of these mistakes well it's also god-like ethics and you know the fact that we're so damn powerful means we better be better because the lookout you know and this we just have no idea what's coming i was talking to a good friend of mine who's a brilliant computer engineer and he's working on this damn thing that he thinks is more revolutionary than the internet and he isn't someone who just says that and he's already done this like five times it's like and i thought oh my god do we really need something more revolutionary and then i thought he is a wise person and he's careful thank god and you know don't no doubt there's 10 things coming that are more revolutionary than the internet you know i heard about like about three of them this week and it's really something and i hope we're bloody well up to it and you know one of the things i hate to like ramble on about jung but one of the things he did say back in the 1950s which really this was in relationship to thermonuclear weapons he said the most serious crisis facing us in the future will be mass psychosis essentially mass delusions it'll be psychological instability because we can't ex we can't afford that and be this powerful so you were talking about your friend and his idea and you said something akin to i hope he's up to it he's at least you know capable of seeing the hazards but the problem is there's no level of wise that covers this none no for you know you mentioned twitter it's early with twitter we don't really know its full effects but i think we can be pretty sure it's not making us nicer or better informed even if that seemed like it might be a consequence but if you imagine i mean i remember you know it wasn't so long ago that twitter was a novel idea and can you imagine saying well what will be the effect if suddenly everybody can you know say 140 characters at a time anything they want at everybody the idea is well what's the harm in that yeah right well so we could talk about that a bit i mean because we don't know much about our linguistic function we have no idea what the combination of 140 character limit no censorship or social scrutiny at the moment does to the emotions we're likely to manifest when we communicate in that manner we have zero idea and by the time we figure it out twitter will be something else so it won't matter right and add to that add to that the um the fact that we're not engaging with whole human beings right that that it's entirely behind a facade some of those facades are real people you know i know when i see a tweet from you that it's actually you who is behind that um there are other people who might know entirely online and i think i think they are who they say they are there's other accounts that are actually anonymous and they're consistent and i think they're going to be consistent but who really knows and of course there are far more that may not be people at all right right i mean that'll be a bigger and bigger problem right we either be hired and are actually real people or they're just not even people so yeah i think 60 percent of the internet traffic is bought something like yeah so yeah so pretty much it's going to be just yeah we're learning to conflate real people with fake people yeah well you have no way to tell the difference think about this too you know so you're driving around in your car and it's a shell it sort of looks like a beetle because the engineers hide the complexity from you because that's what you want and then you see these other people in their in their shell beetle shells and you curse and swear at them like you never would if they were right in front of you and that means that just putting that facade on them dehumanizes them to the point where you're much more aggressive than you would otherwise be and so we have no idea how that works out in the social sphere even even conversing like this which seems like the real thing you know and maybe is close enough that we don't know what that does to the to the likely emotional tone of her interactions no that's that's right it's it's arbitrary is the answer and i i agree with you exactly your your example of cars is a great one but one thing that we can be pretty sure is that if people treated each other uh in person the way they treat each other on twitter they would get beaten up with some regularity which would stop them from doing right and so the net effect might be that you know we would be nicer right and so the uh the suspension of the actual violence may cause us to become uh much more dangerous as we're trying to problem solve and navigate well yeah and then we could talk about that for a minute too because you might think well violence is no solution it's like no but one of the things that you do see in interactions between men is that there is an underlying threat of physical violence that's always there and you think well that's a terrible thing those those demonic males that's rangham's book right but but by the same token you can signal a tiny increase in the potential for that violence in a variety of ways by frowning by changing your voice tone so you just have to hint at it if it's a civilized discussion and it keeps it within bounds and that's one of the things that i don't see so characteristic of linguistic interactions between women for example yeah so it's it's not and i would just add um to pick up on a point that you made earlier you know you said the prefrontal cortex inspiring from the motor cortex uh well it's also specifically in mammals the cerebral cortex is borrowing from uh what used to do our smell processing and you know so as as primates we're much more visual uh than the rest of mammals which are much more focused on smell with it with this increase in the size of the telencephalon but what you know what all are we missing when we're doing something that feels very much in person like what what you and we are doing right now but we're not smelling each other and you know that's your sexual interactions that's got to be crucial man right and it's mostly not conscious like humans yeah we supposedly don't have pheromones well let's see yeah right right yeah right but we know that we're in person with one another there's little things about body language about movements about little gestures and facial movements that don't convey even over screens and certainly don't convey otherwise when i was in college i lived with like six narrative wells and and a couple of pretty decent women and one of the women had this she had her moods you know and i swore that i could tell if she was in a frozen mood when i walked into the house i thought i know something's up here and i and that happened like six or seven times maybe it's you know superstition or whatever but i really think it had something to do with smell and i also had this very strange experience when there was someone in my house that was pretty much homicidal and ready to go off that night in a very not good way a very person who was very disturbed a good friend of mine who eventually committed suicide and i woke up at like three in the morning and i thought no something's seriously wrong and i went into his room and he was sitting there up on his bed and i knew what he was thinking and i swear and my my my brother was sleeping he was visiting me from from western canada a couple thousand miles away he was in the other room completely different room he told me the next day independent of this interaction i had with my friend who was staying with us that he said what the hell was going on last night i couldn't sleep at all and i really think it was smell associated who knows it could be but it also you know one of the things about human beings is that we have really no idea what most of our minds are up to and so you don't know what you're tracking you could be tracking that when somebody is in a mood that they walk across the floor in a particular way where that board doesn't squeak or it does squeak or something about their pattern of behavior has just been recorded as a precursor to something bad and so it might as well be smell or that might be a metaphor i can just smell something's coming um well just think about dogs try taking your dog to the vet without him knowing it's like what the hell is that dog figuring out it's non-verbal clearly it's like you think your dog can't understand language and get some of it but man dogs they know and that's probably because you're not your non-verbal behavior isn't exactly the same as it usually is and they're extremely attuned to that partly because they're not actually blinded by their linguistic ability right because our linguistic ability actually inhibits some of that non-verbal decoding at least our conscious awareness of it yeah we make the mistake of thinking if we're using language we're being purely analytical and we