Joe Rogan Experience #1201 - William von Hippel

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all right here we go four three two hello bill hi what's going on man I am very excited to be here how much sided to have you here excellent um the social leap yes what's the social leap I'll tell you all about it please do okay so um the story that I want to tell is basically how we got here how we became human and so that story begins about six or seven million years ago when our ancestors left the rain forest and so the question is why would they leave and how would they survive once they left and and that's what the social leap is so it takes a second to get it all out there okay yeah all right so here's a story so if you look back about seven million years our ancestors and chimps we had a common ancestor at about that point in time six or seven million years ago and that common ancestor we don't know exactly what it looked like but it was from all we can tell it was awfully close to today's chimps and so there if you look at gyms today you can get a pretty good sense of what life was like then and chimps today are really interesting they're basically at the top of the food chain in the rain forest they're super fast up in the trees super athletic and they because it traveled in groups even amazing tree climbers like leopards won't try to attack them in trees it's just they it's they're too dangerous too fast but if you look at a chimp on the ground it can't even lock its knees it's this kind of cute little stumbled in a long thing and then the question is why would an animal that runs the show in the canopy leave the rainforest for the savanna and then how to survive once it did that and that's that's the story of this book and then how that manifests itself to where we are today so really my goal I'm a psychologist I want to understand why we are the way we are and so in trying to figure that out I said well let's take a look back all the way to our common ancestors and see some of the key events and how they might have had an influence on how we are today so the first question is why would we leave the trees right here we are where dominant position where we're food on the ground why would we ever take that risk and the basic story there is the great African Rift Valley I'm not sure if you've you're familiar with it at all but basically it runs down from up at the Red Sea down to the coast of Mozambique and think of it like a Geographic zipper you know all the world sits on these tectonic plates and sometimes they crash into each other like how India's smashing into Asia and crates the Himalayas sometimes they literally tear apart and Africa's tearing apart at the great African Rift Valley so that plate that has Somalian Ethiopia Tanzania Kenya that's moving off to the lower right the rest of Africa is moving off to the upper left and I got no idea why it's been going on for quite a while but one of the consequences of that is that the East Africa's starting to rise up slowly bit by bit and when it rises up the rainforests dry out and so basically what you have is a situation where our ancestors were on the east side of that rift valley and it started to dry out and now they're in a situation where they've got this great lifestyle their dominant position but now they're pushed they're forced out on to the ground increasingly more and more because there's more and more ground and less and less rainforest and so how do they survive that what do they do in order to make that work and this is a what what period of time is this how many millions of years ago six or seven six or seven does this coincide with the when when was the jump of the human brain sighs well we'll get to that so it's a super interesting question about why that happened as well so basically if you track us across the next three million years how did our ancestors survive when they're basically chimpanzees on the open savanna and you can get a hint of how they did it because there's one chimpanzee group that does live on the savanna in Senegal and they they show some differences between themselves and other chimps they travel in slightly larger groups they share and more nicely with each other which is interesting that's kind of a human trait as well and they also avoid open space like they're just kind of trying to stay near the trees as much as possible and so and if you look at other aids they're not AIDS but other primates that are on the savanna like savanna baboons they're only monkeys so they're not as sharp as chimpanzees are but they have a similar strategy large groups to try to protect themselves and lots of eyes to look out for predators and they do fine on the savanna and so what I suspect happen is for the first few million years basically what you've got is this chimp like an animal that's kind of skirting the edges of Savannah and nowhere near the top dominant position they used to be and just kind of noodle around and that takes I suspect that takes us for about the first three three and a half million years and if you look at who we are then or Australopithecus afarensis so it's if you looked at one of them you'd think it belongs in a zoo it looks almost like a chimpanzee and so a chimp brain an answer to the first part of your question is about 380 grams an Australopithecus brain is about 450 grams so 3 million years of evolution and all we've got forward is 70 grams so why do we get so smart why do we take off in the next few million years and what is it that Australopithecus did that that helped us survive and why do I call that de socially then though I'm kind of tied together and the basic story is that by this point Australopithecus has become bipedal and we can talk about how that happened if you'd like and so because they're bipedal their waste is now stretched out there their musculature like if you look at chimpanzee pecks they aim upward because of course chimps climb and all the time Australopithecus is more lateral like we are we're basically completely lateral because things are side to side as far as we're concerned it's harder to climb a tree but it's a whole lot easier to do a lot of other things and we have much more limber shoulder we have much more limber wrists all that sort of thing and a lot of that was in place by Australopithecus so once they became bipedal they gained a lot of these qualities and then the question is why do those qualities matter well the if you watch the chimpanzee throw it's terrible at it even though they're stronger than you and I are pound for pound by a sizable margin when they throw their inept they can't gain very well and they typically use two hands because they're not lined up well to throw if you watch a really good thrower like you know a gridiron a football player a baseball player or hunter-gatherer throw you know it's a full body motion you step forward with the other leg there's this rotation in the very last minute you bring your wrist through well what that does is it creates an enormous amount of elastic energy across your muscles tendons and ligaments and the end of that throw for a human is like the snapping of a rubber band so chimps can't do that they're not lined up properly but Australopithecus got to the point where they could probably do that pretty well and so now and this purely a by-product or bipedalism because it stretched out their whole body and they don't not climbing as much anymore so their musculature is more lateral which would have been help them for throwing so now you get to a point where they have access to the single most important military invention in history which is the capacity to kill at a distance so if you and I are running around the Savannah and a lion attacks us and we got fifty of our best friends we could kill it with our bare hands but a lot of us are going to die in the process right because you think 50 of us let's make it a hundred that would you know and I'd be super confident were people you wouldn't worry very much but but even if we could so we knew what we're doing we're all armed with knives whoever goes in first is screwed right right and so the capacity kill at a distance though allows a larger force of weaker individuals to completely defeat a stronger and so once they gain this capacity to throw if they were attacked by lions or something like that whereas in the past they did just scattered for the trees now they could throw stones at it and defend themselves now an Australopithecus throwing rocks at a lion it's going to be in the belly of a slightly annoyed lion in about three minutes right right but fifty australopithecines throwing rocks at lions is a totally different story and so it's this is the baddie here's the throwing hypothesis that what what changed everything was throwing and the reason it changed everything is that it caused us it was the first reason why we should have any effective collective action because it's not a good strategy when you're on your own it's not a good strategy if I do it and the rest of the group hits heads for the trees but it's a great strategy if we all do it together yeah and so for the first time in history the group's goals in our history in our line the primate line the group's goals aligned with the individual goals which is let's cooperate and work together to try to drive away these predators mmm now it if you look at a lion and you look at someone throwing rocks it still seems like a really big ask right to drive that thing away or kill it throwing rocks and so but Barbara Isaac was one of the first anthropologists to propose a hypothesis quite a while ago went back and looked through the historical record and these extraordinary stories of how effective people are throwing rocks and so in when the Portuguese went to the Canary Islands to try to subjugate it they rock up with you know armor crossbows and this isn't a like 14 something and all the locals were on with with stones and despite the fact that the Portuguese are there in army trained you know ready to shoot and and in their armor they were just decimated by the local stone rocks at them and this store has happened over and over again and when you read these accounts they're extraordinary I can read you some examples from here they just the happen in Australia it happened in the Canary Islands it happened elsewhere they just saw rocks incredibly accurately incredibly hard and really fast hmm so and there's you know accounts in Africa basically killing a zebra with one blow of a rock to the head hmm so like a pitcher of major league pitcher yeah exactly Drock right who gets very accurate at it yeah so do you think they they must have practiced constantly yeah and so what I suspect is it we evolved to like to throw rocks and so if I look now if you look at my son as a for example when he was 18 months old we would be walking back toward Alice if he saw a rock on the street he'd pick it up and start trying to throw it and my wife said no no don't let him throw rocks it's only gonna cause trouble first of all I'm thinking well maybe I'll develop a good arm so I'm gonna go ahead and let him anyway but but secondly he freaking wants to this is like something inherently fun right and I think all humans enjoy throwing and it's it's stunning how good you can get it with practice so we were at the Ohio State Fair because before my son was born and I was walking by one of these stalls where you can throw in a radar gun and so I thought oh here's I was just started to date my wife and I thought out here's a perfect chance to impress her right house how much I am so I said hey why don't I stop and I'll throw some balls here in this net cuz I'd never throw I don't know how fast I could so she's like sure and I was I played like Little League right so I throw the ball and it's like 50 miles an hour and and she's pretty impressed because that sounds fast right then this like kid shows up next to me he's gotta be 12 years old probably weighs 85 pounds this total gang come out a muscle in his body and he just starts freaking throwing ball after ball at like 65 miles an hour and I'm like fuck I mean she's not gonna be impressed me this like human twit next thing he's kicking my ass right and so I picked up the last ball i frickin throw it as hard as I can hurts my shoulder flies off at an odd angle doesn't hit anything and it's like 57 miles an hour now that little guy who's like literally the size of an Australopithecus was thrown in 65 and hitting the target every time and so it's obvious that it's skill it's practice that would have made you good at this and if your life depends on it you're gonna do it well that makes sense coming from a martial arts background like like coordinated movement where at the end of it you snap does that make sense that this technique is so critical even you're a larger person someone with better technique would have more of an impact with that so the throwing arm I had read this if that was one of the hypothesis there's several hypothesis why the human brain doubled over a period of two million years another one was cooked meat right yeah they figured out a way to get more nutrients out of meat that's rocking it over fire right so that's a little bit down the road so here we are three and a half million years ago and so for the first time we put some pressure on ourselves to have an advantage to be smarter so imagine you're a zebra you know what the hell good is it to you to be Einstein you got runs what are you gonna do with that brain right but it's a big it's a big cost our brains are 20% of our metabolic energy whether we're doing math or watching TV it spreads constant drain and so what are our ancestors why would they pay for that drain now just recently there was a paper that came out maybe three months ago now on a new brain expansion gene they found or they think that's what it is called notch 2 NL and it turns out about 1215 million years ago there was an accidental duplication of that gene on our genome and it but it was ineffective and it just sat there doing nothing now that's a great way that evolution works where it accidentally doubles a gene because then you know you can mess with it and the old gene still doing the job right mm-hmm so it sat there for about nine million years in our line till about three million years ago around Australopithecus and then it duplicated itself and it came online again and what that gene seems to do is it makes our brain remain as stem cells for longer which means a lot more duplication before they run away and start becoming neurons and so if I had to guess I'd say that that probably that gene coming online probably happened many times in the past and every time it happen in the past it was more cost than it was worth and so what's the chimp gonna do with a little bit more brain and just means more calories and what does he gain from it but now that we're working together now that we have collective action all sorts of things open up we could we could devise division of labor I'll say hey man you do this and I'll do that because Australopithecus they've got 70 more grams in a chimp they can't do things like that they can't all throw rocks at the same time that's not rocket science but all the kinds of things that came next probably were enabled by that process of us coming together and deciding to work together and cooperate so if you look at chimpanzees they don't cooperate very well for example one of the activities where they sort of cooperate is when they hunt monkeys and so they'll all gather round and they'll see some monkeys in the trees and they come in from every angle it's not very coordinated it's kind of a wild free-for-all but what's interesting about it is that when the Hunts over let's say you just sat there the whole time and watched and I'm working my ass off chasing these monkeys I got one you come up and bug me four and I don't I don't really handle it you like keep nudging me till I share but I'm just as likely to share with you if you helped as if you didn't I don't make any distinction and you'll never establish effective groups if you can't reward those who participate compared to those who don't even little kids four year old kids when you give them games to play and they earn stickers if you didn't play you know when you come up and ask you don't get it you played even if you didn't do your job right but you tried boom you can have a sticker so humans immediately get that that you get rewarded for your activities as part of the group chimps don't seem to have that that's fascinating because but because chimps really do have a sense of fairness though and that that's one of the issues that happened with the captive chimp that attacked the man who brought the birthday cake do you know that story I don't know that's the awful story oh he's this couple they kept a chimp as a pet for a long time and then as it got older it got a little violent and they had to bring it to a sanctuary and they brought it to a sanctuary and they would go to visit it in the chimp would remember them and they went to visit it and it was on his birthday so they brought him a cake and the other chimps in the sanctuary were furious that they didn't get the cake as well they didn't think it was fair or they were angry so they figured out somebody had left a gate open they got out and tore this guy apart yeah because he didn't give them a cake yeah so there's a the most famous example that is actually with capuchin monkeys which aren't nearly as smart as chimps and it's this amazing study by Sarah Brosnan and Fran's de Waal and if you want to see it in action too has it on a TED talk it's really quite something to see and what they do in that study is they teach these capuchin monkeys to they give them pebble and they teach the Capucines to return the pebble and they give it a cucumber slice and so it's learned the game for a cucumber slices so if you wanted to ask does the monkey think that's a fair reward the answer has to be yes right because it's it's doing that for cucumber so now you and I are both monkeys we're in our cage I returned the pebble I get a cucumber now you return the pebble and they hand you a grape Capucines much prefer grapes over of cucumbers and so then you what happens next well I've been doing this behavior for cucumbers but as soon as you get a grape I'm like yeah I'm not playing anymore and you watch this tape and the Capuchin it they give you a grape they give me the cucumber and the thing looks totally pissed it's pounding on the ground it throws the cucumber back it's amazing yeah well and so the question is what does that mean why do they care about fairness in that way and and I think the answer to that question is sexual selection and so the key to sexual selection is it doesn't matter what everybody's getting so long as I'm getting it bout as much as everybody else but the second that you're starting to get more than I have well then whatever females in our group she's gonna pick you before she picks me and so everything is relative we may think no why do you care so much about what other people are doing why don't you just be happy with what you got but literally the day you find out that the guy in the next studio over salaries twice yours your salary sucks right because and it makes sense because literally she's gonna choose him now before she chooses you comparisons the thief of joy yeah that's exactly right it's a it's a really unfortunate fact because sometimes it matters a lot like for example imagine I invent a drug and I say here you take a dose and it'll double your IQ instantly you're gonna feel like a genius but unbeknownst to you I give everybody two doses you walk out of there you're gonna feel like a dumbass because people saying stuff you can't understand right so then it wouldn't matter right but the killer cases are things were where it's only just a residue so for example there's this amazing study where they showed that people were making minimum just above minimum wage are the ones who don't want you to raise minimum wage they're the most against it really yeah now why would that be well right now they've got a slight advantage over people making minimum wage the day minimum wage gets raised now they're not any better off than anybody else so even though they're the most likely to benefit from it because they may lose that job they haven't have to take minimum wage they're actually against it because it gives them a slight advantage over you know the guy next door this is based on one study because I would think that the people that would be most against it would be the people that are hiring folks alright fair enough I it's only a it's only looking at income so the the boss probably feels even the more negative of all but if you look at people's income and their and their feelings about raising minimum wage the people are making minimum wage wanted to go up to people one notch above do not and then as the higher you go they do again really yeah Wow up until you get to the point where you're employing people right wells and some employers want to raise it right I mean yeah and some don't there's huge argument about that now when it comes back to the capuchin monkeys does the same effect happen whether it's a female or I don't know I mean so thing is and people argue like crazy about exactly what this means I don't think the monkeys have a sense of fairness like you and I have but I do think they have a sense of hold on you're getting more than I am I can't write this happen otherwise I'm screwed and there's lots of great evidence that if you let that happen you're screwed but do the females have that same sense of competitiveness that they need to have the exact same thing those other bitches or haven't they get angry well here's the thing it depends on whether your mating system is gonna be pair bonding or not so if you're a frog or a lots of different frogs not all of them a laughing tree frog or if you're a elephant seal or something well all the females mate with the best male because his job is just sex and so every female can have the best one or the eat either in the situation where they got no choice like the elephant seals he controls the Rookery or in a situation where they just listen to all the croaking and then they got you're the best croaker you're the dad mmm but if your pair bonding like humans or like lots of other animals birds etc the then what you need is you've got competition on both sides so she's always competing to get the best male and he's always competing to get the best female now there's reasons why male-male competition is always a bit more intense than female female competition but both of them are there and the more monogamous the system gets the more both sides compete for each other hmm interesting so what about in the case of like bonobos where they're so polyamorous bonobos are super interesting system so you've got lots of polyamorous animals bonobos our interests are also you know so if you look at them one of the great ways to look at our ancestors and what their lives were like is you look in your trousers and the size your testicles tells you a lot about what sort of mating system your ancestors had so gorillas have tiny little testicles and the reason that they have such tiny testicles is they use their huge body to drive away the other males and then all the females are in his harem so he doesn't need big testicles because he only needs enough sperm in order to inseminate the females he's got it doesn't take much sperm to inseminate any one female and testicles are really expensive tissue to make and if you own a pair and you land on and you know they're uncomfortable - right and so then you look at our testicles and they're quite a bit bigger than a gorillas but they're nowhere near the size of a chimp or bonobo both you know they're basically in many ways almost the same beasts and so although socially quite different and they have a system where they basically have to wash out the guy who was there before him and so it takes really big testicles to have sperm competition so their competition is embodying each other although there's a degree of that - they know full well that when she comes into estrus in the heat there's gonna be a line and if you're fifth in line and you can watch everybody out before