forget all of the things that underlie the analytical yeah like all the musical tone yeah in fact uh this is uh this is my hypothesis for why we have these greetings that carry zero content in them is that it's very hard to hide from somebody who knows you that you know there's something on your mind if you say i'm fine right but you just don't get the tone color exactly right they're confined exactly um right but but there's an awful lot that's communicated and well you see that with small talk too you know and i've talked to a lot of hyper-intellectual people and i was kind of like this at one time it's like small talk you know who's got time for that it's like no you probably don't want to be around anyone who doesn't have time for small talk and because small talk is well first of all it isn't um energy requiring and that's really actually really quite nice and it's also an indication that the person has some social skills you know they know how to just have an introductory conversation and not jump right into what's dead serious and all those things we do to smooth the waters that well that a technology like twitter just eliminates and we also don't know how twitter samples people like twitter may only allow people who are irritated about something to talk that's right that's right and to your point about small talk i i too have dismissed small talk in the past as something you know not not worth my time and i think i've come around as you have it sounds like uh to the idea that it's actually much like you maybe could smell or you heard the floorboards or something with your friend who was in an apparently homicidal mood that night uh small talk allows you to take the temperature metaphorically literally maybe of of the mood of the interaction and get a sense for okay how am i as we go deeper how should i play this like you know do i do i go in guns blazing do i take a little easy you know what what kinds of things is the person that i'm interacting with likely to be able to engage able and willing to engage right now well it's probably a form of play so when kids get together on the say two kids of roughly the same age get together on the playground and decide if they're going to play they start with little and play that's below their developmental level and then they both ratchet it up to their own developmental level and if they're if they match then their good play partners but they start you know with something that's actually quite quite beneath them and then they also tend to evaluate you know if they're dealing with someone who is developmentally much delayed in comparison to them they'll tend to find another play partner and of course we do that as adults that's right as we as we make our progress through the social interactions so okay so so let's also talk about objections to evolutionary theory you know you biological essentialist types you know so so how do you respond to those sorts and there is a danger right look there's a real danger that we should that we should address here we here follow the science a lot and we hear these un thinking claims that well the science will just tell us what to do without any any intermediation of such pesky things as politics or and so and so when people are criticizing evolutionary theory as psychology they are to give the devil is due they're also going after what might be a two-facile tendency to say well this is and since it is i can make it should and it's science that's me allowing me to do that and that's that's not good that's not good for science or everyone else so how how do you handle that philosophical problem let's say when you're trying to write a book like this um two points which are really probably facets of the same point one we are very early in the study of biology unlike things like physics and chemistry and we are also in a different kind of scientific realm complex fields function very differently than simple fields and unfortunately our model of how science works is built on the places where we succeeded early and we're going to have to revise the way we do science for for biology and psychology and all of the related disciplines and i would say a couple things one i think there's a perception in certain camps very frequently they are non-academic camps in which there's a recognition that there's something missing from evolutionary theory and what i would say is we agree there's something missing from evolutionary theory what we tend to disagree about is what is there and from our perspective there is a missing layer of darwinism in other words the darwinian story we tell about how a creature like a human being arises through this process is an incomplete story and many people detect that incompleteness the question though is is that an indicator of some divine force of force outside of physics something like that or is it an indicator that there is a darwinian process that has yet to be described okay so i really want to ask you guys about your opinion about this because that that's a real crucial issue as far as i'm concerned so as far as i know darwin outlined both natural selection and sexual selection and he put a fair emphasis on sexual selection but when biologists started to unpack darwin's ideas for about seven decades eight decades after he wrote his great books most of the emphasis was on this like blind natural selection and the thing that's so interesting about sexual selection and i think this is true as organisms become more complex is that it implies in a very non-trivial manner that consciousness is directing selection through mate choice and so you know this idea that we have that spirit compels matter to emerge towards complexity has something going for it that i it that seems to me to be deeply rooted in darwinian theories of sexual selection it's like and you see this emerging in very weird ways so i'll give you one example that you may know of i don't know if you've seen that youtube video i think it's from a bbc nature documentary of that damn puffer fish making a mandela sculpture at the bottom of the ocean it's like it's like 20 feet across this thing it's about eight inches deep this puffer fish is like this big he spends four days making this incredible sculpture and this is a bloody puffer fish and and then the females come and take a look at his sculpture and think you know he's kind of a creative artsy type of puffer fish and he's pretty practical from an engineering perspective and so you know he might make a good mate and that's a puffer fish you know so well and then in the bauer birds which are also extremely interesting examples of that obviously they are being selected by the females in particular for high levels of creative intelligence and practical engineering skill and so there is a role of conscious choice so because you keep hearing about the blind forces of natural selection it's yeah fair enough but what about sexual selection and then what does that say about what consciousness is doing and i i don't think i can't because that's not mechanistic in some way i well that's all i have to say about that i don't know where you think about all that you're exactly right your your sacrilege is dead on um and you know you can detect that this is the error with the following version of the same puzzle right we swear that evolution does not look forward right on the other hand we also swear that we are the products of evolution and we certainly look forward right we can project forward in time so if it is true that selection can build a creature that can model the future then is it true that evolution cannot model the future that seems wrong right so anyway we could parse the details of that but the basic thing is look we are not dealing with darwinism 1.0 we're dealing with darwinism 10.0 or something like that where the original crude haphazard process has built refinements that allow it to function much more effectively than it otherwise would which is exactly why we say there's a missing layer and as a placeholder for that the the terminology which i've used which has gotten me in a ton of hot water is explorer mode right the idea is how does evolution 10.0 explore design space in something other than a haphazard fashion because of course a lineage that explores in a haphazard fashion is a terrible disadvantage i got to say something i got to say something about that so i had this vision of play okay so and i first saw that the fundamental role of the patriarchal spirit in a household was something like the provision of a safe place for play and then i could see children as experimenting with different manifestations of their physical being that's in play and that's relevant epigenetically as far as i'm concerned because what they're doing is modeling potential ways of being in their play and then they instantiate those physically and i don't know how deep into the biology that goes but it's but it's not trivial this because they are playing with alternate forms of being in play and of course we are neotenous you adult human beings and we play a lot and so we've retained that ability into adulthood so so take take what you just said about play and epigenetics and extrapolate it to birth order effects right birth order effects which are either a failure of selection because if there's some best way to be then where you are in the birth order shouldn't affect it but there's another way of interpreting it a much better way of interpreting it that says depending upon what has come before you what you should be will have been changed and there may be predictable patterns in the way it will have been changed and so your point about a child exploring your child is effectively exploring developmental niche space which is altered by the siblings that came before yes okay and so and so now you have built into your genetics this is maybe a discussion of something like human potential so you know when you go into a new environment new proteins are coded for by genetic structure so partly you think up new ideas in a new place but that isn't all that happens is that when you go into a new place there is new biochemical potential that's being unlocked within you and that's part of the reason why going many places makes you you know more than you were and so that's deeply coded all the way down to the molecular level by the looks of things that's right and that's um to your earlier question about doesn't an evolutionary interpretation of what we are faked us to to a preordained conclusion well no it doesn't and part of the answer to why is this concept of reaction norms where you can start from a very similar starting point you and someone else and end up in a very different place because of the environment to which you were exposed and so some of the examples from non-human space of this would be tadpoles of some species that if they are raised among kin they become sort of docile vegetarians with small mouths and if they are raised among non-kin they become carnivorous uh cannibals who are going to tell you a story about that if you don't mind so when my daughter was very little we went to a pool a swamp you know on someone's farmland and she collected about 50 tadpoles and brought them home put them in an aquarium and one tadpole lived and it ate all the others and then it turned into a frog which she had for about three years but i had no idea tadpoles were carnivorous but apparently if you adjust the niche properly then there you go so i didn't know it was only non-kin it's well it's it's different in different species but it's a density dependent response to the environment density dependent and kind dependent response to the environment and this suggests that you know just to say that we are evolutionary beings does not fade us to one particular thing we have to be paying really close attention to what our environment is and just one more one more story that's a bit similar here with regard to the bauer birds that you brought up and play in explorer modes is that in one species of bear birds where the males build these beautiful bowers you know much like palaces for the females to come by and assess the males know as they build them which direction the females are going to come through and in fact they in some cases sort of build the pathway so the females always come from a particular direction and they actually build forced perspective just like human artists forced perspective into their bowers such that from the place that the females will first view them they look bigger and grander than they actually are and you know this again is the way that males can modify what females will think of them and enhance okay so let's think about that really seriously let's and let's just talk about the birds so what exactly is it do you think that the bauer bird male is demonstrating and what is it exactly that the female is looking for because you might think well what the hell does cr like nest building artistic creativity have to do with a bower bird but something and and there's some analogy to well human beauty because they actually make beautiful things these birds and they look beautiful to us which is you know kind of peculiar all things considered what what are they selecting for uh it's a very good question i'm a little bit in some sense this is part of the subject of the next book but i will maybe preview that a little bit for you since you asked such a good question the problem so this kind of behavior is very common amongst birds right and birds create a special hazard the females face a special hazard in choosing a mate because birds can fly so let's say that a female is selected to find a male who's in very good condition if he's only going to get gametes from him and therefore genes then his very good condition might indicate that he has very good genes that's standard evolutionary theory but the problem is what does good genes mean does it mean some general good genes or does it mean good genes that will be good for her offspring where her offspring will exist and so if a male has gotten well fed in a remote location and then flies in and demonstrates that he is well fed it may indicate nothing at all or it may even be counterproductive from the point of view of her searching for genes that will be well matched to her own in the environment in which her chicks will grow up so one thing she may want to assess is did you get well fed here and the thing about bauer birds we could go on for hours about this but the thing about these bowers which have no function whatsoever they are not nests they don't provide shelter they just simply are these structures that demonstrate something is that males will steal from each other so a male who is not present will lose materials and his borrower will degrade as a result of theft from neighboring males he will also typically have a behavior like a dance right in which he will perfect in the exact location he will dance around the objects of his bower and so if a female let's say that a male does the words i want to see my etchings let's say that a male flies in right or a well-fed male flies in from somewhere where food is abundant and then he because he's a big brood evicts a local male who's built a beautiful bower all right and then a female comes and she assesses the bower looks great then she assesses the dance won't look great because he hasn't practiced it there right he just flew in he's a faker right she'll detect that okay um whereas if he's you're a thief and you're a thief from far away furthermore right now let's say that he flies in and he gets the bower and but he has to stick around long enough to learn the to dance around this power that he didn't build well he's gonna have to spend a lot of time foraging away from the power right and so he may look well but the bower may be degraded even if his dance looks good also a no-go how about a male who's again done the worst thing and he's evicted the local resident and he flies in he evicts the local resident he manages to feed himself but spend enough time at the bower that he can defend it and practice his dance well then even though he's stolen the power the female is getting a proper indication that his genes are well suited to the local environment he's feeding himself well here he's been here long enough that he's learned the dance he's defended his bower probably a good bet so even in the case of the bower isn't his construction it might be a an honest indicator of his genetic quality so one of the things when i was reading evolutionary psychology and and trying to parcel out uh you know differences in sexual attraction markers between men and women i'll tell you a brief story as an intro to this so when i was an undergraduate at the university of alberta i had you know i had some success with women but not much and then i went to mcgill and i was a graduate student and nothing changed really in the couple of months between when i was a you know senior undergraduate at in alberta and when i was a low-level graduate student in montreal but how attractive women were to me changed a lot and i thought well that's not you that's something about status and i already knew that evolutionary theory there and you know that women are more affected by let's say social status in relationship to sexual attractiveness than men are but then i thought that through to and i thought no no women use status as a marker for the ability to gain status in novel environments it's something like that and so like an expensive watch or something like that or a nice suit shows that you have acquired resources and hints that you still could even if things fell apart so it's