you you mind at the dead wash everybody there's a funny way of putting it so it's this this testicle size is directly proportionate to the number of promiscuous females well that's right the promiscuity of the mating system yeah and so if you look at our mating system we clearly evolved to be largely monogamous but not entirely our testicles are unnecessarily large for an entirely monogamous species and so we're a little bit on the wash the guy out ahead of us there's many people to make arguments that are monogamy is socially reinforced and it's not natural look if you look at how to gatherers and and so the best the best way that we get a sense of well what what did we evolved to do is to look at the remaining hunter-gatherer societies particularly if you look at what are called immediate return on to gathers so there are people who eat today what they killed today then you get a lot of hunt - gathers once they left the equator they could store food and everything change for them and they actually and the babes they look a lot like us and we can come back to it if you'd like but if you look at hunter-gatherers around the equator they're typically immediate return kill eat and so those guys tend to be tend to be there's always of course human differences where a super variable species but they tend to be serially monogamous and so some people pair up for life lots of people pair up for five seven years and then break apart and pair up again and so you have a sequence of children with the secrets of people right but but largely monogamous not entirely and the fact monogamous during those time periods yeah largely now we know every single animal we've ever described as monogamous when we do the DNA we now find they're not entirely mmm but they're mostly mmm interesting so have you ever read sex at dawn mmm-hmm what did you think of that um no offense but I think it's total crap Chris Ryan do you hear that shit everybody's rocking on your book bro what did you think is crap about it I just don't think the system works that way that explain to people that may not know what word I haven't read that book now since it came out so let me remind remind me of the thesis do you remember the idea is that we evolved in these small tribes of people that essentially shared sexual partners oh yeah that's bullshit and so the thing is that what makes you say that so confidently well I don't know I shouldn't say it quite so confidently you're absolutely right I believe that's bullshit how's that okay why do you believe that's bullshit because so human beings have very clear evolved jealousy systems and they're not just a product of the world that we live in today you can see jealousy among hunter-gatherers as well now the thing is they get jealous about different things because of course men and women a slightly different pressure on them but they both get jealous by infidelity now that's not to say that the book is incorrect about some societies in some places because one of the interesting things about humans is our flexibility and so you can create a system and someone togethers have where there's a lot of that none of that there's some really interesting ones where literally once the woman gets pregnant she then starts to sleep with all the other males because she thinks her baby will gain the qualities of all the men that she sleeps with so I'm not trying to claim that we're always monogamous because absolutely that's untrue but I do think that the dominant system is one of serial monogamy and I would and I think that that's the dominant system is this is kind of the deal that we made whereby the males go out and do the hunting the females go out and do gathering and that's basically universal she tends to cook for him and that comes back to the fire point you made which we can come back to and and so they share resources and and he's happy to share resources and do his best to kind of sort of look out for her kids I mean human males aren't we don't take as much care as human females do of our kids but we're much better than the other great apes and so that level of investment he's gonna make is tends to be to the degree that he believes that he's the father of the kids now you have societies where he doesn't know that really all are polyamorous like that by all means I don't know how what percentage they are and it could even be their more common than I believe but when that happens the systems tend to change a little bit and he's a little bit less willing to look out try to help out kids other than to do her a favor unless the kid looks a lot like himself now what about why having a system a biological system where jealousy comes up what makes you think that that somehow or another negates the idea of polyamorous relationships well it does suggest that they're not our default because it doesn't it more likely suggests that it encourages competition which is just natural well now you think about Envy instead of jealousy and so if I'm jealous I'm upset that my wife slept with somebody else last night he could be a lowlife I don't envy a thing about him I don't want anything he owns but I'm jealous of her behavior I'm protective of what she's done and so there's a wonderful experiment David buss has run at the University of Texas jealous of the man as well you're not just jealous of her behavior you're you're jealous of this other male that gets to have sex with your wife and could not possibly encourage competition and encourage men to be more aggressive or more ingenious or just create encourage creativity encourage better hunting skills so you attract more women I mean all those things see all these I would have more oh yeah I would agree with all that but I phrased it a little bit differently so there's this wonderful study out of the Philippines where they measured minced huge number of men's to when they were single and then they waited a few years and measured it again after they were they were still single we're now they're married or now they're married and they have kids okay and I'm sure it wasn't a psychology study because we can't afford to do that it was probably some medical thing but they used at answer this interesting psychological question which what's HAP who's most likely to get the girl by their original testosterone levels and what happens when you do well the guys who got married in the intervening few years had higher testosterone than the guys who didn't so yeah you're absolutely right we're out there competing with other males in order to get the girl and and there's lots and lots that goes on there tons of really interesting things but what's interesting is once we get the girl our testosterone drops and so if we once we partner up and if we're in a monogamous relationship not polyamorous but in a monogamous relationship our testosterone drops and then it drops again if we have kids and testosterone is a great hormone for getting out there and being competitive with other guys it's not a great hormone for being nurturing for your children and it's not a great hormone for being faithful to your partner and so I think that we evolved to compete with other males in order to get into the mating game so if you look at our ancestral DNA you know how you can track our male and female ancestry through mitochondrial DNA on the mother's side and why you'll see that we have far more female ancestors than male not quite 2 to 1 but I think it's close to that and so what does that tell us well lots of guys are getting left out of the mating game entirely and lots of guys are inseminating lots of different women so all those things that you said are absolutely true and all that pushes us for competition but part of what I believe goes on as part of that competition that we engaged in was in order to get the girl to get into that relationship in the first place could I start be there because I think that if you're gonna have a study on testosterone and you you have to have a study on lifestyle I mean it you if you get married and you have children one of the things that happens is you become less active you don't exercise as much you don't sleep as much all those things have a pretty radical effect on hormone production absolutely and it could well be that you know you always have to have a proximal mechanism whereby evolution plays its game right so the distal cause is as an evolved species testosterone super important to get us into the mating game but it's less you once we're in it well all you what you could all you have to do is have a system whereby those things tend to down-regulate testosterone exactly like you said because you know those things are gonna happen once you get partnered up and so but mine's your when our ancestors partnered up they're still out hunting every day you know we may be threatened I don't have Studies on we don't unfortunately we know is that I'm having with this is we have Studies on the the general health and testosterone and hormonal health of sedentary humans yeah I mean I I would like to know what their lifestyle is I would like to know what they're doing yes doesn't seem to make any sense to me because one thing that everybody knows is that you get dad bod right that's dad Bob what does dad bought dad buys a guy who works all day comes home sits on the couch probably eats food you probably shouldn't eat hangs out with his kids doesn't get a whole lot of exercise works probably doesn't sleep as much as he should that that's a to me that's a symptom of poor health and fitness right and it's not a symptom our ancestors ever experienced like it's not this is not necessarily an indication of any sort of evolutionary benefit of having low testosterone because we've demonstrated for sure that when people don't get sleep and when they don't get exercise their testosterone drops well those are two things that absolutely happen you get married and have children right and the only thing I would say is the times the time span of this study was only over a few years that's even worse the thing about having this kind of a study and making these kind of kind of conclusions based on I mean we we see we we know these mechanisms are in place we already know that there's natural effects of sedentary lifestyle lack of sleep and and the the effects are your hormone production drops your body suffers you become less healthy and this is this is not indicating monogamy this is just indicating poor health this is not like an evolutionary advantage to having low testosterone because it helps you raise children you can have a high testosterone still be a good dad and raise children and still forsythia of course all these things are bell curves right yeah higher T you are the harder gets I would say part yeah the problem having is is drawing conclusions on this one study and stating them as if they're facts no you're absolutely right if I say as a fact it's over stated because we only know the problem with almost all of our studies is exact one you point out we've got them on us right right we don't have and so like the the sex studies are a perfect example like things like female orgasm what role does it play well you need really good data on hunter gathers to know the answer to that question if you look at hunter-gatherers they don't have dad bod right they're all rain and whether their fathers are not because they're out there hunting every day or gather so if I if I over sold that my apologies cuz you're absolutely right I suspect though that you'd find the same thing I don't know it it's all we got right now but how can you suspect it I mean it's just there's no data yeah there's no data it's just when you look at these guys I have a friend of mine who he was was it how do you say the name the Yanomami and I'm Olivia Olivia well they're in Venezuela Brazil yeah and he spent some time with them and you see these people and the lifestyle they lived there all barefoot wandering through the jungle they have these crazy looking feet with her toes splay out because they're just constantly gripping the floor with their toes I mean they probably could choke you with your feet you know and these people just look so fit and healthy in their in their 50s and 60s and 70s and they have their shirt off and they're ripped yeah they're super fit same holds if you look at the hodza and Tanzania any of these groups the Yanomami are interesting because they're hunter or two cultureless so they're actually doing a little bit of gardening as well but they're the ripped and strong and they don't have obesity problems yeah and so all I would say is that the same thing holds the one thing that we found in humans in our modern culture where we have these data is if you're married and have kids but you're still looking around you're T hasn't gone down as much now you're gonna point out quite rightly that well maybe that's a different kind of person than the person who marries and isn't looking around and so it's all confounded super hard to do experiments on these things yeah and will be a lot better off when we've got you know we're losing the world's last time two gatherers are disappearing yeah and and it's not easy to collect these kind of data but they're doing lots of genetic work with these people right now all over Africa because you know there's we've got tons of genetic data now on European descent and the East Asian descent but almost none on Africans and so that's a huge project underway and so for all I know they're working on hormones and the things as well yeah that's I mean the reason why I'm asking about this is you you were so readily dismissing you were so willing to dismiss that second on yeah well the a lot of the facts that are laid out as facts in the book don't really hold up and I mean I wish I'd read it more recently and so I could go through the details with you there's some really good reviews by anthropologists and by people who work and you know sexual studies and stuff like that going through the details we read it as a we haven't this evolutionary center Center for a psychology and evolution and we read it and went through it and we weren't convinced I'm embarrassed to admit I can't remember the details of Chris a very smart guy he's a good friend it's also a great book it is a great book I would love to see him debate when those folks I'm sure he probably has he probably has and look I know that all these things that we're talking about are heavily debated right so so my colleague Rob Brooks is a wonderful evolutionary biologist in Australia loves that book so the fact that I think it's bullshit is obviously one person's opinion and where I dismissed that argument other people might say well look there's a lot of cultures that that do have much more like the system I told you about where they have sex with lots of men after they have their baby right you humans are so flexible we can do all those things we just changed the nature of how we do things um the social leap that I'm arguing about is not this pair bonding thing it's about how our groups came together to engage in collective action so in principle I'm agnostic on this issue I just happen to disagree with that I happen to feel like no I think we made these deals and so to come back to that study the David buss did that I was starting to tell you about so bus has this um he's got when he came along people thought that the two sexes had similar levels of jealousy for infidelity and David was like well looks inseminations internal and so men should be a lot more worried about her sleeping with somebody else then women should be because he men never know for sure if they're the father they can't see it happen whereas you know if you're a salmon you can say okay I'm the dad I just watch that but females the insemination is eternal but they know they're the mother that's not their concern they should be more concerned about things like has given her resources to help her raise the kid and things like that and so what bus found is if if you ask people this question what would bother you more imagine your wife having sex with somebody that she just met for the first time having this great time and doing all these different funky things with them and then never doing it again or your wife develops this you know ongoing emotional connection with somebody she never touches him he never touches her but they talk and I've shared their feelings and stare deep in each other's eyes what would bother you more and you ask men and women that question hmm so what would in your case what would bother you more to have your wife to know she had this one-off affair fling sex only didn't care about the guy or she develops a sort of emotional bond with somebody never touches him that's a good question I'd really have to think about that it's not anything cos nobody likes either no yeah because it's a matter of time before that dude gets in that's a no-no in this case it's a guarantee right it's a guarantee that they never never touched never took long as he doesn't talk shit about me that's your way I would do so much better well here's the thing weasels on average men are more bothered by sex the one off sex and women are more bothered by the emotional emotional connection because that's a big attraction could lead to him leaving her well also if it's him leaving her in directing his resources elsewhere and so so it's it's mind you every time we talk about gender differences is super important to keep mind they're heavily overlapping bell curves right so it's never 100% this way and except like do you have this organ or something right but if you psychologically it's always overlapping but on this is a big effect men on average are much more bothered by the one-off sex and women on average are much more bothered by the emotional connection yeah that's fascinating because I was reading something about inappropriate emotional relationships that people have at work and that this is an issue with people that work together they develop these you know office friendships that lead to inappropriate emotional relationships and I was like wow this is a you know I've never worked in an office so I'm listening to this reading this rather and I'm like what a strange world that is like I get it though I get it like if there's a guy and he's married in a gal and she's married but they meet at work and they staring each other's eyes all day and they go to lunch and maybe they even hold hands every now on that well they become yeah that's so that's where it crosses the line like you're a lot of hug people when you hold hands that's fuckin that's intense that's skin-to-skin it is serious it's it's gonna concern you if you're a partner yeah but what's also gonna concern you as a mere fact that you see this kind of thing this deep conversation happening and all that because think about it if we evolved to basically partner up for a while then there's always gonna be the chance of that next person long it's gonna be the one Oh wedges years away serial monogamy and both males and females gain from not putting all their eggs into the same genetic basket so if my part if my wife partners up with you for a while she'll get a certain kind of offspring and then maybe that'll be a great thing but maybe when the situation changes or the you know in in tomorrow's world some smaller or wimpier guy would be handy in some way and so maybe she's better off partnering with me next interesting yeah it is fascinating when you break it down that it really does become there's a biological reason for these behaviors and these the the motivation for the jealousy and all these things that there's right there's no history a biological history to all this stuff and and we don't know what I'm together is how they would answer that question so we can or only just assuming that the answer we're providing is general but for me those kinds of things suggest that we involve we evolved in a lot of long-term monogamous circumstances that may have been serial and that was certainly fooling around but if we were polyamorous like the book says we'd have bigger balls balls are so big though compared to a chimp they're small yeah but chimps are mean everything's big with them well no our peoples have way bigger than theirs right they got a tiny little live large Paul's smaller penises but pants are probably get in the way right well no here's the thing about so human beings copulate for an extraordinarily long period of time and and we also have this cryptic ovulation you know where she's not showing you that she's an E so MailChimp's aren't interested unless she has an enormous swelling on her vagina and then they're like oh that's super attractive to me oh I say so but what about bonobos because they well they do this funky sex thing all the time right they'll have fun right yeah they're all sorts of funky orgiastic kinds of things we used there's a when I taught at Ohio State University of the zoo there has a great bonobos exhibit and you bring your kids too and there's a serious orgy going on and the kids are like hey mom she's up Julie you know yeah there's a lot of zoos that won't happen ovals because they're right and they're pretty interesting and so the thing is that those kinds of things just show you that it's complicated right any kind of straightforward answer it's gonna have some solutes yeah yes yeah and I apologize if I get some earlier no no and so anyway the but back to this issue so if we had a total bonobo chimp kind of system I don't think we'd evolved those systems of jealousy because what's what's to be gained by that we're not making these long-term partners why would you get these differences again whenever I bring Chris's book up but and I have to defend it because have it a couple times in the last year I haven't read it in at least two years I'd have to go back and I read it back over probably five years ago when it came out when my friend's wife got ahold of it my friend got it and my friend's wife got all of it and she'd throw right in a trash she read like a paragraph or two and she's like fuck this book yeah a lot of women react that way whatever so when these chimp like creatures from millions of years ago slowly started walking upright and started moving into the grasslands and making making experiments and traveling away from the jungle and this coincided with the development of the throwing arm and this could because they started walking upright when did this when did the cooked meat aspect okay come along so they don't control fire so also pigeons can't do that so now we go forward we're now about three and a half million years ago you got to now go forward to about a little less than two million years ago to get to Homo erectus so once we get to homo erectus we now God and an ancestor that literally if it went to the seed say well that's a kind of rough hewn guy but you think it's a person and not somebody who belongs behind less so so a chimp brain is 380 Australopithecus 450 and Homo erectus 960 whoa so you got doubling our brains has no mind you it's a bigger being so you're it's not as quite as big a dramatic of a change as you think but along with that comes all sorts of capabilities now you write about this book Catching Fire Richard Wrangham argued that what enabled that so if you look at the gut of a gorilla or a chimpanzee in their brain they got a lot of gut for a little bit of brain because it takes a lot of digestion to keep a little bit of brain going we have a tiny gut for a huge brain and Wrangham argues and I think quite rightly that the only way you can achieve that is by releasing more nutrients from your food and the only way you can release more nutrients from your food is by cooking it so when he made that argument he thinks it goes back to the beginning of Homo erectus and I suspect he's right at this point when he made the argument it was only back to I remember half a million years three and seven fifty thousand it's already back to a million years ago we found in caves in South Africa evidence of controlled fire and so it'll probably keep getting pushed back because you know that craps hard to find right so this was you say a half a million years so now it's back to a million a million years and he made that prediction when it wasn't even that far back and a million years ago even though they're not