it's not mere power or even resources which it's often parodied at and sometimes as and sometimes understood as it's a proximal marker for something much deeper which is somewhat akin i think to what you're talking about with regards to the male bowerbird it's that way offer no that's that's that's very much the case and i'll let you continue after brett but its status is exactly an honest indicator of the ability to have and presumably the ability to continue to procure resources and frankly this is a part of the sexual selection literature of how you know most evolutionary biologists would would have us discussing this that is quite unnerving and rather actually disrespectful because it imagines um that female choice that the females doing the choosing and all of these species including usually humans are just being frivolous that they just it doesn't matter it it's it's simply about status and what does status matter anyway whereas exactly what you've done here is tying it to the reality of how good a potential medicine is going to be and the answer to that is going to depend on whether or not your potential mate is going to be an active father or just you know provide gametes and then disappear you know what quality of mate what the qualities are that you're looking for will vary depending on what kind of creature you are but the idea that females are just being frivolous well that we can talk about status for a minute too and so like if you look at human social hierarchies and this is true across the animal kingdom and then you rank order individuals in terms of their relative status even in relatively non-social creatures that have to occupy the same territory those that have the best local niches have offspring that are much more likely to survive they have much lower mortality rates and then there's something else too that that psychologists have figured out that i think is right it has a biological underpinning which is that your serotonin system is more effective at modulating your negative emotion given as a certain level of stress the higher you up are are up in a social hierarchy because you're actually safer and so that's and so part of what that implies and this just blew me away when i sorted it out was that when you go after someone's beliefs and they've used their beliefs to stake a claim to a position in a hierarchy you're attacking the structure that's that modulates their sensitivity to negative emotion and and you know if you're hypersensitive to negative emotion you hyper prepare physiologically so much that you die way earlier so this isn't trivial and it isn't it isn't like the terror management theorists think that you know your beliefs somehow regulate your anxiety directly it's no you have a set of beliefs that gives you a stake to a claim in a status hierarchy and so that's what we do as professors right we say well look we have this knowledge and that's why we get this niche well then you attack i attack the validity of your knowledge then i make you out to be one of those flying bauer birds that just ripped off the status hierarchy and well and then that interferes with your emotional regulation that's like well that's worth thinking about for about 10 years that i think yeah well i think uh one thing that is true is that our modern environment and our mismatch our evolutionary mismatch with it obscures all of the elaborate logic that undergirds the relationship of a normal creature in its environment or where would have uh would have characterized our ancestors in any of the environments from which they came and so it's very easy to look for example at uh you know modern human females and see that there's a a preoccupation with the level of wealth and status of potential mates and to read something uh superficial into it but the point is no this is about deadly serious stuff and it may not be deadly serious stuff in the modern environment but the point is the sensitivity to those things has everything to do with females in a past environment uh sussing out small differences that had large evolutionary implications for their lineage going forward you well i think that your your notion of niche transformation niche switching there so imagine that partly what the woman is trying to do is use markers of proximal success as an indicator of niche switching capacity now they're in they're in adequate markers and and that's partly why they can be criticized you know and it they're no more accurate than the claim that just because you're rich you're good but it doesn't but status is not exactly wealth although wealth is a proxy for status status is more subtle and but symbols of wealth are pretty good instantaneous proxies for status like they're subject to all sorts of flaws and they're not sufficient but you know you have to screen most people out so you need simple markers to begin with so heather let me ask you how do you view as a both as someone who's female and someone who's an evolutionary biologist how do you conceptualize the difference in status hierarchies in human females and human males i'd really be interested to hear that yeah well this too could go on for 10 years we are one of very few species that has hierarchies and females in hierarchies and males other species tend to have one or the other um there may be a couple maybe japanese macaques if memories serves that have both but in those few species that have both and in all of the species that have one or the other the hierarchies are created and maintained via different different means and you know there's there's variation of course but in general uh the hierarchy in in males in other species and men in in humans is through overt means through uh fairly direct claims sometimes it's physical but usually the physicality is under the surface right it's you know it's there as a possibility maybe you want to call it a threat but usually things don't get physical as men are deciding um what what the hierarchy actually is but there's direct confrontation of a linguistic sort of a gestural sort of a oh you're doing that i wouldn't do it that way or here let me you know we were often couched in a joke too oh and right you know and and so maybe that could be seen as sort of an end run around the direct provocation but there's there's very rarely with with men and you know maybe this is changing in modern times but if if man a is uh is interested in critiquing man b he's very unlikely to say i'm going to take this to man and see first i'm going to go talk to our joint friend and before i take it directly to to the guy in um who with whom i have an issue whereas um so that's you know that tends to be overt and female hierarchies tend to be covert in nature and you know this this probably originates in part through the fact that even though we seem to be moving more and more towards a monogamous uh mating system and we are therefore losing our sexual dimorphism in humans we still are sexually dimorphic and are still on average smaller and less muscular and less powerful and so you know the the ability to back up disagreement with the threat of physicality would have been less successful certainly engaging with men but also um with with other women and so we're more likely women are more likely to use social signals and covert signals and less direct signals to assess and to change what the hierarchy is there's ton more to say but maybe i'll leave it at that for the moment so let's let's switch you you have a chapter on sex and gender and that would be fun to talk about so first of all i'm really curious about if you think those terms are importantly different and if they are why and what they both mean if they're different so let's start with that all right um they are different but uh the the way in which they relate actually uh you can deduce from the omega principle which we haven't talked about yet but essentially the the way of conceptualizing it is uh heather and i say this slightly differently but i would say that gender is the software of sex and and i tend to say that gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex and what this means is that these things are housed at a different level what it does not mean is that they are pointed towards different objectives so the omega principle which is one of the important principles that undergirds the logic of the book is that epigenetic phenomena including culture and all of the software layer is more flexible than genes and therefore more rapidly adopt adapting but it is also subordinate to the genes in terms of objective because genes are in a perfect position to shut down anything behavioral or cognitive that does not serve their interests which it won't do instantaneously but over generations it will so what we find is gender has to be serving the interests of the genes and therefore sex and gender should be pointed in the same direction now there's a lot of variation in the the gender layer but it is not a completely independent phenomenon it is not superior to the underlying uh genetics so let me ask you about that in terms of personality then because i've been thinking a lot about the sex and gender issue you know the idea that there's an infinite number of genders you know i like to give the devil his due as much as i possibly can and one of the things you do see in the personality literature in psychology which is reasonably well developed right i mean we have a pretty good model of human personality five basic personality traits maybe they're subdivisible into two sub traits each so that's ten it's five dimensions of variability that's a lot reality only has four dimensions of variability so so what you see is that there are reliable differences between men and women in aggregate in personality and and one of the big differences is that women are about half a standard deviation more sensitive to negative emotion and they're about half a standard deviation more uh agreeable so more compassionate and polite and you can it's not that hard to point out that well that might be a logical consequence of sexual dimorphism so women should be a bit more sensitive to threat because they're a bit smaller but also that they have to i don't think human adult female personality is adapted to human adult females i think it's adapted to female infant dyads and a female infant dot because here's why you don't see those personality differences emerge till puberty now that's also when you get sexual dimorphism but boys and girls under 12 11 they're not different in terms of sensitivity to negative emotion but then puberty hits and the transformation seems permanent and so it makes sense to me that a creature that has an infant is going to be more sensitive to negative emotion and also what has to be more agreeable more compassionate because well it's an infant right and compassion is the right emotion for someone under nine months of age it's just compassion because well they're born so young right we we have a very short gestation period and so they're completely helpless so of course it's compassion okay so now having said those differences exist and there's some other ones but they're more trivial there are lots of women who have male personality patterns so you find women who are low in negative emotion and low in agreeableness they're quite masculine that way and there are men who are quite feminine in their personality characteristics and and then you could also say well insofar as personality is associated with gender well there is tremendous ten-dimensional variation and so the idea that gender is fluid in some sense and that it's you know not exactly tied to the underlying sexual structure there's some when it's not pushed too far when it's not political in its intent there's some validity to the claim so what do you think about that biologically yeah i know i think i think this is exactly right i i would before i answer that though i would say that no woman who had ever brought a child to term would claim that gestation was short in humans but i know i do know what you mean i get your point um but it feels interminable when you're actually undergoing it um with regard to sex versus gender and the sort of you know gender is is is way more fluid than sex it is you know sex is binary we have you know we are a binary sexually reproducing species with two and only two types of gametes the intermediate type of gamete which has a little bit of cytoplasm and kind of moves around a little bit you know a little bit eggy a little bit [ __ ] doesn't work there's lots of good reasons for this but the evolution of anti-sogamy the two different types of gametes is well understood from both a theoretical perspective and it's just manifest right in in plants and animals right so that is true sex is binary and then the expression the software to use um brett's framing or the behavioral manifestation of of sex to use as mine of course behavioral manifestation only works for animals it doesn't work as well for uh for plants but you know we see the same kinds of sort of i don't know cultural behavioral manifestation of sex even in plants even with regard to eggs being more choosy than pollen in in plants with regard to who to mate with so of course there will be a greater manifestation of ways to engage the world when you're talking about say the behavioral manifestation of what your underlying sex is then there will be uh for you know what your actual sex is and you know i i say that as someone who is gender non-conforming and who was never confused about whether or not i was a girl you know this is this is the conflation these days right the idea that gender disorder yeah it's yeah it's real well it's weird how it's flipped around too because there's a an infinite number of genders so let's say and well but if you're kind of acting girly and you're a boy when you're three well then your sex is wrong it's like wait a minute i thought that gender was fluid and and it's that it isn't binary it's like how come it's linked to sex so tightly all of a sudden when you're talking about you know non-stereotypical manifestations of behavior it's super progressive too right i mean the idea you know we growing up in the 70s i was a girl who didn't like dresses and the idea that that made me a boy would have been considered completely anathema to the second wave feminists among whom i was growing up right i was just a girl who liked to get my get my uh get myself dirty and play in the dirt and go look for salamanders that didn't make me a boy of course not right so you know being interested in things that are maybe more likely to be things that boys are interested in is awesome and it is a hallmark of modernity that we can embrace such children and same thing for boys who are interested in things that have traditionally been more likely to be things that girls were either natively interested in or encouraged to be interested in but it doesn't change the underlying sex at all when my son was young three years old at about that my daughter was about four and a half and her friends used to get together and they'd dress him up as a princess or a fairy and then he'd prance around the house and he's quite a masculine boy by the way and this actually bothered me you know and so i sat down and thought about it for a long time because well i didn't know why it bothered me exactly and then i came to the conclusion that wait a second you know because i didn't want him to get confused maybe it was something like that and some of it was probably like arbitrary northern alberta prejudice or who who the hell knows but what i realized was that if i interfered with this in any way that's raised eyebrows or any of that non-verbal stuff i would be sending a message to my son that playing at being a girl is wrong and what that meant was that i was telling him that embodying and understanding what it meant to be female was unethical and that was a very bad idea and so when you see that sort of gender crossing play take place with kids especially at that age you should you know take somewhat of a hands-off approach and understand that they are one of the ways i know who you are is to act you out to play you out and to imitate you and and it's easy to shut that down and and then you get you get the kind of divisions between the genders let's say or the sexes that aren't that aren't good you can interfere with that very young but so it goes to your earlier point about children effectively exploring epigenetic space and discovering who they are and the fact is you can start with a perfectly random approach to that right i'm going to try being anything at all and the point is certain things land somewhere where there's something useful to be done and other things don't land at all and some things are fun for five minutes and you know heather points out i think it's a lovely point that you know we don't rush to get the child who declares themselves a dinosaur to the transition clinic right we just maybe think that'll pass and the fact is we know enough or at least you know as douglas murray might say we knew until five minutes ago that kids should be allowed to uh try out different gender stuff and usually it just works itself out my my granddaughter ins she watched pocahontas a lot and she and she had a pocahontas stall and she insisted for about a year and a half when she was i think three that she was poke if you asked her if she was pocahontas or ellie she she has two names ellie or scarlett she would insist that she was pocahontas for a long time and i thought that was remarkable you know that she'd caught something out of that movie that attracted her so much that she