technically it's not homo sapien no we're still at Homo erectus and so they started a 1.9 or so 1.7 million years ago and 1.9 I think and what Homo erectus could now do so now remember what the argument is is this social leap it's this collective action that not only protects us on the savanna but sets us on this new pathway it creates this new niche it's this cognitive niche although I think of it as a social cognitive nish because it's the working together that gives you all these potential advantages to getting smarter and so now that when that gene sitting in our head if it kicks into gear those and starts to work and and it quit leads to cranial expansion those animals who have it will have an advantage because they can coordinate with each other better and so they can remember hey man you helped me out last time but you weren't so you couldn't count on you so I'm avoiding you and I'm sticking with you they could do a lot of things with that brain power and by the time you get to homo erectus and the brain powers double we see also it's a super interesting things so before Homo erectus when you look at our tools that it's called an old wand tool and it's basically a barely sharpened rock and you never find an older wand tool to very far away from where ever it was quarried and made like you know you look at the rock and the chips and not far away is where it's lying on the ground Homo erectus made a much nicer tool it's by facial it took a lot of energy to make it when we teach modern anthropologists or grad students or whatever to make them and you put them in an fMRI magnet where it can measure metabolism in your brain as you go you see that it takes a lot of frontal lobe functioning in order to make one because it's a lot of planning how am I going to hit it next to make this thing just right compared to an old Awan tool to make those doesn't take much frontal functional I just whack it there and it'll be sharp and so the so first of all we know Homo erectus invented that tool this is the seshu lien tool with his by facial hand axe second of all and one of my one of the coolest findings there's some interesting work in a 1.2 million year old site in India by Kari Shipton where he finds that the the production of these Eshoo lean tools is separated spatially about the place so the first step is bashing loose a big piece of rock and that's done here and then 10 meters over there somebody's doing the initial chipping on it and 10 meters over there somebody's sharpening up the final touches now if you were making it by yourself why would you systematically walk around the site as you made it you almost assuredly wouldn't but if you've got division of labour you're the big strong guy you do the first thing then you hand it to me and I do the finer sharpening it makes sense that it would be spatially distributed about the site so there's that evidence for division of labour there's the evidence that they're bringing down some pretty fast animals like horses and potentially even bringing down elephants which in those days are like twice the size of an elephant and then the using Spears if that's what we don't know because they didn't survive right and nothing wood is still around there's no sign of hafting anything so if it was Spears it would be in a wooden point so I think what they could tap ding meaning the end of it like Hutton half spear tip yeah exactly and then exactly strata on earth or any of a variety of way I put yeah and so they there's no sign of that yet but there's no reason why they couldn't have a sharpened spear in fact we know that remember I mentioned the chimps in Senegal that live on the savanna they're the only chimps on earth who do this they'll bite the stick to sharpen it and pokum monkeys too when they're in the hull of a tree and stab them did you see that recent discovery and I mean it's really recently there was an article I read one or two days ago at about orangutans so when they gave them wire they used the wire to fashion it into fish hooks no I didn't that's totally cool yeah they figured out what if how to make a fish hook independently and that's amazing you've seen them like spear fish right hang over trees that's that that picture is actually of an orangutan who's watched fishermen do he couldn't do it remember an orangutan if it Mitch you could literally pull your arms off like that right the so enormous strength but to get gearing for that strength they got very poor motor control like you and I can type they can't do that right and so that orangutan that that famous photo never could catch anything he'd seen it done and it was trying to see if he could do it - fair enough just trying to use a try now but but you know there's these corvids these crows and and such they'll fashion hooks - yeah so there's some there's a lot of amazing evidence for this sort of animal ingenuity and making tools well you've seen the studies with crows where they use one stick to get a larger you get a larger you're mindful yeah it's amazing now the one thing is we don't they can do that and then they fail some super simple tests so it could be that their brains tiny though they are dedicated to a particular way of solving a particular problem because it's especially these ones that live in new caledonia do this in the wild and so they a fashion amount of palm fronds they tear it off and they reshape it and then they hook insects out of the bark of trees and stuff and so you could imagine that they've kind of learned a specific way of problem-solving but they can't do something that to you because you would solve that using some pretty domain general mechanisms to you looks the same but to them is totally different did you find a thing with the orangutan it's it's really crazy it's just well you know I read something here we go my intent spontaneously been straight wires into hooks that's a physical food just amazing use they have a photo of it Jamie if you scroll down a little bit there what does that photo it's just I'll just him with a stick yeah yeah oh yeah that's really really cool I had read something a few years back that said that they were agreeing that chimpanzees had officially moved into the Stone Age yeah so chimpanzees will use stones as tools so they'll crack nuts with them but they've never they've never been shown to modify stone bars and so if you want to say the Stone Age usin stones by all means if you want to say it's modifying stones the the oldest evidence that we have of potentially modified is three point three million years ago these Lamech we tools but there's argument about how legit those up right there's argument about a lot of those sites to where they believe that they find stone tools that are ancient because it could easily just been shale or yeah and overwash it's super complicated to know exactly when it got laid down every once we'll get lucky and and the layers are super orderly and then when you give to that layer you know exactly what you got but now what's the chances of finding what you're after there right yeah now when they say the Stone Age that's what they mean just the idea of consciously using a rock to like smash open a clam or something like that yeah I mean to me that does I got a I gotta admit I'm not quite sure technically what an anthropologist would mean when they say Stone Age but to what what we know is that chimps will do that they'll use rocks to they'll even have it's they're clever enough to have an anvil basically like a hammer a base stone put a rock on it smash yeah what they're not clever enough to do so chimps have partial theory of mind and theory of mind is this idea that I know that the contents of your mind differ from the contents of mine and all humans get there when they're little around age four and so the and you can see the penny drop because they just assume everybody knows the same things and everybody's the same preferences and and that's why when they're really little their stories can be hard to follow because they assume what's in your head is the same as theirs they assume you like the same things and actually it turns out that the ones who have siblings learn it earlier because it's like oh you like the red jelly beans I like the green ones awesome this is a beneficial deal for both of us right right anyway chimps can get partial theory of mind so I could see what you could say I know what you could see it your angle if I'm a chimp and I know that it might differ from what I could see right but they can't get to the point of knowing that you could represent beliefs that aren't true that you could have to believe etcetera or that maybe I don't like bananas but he does like but they can't really get that no and so what the problem is without theory of mind how do teach somebody because if I just assume you know what I know then when you're doing a crappy job breaking the nut I'm like what's wrong with Joe here Brian and so chimp mothers take years to teach their offspring to break these nuts open ten years on average because first of all they don't get a chance to do it very often then that's got to be in season second well it's easy to break your fingers and that kind of slows you down a third of all they'll occasionally make some very specific Corrections when they when the offspring is doing it wrong but they don't know what the problem is because they don't know what the kid doesn't know and so when you don't know that you can't teach and that's why humans are stunningly effective teachers that's fascinating so chimps learn more just by observing yeah and what's amazing about the way chimps observe is that because we have theory of mind we also do imitate differently so this amazing experiment by Andy White and his colleagues and what they did is they created this treasure box and so inside this treasure box there's something that a chimp or a kid wants like a little piece of food and in the in one condition the box is totally opaque so you can't see how it works and they'll poke at the top of it and then the poke in the middle and it pops open and then they give it to the chimp close it up chimp does the exact same thing poke poke poke poke pops open give it to a kid does the exact same thing now they do that they do the replicate that same experiment but instead of having that that box be opaque it's translucent and you can see well and truly that poking the top does nothing the latch is actually right here and so that initial poke was a waste of your time this second one actually is one that opened the box up when when chimps watch that they skip the first one and they just open the box kids despite being smarter than a chimp poking at the top first and then they poke it in the bottom and we call this over imitation they're imitating clearly irrelevant actions now why would anybody imitate clearly irrelevant actions what advantage would it give you well if your theory of mind you say well that's Joe's box he knows something about it there may be a reason why I can't see but there may be reason why he's poking at the top first and so I better do everything that he does I better have the highest fidelity copying that I possibly can because it may be valuable and what you end up with is these systems around the world where people eat these amazing foods that you think you know how on earth they've ever figured that out well this probably developed step by step and everybody's always got the super high fidelity imitation because they're over imitating so my favorite example is in New Guinea they'd the sago palm I'm not sure if you ever seen a sago palm but it does not look like an edible tree it just looks like a freaking tree right mmm and it turns out that if you you chop the tree down take the bark off take like in ads or something similar grind up the sawdust have all that sawdust you then wash it off in warm water because of course all the water in New Guinea will be nice and warm and that causes it's a super high starch tree that causes the starch molecules to separate from the sawdust because at that point it's inedible so then they have these cloths and the starch molecules have passed through the cloth the sawdust one now they collect this cloudy water they put in these traditional canoes they let it sit overnight and all the starch sinks to the bottom then they pour the water off the top and now they've got this flower but you have to dry it out in the Sun really faster it becomes toxic so it's like this nine step process that who on earth could ever come up with it right but once it's in place once they slowly figured it out to make it work everybody just does it the same way because even though they don't know that they may understand it but they don't need to they just know this is how we do it right well that's like that what is that route that they cassava yeah yeah that if you don't cook it correctly it's literally cyanide yeah and they have water from it and they have to take that water and they have the buckets of these water these you know water for that they're using to create this stuff and they just leave it laying around and kids are playing around it no yeah pigs and animals around it and if they drank it they'd be dead yeah i don't know that i don't know the detoxing of cassava unfortunately not i'm not familiar with it but there's a lot of those examples and you're also right that in those kind of societies they're super relaxed about things that we strike the stress is really what exactly but that stuff it becomes cyanide right you could be right i don't know that one see if you could find this cuz it's on an episode of that same show it's not this show is called meat eater it's my friend Steve Rinella who went and spent some time with them down in the jungle of South America it's really interesting stuff just seeing how these people function and and they have this big vat and they're cooking this stuff and they're you know he's explaining like right now if you a you're you're dead you gotta wait a while and like how the fuck did they figure this out researchers to get the real Java cyanide was cyanide producing abilities cassava is the third most important food source in tropical countries but it's one major problem the roots and the leaves the poorly processed cassava plants contain a substance that when eaten can trigger the production of cyanide yeah it kills the shit out of you yeah but it's weird like that that thing is like a major step on their diet well this is a really good example of a the value of human learning and and this over mutation process right because the first guy way they go okay I'm not gonna do that right and then this person ate and they did successful let's take a look at what they did yeah so I remember when I was a kid I was trying to learn to play baseball and pitch the ball and the person raises their knee almost up to their nipples and I'm like that's the most awkward pitching motion I've ever seen but I didn't occur to me I'm not gonna do that right it occurred to me well there must be a reason to do that so what can I do to try to emulate that motion right the whole nine yards there's a purpose for every one of those pieces right and as humans we say well you're teaching me how you've got to have a reason for doing that and that's the huge difference between us and everybody else nobody else can do that theory of mind thing to make that assumption and that's why the chimps skipped the step that they did they know at least you know in that particular experiment is really actually useless and kids don't so your concept is that as these animals that used to be monkeys start evolving and and and trying out new things one thing if they learn as they enter into this new climate is there's a massive benefit to cooperation yes now I would say Apes not monkeys because technically speaking well aren't all apes monkeys but not all monkeys or Apes No so monkeys and apes are different they split off but monkeys not a real word I mean it's not a word in terms of scientific designation right no no even a monkey or two different things right but there's there's all world monkeys in new world monkeys but all of them have that the genus and species you know it's letters but it's not a scientific name right neither's a keys not right now they're primates they're all provides see if you google that cool there's a whole article that anthropologist wrote that not all apes are monkeys but all monkeys no not all monkeys or Apes but all apes or monkeys cuz monkey is almost a slang term because it's bullshit I think it's bullshit but we'll find out that what I would say is that all Apes and monkeys are primates and they all started from monkey ancestors right right and so but then the Apes split off you got a rang intent the great apes are orangutans gorillas chimps and us right and then you got Gibbons which are lesser apes which split off quite a while ago and they're very different they don't have the brainpower of the great apes do you find anything like that I've read this a few years ago it confused the shit out of me because I didn't know that monkey wasn't a scientific term the scientists talk about old-world monkeys in new world mo right but it's almost a slang term yeah there's something well whenever you're if you're if you're proper biologists and you have the species just say that you know the Latin pansy is pantera resource but it pops up one on Google okay it's so long as there's more to it apes are monkeys in the same way that monkeys are primates humans are Apes and I'm a human it's called the nested higher that's right this okay it means that all Apes are monkeys but not all monkeys or Apes just as all humans are apes but not all apes are humans okay yeah as I go mom click on that link I think it's someone's website yeah this is what I read you know is this a is this a bullshit article I don't know sorry apes or monkeys deal with it I don't know the turn I don't know the origin of the term Mark Martin Robbins wrote a fun piece to the lay scientist the other day the incorrect term these monkeys just cry apes they triggered an article by Graham Smith for the Daily Mail in Martin's words a great crime against potential in progress and it's time for someone to draw a line so as a pet aunt how do you say that pedant Ted antic yeah with a professional interest in the issue I'm taking my stand to help ensure the that a miscarriage of pedantic justice doesn't occur this guy likes that word nested hierarchies apes or monkeys in the same way that monkeys are primates humans or Apes and I'm a human it's called the nested hierarchy and he has a primate nested hierarchy set up could be right I just don't know I don't know the origin of the term mmm okay but he cares and he cares enough to put that up yeah he fucked my head up dude it could be right okay why not right he's if anybody's right he's right or you're right I have no no knowledge but all I mean is that so the ancestors who moved to the Savannah weren't monkeys like baboon monkeys yeah like ancient chimp and so once we get tome erectus they're basically like us although they're our brains they're around 960 we're around 1350 so we literally have a chimp brain added on top of there right so there's a big difference and you're absolutely right it's accelerating like crazy and I I'm totally convinced well I believe ragams right I mean we don't know for sure of course but I believe he's right that it was fire that played a huge role in that and so what you got is this process where our evolution facilitates our further evolution right so you get the cognitive capacities to control fire and now that allows you to grow your brain even larger because we can we can store fat we can get more nutrients from the food we eat we can detoxify other things fire is super valuable even chimps will eat if they go through our area where there's a forest fire you know speaking what's going on locally they'll eat like the roasted nuts first they really like that because I mean you know just you go in your kitchen you smell a raw steak it's like palatable you smell it when it's cooking it's delicious right that is interesting right that's us no salt or and yeah it's our nose telling us that is a great source of food and nutrients that's not so much that is interesting I've never thought about it that way but yeah there's a tremendous difference in the way your your body reacts to it and it's not just based on your experience eating it it's just smells amazing and so Wrangham talks about he argues that you've you can't live on a diet of raw food unless you're eating these like super fruits and stuff like that basically we've horticulture it into existence because raw food just doesn't give you enough calories so the example that he uses which is a great one his chimps literally spend something like six to eight hours a day chewing just to soften up the food enough so that they can swallow it and digest it right we you know if sushi you're hardly you know some of the things that we've cooked and that's raw in that case but you know cooked steak a really nice one you barely chew it at all down the hatch ago that's a great argument for gorillas as well right because gorillas are just eating roots yeah fucking celery and so literally they have a humongous gut right constant you in order to me and they've got hewed the sagittal crest right here with the bone so that the muscles attach to it so they can chew hard enough to get through all that stuff and make a digestible and still there God is enormous yeah that is interesting the chimps have those enormous chewing muscles on their head and so we lost that's another example where somebody along the way lost I can't remember what that gene was where our muscles weaken in our jaw and that would have been a that would have been a death knell if you're back before cooking opposed cooking all that does is free up space get rid of some unnecessary muscle free up more screen eyo space for brains the inside not the outside so is it likely that there was a bunch of different factors that there was natural selection in play and that there was also the the throwing arm and then also cooking and also this this cooperative effort that led to people being a little bit more ingenious a little bit smarter and how they hunted and how they tried to get food and then how they protected their fire how they cultivated fire and then all these things led to more clever behavior which led to a natural selection of clever more clever chimps with larger brains or Apes rather with larger brains absolutely and so anytime you got something major happening it probably doesn't have a single cause it probably has lots and lots of causes and so in this case all these kind of factors came together now if you're standing at the outset and you're playing God and saying well let's see what happens when I dry out the rainforests I think 9 times out of 10 the chimps all end up dead right right but somehow we got really lucky and they went down this very particular road and once they got their social act together and they started cooperating chimps are never gonna be very effective in groups because they can't get along they can't cooperate very well but but once these animals probably add Australopithecus but maybe not so later of course we don't know all we can look is what they were capable of but it fits the storyline that they would have been the ones who developed that once that happened social becomes everything so we tend to think about what are the challenges of physical life like you know that sago palm you move into that territory and you got a freaking figure that out it seems enormously complicated but you have to remember that before modern travel was invented everybody walked everywhere which meant you spent your entire life basically in territory that you're familiar with or the kinds of animals that live there the kinds of problems that you face so cognitively the terrain is not really a challenge for you and how to even making food in those really complicated ways it's not a challenge for you once you got theory of mine and you can learn how to do it but what is a huge challenge for you it's the social interactions with each other because as my group gets smarter if I'm not smarter first of all remember we talked about sexual selection I'm not gonna get picked I'll get