was trying to embody that spirit and well that is the point of these sorts of animated movies is to put put that spirit forward but it was remarkable how committed she was i could think about that over a year at that developmental stage she's not pocahontas anymore by the way but i tested it for a long time and so that play that's really deep that's a really deep phenomenon so and it gets to the human imperative to create story to create meaning through narrative and you know there is we've talked about this a little bit there is not uh the hero's journey is extraordinary and universal and in modernity i think it can just almost just as easily apply to many females journeys but there aren't as many universal stories for for girls and women and beauty and the beast is pretty good i think it's the best disney animated film and like beauty is really smart because she doesn't pick gaston he's got all the markers right right she actually wants a civ a beast who can be civilized that's right and he's the the one advantage that he has gaston is all persona so he's all the fake bower bird now he's a big guy and all that but even that's fake but and and she's wise because she doesn't fall for the status markers and he's completely nonplussed by this because he's you know he's devoted his whole life to just developing the status markers and so i think it's beauty and the beast is is there's a hero's journey in that that's that's very deep and you know these very some of these fairy tales some of them have been traced back like 12 to 13 000 years and so you know if it's that old it's like a hundred thousand years right right but this actually goes uh to a point that you and i have been dancing around forever jordan which is the point about to which level to what level are these very ancient things effectively timeless and to what level are these things in need of change because we now face an environment for which they were not built and so the hero's journey i would argue just painting with a broad rush the hero's journey is timeless what does the hero's journey look like well it can look like odysseus or it can look like the fellowship of the ring right those are very different versions of the hero's journey and in fact at the moment one of the things that we need are stories that are not built by the market to fill some need but that actually reflect the transition in what males and females do in the world that in some sense one of the positive things that has flown from from birth control is that women because they can now uh engage in family planning that works are free to compete with men in every realm that isn't physical yeah well one question we're wrestling with is well are women just men then they are not right since the birth control pill well that's that well but they are in some way which is just what you said they're way more like men than they were before 1950. we are free because they have control yes exactly and so part of what we are trying to sort out in our culture is well you know to what degree are they just men or better men even i mean look what's happening to university enrollment for example and so we don't know and that that our that issue of universality so a student once asked me in one of my classes at harvard it's like well if these stories archetypal why don't we just tell the same story over and over like exactly the same story and i thought that's a really good question and then i thought well there's actually an answer to that in christian symbolism so one of the things that's really strange about christian thinking is well there's god you know so he's the sum of all good very abstract though maybe he's a father but he's way out there and who knows what to do with him but he's really abstract well you have to take that abstraction make concrete you have to make it embodied right you have to make it incarnated and so i'm speaking psychologically about the story not religiously so to bridge that gap between the the ideal image which is archetypal and universal and the particularity the way the christian imagination solved that problem was to say well that ideal was embodied in a particular time and place which seems extremely arbitrary but that's us right because we are arbitrary embodiments of that whatever that abstract humanity is and we have to particularize the universal to our time and place and that's why we need new storytellers all the time right you need new storytellers and you need effectively a process of selection it may or may not be affecting the storytellers but it affects which stories resonate and so a perfect example of your what we do instead of telling the same story over and over again is we tell a story in a way that is relevant to the current moment right the allegory of the cave is the perfect example of this right the matrix is the allegory of the cave arguably the truman show is the allegory of the cave and the point is there are ways in which this needs to be you know we probably needed an updated version of 1984 because we're living it again and apparently 1984 isn't good enough to get us to recognize that at a level that will stop right so in any case there is a sort of need and actually maybe this is uh the way this intersects with the book is hyper novelty is the uh out of control process by which the acceleration of change outstrips the capacity uh to adapt that suggests that the pace at which the stories that we need must be updated is accelerating and probably too fast for us to get those stories well you know it's it's something here's something that's worth thinking about too in in that regard okay so what drives innovation in computer hardware it's the attempt to tell stories in to portray stories realistically because that's the most technically demanding and i mean this economically i've talked to people who've designed these chips why do we need more and more powerful chips given that our computers are already too fast for us it's like well we keep building these virtual worlds and we build them because narratives think about the game market are so unbelievably compelling and that provides the economic rationale for making our machines more and more intelligent and so we are hyper motivated to solve that problem in some real sense now how successful that is that's a whole different issue but you know it's just it's worth taking seriously after all we've all been told that politics is downstream from culture so i certainly like your your point about it's the uh desire for the realism and the narratives it's actually driving technological process although if you complete that story at the moment it may be uh alchemy right it's the mining of digital gold that is actually driving the hardware it's in fact yeah well that's a that's a very strange thing too yeah so various sorts of ways yeah yeah it certainly is and god only knows how revolutionary that is so i talk to a lot of the bitcoin thinkers now and and i have a better sense of what it is and i can't believe how smart the person was that made it it's really and the story is just beyond belief the you know this guy pops up he makes this thing he disappears no one even knows who he is for sure it's like who could make that up right if he's even a person well and i'm you know what i'm trying to do yeah if he's even a person i'm i'm trying to update our understanding of stories you know that's that rather than the stories themselves i suppose and also to point out how important they are that hero archetype i really do think that that's the story of niche switching right because see this is why i want to do a series on exodus and i really like x-dis and you think about it in terms of of a story about adaptations to niches okay so and all that that adaptation gets tyrannical it gets cast in stone that's egypt it's all stone symbolism it worked once but now it doesn't well that's that's an adaptation because the niche keeps changing underneath it okay so then you have to switch the adaptation well moses is is the king of water and it dissolves stone he's the master of water well what happens when you lose the adaptation well the tyranny disappears hooray but then where are you well you're in this terrible space between adaptations you're in a space between adaptations that's the desert ah space between adaptations we call it the adaptive valley and you're very right that a desert is a perfect analog for the adaptive valley it is not a productive place it is some place one must cross and frankly it has the same problem as the adaptive valley on the evolutionary landscape which is you have to cross it in the right direction or you're cooked hmm so elaborate on that a bit i don't know the i don't know the valley so uh theory that we have it's very interesting yeah we have this very old metaphor in evolutionary biology originally