left behind right second of all we live in a world where there's no law enforcement and so the day that you decide that I'm more trouble than I'm worth I go to sleep and I never wake up again and so I have to be able to manage some very complicated relationships it's a little bit in my mind it's like every morning when you wake up it's to an episode of The Sopranos how are you gonna find a way to get through your day without getting whacked right and if you can't figure it out that's the end of your line hmm have you ever read any Terence Mckenna I know you're familiar with something called the stoned ape theory no sorry not McKenna it was a he was a ethno botanist he was also a psychedelic adventurer and he had a theory and the theory was that the what you're talking about this climate change that also coincided with the doubling of the human brain sighs his theory was that one of the things that was in play was that these Apes would experiment with different food sources as they moved into the grasslands and there was a lot of undulates in these grasslands and at psilocybin mushrooms which we know existed back then would grow in these grasslands and that these monkeys these apes rather started consuming psilocybin mushrooms and it led them to be more creative it also led to specific traits like the development of language that eating mushrooms in low doses increases visual acuity which would lead them to be better hunters or more perceptive it also leads them to be hornier which would most likely involve more breeding more sexual activity and possibly select the the ones that chose the the mushrooms would maybe possibly breed more than the ones that didn't choose the mushrooms because they were more into it and were more social more sexually active and he has a series of like his brother dentist who's still alive detailed it on a podcast we did the very first podcast we did his brother is an actual scientist and detailed it in terms of how psilocybin affects the brain and what areas of the brain it what what what actually takes place when you're under the influence of this and that it could very potentially have led to the development of language and that this all these things in play the throwing arm the you know developing these new social networks where you need to communicate with each other along with the harnessing of fire along with the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms on a regular basis because they were incredibly frequent and very edible all right that's total trip I've never heard of that before yeah it would be really like that's a really good example of some random thing if it really did play that role how random that is that these freaking things happen to be growing there and that they happen to be attracted to them innate them we know that animals like to get high elephants will eat these fruit that have well the drunk in this case it over ripened and have become alcoholic we know that animals will do that you've seen Jaguars that consume psychedelic plants and they rely on their back and stare at the sky oh it's amazing but you know what ayahuasca is no ayahuasca is a it's a way that these people in the rainforest develop untold thousands of years ago of developing an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine do you know what dimethyltryptamine no I'm not okay dimethyltryptamine is the most potent psychedelic known to man incredibly potent drug that is just intensely hallucinatory gives you these insane visions and it also is proof this here's a Jaguar it's really crazy and this is in the Amazon these Jaguars eat these plants and these plants are they have the ingredients of ayahuasca and these Jaguars are known to eat these things and then trip their fucking balls off they eat them and there are pupils dilate and they roll over on their back and stare at the sky I mean they're clearly high right so this is something oh you're gonna say yeah this is what I'm gonna say so this is what what ayahuasca is is dimethyltryptamine like it's kind of cool watching this Jaguar trip balls yeah they just stare they see shit that's not their I mean or it is their maybe they're still traveling it's amazing so what ayahuasca is is there's dimethyltryptamine which is this incredibly potent psychedelic drug is produced in the human body it's produced by the liver it's produced by the lungs and they also believe it's produced by the pineal gland which is literally your third eye the pineal gland in certain reptiles actually has a rep retina in a lens I mean it's like an eyeball and they think in the Egyptians called it the seat of the soul and they think that this is one of the reasons why they have this obsession with this gland in Eastern mysticism is somehow or another they figured out that this is the gland that produces this incredibly potent psychedelic drug this psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine also exists in thousands of different plants the problem is when you consume in orally your body produces something in your gut called monoamine oxidase mono AMI and oxidase breaks it down so what these indigenous people figured out is how to combine one plant which contains this psychedelic compound with another plant which contains a natural MAO inhibitor called harmine so they brew this all together much like they did with the cassava but we wondered no idea how they figured that out right they brew this stuff up together and they create this psychedelic tea called ayahuasca and ayahuasca now they have all these trips where people go down to Peru and take this stuff and trip to fucking balls off and this this the combination of these things leads to this incredibly potent Trench really transformative experience which is impossible to describe and that this this psychedelic drug why did I bring that up what was what we're talking about how maybe jimpson are these early ancestors did something similar which pushed them along this path is starting to completely I get to DM 2 what did I get the ayahuasca a couple of links in that JT is because of animals that get high that's that's what it was so this is this that's exactly what it was it was yeah the Jaguar getting high on DMT so that's what they think that Jaguars doing this is the Jaguar consuming this stuff it's making him trip on DMT and EMTs I mean it's fun it's really exciting and so it's so Robert Rivers is wonderful biologist who started a lot of the kinds of work that we're talking about going in the 70s calls these sorts of things of phenotypic indulgence right so evolution gave you these pleasure centers in your brain so that you do what's in your genes best interests and kill the animal or get the girl or whatever and that makes you feel good and so we tend to like the things that are good for us and dislike the things that are bad for us we don't want to eat feces we do on eat a steak so there's cases like this where it's short circuits that it goes right to the pleasure center even though what it's doing is kind of irrelevant but this is a case where maybe it wasn't irrelevant maybe it actually caused these animals to then change the way that they behave to become more sociable right it's very possible something like that played a role along the way which is why if you replay the sequence of The Vanishing rainforest ten times only one time does it maybe lead to anything good and the other nine times it leads to a bunch of dead chimps mmm yeah well the the process is probably incredibly slow right over a millions of years of the climate did alter what's right so you got millions of years for the rainforest to disappear so you got these animals to slowly slowly say I got no choice slowly figure it out and then I I think for three-and-a-half million years literally there was skulking around the edges and and they figured nothing out but there was a pressure on them to walk upright and nobody knows for sure what that pressure is one hypothesis that has some possible there's probably a lot of reasons right anytime something big happens it's probably a lot of causes so some people have said that you can cover ground more efficiently when you walk upright with fewer calories and especially this idea of slowly running down animals you may have heard about this notions persistence hunting exactly we talked about that yesterday huh and so um but another reason is so ask yourself so why would an animal so if we back up a little bit remember I talked about how Oldowan tools which are made even later than when we first started walking upright so they're even after that Oldowan tools are never carried at any great distance from where they were quarried and made and so what you have is an animal just like today's chimps they can't plan for tomorrow so chimp can plan for needs that it currently feels it can say oh I want to go get termites out of that Mound all break the stick off I'll strip the leaves and then I'll go over there and do that but it can't plan for the fact that it might have that need again tomorrow if it doesn't feel the need to can't plan for it and humans can plan for unfelt needs and the best example of that is the notion of taken a tool with you that you've now used and saying well I'll want to use it again tomorrow right so whichever also a Pittacus was the first one to start walking upright was almost assuredly incapable of planning for the future for unfilled needs but it could plan for filt knees because a chimp can do that too and if you think about how would you feel if you're about to walk across the open savanna and you're kind of small and leopards and lions are way fast and you I think the primary thing you'd feel is fear like oh shit I'm gonna detect and so I want something in my hands to help me defend myself mmm a spear a club stick something right and so I what I suspect it's a part of the process is my desire to hold something in my hand as I'm looking around and I'm scared and a bunch of us are doing that and so I suspect that that's what led to played a role in leading to bipedalism there would have been other factors at play like persistence hunting and stuff but I suspect that came later so whole actually holding a weapon might have led to the beginning of yeah yeah sure just because you you don't need to be a rocket scientist you're scared now you want something to defend yourself do we have evidence of them sharpening sticks remember so modern chimps who live on the Savannah do sharpen sticks modern chimp yeah but do we have evidence of ancient man and we don't have any sound we don't even have sticks leftover fractus we know they must use them because they're making some pretty complicated stones and so surely they were sharpening sticks but all of its decayed so what year did we so we really don't know when they first started attaching these stone tools to sticks right all weaking axes right Spears um we know that that's happening very recently by homo sapiens we don't know if it happened before that right if I had to guess I would say that homo erectus did that if you look at the quality of other things that they've done so for example there's this amazing site off the Sea of Galilee it's about 700 thousand years old so remember human Homo sapiens let's call it 300,000 years mm-hmm so now we're 700 thousand or so years ago and there's this elephant skull that's been turned over so that they can get access trains yeah friendís yeah that's that thing is unwieldy it's heavy as anything you got to have people working together to turn that thing over there's even a log underneath it that might have been used as a lever that's kind of help plop the thing over so what you got is people are quite capable of working together they know what they trying to achieve they know how to access those things I I suspect that they knew that they could sharpen a stick or maybe even have to put a stone to make it even better it's just that we can't find any evidence for that least not yet you wasn't there some there was certain really ancient evidence of cannibalism too because of the scrape marks inside of skulls and they think they were scooping out brain matter that's possible I haven't seen those data but absolutely you can see where they've used those tools on like the legs of animals and things like that so you would see it inside the skull as well a human skull that I'm sure you're aware of that little person that was discovered just a few years ago I think it was like a decade or so ago that on Indonesia on the floor is yeah yeah they think that little person type thing used two stone tools right yes those guys so so remember there so what happened about a one-point X million years ago we'll call it 1.7 I don't remember exactly Homo erectus leaves Africa but they also stay so you got Homo erectus basically colonizing all of Africa right and you've got Homo erectus colonizing almost all of Europe all of southern Asia and so they don't they don't go beyond that at least not to our knowledge maybe they did but but they certainly covered all that ground and and outside of so now you've got Homo erectus in Africa and Homo erectus outside of Africa and of course then over time both of them are going to evolve and change the ones outside of Africa end up as in the Endor Thals those are the most recent recent instantiation of them the ones inside of Africa end up as us and so when we leave Africa the first thing we encounter is Neanderthals in Arabia because that's the first point of entry out of Africa and so we probably started copulating with them there we know we started copulating with them soon afterward so as we left they had evolved somewhere else that evolved in Europe and Asia yeah yeah and so they evolved from some other type well the same ancestors so our okay our great-uncle left and our great-grandpa stayed right and so the ones who left some of them evolved into those people on Flores into those tiny little people some of them we know this Denisovan from a pinkie bone you know in a cave inside yeah yeah and and we have got we know that we interbred with Neanderthals and that that's where a lot of our genes that we currently have for light skin and blue eyes and things like that come from and they think wewe interbred with the Denisovans as well right well not all of us so there's some there's evidence for Melanesians if I remember I having Denisovan blood our DNA I don't I don't know about us it may turn out that we did I don't think so though but there's no evidence that humans interbred with the folks from Flores right not that I know I've never seen that they're tiny yeah they're very small they're like Hobbit like now that doesn't mean that if if well no we know it's possible that we could have overlapped with them if somebody would do it yeah so like we hit we hit Australia by 65 thousand years ago and I don't remember when the floors people we hit Australia 65 thousand years ago Wow and that was through some sort of boat traveling yeah remember so 65 thousand years ago would have still been Ice Age and so we would have had a lot less water right so if you if you look at topographical maps then when you look at what the Pacific Islanders didn't stuff it seems ballsy as hell but it's a little less ballsy when you can keep seeing the next piece of land not not as far away compared to now where the sea is much higher and you can't see the land okay so when the Pacific Islanders like traveled to Hawaii you think they could see things yeah they can see a lot better now the most recent at the very last place the Pacific Islanders settled in New Zealand that's only seven hundred years ago so that's the same as today right but but a lot of that discovery was done at a time where the sea was a lot lower and so there'd be a lot more island sticking up that we don't currently so 700 years ago they had much more sophisticated boats yeah they had those awesome yeah breakers and all that right yeah it is crazy when you think about like we're like little rats with the way we've scattered across this globe yeah and and if you if you think about it it seems like it's all ballsy exploration but I actually suspect a bigger part of it is running away from the guy behind you who's causing problems and so my favorite example that is if you look at the cliff dwellings like in the American Southwest and you go there and take a note that would live like this I mean you know when jr. walks out there but if the people down the valley are scarier than the risk of falling outside you came you're gonna live up in a cave dwelling right we're gonna climb up to get ya and that's part of the remember we talked about sexual selection as a source of people don't like unfairness well people also don't like unfairness between groups because if you and I make a deal and you know I'm from Ohio and you're from California and the Californians benefit more than the Ohioans even though I benefit you benefit more and now I'm at risk because maybe your group you know ancestrally it's gonna cause my group problems interesting so when you're studying all this stuff how does that make you feel as a person do you mean do you do did you ever internalize all this stuff when you're thinking about like all the weird ape-like creatures that turned into people and all the thousands and thousands of years of evolution and how it could have gone left and it did go right and does that freak you out when you really get deep into the study of all this stuff it first of all I do this all the time right so it does freak me out but it's what I like and it also we can talk about all the ways that you can predict things about our modern cells based on knowing these things in the past right but secondarily what freaks me out the most probably is the enormous role of random chance in all this right and so if you think about the I mean just think about our own backgrounds the random chance that our mom and dad got amorous the night that they did made you and me if if they did a different position maybe your brother's talking to my brother right yeah it's so it's really which sperm wins that race is so unlikely to be us right and so every roll of the dice has to go your way right and so the the role of chance in all this kind of freaks you out if you think about that yeah but at the same time your brother's probably a lot like you my brother's probably a lot like me or my sister or whatever and so you have one child or you have more I've got a boy a girl okay yeah well you know then that they're so different right out of the box yeah they are totally really weird it is weird so I don't know if you saw this book that Plomin just wrote called blueprint Robert Plomin he's a behavioural geneticist I haven't seen that oh it's a lovely book just came out and just out like really yeah like a month or two at the most PLO mi and Robert Plomin and he's a wonderful behavior of geneticist over in the UK and this book blueprint talks about the role of genes and all this and he he basically is one of these people who's been in the field almost since it got started and and what they kept thinking is that the environment was gonna play a huge role the parents were gonna play a huge role but of course what they keep finding over and over again there he goes how Danny makes us who we are and and what they find over and over again and this was so disconcerting is first of all on average most things are about 50% genetic but the bummer is that the other half isn't and isn't what's happening in your house and the way you brought up by your folks it's the random other stuff like the first we don't even know what it is it's just it's what we call unshared environment maybe that first girlfriend you had maybe you biked into a tree and you unimproved your face you know a million different things that specifically happened to you that didn't happen to everybody else in your family right and also the way you address those things that happened yeah and that could have a factor it could be a factor in how you were raised and how you were taught to deal with stress how you were taught to deal with situations and wealth after development but all the data suggests not it suggests parents just don't matter how you were taught doesn't seem to play a role because when we parse up all the different traits about you there's a few that your parents actually have a big influence on it what religion you're in for example but not how religious you are so the biggest role that you can play seems to be when spermatic it's a friend of mine the analogy they made when when I when I had my first kid is he says here's what you're gonna find out that you're handed when the baby's born you're handed a negative it's the pictures already been taken you can screw it up by being in the darkroom a little bit wrong or you can help it a little bit by being in the darkroom a little bit right but the photograph is already there and my son and my daughter are wildly different in some ways in some ways are quite similar but I feel like I'm along for the ride more than I feel like I'm shaping them to make them who they are but don't you think you're shaping them somewhat I'm trying look that's what we do right but the data say no well but how would the data know I mean how would you so here's how we do have to study so many different human beings you have to you have to take into account all the variables that took place during all the developmental periods of their life well the you to do it right you need to do all that and we can't do that yet and to do it right what you want is actually to have that the actual genetic markers not just to know the genes of their right and that's all starting now but but we don't know yet what they do do is they'll say well we got a bunch where there's two ways to go about this employment was at the front of both of them one you look at adoptive studies versus kids were adopted into a family versus biological and you can compare the parents of the adopted kids to the biological parents versus the home parents and it turns out that the biological parents predict a whole lot more about the adopted child and the parents who raised them mmm the parents were raised and predict almost nothing whoa I know and then the second thing you can do is you can look at fraternal versus monozygotic identical twins and you find that when you then they all share the same environment they're all brought up by you and me right were the parents of these kids but they also there's a lot of unshared environment and that's when they differ it's not because of you and me we can't find any evidence that you and me that you and I made any difference all we can find is evidence that other things in their life made a difference now to say that means what we really don't know is well what is that unshared environment all we know is it's not something about your household because that would cause fraternal and identical twins to both be more similar to each other right and it doesn't well and obviously a lot there's not a lot of data in terms of when you're measuring someone's entire life from birth to death we know no but there's there's enough that people are starting to draw conclusions one of the more interesting ones is when you see identical twins that were raised in different households without any knowledge of each other yeah and then they run into each other thirty years later and they find out they have disturbing similarities is that's exactly another example and what's also interesting about it which Blauman talks about in blueprint is that your genes become more powerful as you age so the heritability of things like IQ goes up as you get older and so the argument is that your genes seem to be causing you to select out environments so you gave the example well maybe the way that you discipline them or tell them to be resilient or whatever you do as a parent causes them to shape their environment it doesn't seem to be the case but it does seem to be the case that that genes that you give them cause them to select their environments in certain ways because remember kids choose their friends right mm-hmm you want them to play with Timmy but they want to play with right that's that's the unshared environment they're making those choices every day it's also the case that their peers matter a whole lot more than their parents do once they get