penned by a guy named sewell wright in the 1930s 1932 i think anyway it describes basically niches and opportunities as peaks and the obstacles to moving from one opportunity to the next as valleys this metaphor doesn't work as it was initially instantiated because we didn't really know enough about genes and epigenetics for it to work but it can be easily updated and the basic idea is well i would argue it has to be updated again that to think about a mountain range with valleys between peaks doesn't quite get it because if you're really in a mountain range with peaks you can see where the other peaks are but that's not how selection works right you cross into a valley because your opportunity is no longer good enough and you guys have to talk to jonathan pazzo about the symbol the religious symbolism of mountains because it's dead relevant to your to your biological theorizing well it wouldn't be so because the the perceptual landscape in some sense is predicated on the symbolic notion of a divine mountain so imagine at the center it's like the fovea of the vision right everything's clear there it's it's closest to the center of the of what would you say mastered territory and so pyramids are a representation of that and that's partly why they're sacred and so this is act this idea it's not fluke that that metaphor sprang to mind for the biologists and it's dead relevant for a study of religious symbolism right it could be it could be convergence or it could be that sewell writes somewhere lurking in his mind had uh religious stories that hinted at this and you know basically preconditioned him to see that meta for his particularly resonant well on you i mean brett has brett actually has been too modest here you have actually updated the model in your dissertation to shifting landscapes of dunes ridges and plateaus where you know the selective pressures can yield you know lines along which you might be a most adapted form or a you know an area that can fail you know and also a volumetric and understanding where you can fill a space where in latecomers maybe less adapted not because they themselves are any different but because they're late to the game so you know there's there's a lot to be experienced there's a whole lot there's a whole lot to be done but uh so far has been mapping out the relationship between the mountain symbolism in religious thinking and also the relationship between that and perceptual categories and cognitive categories he's the only person i know that's done that he did that partly because he spent a lot of time talking to john varvakey who's an expert in the cognition of perception and also interested in religious ideas but there's a biological under so okay so then back to the knee switching idea so imagine these mountains and valleys and the adapt in the adaptive landscape in some sense well you want someone who is at the top of the mountain but more importantly you want someone who can travel from one mountain peak to another and even more than that you want someone to travel from a lower mountain peak to a higher one well so uh boy there's a whole lot here one thing is that the skills that allow you to ascend a mountain tend to be in a trade-off relationship an important trade-off relationship with the skills that allow you to cross these valleys right and so in some sense those who are good at starting up businesses aren't necessarily the people who should implement them and of course yeah openness versus conscientiousness that's that's what that boils down to basically i i once heard a very good discussion about whether or not this is why uh god kept moses out of the promised land exactly yeah because that was going through the back of my mind he was the valley crosser right um so there's a lot there's a lot to be said for that but the other thing is that human biblically he wasn't christ that's why he couldn't get to the promised land yeah that's the christian version of that and so and and and it's related to this it's related very much to the idea that you just put forward different skill set in some sense yeah i mean he wasn't david most fundamentally but yes yes well um but let's just say that if all creatures are caught in this adaptive landscape issue where you they can't see the other peaks and crossing happens as a result of some process human beings are in a special condition and this is exactly what we talk about in the second to last chapter of our book which is the consciousness the collective consciousness process actually allows us to effectively um debate and discover the probable location of future peaks without having been there right yes to know that a peak ought to lie in that direction and to move in that direction in some coherent way this is a uniquely human capacity it is why niche switching is our special gift and you know hopefully it's dependent on the free exchange of ideas which is no different than thinking and we do it collectively yes we do it that's the thing that not every free of exchange of ideas works this way it is a collaborative free exchange of ideas where people who are agreed that the what we need to do is get into the future how best to do that is the question around the campfire yeah this collaboration involves ideas being exchanged which can be altered by the exchange yes as opposed to as opposed to read-only uh receiving i think so i think that's why see i think that's why the ancient egyptians worshipped the eye horus's eye because it's opening they weren't worshiping intellect they were worshiping attention it's different it's really different and intellect that's milton's like authoritarian demon attention is different because when i pay and i really learned this in therapy the best way to help someone move forward is to listen to them is to listen because then they can talk and then you respond non-verbally and that helps them figure out where they're clear and not clear and then you can ask them questions like well you said that a minute ago and then you said that they seem to be contradictory or maybe i'm just stupid can you clear up that contradiction and they unfold their possibilities unfold as a consequence of talking but you have to listen and that's a tension and so and it's it's the listening that is that it's such an important part of that collective transformation of ideas right do podcasts work this way well look this is cool man if you think about this so i'm stunned at how positive the youtube comments are on the dialogues we have like this it's they're so positive it's just ridiculous you can't believe it and so they work like that when they work right and you know when they work because you're in the flow state and that flow state is an indication of being possessed by that niche switching capacity and there's a religious dimension to that because it's so important to our survival that it's associated with our deepest values and we fall into that and love it people love that and that's where education takes place too on that edge that's that edge of transformation and being there is way better than being right yeah it is and playing way better play requires attention right you aren't successful and play with someone else if you're distracted exactly it's a dance yeah yeah i i agree with this and it's funny we hear often about the terrible fact of what people experienced on twitter and youtube comments and all of this we have very often existed in a state that just didn't mirror people's description of how terrible these things were and then sometimes the narrative shifts on you and so it is almost like a flow state that you uh you reach and the audience resonates and the comments look a certain way and then something happens sometimes something intervenes from the outside to disrupt it and i guess i fear more and more that uh there is so much at stake in the sense-making that goes on uh in these forums that something is intervening for economic reasons or reasons of power that in other words uh yeah well that could easily easily happen yeah i mean hopefully it won't but because i think it's already happening yeah well the idea is it's always it's look we have to fight against look we have that that's part of the eternal battle right that the the imposition of what's right against that flow state that's that's there forever i mean the ancient egyptians do that they had osiris they're their gargoto cirrus was a representation of that totalitarian proclivity that's the evil uncle in in the lion king it's this and it is the the existential psychologists who i like a lot one of the things they did was lay out throne-ness it's right well what do we always contend with well we always contend with evil uncle that's the tyrannical face of history and it's always something against which well the hero battles for example and then often