to a certain age you know I'm chopped liver as soon as my kids are a bit older but when I'm young I'm their hero right yes now when you say that your genes become more powerful as you get older what do you mean by that though well they they are more predictive of the outcome and so if you look at the heritability of IQ when you're a kid it's lower than when you're an adult and it's lower still than when you're an older adult and so what seems to be happening to a lot of our traits probably almost you sure are you saying that like if you have children as an older person it's inevitable as the kids get older sorry okay so is it so if you look at the heritability of IQ when kids are 2 4 8 10 20 60 you find that identical twins come more and more together as they age whether they're aging in the same household or not and so there's it's something about selecting your environments so like here's one kid who loves to think and do puzzles and it's identical to and loves to do the same and they kind of get smarter their whole lives here's another kid who's not interested in that they have other interest and they go in a different direction but when you're when you're the parent you can be busily pushing them to do the things you want them to do right and so there heritability is less strong and there's there's lots of cool examples it's like when totalitarian governments are eliminated and the school system becomes more fair heritability of intelligence goes up in those societies because kids are now more capable of selecting the schools they want to go to the environments that they want to be part of wow we're so flexible it's so weird when you think about all the the various styles of civilization that human beings exist in and thrive in right and for me that's the key so when a lot of people hear about this they sort it sounds like genetic determinism that your genes are forcing you to be a certain way but for me it's theirs it's nothin etic determinism but you can think of about as a genetic nudge part of your nudge is gonna come from the DNA your inherited but part of it's gonna come from the environment and part of its gonna come from your own personal decisions yeah so in my mind we talk about in terms of your mind because that's what psychology but an easier example is your muscles you know some people inherit genes that if they lift one weight once but they're not they're both other people's genes they have to workout a lot if they want to gain anything but you can still decide I'm gonna work out a lot or I'm not I'm gonna eat these nutrients or you know a lot of protein or not um you can choose a lifestyle that leads you to be more muscular or less so it's partially choice it's partially environment it's partially that interaction between your genes in environment which would make sense if you think about how flexible we are absolutely it has adaptive that we are it has to be because human beings have to learn how to survive in every environment on this planet if we were meerkats or something well we got a certain way of doing things and you your genes can basically tell you what to do and with meerkats there's some really interesting experiments where you can show your genes cause you to listen to one signal and just follow that but as human beings your genes have no choice but to give up control once we went down this cognitive pathway that emphasizes learning over inborn instincts you know you've had little ones you know they're worthless when they're babies right baby wildebeest gets up and off it can go it run away from a lion yeah it's just so fantastically complicated the the developmental process from birth to adulthood and that this is taking place simultaneously amongst hundreds and hundreds of millions of people and with varying results and all sorts of different levels of creativity and ingenuity and mathematical prowess and literature and all these different things that are being created by all these different weird little ape creatures everywhere and there's so many different factors that determine what this ape creature becomes right and that's one of the best things in my mind about being a person so if like if you're a dung beetle you got one job in life push a ball of poo and if you can't push a ball of poo that's three times your body weight well that's the end of the line for you right but if you're a human maybe you're big and strong maybe you're a lot maybe you're really smart maybe you're not maybe you're really creative you know there's a million ways to skin that cat and and the great thing about being in the human is that any if you're good at any of those things there's a niche for you you will be beneficial and because we evolved to all work together they'll be valuing you you're my favorite barista you're my favorite whatever whatever you're good at and everybody's good at something and so the thing is that people worry about this sort of upcoming genetic revolution that it's going to be well there's gonna be the good and everybody else and that's just not gonna happen because one of the things that we know and you'll see this if you look at blueprint is that you have a gazillion genes underlie every trait there aren't five smart Jeanne's there's like a thousand of them and furthermore each one of them only accounts for a tiny tiny bit and they do lots of other things too so you can't like design you can't make a design or baby that has all these qualities because all you do is noodle around with five or six genes there's a couple of disorders that work that way but our personalities our abilities our proclivities are all heavily determined by large numbers of genes that do lots and lots of different things we're talking about our understanding of genetics currently yes and when you talk about things like genetic manipulation or the use of CRISPR or any of these maybe new tools that they're working on right now they've already updated CRISPR they were CRISPR point two right yeah when when this continues to evolve and and more and more innovation takes place in in that world don't you think they're gonna get to a point where they're gonna understand all the various factors in genetics and they're gonna be able to create a person who looks like Thor yes and no so in principle yes you've got like I don't know three billion base pairs in your DNA and most of those we all share all the same ones so screw the ones that are shared we don't care about those all we can do is noodle around with the ones that aren't now what makes it complicated is that most of the ones that differ between people are actually none there in what we now call the regulatory region we used to think of as junk DNA but now we know well think about a company a company that makes widgets doesn't just make widgets has to have sales veste marketing as to management and now we know well sure enough a lot of the DNA that's not coding for proteins is working with the other DNA to turn things on and turn things off and there's three billion base pairs so their level of complexity there is outrageous right so but let's still but someday we'll get it right okay it's not you and I won't see it and and what we now know from these studies jiwa studies genome-wide Association studies is that you can look at all the very base pairs at very and you can say all right which one of these things are correlate with my outcome of interest and so you say Oh education and they create what's called a polygenic score and you say let's predict how many years of education you're gonna get and sure enough the richer you are on average the higher your polygenic score is you're born into a rich family you probably have a higher polygenic score but if you're polygenic score for education is lower than then the average for your thing you probably get poorer across your life if it's higher you probably get richer is it a gene for being smart for sitting there and doing what you're told for self control like it could be and there's a thousand things in there and each one of them accounts for 1/10 of 1% of the variance but what makes it complicated is that whole set of genes also predicts how artistic you are but in a different combination and it predicts how friendly you are in a different combination and so the genes that do one set of things almost always do lots of things and we have very few traits at all that don't have lots and lots of genes that each play a tiny role underneath them the example Plomin gives in his book which i think is great he says we started out looking for gold nuggets and we now realize we're looking for gold dust it's just lots of tiny stuff out there so in many ways when you're looking at a 1 you know you talk about the the the human genome and our genetic code we're really similar to computer programs and that there's millions and millions of lines of code in computer programs but we know how to make computer programs so we know like what these well we don't somebody smarter than both of us knows how to make these rattle but she knows that lead to operating systems and but now we're writing codes that we don't understand so if you look at neural networks they'll be input levels and they'll be output levels and the freaking computer decides how to mix those things together and we don't even know what the hell it's done and two of them that are learning the same thing might get there via different mechanisms so by that the idea or with it through that idea wouldn't you think that artificial intelligence could lead to the mapping out of the human genome or rather the altering of the human genome mapping out a different type of human look in principle it could and and it may when all I would say is that you that what we thought though is that there'd be five smart genes that really matter and the rest are trivial and so turn on those five smart ones everybody's gonna want that right and there'll be five funny genes and we'll turn those on you know etc but there's not and so what that means is I got to decide imagine this future world where I'm about to have a baby and I can CRISPR the whole thing and I have to decide what genes I'll say well I can make him smarter but then he's not going to be very friendly you know right or whatever right they all trade off against each other right you could get the big dick gene but it doesn't see it give them glasses exactly and so the thing is that it makes it so yeah we will get rid of thing the single gene disorders that are awful right but but we're not gonna I suspect we're not gonna noodle around with our smarts and our personality because every single change we make is gonna have a commence or change somewhere else oh well I can make him smarter but then he's gonna be depressed and he's you know like that yeah that that is a boy the the idea of playing God like that I mean that's that's really I mean we are playing creator you know I don't even necessarily think we should use the word God in that respect because it's something that's already been created but we're taking this life-form and radically altering it and we can already do that and people won't start doing it soon and we like when I was a kid when we were kids IVF is playing God mm-hmm now it's a triviality right that is crazy what we're you know do you don't think that this is going to take place in our lifetime to move Russia or China is gonna make some super person not there's there's too many genes that play too small of a role and so the thing is that the it it's too hard to mess around with it's too hard to make the to create these things there's no reason you'd be a lot better off if you just did selective breeding and the reality is you don't even need to people already assorted of lis mate they already choose partners who are similar to themselves if they value education the other person does too if they value athletics the other person does too that works so much better than anything that we're capable of doing right now and when you do these G Wells studies with these polygenic scores and you say oh look you're born into a social class and suggests to do it probably behind yours kind of low and sure enough you get poorer across your life you're literally accounting for 3% of the variance you're barely explaining anything because even though we when we look at the behavioral genetic studies we can say wow intelligence is 50 percent genetic we can't come close to finding the genes that actually do that and and part of the reason we don't know but part of the reason may be that first of all its course is 50% environmental and what those random things are we don't know and second think about how you with 3 billion base pairs how many things maybe when those two are in place and that one isn't in the third you know you could be interactions that really really complicated levels where you're almost dead infinite right and so that's why I don't think it happens when you and I around to see it I think you're probably right but then I just realized that things like CRISPR which were invented by accident who came out of nowhere less than a decade ago I believe was less than a decade ago right it's super recent it's outside yeah and then if you really stop and think about even the mapping of the human genome it used to be an unbelievably difficult thing yeah and then you know checking your genetics was preposterous ly expensive now you just spit into a little to end of the 23andme and they they tell you hey bro you know someone's family is from Europe and this guy's from Asia and yeah yeah and so I could easily be wrong that you and I will see it and it's only ten years away yeah because computationally it seems so hard right now but things that were computationally impossible and I was in grad school you know that the simple analyses we did with our data in grad school it's just like a phone could do that so easily now when we waited 24 hours for the mainframe to give it back to us what Kurzweil talks about that that we really don't see things in terms of the exponential increase in technology you know Kurzweil believes all this is gonna happen plus more he thinks you're gonna be able to download your brain into a computer and you know and he supported ourselves he's smarter than me I don't know if he's smarter than you he's definitely smarter than me and his idea is research has just turned on the world's most powerful supercomputer designed to mimic a human brain whoa I think I was telling you about a week it last week morphic computer neuromorphic computer just got a big boost with a million core supercomputer that took over a decade to build mother yeah this is the beginning of a movie right right doesn't go well but here's the thing right this movie in this movie this is a whole room full of computers just like the Apollo missions used a room full of computers that can't fuck with your phone really crazy that's 1965 66 67 right they had a room this iPhone buries that room full of fucking shitty ass computers and plus it takes pictures do you remember one of your kids and everybody said everyone will have their own phone right I never thinking who the hell wants a phone like my mom will just reach me wherever I go you didn't know what a phone could do in those used to have a bit and this is only from 2005 from a Netflix special I did 2005 which you know it's 13 years ago but doesn't seem like that long ago but I was making fun of people texting uh-huh because I was like hey bro why why are you making me read call me I go you're sending the text from a phone a fucking call me takes you four presses to get an S yeah and then that was also back when people thought it was cool to have those walkie-talkies those Nextel phones do you remember that there that was like a big deal to have a walkie talkie and a phone that died out thankfully but this this whole change in the way we view technology from 2005 to 2008 een the world is a radically different place and the funny thing is that you and I both make a living by observing the human condition right that's our job and we both get it wrong constantly right every day you got that the texting what the hell is that I remember my sister showed me Facebook cuz she was in an NGO and they're using it to keep track of each other I was like yeah people don't want to do that shit every time every single time I follow quite a few people on Facebook that are nuts and I go to their pages just to see what kind of arguments are getting into like as a sociological experiment and there are people that are on Facebook arguing about Trump or abortion or Islam or you know fill in the blank environmental concerns fracking and they just fucking argue all day long it's fascinating you look at their timeline you look at the entries and you're like oh my god this there's like 10 hours of this shit in a day and they just do it all day long and you just picture this sweaty person sitting in front of a computer arguing with the world I never would have thought that that there'd be people sitting in front of their desk arguing with people that they can't see all throughout the world who thought that right who thought that would be fun I don't think it is funny I think it's an impulsive obsessive thing that people get sucked into and I think they're vastly healthier and happier when they're not engaged in it yeah well I mean the truth of the matter is and this comes back to the past again so you we talked about all these differences so one of the really lovely things that you can do is look for the past and then say well how does that manifest itself today and one of my favorite examples is the whites to your eyes so chimpanzees have brown eyes the the sclera round the cornea yeah ours are white why would you do that well that advertises the direction of your gaze why would you advertise the direction of your gaze because what that says is that on average as a human when I look over there and see something I want you to know that I saw it you and I are probably going to cooperate to help us achieve whatever the goal is that I just encountered a chimp wants to hide it from its fellow chimps because it's competitive right on average whatever the hell's over there you're not gonna help me get it right yeah exactly you're gonna make it harder for me to get it yeah the chimps ever do though hmm amazing Laura Jamie oh girl huh amazingly groupers and octopi hunt together and they do that whoa groupers and octopi work together that so the grouper will be over the Great Barrier Reef and the fish has gone in and he goes to the octopus and he goes right there no reason he doesn't give a shit about the octopus of course but if the octopus goes to get it and doesn't get it it's gonna come out and the groupers got it well cooperation always works better than working on your own right Wow so is there real evidence it shows that the whites of our eyes developed in order to indicate which way we're looking well in all these cases all we can just say let's do a little phylogenetic analysis who's got it and who doesn't we're the only great ape with whites to their eyes so 90 so we're gonna look at this here's an octopus that's chilling and is that a grouper yeah it's a weird-looking fan since about it I guess I don't know if it really pretty looks like a coral trout to me oh man so what do I know look how pretty that octopus is - yeah they're really fucking love octave and they can change colors like that I know yeah we've gone down massive rabbit holes with these things for hours at a time look at this changing right now as we're watching him so he's sitting there waiting and the fish tries to get out and the other fish got you yeah that's fine and so it's really cool the way they have the good sense to work together look at the octopuses mad it's getting dark gore has a yard how cool his skin is how it just changes and morphs as you're looking at it that is so bizarre what a crate I didn't you know I didn't know that they could do this until my friend Remy war came on the podcast and he had a television show called apex predator and what in on the show they would study the various ways these animals would hunt and the way they would you know all their the different adaptation to their environment all the different ways that they would use the environment and and he would try to mimic those different ways and one of the things that they studied was octopus and what's that other fish that's like it the cuttlefish which is also the octopus is using a clam shell what is he doing he's lounging they found that he picked it up oh my god there's a BBC this is crazy oh my god the octopus is climbing inside a clamshell and then he closes it that is bananas there's a BBC blue planet where it shows the octopus picking up all that random shrapnel when there's a shark coming after it and it covers itself like a big ball and the shark keeps going wow they're super smart octopi well they eat sharks you ever see that one there was a video where they found this aquarium was having an issue where sharks were disappearing they couldn't figure out what was going on and they put a camera inside the aquarium but it turned out that the octopus was waiting just chilling on the rocks till the sharks came by and they would snatch them and eat them watch this it's really cool to watch he's like doo-doo-doo who me don't bother with me I'm just a piece of coral I'm just hanging out here being cool bitch that's you like in cuz he looks exactly yeah even in texture like the coral which is so fascinating but when they found this they were stunned they had no idea that octopus could do that could not only that they could do that but that they would eat a shark and that's a big fight fuck man it's not though you want to squeeze his mouth shut first but it's an easy fight it looks like he's the thing about octopus though too they could sacrifice a tentacle and it just grows back yeah sorry there really no big deal it's annoying but yeah yeah I don't know it's annoying I mean we're just guessing right so there's a fascinating animal there's a rich twisted them up there's an amazing case in Australia where a Coulomb brown as a biologist had cuttlefish in his tank and they can signal they like an octopus I can do whatever color and in this tank he's got a bunch of females on one side a bunch of males on the other so male goes in between them and he signals to different sides of his body he shows the females he's male but he shows the males that he's female so they won't attack him for a sideline out to the female it's weird it's weird that they split off from us hundreds of millions of years ago right like it's closely related to celery bass yeah that's crazy but they're so smart and their eyes are similar to ours and like in the development actually it's the opposite so they're our eyes are poorly designed there's a very well designed so our eyes have all the detecting stuff is in its own way it's backwards and so the light comes in and has to pass all the cellular bodies before I can get picked up by the detectors theirs aim in the proper direction so the shit isn't in the way and we have this blind spot because the big thing the the nerve connection they don't there's comes in from the back where it belongs so what that tells you is that yeah we both started out with some kind of randoms light-sensitive spot and there's happen to work much better if you want to turn it into an eyeball than ours did because evolution can always it only can start with what you got right but deserves work better because they can see in water I mean is that well no I mean because there I think it's purely random that they don't we do a great job of getting rid of the cellular bodies that are in our way so what your eye does is it Wiggles all the time and so if anything's retinal stationary it's wiggling and equally with your eyeball you ignore it and so you don't even know you have your own blind spot you fill it in your brain does amazing things to fix the problem if you have a piece of lint on your eye or something yeah if it we're literally attached to Vince she would disappear mhm and because your brain says oh that's irrelevant um and so you can't see your own blind spot unless you close one eye and then you sit there with a neutral background you move your thumb across and literally your thumbnail disappears because that