incarnates in his old age unfortunately but i mean i'm i'm optimistic about this and it is play and that's that's and so people love to be invited that's what's cool about this too is you invite people into this you entice them into this you don't tell them they have to do it and then they're so happy it's so cool it's so wonderful to be able to do this and yeah and then you also think you just you want to have someone you actually disagree with to talk to because you can actually play with them more deeply if they're being honest partly because they're way more unexpected than someone you already agree with and that also means that flow state can be deepened because you get farther right you get more novelty that gets incorporated and understood and so that's really fun too what you just said reminds me actually of advice that we got from bob trivers who's uh one of the greatest living evolutionary biologists and who was our undergraduate advisor uh when we were looking to go to grad school uh he said uh if you end up going on to being academics to going on to being professors somewhere you should find a place where you will be regularly exposed to undergraduates because it's by engaging with the minds of people who do not already think they know something about your field where you will learn the most and um for him although he didn't say it as part of what he was telling us it was also part of the sentence of play you know he was just an extraordinary lecturer he had a ton of fun up there and you know we first met him with his undergraduates and you know watching watching him play indeed with questions that came at him from people who were engaging in good faith but didn't know what they were supposed to ask was extraordinary and that of course that's where we learn the most and where we can also have the most fun yeah it's really interesting to hear that trevor's was like that because i know of his reputation i mean i know he's very well regarded by psychologists as well particularly for work on self-deception among among other things so i guess i knew that you guys were his students but i it didn't quite sink in that was quite the privilege eh it was it was very much a privilege and he was uh a marvelous lecturer i mean just the man in a piece of chalk in front of a board was uh was something else i should also point out that bob is a good friend of ours and he was the officiant at our wedding so anyway that was an interesting experience and and one i think we're both thrilled to have had and answers interesting actually um you he he's a man of faith he has he has thank you talk to me on my my youtube channel very like yeah hey that'd be great let's do that so if maybe you could introduce us because i'd love that i really like talk to him about self-deception well among other things he's extraordinary um but he asked us the day before uh he was to marry us up in the up in the mountains of california in the sierra nevada um some questions just like a clergy person would you know he really took this role on very seriously this isn't something he'd ever done before nor i since no i think since um but he specifically wanted to know if we intended to have children we were in our late 20s at the point we got married we'd been together for a long time and uh we'd never said anything to him about our intentions or not and he knew that he would be giving a different wedding for us i don't know if you have children do you have children oh yeah well good because you should have and so hooray well i see i've had i've seen very many couples that that decided not to have children and you know i thought you could have had some remarkable kids and you would have been remarkable parents and it's really too bad that that happened and so i think the the right way to say it is that uh children will destroy your life and replace it with a better one yeah yeah right well one of the things i love about kids is well first of all they're ridiculously funny and playful ridiculous they're little clowns that's so mind-boggling they have sense of humor like it's like at seven months and i don't understand that and that's so funny and they're always playing weird tricks and and and then the other thing that's cool and i think this is part of the theory of mind issue is that so you look at the world through a layer of latent inhibition right so mostly what you see is memory you don't actually see what's there because your brain wants to take visual shortcuts because it's so goddamn complicated to look at things and so you know by the time you're 50 you've seen a million houses so you don't see any anymore but then you go for a walk with a two-year-old and because you can adopt that frame of reference the world re-novelizes like a little mini psychedelic trip and that's something that the infant's children can you know that's part of the reward they bring you for having to take care of them humor play that renovation and then the other thing i loved about having kids is you can have the best relationship you've ever had if you're careful yeah absolutely it's it is it is a unique relationship because i mean obviously parenthood is very very ancient and has nothing to do inherently with human beings but the degree of uh what it is to be a human being that is transmitted after you are born through uh interaction and you know not even explicit analytical interaction but by modeling what it is to be a human being and them extrapolating and then throwing out the stuff that maybe is no longer relevant or wasn't that useful uh as a mechanism for you and replacing it with something else it's really an amazing privilege to be to be part of an ongoing uh transmission of adaptive information down past the generations spoken like a true evolutionary biologist i think it's really funny that you got married by by robert trivers that's just exactly right that's very cool so look i think that's a really good place to stop we've been going for an hour and 45 minutes and it like zipped by and and we did stay on your book pretty good so hooray for us and it was really fun and i would like to talk to bob trivers that would be great and uh i wish you the best with your book how's the book been doing and tell them about the book again hold it up again so because i don't want people to forget um the book has been doing spectacularly well in fact so well that it is now a victim of its own success it's sold out in three days back on september 14th and uh people are getting them but it's uh they're struggling to keep them in stock yeah that's a terrible problem that you've got there it's like oh my god we were too successful but so you can buy it on kindle and you get the audio version and absolutely and you said i think you said barnes and noble still has some in stock so that's a good deal and then you hit you said it hit the four four number four in the new york times best seller list yep we sure did yeah sure did so we're very pleased with that and just love that people are reading it and having conversations about it and you know this this conversation with you is fabulous and we are grateful for it and for all of the conversations that uh we are hearing that the book is spurring it's really exactly what we were hoping for great great well it's really nice to see both of you you look great uh younger even i think maybe so that's a good economy we are we are getting that's the third book we're going to write about how one gets younger if we aren't dead by that right yeah well all you need is like social isolation and you know pressure on your job and and the collapse of your life and all that and hey you're rejuvenated so if you're lucky there you go right yeah like like a phoenix rising from the ashes all right well thanks so much jordan great talking with you too yeah more and i would say talk to jonathan pagio man he's deep and you're there's these there's this linkage of ideas way down there under the surface that's really worth investigating he's something so great you'd have a great overdue for a talk we've been there yeah we've been talking about having a talk for something yeah yeah i think and to concentrate on this issue of the sacred mountain that would be unbelievably i just saw a talk he did to the union society in montreal that was just bloody brilliant i'm going to put it on my youtube channel and so i think that could be a killer discussion uh the mountain idea and its role in biology and yeah that would be something cool cool all right all right wonderful ciao guys thank you jordan i hope hopefully we'll see you again soon wouldn't that be nice [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 750,046

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations

Id: jKh0ni7HlNw

Length: 93min 23sec (5603 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2022