spot is just being filled in by whatever the background and what happens with the octopus it doesn't have that problem because our nerve anding creates a blind spot by being on the wrong side there's comes in from the back and so the whole thing works beautifully there have to deal with the blind spots would that be as effective though in the world that we live in yeah it's a watery or irrelevant it's purely a happenstance that with the light-sensitive pit that they had started to get innovated properly from the back and ours didn't and then as ours evolved into an eye I mean of course we don't know this is just but as ours evolved too and I we just had to find ways around the problem that all the fancy structures that we now need in front of it are in the way does anything have an eye like an octopus that lives on land great question I don't know I don't think so see I've read something about eyes that they think that I got shit information no you're pregnant memory that they have an amazing memory all these shows that you still throw away that's too many shows man I don't have any memory anymore so it's like full yeah I've like I'm like a hoarder like my house is filled with boxes of shit that I don't need that's how brains work I'm afraid our brains work yeah I mean it must be because like I know that there's a lot of stuff in there that didn't used to be in there before but I also know like it's like random people that I should remember that I don't remember yeah well then the funny thing about brains is we may never forget anything but we just lose our capacity to access it right but the data suggested it may still guide our behavior and so every single experience you ever had may still be in there and it guides your behavior but but it's use it's annoying for you to recall it cuz it gets in the way of what you want and so when we talk about forgetting what we're actually talking about is being able to actually retrieve it and talk about it not to have it guide with our action well also I can I could retrieve things far better if I get access to the file by someone else's memory so like if you and I had an experience like 10 years ago we went on a camping trip or something like that and I forgot something that happened and you said do you remember what happened by the creek when Mike for hurt his foot I'm like oh yes exactly oh my god I forgot about that and then you know it's of this memory right and so what we've done is you've broken access in yeah and so but if you you could literally find the sneakers wearing oh holy crap right we're in this you know and so that's how our brain is designed it it's it's annoying to retrieve when you're looking for one thing to retrieve everything yes if it's important or happened recently it probably should be retrieved if it's not let it sit away and it'll still guide your baby you won't put your foot in that same hole when you and Mike go on the camping trip the next time but you won't even remember why right and unlikely significant lessons are important because they're seared in your memory of this is uh this is a significant point where you figured something out that you didn't know before and it changed the way you looked at the world so this is seared in your memory yeah and so when emotions get involved you tend to have it's much more easily retrieve because your brain is saying yeah that's our evolution or whatever you wanna call it it's telling you that's important that should be retrievable right and and what you had yesterday for lunch I can never retrieve that right yeah that's one of the reasons why epidemiology studies on diet are so difficult because people don't remember what the aim is they eat the same same thing every day yeah yeah it's the human mind is so fascinating and it varies so much and there's so many different factors involved and whatever it becomes cultural factors and yeah environmental factors dietary factors and that's all that flexibility that we evolved to put us in that special place that we are yeah and so we made a deal right so we said alright we're gonna start going down this cognitive pathway but that means that there's very little inborn knowledge and that means that we're gonna have to learn from people older than us and people with experience there and that means it and the best way to learn from them is high-fidelity copying and so if you happen to go off in the direction where they use chopsticks well that's how you eat you happen to go in a fork direction that's how you eat there's a million ways to do things and so we started with the sort of argument about well was it monogamy or not right and the I'm arguing that by and large it was monogamy because you've got these systems in place that our testicles are big enough we've got cryptic ovulation which means that we can't tell when she's fertile which means that we have to be available sexually interested in available all the time so we can make sure we're the father and so that allows her to pair bond with us and there's some evidence that orgasm is a pair bonding experience certainly for females probably for males it works in lots of animals via oxytocin and some vasopressin all that kind of stuff right so all that suggests that probably on average that we evolved to do it this way but we're so SuperDuper flexible that when another society says well hey these works for us off we go and we find a way to make that work are there studies that compare testicle size of different civilizations and different cultures yeah so there's a lot of argument about this and the problem is that the president's racist a it's racist right that's what underlies a lot of it but right so the thing is that that the the genetics that explain why one animal or one species would have large testicles in other word have small testicles are not the genetics that it would explain why two different individuals in the same species would be that way because the only way to make that latter one work is you have to inherit a constellation of traits so if I'm gonna hare the genes for big balls and for impulsiveness and for having lots of kids and not caring much about them and all the things that are supposedly go with that that do when you look between species there's no way for though that constellation of traits to be inherited together because remember I was talking about how polygenic everything is and so they'd all literally need to sit next to each other on the chromosome if they've got any chance of being passed on as a package and they don't and you also get all this shifting around or in meiosis I can't remember the term for off the top of my head but where the pieces of genetic material move around and that virtually guarantees you're not going to inherit this huge constellation of traits within a species between species is dead easy you know your species inherits big distil and inherits impulsiveness it inherits you know whatever in our strategy just reproduce it on and ignore them you know all that kind of stuff steady Z and so chimp fathers don't pay any attention to chimp babies to speak of because well that's their mating system right whereas um you've got pair-bonded Gibbons and things and now parents start to play a much bigger even male parents start to play a bigger role but there's no studies that show that human beings with larger testicles tend to ignore their children well so this is just it people have tried to show that but here's the problem try to show that ya studies yeah so lots of people make that argument and it's called life history strategies where you say well you're gonna develop one life history strategy in these circumstances and another in these other circumstances the problem is that you end up with ethnic differences in testicle size which we know exists and you also have ethnic differences and we're how in in the kinds of life's that people currently lead the difficult thing is it's super easy to look at the world we are in right now and this is what tripped me up earlier as well you look at the world that we are right now in assume well that's the way things have always been and they haven't and so right now you know the mathematics used to for a while they're the best math in the world was taking place in the Arabic world now it's not anymore and so if you but if you don't know that past you'd say well look people in the Arabic world aren't as good at mathematics and they have these qualities and then you'd make an inference right now the ethnic differences and testicles I believe but I can't promise you that it's some different West African groups happen of the largest testicle size on average those West African groups tend to be poorer right now there's lots of things about life that go with being poorer that look like in our strategy having lots of kids and paying less attention to them but what you're probably looking at is a coincidental association between some biology and some part of some way that your your people happen to live that didn't exist a while ago and that won't exist a while from now and so it's really easy to try to use this research which people have to say well you've got some primitive people who have big testicles and low parental effort and you've got some more sophisticated people with smaller testicles and high parental effort but that's genetically super naive one of the things that I learned when I was in Rome we took a tour of the Vatican by this guy who's a professor it was really interesting it was cool because we to have a really enthusiastic guide and who could explain a lot of things to you and he was really excited that you know me and my family were very curious about these things too but one of the things that he said what's really interesting I said ok I go why did all the dudes have little dicks like what's going on with that and he said that they believed that if you had a large penis that large penises were a symbol of barbaric behavior and that these were cruder people and that to be you know thought to be a sophisticated person you wanted a smaller penis so they actually accentuated smaller penises and their gods and smaller penises in their statue and that's funny I mean you can see these kinds of things all the time so early pre Western contact if you look at Japanese women they're pinned they're painted with their eyes as narrow of a slit as possible post Western contact now the women want more almond shaped eyes and so they start painting them with the beautiful woman have bigger eyes these things can change all over the map I personally suspect that large penis size is also a product of sexual selection it sounds more fun for her if he's got a larger penis they're having sex for longer and more red because ovulation is hidden so he has to be available all the time so she has to be available all the time or the system doesn't work and that's what creates pair-bonding so humans copulate for a very long period of time if you compare us to the other primates with a single exception of bonobos and we have way bigger penises than any of the other great apes and I suspect that that's something that is female I mean women always say why are men subsets to the penis size but I suspect that they're the creator of it and that's why we're so obsessed with it women who say that are playing games no that's ridiculous I don't know that they are they're definitely playing games that's like men who are saying why are women so obsessed with big breasts we don't even care I've never had a guy who said that there's some asshole out there that's playing games okay possibly all right yeah it's it is fascinating when you think about all these different things that lead to natural selection and the fact that there's so many variables that are in place and that we're trying to find out what is better and what is not and if you have a study and the study finds genetic differences in ethnic genetic differences there there's there's a lot of blowback and a lot of pushback yeah yes there will be and and one of the interesting things that we do know is if you think about how Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and a small percentage of us left which means the majority of us didn't right I mean there's few randoms who lived up in the top right hand corner were available to go which means that all the rest of the earth comes out of a few small percentage of the population that could have left and so we now know there's enormous genetic variation within Africa way more genetic variation within Africa than outside of Africa or than between any two people lack of Chinese person and a Norwegian person are much more closely related to each other genetically than an African guy who lives in the next village over and so because most of the genetic variability never left the continent and so we have this idea of race as if it has genetic meaning and it doesn't but ethnicity does have genetic meaning right so an ethnic group evolved in a very certain spot to deal with very certain problems and their body shape will vary and you got these West Africans who are really jacked with these big muscle ah'd of quick jerks my sister you don't see that over on East very much you've got tall people in Denmark you don't see that you know in other parts of Europe etc so people are the adaptation like the Inuit to do exactly also and lots of that's adaptation and a lot of us just random genetic drift to founder population other causes that aren't evolved but nonetheless have a big impact on what the population ends up looking like it's just so amazing to consider that this entire species essentially except for the times that we interacted with interbred with Neanderthals came from one part of Africa yeah you know that's one of the reasons why racism is so preposterous because we're essentially all African yeah we are all African and we've all of us were out have a little bit of other stuff in them us but just a tiny bit we're so weird though we're so like we're so much like dogs you know like a Great Dane can breed with a poodle yeah and they don't look anything like each other yeah we're from another planet you go well that's definitely that's not gonna happen it's like if you looked at LeBron James and you know Traci Lords right they really do and I suspect that when we ran into the nfl's were like oh she's kind of interesting looking sort of hot sort of different and so it you know first we know humans will copulate with almost anything that old sales right yeah and things that aren't even alive yeah things that aren't alive things though yeah things that they probably shouldn't be etc but but the end of Thal ones are interesting because really they are cousins their cousins separated by a million years and some change and and we don't know too much about them either which is really weird we know they had larger brains than us but we don't really know how smart they were no and and and why did we replace them yeah like did we was it diseases we carried that wiped them all out was it we were better organized so we covered it we all competed them we killed them on purpose you know if there's a million ranch species we happen to know but a lot about Neanderthals because they are existed till very recently but what we there's all sorts of branching that took place early on lots of different australopithecines etc yeah almost all those are dead ends yeah and you know the fact that we're the only one that comes out of that could mean well we got lucky or were mean as shit and we took care of all of our cousins who didn't you know we wanted what they had I think the latter yeah I don't mean well I mean that doesn't it make sense that we were mean as shit a million years ago we're mean shit exactly and what's so interesting is you know this is something that coming back to the point I was making earlier about us cooperating so we evolved to cooperate with each other but the key is we did not evolve to cooperate across different groups so once you get to homo erectus and now you've got division of labour and you've got the capacity to plan for unfilled needs right where they're carrying these eschew lean tools with them over great distances etc well now who's your most effective predator uh you know the occasional mammoth or saber-toothed tiger will have killed the occasional one of us but they can't possibly take us on in the same way we can take them on there's only one other thing on the planet that can take us on and that's ourselves so other groups of Homo erectus would have probably been a major threat certainly by the time we're Homo sapiens other groups would have been our only major threat yeah and so we evolved to be kind to each other within our group but we did not evolve to be kind outside our group that doesn't mean we evolved to be mean we evolved to be neutral so let's see if you're gonna be friend to foe and I'm and that neutrality is super important yeah it has the potential for cooperation across group boundaries we can change women and men can mingle so we don't interbreed too much amongst ourselves we can trade with each other lots of good things can happen but the second you guys get a little bit aggro with us you know now we're in a position to just go all out and try to exterminate you and so Wrangham has he's great data Richard Wrangham same catching fire guy shows that if you look at the rates of violence within human groups compared to chimps they're like 500 times more violent physically aggressive than we are you look at the rates between human groups equal they're the one-to-one ratio so we tend to think about well how could it be that were both so nice and so mean but we have to remember that we evolved to cooperate in to be nice to each other to be more effective killers it wasn't because let's make a hippie you know paradise it's like shit these lines are gonna eat us you and I gotta have to get together to sort out these guys and so our cooperative nature is literally the flip side of the coin of our competitive violent killing nature also the undeniable history of unbelievably ruthless tribal warfare would indicate that we have a long history of fighting against others that are like us that we don't know absolutely when when hunter gathers meet each other and they do come into conflict which is a huge percentage of the time they literally fight to the death because if you capture me you're gonna torture me to death if female you're gonna incorporate me into your system and then it's gonna be okay not great but okay but if I'm male I'm gonna die so I might as well die fighting you now because I'm gonna die unpleasantly later yeah and that's super common that's everywhere we see it and there's tons and tons of bodies that are have healthily perforated that that are the clearly the consequence is this kind of Wharf it's crazy that that is thought to be even in 2018 an evitable part of being human being I mean warfare even to this day is thought to be inevitable because there's no I mean we would all love that one day there would be no warfare but there's no indication whatsoever that that's gonna take we're not almost there and I actually I think Pinker's got the best answer to this question which is basically well what structures do you need to put in place to make the world a safer and less violent place and and I don't know if you've talked to him about his book better angels of our nature I know you've talked to him about more recent ones but yes better angels is a great example it's a great book it's a great example of how we become less and less violent and even over our lifetimes and and part of that is undoubtedly better governance structure and all that but part of that I think is cycles on itself so when I was a little kid and this kind of thing probably happened to you I was on when I was in kindergarten the guy who drove our carpool was a cop so this cop is driving me home in the back of his car now he's got no seat belts cuz this is 1969 and cars don't have seatbelts right big bench seat in a Buick or something and we'd come around a corner and they all slide up against me to the edge of the car seat and I'm trying to push back but I'm this little guy right and I can't and I hit the I must have hit the elbow against the door and it flies open I roll out of the car oh man I go bouncing across the street right so he's you know he's not gonna ride home in two handed so of course he goes and retrieves me from the ditch and he brings me out and shows my mom and I'm bleeding and bruised and torn shirt and you know like you'd expect from bouncing out of a car and my mom who's a pediatrician so she could tell I wasn't badly damaged looks at me and says ah he looks fine don't worry about it can you imagine somebody brought your kid home said hey man really sorry Joe your daughter fell out the car bounced across the frickin street you had a throttle them it'd be freaked out and it's not that long ago either no this is 1969 when you and I are both on this planet and so what I think is part of what's what Pinker is documenting is as the world gets safer we start getting used to a low man ham world yeah and and these these mayhem events stand out in our mind and so it actually self perpetuates where the safer gets the safer we need it to be because every little thing that goes wrong stands out in sharper relief that's a very fascinating way of looking at it you know what's interesting to me about Pinker's work is how much pushback he gets and particularly about the world being a safer place like people want to keep putting pointing towards violent episodes and-and-and and racism and and crime and all these different things is different factors as if it's some sort of evidence against what he's saying when he's incorporating that those current events into this large database and he's saying yes it's not that we don't live in Utopia right but the world is vastly safer and better now than it was a thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago or even a hundred years ago or even thirty but why is there so much pushback against it well so the thing is I think what's going on and so people worried that it doesn't look like a problem to be solved anymore right so when you want our kids we both have lots of gay friends but we didn't know it because they're not telling anybody cuz someone's gonna kick their ass if they knew that they were gay now yes gay people are still discriminated against but it's so much better than it was then what you don't wanna what I think people are advocates don't want to say is well there's no problem anymore because then you can allow them to still run into troubles in various circumstances even though the trouble they run into today is a thousand times less than the trouble they ran to and right a little same thing holds for racism same thing holds for sexes and they've all gotten so much better but and sexual violence is a perfect example you know if you look at if you said this is in Pinker's book a few set rape and homicide - you call it both of them whatever level they are in 1970 to a hundred and then you track them through to the early 2000s homicide in the u.s. homicides dropped down to like 50 rapes dropped down to like 25 but if you listen to women's advocacy groups about campus sexual assault and stuff you'd never know that and the reason you wouldn't know it is because they people worry well if you think the problems getting better on its own then you won't keep doing anything to help fix it and that's a really unfortunate part of our psychology because it makes people feel like there's been no progress and when you feel like there's no progress then you think well maybe we need to completely overturn the whole system and something new and that's of course the point of Pinker's newest book enlightenment now know things are going freaking great turn it anarchy and all those things are really bad ideas voting for somebody like trumps a really bad idea because things are actually running along really nicely it's just that we tend to forget it because every advocacy group who's all worried about whatever their particular issue is doesn't want the word to get out that things are a lot better than they used to be because I think it's some fundamental level they think well twenty five rapes here isn't bad enough we better say that there's a hundred you know I'm not saying they do this consciously but of course twenty five rapes here whatever the number is is bad enough right it doesn't it doesn't have to be the numbers that it used to be when I was a child to be a problem it all has to be is a number above zero well there seems to the people develop this vested interest in promoting an idea and they want to exaggerate that idea whatever it is whether it's the idea that the world is a safer place than it actually is or whether it's the world is an idea of a more danger more dangerous place than it really is and for whatever reason once we have it in our mind that this is the thing we're married to we're married to this concept of polyamorous life and that this is a natural way to live or that you know violence is inevitable and then this is just a part of who we are we tend to promote that and we tend to have massive confirmation bias and it's it's I think it's because we personally associate ourselves with ideas we don't look at ideas as being a thing like if you think that something is one way and then you're pointed towards evidence that you're incorrect you feel like personally you've been slighted or you're being somehow somehow you're being diminished by your lack of being correct but your incorrect assumptions and notions you're absolutely right that is a weird and part of being a person it's a very weird part of it being a person it's the hardest part about being a scientist because every good scientist is wrong all the time mm-hm I've been wrong already on your show right and so it's super hard to admit because by human nature you just want you wanna my immediate reactions to fight against it and not to say well hold on what's Jo saying you know he's right I overstated that let's back off right and so there's this really lovely paper that came out in 2011 by Mercier and Dan's Berber and what they argued is I think they nailed it and they said here's what it is our brain actually we evolved our logical process singing abilities not to find out the truth of the world but to convince you of my point of view and so which does our logical abilities evolved in service of persuasion not in service of seeking out the truth because of course if I can persuade you that the world is the way it would and in a way that benefits bill that the world is you know something about the way bill wants the world to be is true then the world's gonna be a little kinder to me it'll fit my worldview and others will give me the things I want and so I go through life trying to persuade you of my worldview rather than trying to find out what's actually out there and so that's why you think oh well smart people are gonna fall for that no smart doesn't matter how smart you are you you you're using whatever brain power you have not to define the truth but rather to find evidence for your particular point of view well I see I think it's also a byproduct of ignorance because for the longest time you could tell me something and there was very little way that I could find out whether or not you're right or not I really couldn't no you're correct unless I went and started doing research and read some books and whereas now I could just pull up my phone and say hey Bill just said this is that right and then the phone will go no there's been a hundred different Saturdays each other and you go oh look motherfucker yeah I got the stats that's true and that definitely matters a lot it's it's the this awesome democratization of knowledge but if that really were all that it was then everybody would agree on their politics everybody would agree that the fake news was fake and the real news was real not necessarily because this is a fairly recent invention but what I'm getting at is that I think that the ability to be deceptive was perhaps there was an evolutionary advantage oh absolutely yeah so that's one of the very first things that happens when you have theory of mind because as soon as I realize the contents of your mind differ from the contents of my own I say oh I can plant something in Joe's mind that'll help me that ain't true but if he believes it his life will be better for me right and so as soon as kids learn theory of mind at age four they start to lie prior to theory of mind they tell the truth when it's like um where are you you know plane I think I'm right here dead you're supposed to keep quiet but they can't because they don't understand that you don't know the same things they know right yeah and they also understand that they could perhaps change the way you feel about them by manipulating truth manipulating information yeah it's what's weird is having kids and seeing kids that grow up in troubled homes one one thing you see almost universally is if those kids lie a lot you know there's no choice condition right yeah you're in a bad spot and like one of my daughter's little friends is constantly lying that you know she has a broken home and the situation's not good and it's just it's unfortunate but this little kid is tormented because of it she's always making stuff up and all the other little girls roll their eyes and they know she's a liar and it's it's sad but the ability to be deceptive I feel like that you know this is there's some sort of idea that we cling to that if you can deceive someone about certain particular aspects of your mind or your past or what you've what you've accomplished or what you you're capable of doing that you will have a better place in the social chain no that's absolutely right and so the way I think about it is think about the difference between cons specific conflicts conflicts between members of the same species and conflicts between predator and prey so every time predator and prey interact eventually one of them's gonna die the others gonna start off prey is gonna get eaten right yeah but when conspecifics members the same species interact and we're competing over something even if it's a very subtle level of competition we don't want to come to blows because if I'm trying to size you up be it physical blows or mental blows we there's suffering on eat both sides if we have to duke it out and so I want to sell myself as being a little more than I really am I want to be bill plus 20% and you want to say yourself is a little more than you really are because we know that we're not fully gonna test each other because there's negative consequences for testing and whenever there's negative consequences even for the winner for testing there's a lot of posturing that's gonna go on and that posturing is something that's literally built into our psyche and we go through life trying to self inflate on average not a buddy does this but on average trying to self inflate as much as we can in order to gain the things in life that we might not get if we were brutally honest about what our capabilities actually are that's so fascinating that we cling to all of these ancient structures that are in place when it comes to the way we interact with each other and how important it is like the social exchanges that we have and that I think this is one of the reasons why we cling to ideas so much that these ideas right if you can push an idea through you've you've got some sort of points on the board yep you've got points on the board and probably your ideas on average are gonna benefit you and my ideas on average around benefit me and so if I'm if I'm happily married in a monogamous relationship and I'm not looking around well then monogamy is the great thing and sleeping around is a sin but if I'm then it's if I'm single and I've got opportunities well then I probably hold alternative view some on average are views perfectly but on average our views serve as well and if I can plant my views in your mind and I've benefitted yeah I saw that a lot I mean you're glad you see that a lot with everything but I guess what we're talking about people that don't want to admit like what about when it comes to like Pinker's data about the world being a better place because they have almost a vested interest and stirring up fear and they're committed that in their mind they're committed to constantly studying the the the wrongs of the world and the evil of the world and that any sort of diminishing of that is actually going to cause harm to the people that are suffering yeah I think they have a good purpose in their mind there's good intention I totally agree yeah and the data are consistent with their strategies because on average fear appeals and anger appeals work a whole lot better than hey man things are great donate to this cause and we'll keep them great it doesn't work at all and so when when viagra was invented in 1989 my little brother and I were chatting about it and we thought you know this will save some animals because there's a lot of animals that are consumed for their presumed potency effects by like traditional Chinese medicine consumers and things like that and so we thought boy viagra actually works prior to viagra nothing is out there that works up at this 11 impact and so we wrote this little letter off sent it to a journal and said you know that this is gonna save certain animals like seals which they could be harvested to eat their penises Canadian seals I know what I know people that you're you're allowed to kill a certain number you can't kill the seals in America they're protected but in Canada a US but in Canada you can there's a hood seal a laminate allotment and a harp seal allotment and so people are killing up to their allotments and selling you could do it solely for the penis and sell the penis for enough money to make your money back now what purpose does the seals penis have beyond the seals original purpose zilch right but they eat it because it's supposed to make you more potent hey saddest one is a rhino horn right rhino horn is an example that's used for lots of different things so it's less likely to be helped but the seal penis is only you know people basically only using it first potency and then when Viet comes along like literally you're shopping in the supermarket whether you get hit by you're gonna get I'll have some seal penis or I'll take a Viagra well we just said people are gonna switch we were greedy you throw both yeah right try them both and and people did actually but but we we made this argument and we literally were attacked by the World Wildlife Fund government looking at plan to revive seal penis what hold the fuck on is this recent it's was update as published and 2015 but it was updated this May what the government is looking at a plan go back up to revive seal penis sales okay this must be a plan was brought to the government this must not be the worst way of like looking at that headline is that the government's thinking man we got to fucking revive these penis sales no one's buying seal but their mate because they actually maybe thinking that because you've got some relatively impoverished people who are hunting for them and no one's buying them anymore so if you're not gonna whale that if you're not not real the report drafted by the fur Institute there you go see is aimed at creating new markets to support an earlier proposal to kill a hundred and forty thousand grey seals over five years in the southern Gulf of st. Lawrence 70 percent of gray seals that frequent the area so they're what they want to do is they want to diminish that okay so here's what it is they have long complained that the growing population of gray seals is to blame for eating too many commercially viable fish which has resulted in repeated calls for a call okay so they want to kill the seals so to save the fish market so they're gonna get people to buy dicks right so they make it financially viable look at this this is racist the penises of juvenile adult animals may be dried and sold as sexual enhancement products particularly to Asian buyers well that's because it's not meant to be racist is because in traditional Chinese medicine the seal penis was used as a potency product I understand but the target those Asians those poor fools well they're not profiles anymore because you know what they switched so we write this paper and literally the World Wildlife Fund attacks and I did not see that coming right I thought boy the World Wildlife Fund is gonna be psyched because here's some good news for a change right but they don't want good news they only want bad news because people pay and they do what they can to fix things when it's bad news they and they forget that you got to have some good news along the way or people give up look at this this says here Asian consumers particularly athletes also consume a beverage called honey say that dilution oral liquid that is made from seal penis and testicles which they believe to be energizing and performance-enhancing how about some studies motherfucker before you start eating sealed dicks why would you take that when you can get fucking viagra exactly guarantee a viagra is better it is I mean if it's not better it's good enough like what are you trying to do so so we actually because we got attacked by the world well of fun we sent to one of my Ida graduate student from Hong Kong we descent him to go back to Hong Kong for the holidays to go back to you well the World Wildlife Fund because they said that we're wrong people won't switch they said what how would that how did they phrase it well they wrote an article they rebutted us and they said no no our data show when we tried to get people to switch from rhino and tiger horn to aspirin they wouldn't and so they want yeah so they won't switch to viagra and I'm like look I think fire is different from aspirin I got a headache I take an aspirin see yeah I think my headache got better faster than it would have otherwise a little bit vague you need a viagra you take it you're like yep that sucker worked right there's visual evidence and so we argue that it's different and so we actually went into these clinics and we asked people in traditional Chinese clinics in Hong Kong what do you take for a headache what do you take for gout what do you take for wrecked-tile dysfunction and that was the one case where they'd switched so consumers all over the world they know when a better product comes along they know when they've got no options like well you might as well eat ooh seals penis because that's as good as anything or because nothing works maybe you'll get a little bit of a placebo effect or you know oh hey look there's something that actually works that's what I'm gonna buy what I read about the one of the issues with rhino horn with some Asian buyers is that also it's a it's a signal of affluence that's exactly right yeah it's prestige purchase it's so super sad as shit ever because that is such a crazy animal but bizarre creature that almost seems like a living dinosaur it looks it and we're losing them left and right because people are killing them for their fucking horn which is basically just collagen right now it's fingernail yeah that's bananas it just doesn't make any sense to me that that is still that they haven't realized that there's no value in it there's no physical value it doesn't really give you erections and supposed to do fever it's got a long list unfortunately and they're still buying it and there's no but and they're buying it again yeah for affluence like they get it exactly it's like buying a Maserati wow that's so crazy that's so sad oh my daughter's outside the door hi get out here you bother us yeah it's so strange to me that there are these specific cases right like it's not like people are looking for giraffe horns looking for rhino horn like what do you think that they made an association like damn if I was Jack I know there's chicks like me I need to get that horn and eat it might get hard like I do think so because if you look at the long list of products they look pretty phallic and mostly people eat phallic things in order to gain potency is there something crazy about seal dicks like what's there decently sized decent a good word for that I like that and so you know you think oh I eat that sucker I'll get big too right we're so weird but it's so weird that in in the face of new evidence that people haven't adopted you know this new evidence and they still claim at least some people claim to yes so our our pre-modern ancestors didn't understand germs at all right there was no way they could have it's such a bizarre idea that something that small could kill you but they did know that if I touched you when you were sick I might end up sick too and that seems almost like a magical transference and if you accept this and they all know that like they they'll they'll shy away we all evolved chimpanzees that will shy away from disgusting stuff and open sores and and people yeah yeah absolutely if you get the right kinds of illness that that that manifests that you're seriously outwardly sick and contagious we're gonna find it disgusting and so that kind of magical contagion it's super easy to see wow that well then it'd make you think that while rhino horn will make my dick bigger too yeah I guess I mean are there any ants since this where that stuff is real where it does actually work that way nothing I know I can't think of any but it is the case that that you you being sick will make me sick no question but nothing that what you eat an animals thing you consume no but if it is the case imagine that like after you and I chat you say hey bill here have my jacket and now I go out with your jacket on and people go oh man he's got Joe Rogan's jacket he's cool and I've got a little bit of your cool and now the girls are like me too that does happen like when Hercules put that lion's head on that you you kicked some ass to have that thing that's true yeah yeah I guess you know it's just manure we yeah just a human animal itself is just such a strange thing and the more you study it the more you go deeper and deeper into the layers of weirdness that we are yeah and and psychology is pretty good about finding out our average weirdnesses we're not so good at finding out they're really unusual weirdnesses because we can't predict that one out of a thousand behavior very well we can break what people tend to do when the bell curves tend to split we can't say with some random psycho or genius or artist or whatever will do under those circumstances because that's not what our models are designed for yeah it's um it's it's so interesting when you think about our interactions also with all the various animals that we've come up you come across like all all throughout our our life as human beings and that people have chosen some to some to cherish and some to some to take on as food sources and some to worship and right and and often it makes good sense like so dogs are great because we have great vision so our noses and ears don't work very well if we could have somebody around who could hear and smell well and is on our side that's a huge plus right that's worth feeding that thing or at least tolerating it and it eats the scraps and some of them are cats you know they're knowing they don't like you but they're good at killing rats and other vermin that would have once we were agriculturalists those kind of vermin would have been a real problem they'd have been largely irrelevant when we're still hunter-gatherers but so we we had dogs we domesticated those while we were hunter-gatherers but cats the best I know it was like ancient Egypt and these these societies are not storing grain and things like that so those ancient systems make good sense you're making a deal with an animal that can achieve something that you can't achieve and of course you're living in a world without chemicals and machines and all that kind of stuff but tons of them are just totally random and in this culture that thing is a worshiped in this culture it's eaten and you know and that that sort of stuff is super hard to predict now in studying all this stuff and writing this book how much does this change the way you just see humans like as you're just going to the mall okay it does change it right so you see like I remember being proud of my son when he told a lie because I was like oh good on you mate and so we're in the poor in the playground and this little boys playing with him and my son doesn't have a lunchbox at all he doesn't own one and the little boy says I got a spider-man lunchbox and my son is like four four and a half and he looks at the kid and he doesn't know his fighter minutes because he hasn't seen the show yet but he knows it's offic the kids bragging it's obviously something good and he goes yeah I got a grassman and a leaf man lunchbox nobody he just made the shit up right because spiders right the Spider Man there's a grasp and he's looking around for other things right and so I was actually proud of him because it showed a he's got theory mine down he knows what the kid can and can't know and B he knows that telling these stories are gonna be important for his place in the social hierarchy so the kid looks at me and I'm like trying not to laugh right cuz I got to support my son and he's like really and I'm like damn right kid and so you you can imagine that it without this background you might say look we should discourage this kind of line right but it gives you a little bit of a different perspective on it's also probably weird because you you know your kid realizes yeah my dad's got my back well that's good thanks bro exactly and then she'd always have your kids back yeah but grass man and leaf man you got a poem aside like dude try to do something that's got what Congrats man actually do besides photosynthesize but he was on the spur of the moment and he's only four so I decided it was good enough yeah and then is also cattle worshiping is very fascinating to the like the Hindus and all these different different tribes and different cultures that worshipped cattle where other people just thought of them as food sources right and so again now I don't know the origins that you can imagine a system whereby well if you keep cattle and you benefit from them rather than eating them you're gonna get some gains from that and we do know when you shift from being on together to basically kill in and eat and stuff to being a pastoralist so you're you have cattle or sheep or whatever or to being a farmer you suddenly have to start taking on the long game so humans are perfectly capable of envisioning unfelt needs no matter what kind of society they're in but hunter-gatherers are living for today and so it's it's kill it you know hunt it share it out amongst all of us and then we eat it and then we'll worry about tomorrow when it comes along well once you shift to having herds or having land you can't that psychology doesn't work anymore and so what's super interesting is it took literally like 10 or 20,000 years we've got the implements in place to be agricultural as but we're not planting and it just were just grinding stuff that we gather and why did it take so long to plant well maybe it was weather maybe it was a bunch of things but part of is you have to shift your psychology over and say all right I got to stop thinking about eating killin a nyan it today I got to say well all right well would it be beneficial to me to keep this beast around and have it for tomorrow and drink its blood or its milk or whatever and one way to get there might have been well let's let's create a religion that says we can't eat them today because that'll solve it immediately right that's one way to look at it but have you ever looked into some of the other hypothesis on the origin of cattle worship I think it again has to do with psilocybin because they know that could be totally cool right growing cow shit and that'd be totally cool and not only that but it would because it has benefits so like societies can do anything they want right and there's some crazy systems that they do and a lot of those are really bad ideas they're sources of infection and disease and death and those societies tend not to grow but societies that do things that happen to be good ideas even if they got it from mushrooms and things like that those are gonna really pass along and so you got a lot of people on this planet to worship cows which suggests that whatever got that started actually probably had a benefit because those societies grew and because worshipping cows not something like when you come to me and say man I worship cows and I'm thinking okay I'd rather eat them but fine right it's hard to imagine being persuaded but it's easy to imagine growing up in that system over imitating right we talked about that you automatically just copy dad worships cows things are working out well for him I'll do the same right and then you've got and that good thing for your society - because you can drink its blood or its milk or whichever you're lactose tolerant whatever you do and then that allows your society to grow was there anything surprising to you in in writing this book and researching it and putting it together was there anything that really just had made you step back and go wow I didn't see that one coming look there's a lot of things that I didn't see coming and a lot of times where I thought I had an idea of how it all worked and then I thought I would read a lot of more papers and I go that's not even possible they didn't have that capability or whatever what what surprised me was that I a big part of the where this book comes from is that then colleagues would say they would know I'm working on this and they'd say well come give a talk at my conference on leadership and I'd say well I don't know anything about leadership well surely something it must have implications for that and every time they ask me to do that you know I'd say okay I'll give it a try and then literally you sit down and think about it you guys wow there are important implications for leadership or innovation or happiness or sociality and I never saw them coming and so as literally friends of mine kind of forced I had one goal which is just understand social intelligence and how did we become so socially intelligent and the and that was where I started and friends just kept asking me to look at other things and every time I did there was an answer sometimes there was an answer that's easier to find and it's harder to find but it was always there and what that tells me is that there's really a lot of value and taking the anthropology in the biology and putting them together and saying alright where do we come from and now what can that tell us about who we are today that's an interesting stuff like sort of a intellectual exercise to write a different perspective on the material that you're going over is somebody forces you into a little box like tell me you know what what happened you know what's the influence on or what the impact on creativity yeah what's the impact on leadership or all these different yeah yeah yeah just to give you a different view let's look at it from the left let's look at it from the top from below and now it's so fun about Sciences you could say all right well let's see if it tells us anything that either we already know is true and now we could get new things that we would know about it or if it tells us something that we don't even know but that might explain the way the world is and both of those are valuable because then you can run off and try to test them and a lot of dead ends I mean that's what science is all about but some of them will hopefully not be dead ends and you'll run off and test and say holy shit now understand innovation now I understand whatever what's interesting about this kind of material is that it gives you did me as a individual gives me insight in my own behavior and I think it would do a lot of people do all of us some real good if we had a better understanding of what our motivations are and how we got to this point in civilization what we actually are you know I mean maybe a will or won't change your behavior but at least it'll give you some insight into oh I totally agree and the thing is that when I find myself getting upset because you disagree with me about something trivial or even important like politics or something and it takes a second you gotta stop say hold on I don't have any privileged access to the right way to do things right and so the fact that you care more about X and I care more about why doesn't mean that you're like an evil person and must be overcome it means that probably we ought to be talking to each other and trying to find a compromise solution that makes things work best but there's this automatic incident I think that you are evil absolutely and so the beauty of this kind of more you know about this stuff in the past and our evolution our origins the more you know that literally we've evolved to do that because if we didn't do that we're screwed but now we don't need to anymore and so now we can say well hold on I'm a lefty and you're you know in my example you're a righty and we disagree about this particular president but a fine let's see if we can both agree on a goal that will make both of us happy rather than oh you're evil and all I have to do is overcome you one of the things that I've really tried very hard from doing this podcast is to not be attached ideas and to do that as an exercise and I think over the course of the years I've been doing this I've gotten way way better at that but it's it's just so fascinating when I encounter in the raw form like when I go to a party and I just run into some guy was a dad and he brings something up and I tell mom it's not totally true because of this and then you see this like the blood starts yeah pumping and the heart starts beating and they're trying to look at some way you're wrong and you know it becomes a personal thing it gets very very heated and it's easy for all of us to do that and my job and your job is the same it's to say okay is it time to abandon this ideas or time to defend yeah and when I was young in an academic there was no way I was abandoning that was lost all I was gonna do was defend so you attacked me and I Marshall everything I can and I to attack you back and it was some of my colleagues are like hey man you know it's when you're wrong it's cool that's what science is and I'm like ah you're right you're right I've got it started and so now even though I love the give-and-take of academics and I love to argue about stuff I try really really hard to keep in my mind well what if what you're saying right now is right rather than trying to just attack it which is my automatic instinct to say well what of what of it that you're saying now might be a value that I should actually be incorporating and not trying to stomp on yeah and also just the ideas aren't you exactly you're you and these ideas are just something that you're tossing around like a beach ball yeah exactly right and that's super hard to keep in mind because everything that we come to own we get attached to and if I tend to have my ideas because they tend to make the world a more hospitable place to bill then in a way I kind of do need to defend them because if you convince me know the way the world should work is whoever is strongest gets everything well I'm stuffed and so I need to try to fight against a lot of alternative views and and I have to overcome that in my effort to define what the right answer is as well so it's good makes good sense that our ideas of like possessions that we have attitudes toward our ideas just like we have toward the objects that we own that means something to us to our family to our group etc that all makes really good sense and and the other side of that coin is if we talking about the way things used to be in a pre-medical world if you're the chances of you carrying different pathogens and I carry is reasonably high and if you infect me I'm screwed now if you do things differently than I do things so you eat this food and I eat that food well it different could actually be wrong from my perspective because if I do what you've done I might get myself sick because you've adapted to that that thing and so we literally probably for good evolutionary reasons came to view cultural ways of doing things that are different as if they're wrong because that saved us that protected us from the kind of pathogen vectors that you've gotten adapted to but that I haven't that's fascinating so that this is almost like ingrained in us yeah well it's we've evolved to be this way and so it's hard to undo that do you think that with the access to information that we're currently enjoying that because there's so much information now and it's so easy to get to that perhaps there'll be more instances of people not becoming attached to their ideas and recognizing that they are there they are separate the you are just a thinking organism and what the facts are and what reality is is just something that's happening and you don't have to be personally attached to it it's not a part of your identity yeah I hope so because in an ideal world we could have the things that were attached to that don't really matter I'm an iPhone guy and you're an Android right who cares right we could argue about it and be silly and exactly exactly we could still be friends and all that and then we could when there's something that mattered and know this this political strategy will make everyone poorer or sicker or whatever then we could be willing to change their minds because in the end I think we've got this evolved desire to latch onto these things these ideas and values and and products even and I all that and so it'd be nice if we could do it with the trivial and let the stuff that really matters guide our us by its accuracy well it'd be also nice if that the stuff that we do with trivial it stays actually trivial yeah because there's so many people and well I guess it goes with sports teams and but it also goes with like brands of cars like I've heard people say I've always been a Ford guy I love for it's like okay yeah I probably remind you the Ford your dad drove or whatever I guess but it's like I would never buy a Chevy alright okay look really never it's funny is like what if the best fucking car was a Chevy and you have the opportunity to buy like no no I'm a Ford guy like right wait what benefit would some strange reason this there's some weird motivation to stick to your initial statements yeah so I think it's like all our Wendell Holmes or someone who's had a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin to small minds right but we all have these consistencies ass because part of the problem is if I move around with the wind you look at me as I'm a nothing right I can't stand flop if I can't stand by what I believe in then you have no respect for me but what if you boot what if you what you believe in is incorrect right that's that's my Psicosis probably into that right and so that's that's where it gets real right and so what you obviously would you ideally want it's here's my value structure and it's unchangeable and then negotiable yes and yet when you show me that I'm in that my attitudes are impeding my own goals then I'm willing to change them to achieve that value structure and and I think the best politicians and scientists and artists and comedians and all the rest are the ones who can do that yeah well I like what you said like here's my value structure this is these are my ethics these are my morals this is how I treat people this is who I am but all that other stuff is just information yeah it's all means to an end and so some people care a lot about loyalty other people care a lot about fairness other people care a lot about sanctity and purity right there's different values that are important all of the world we all care about them but some people wait one set more important more than another set yeah John Hyde if you I don't know if you've had him on your show he does this work and he's one of the first people to push these ideas and you can predict them by people's politics and stuff like that and so if we all agree they all matter but the problem is then we get into an argument where you tell me loyalty is more important than I tell you fairness or harm is more important and then we're never gonna see eye to eye you know with two humans that are healthy that's an interesting discussion because why do you think fairness is more important why do I think discipline is more important than fairness or education is more whatever it is hey I think that when someone clings to this idea that this is the most significant aspect of human civilization that's always weird yeah and it's hard when they can't acknowledge other possibility right right and some and again all these things are I hate to say but they're like 50 percent genetic right some of us are more open-minded and some of us are more closed-minded and there's probably good reasons to be that way that made your that made you successful under one set of circumstances versus another because you know extraversion for example almost all people prefer extroverts over introverts but extroverts are all sorts of risk for disease because they're constantly up in everyone's face and so in ancestral environments it was probably pretty costly to be extroverted and you'd you paid a price and that introverts didn't have to pay when you got sick there's also like we gain so much creativity and insight from introvert of course no but it but but at a social level extroverts benefit introverts might benefit by then running Microsoft and being the greatest artist and all that and that's again this band that we talked about this earlier the beauty about being human is how many different ways you can achieve the same goal yeah what are your thoughts on the influence of epigenetics look it's super interesting so my my I know little about it very little about it my behavioral genetics colleague insists that there's no good evidence among humans from multi-generational epigenetic effects we know that they exist now in some animals we can do the experiments pretty easily to get these multi-generational epigenetic epigenetic effects plain to people what we're talking about yeah so epigenetics is basically you can turn genes on and off in the simplest sense and so environmental factors will matter like maybe when you're in utero there's a famine and that's a common thing that's looked at well look at that in in rats for example will under feed the mother when the baby's in there and that causes the babies methylation of some of the genes I don't understand the science of it at all but it turns some genes on and some genes off and so a baby of a mother rat who was raised who was in utero when the mother was under fed will mature more rapidly it'll eat everything that's not nailed down and it'll have sex with lots more rats than unregular than a rat that wasn't it didn't have its mother starved and the key thing is that makes good sense because it's a way to respond to times of famine grow as fast as you can reproduce as quickly as you can because you know reproductions the currency of evolution the fact that you exist and live is trivial the fact that you passed on your genes that's what evolution works with so it's a great way to change with the local environment and there's some very interesting evidence that then those effects are even in the next generation so the the child of a rat that was that was in a mother who was underfed will also have some of these strategies didn't believe they find that in humans as well we all have suffered from famine that's the argument but none of the data my behavioral genetics says none of those data are robust enough it's sort of like some of the Christians you made of what I've said and you're right the data suggests things that might be but there's lots of alternative explanations right so we don't yet know I mean I've read is about longevity and that there was some sort of evidence that points to the the descendants of people who survived famine they they live longer right and so the the question might be why and so we know for example that if you're in utero during famine males are more likely to be aborted than females when it gets really bad mmm female fetuses are probably more robust but if you ignore that gender effect in all probability those fetuses that could survive and a mother during famine might just be the more robust specimens right and so you might just be calling out the people who wouldn't have lived as long Brian and so it's super hard you know you don't do experiments on these things in humans you can do experiments on mice and rats and and try to find these things out the downside is you know if you've read about a million cancer drugs that are really gonna help us and they disappear it's because it works in a mouse and it doesn't work in us and the downside of these things is even mice and rats differ from each other and so and we're a long way from either of them and so their epigenetic effects that they show there may be good reason why we don't yeah there's some real ethical questions in regard to running studies like that on human being exactly we're gonna have to develop headless humans in a lab that have no soul that we could do tests on but we could but I actually think that what will get really good at is the issue you raised earlier and that is I don't know everything that's ever happened to you but someday it'll be possible to know a ton of that stuff yeah and I'll be able to rule out all sorts of alternative causes and Diet is a perfect example you guys talk about that a lot in the show well how do we know that this particular collection of foods will actually do you any good how do we know how well people are sticking to it and a big part of those effects are actually the psychological effects so protein is a really good example that you know Steve Simpson argued in the early 90s that if you he started with locusts that animals are motivated to eat as a function of how much protein that they've consumed and so the Atkins diet was the right idea but a misunderstanding of the cause it's just that protein we evolved to feel full when you get protein we didn't evolve to feel full from carbohydrates and there's a host of reasons for that and there's a host of other effects that are going on at the same time but the consequence of that is then when people's diets move around you say oh look this diet is this effect and that one doesn't but you don't actually know what they've been doing because some diets are harder to maintain and they're cheating more or whatever someday we'll have much better evidence and all that you'll be wearing a device I'll know once you consume don't know an accelerometer on the wall everything that happened to you well that's another interesting aspect of genetics right there's one thing that we absolutely know is that some people respond differently to diets and other people do and you know for some person a particular type of diet is like beneficial and perfect and just locks in and other person it would be horrible yeah absolutely that's weird you know no it cross the species you know find out with dogs or but it at an ethnic level perfect yes because the people who've been eating different foods for a long period of time after to adapt to them yet and of coarse aggregate sir is only 12,000 years old total although we've been eating cereals before that and lots of societies didn't have it at all or only had it very recently and so it's super hard for some people eat grains compared to other people to eat grains because they're they haven't adapted either diabetes wise or all the other kinds of things that it can cause it to go wrong certainly with alcohol that's a giant yeah exactly an alcohol it gets invented every time someone invents agriculture because all you do is you accidentally leave it there too long and then ferments right and so the and there's an argument that we actually evolved to have a tolerance for beer rather than a distaste for it because once we're in early agricultural settlements for the first time ever were crapping where we're drinking we're not moving on and so we foul our own drinking water so beers literally safer to drink than water beer and wine low grade alcohol and so what the data said suggests what people argue is that we evolved to actually have a taste for it but by the tolerance to it rather than a distaste for which would make sense evolutionarily it's getting drunk with hippos running around can't be a good idea also if you think about wine or any booze the first time you drink it it's disgust yeah yeah it's hard to develop a taste for it's exactly right and so and lots of things that that way Tabasco you know lots of these spices have antibacterial effects yeah and so the mothers are giving it to the kids we're like on my mouth to be on fire if I ate with some six-year-old Candide in India or something wasn't that initially why they added wasabi to sushi that's what a lot of people argue and in fact as you work your way from the poles to the equator you get more and more spices because of course in Sweden there's six pathogens and you got salt and pepper and in jungle and then Africa you have a gazillion spices to do garlic all these things are super powerful antibacterials wow that is a really interesting way of looking at it yeah I'm sure right like Mexico very high in spicy food warm climate totally makes sense exactly and the same thing happens we've found the profusion of religions and languages the closer you get to the equator the more right languages you have and the more religions you have because people start saying you know on the other side of the valley literally you could have a pathogen that makes me sick and so I'm gonna stay away from you and by staying away from you over time we develop different languages different religions again back to Sweden whatever you got I got there's three things to have right and so you're not a risk to me and we share the same language we intermingle much more readily and there's more ethnocentrism as you go close to the equator Wow to keep and keeping apart makes good evolutionary sense under those circumstances but we live in a world where no one's keeping apart exact now we live in a world where it makes it much much more difficult and you don't necessarily stay in our in our blessed industrialized democracies where we've got good medicines at least for now they still work you don't need to anymore right but we also have these crazy factory farming setups that lead to the kind of horrible superbugs that can kill a million handle yeah we do it I remember when I first found that out that most of the major flus like avian flu swine flu I didn't know why they were calling it the swine flu yeah and then I found out no it's from domesticated pigs and it's somehow morphed and jumps to humans like why and that was the cost we paid with agriculture so the first time we were starting to get we are cheek by jowl with a bunch of animals and agriculture I'm gonna have to gathers eat them they the animal never lives long enough to give you the flu right Wow so everything you know there's always pluses and minuses when you change how you do things and we you and I are really lucky we live in a time where all these great medicines exist and they haven't become worthless yet and now it's really a race against the if all evolution of the bacteria and us devising new medicines that can continue to defeat them because everything is becoming treatment resistant right that's how evolution works and and that's just starting to happen and so now scientists have to work double time to keep inventing new drugs to stay ahead of the game with the exception of some things that just for whatever reason bacteria don't seem to be all of all resistances to them well what's fascinating to me is not just scientists creating these vaccines and all these different medicines to deal with these diseases but the potential of shutting off genes the potential of altering the human genome and using things like whatever the the future version of CRISPR is going to be to I mean they've already figured out a way to stop certain diseases right so those single gene things are great yeah remember with everything being so polygenic you don't just want to shut shit down willy-nilly right and so then really what you're at the advantage is the point you made earlier so my diet should be 60% protein in your should be 15 percent or mine should have more leafy vegetables than yours whatever and we'll be able to know that well know how my guts gonna respond to it and how you're gonna respond to it well that's one of the things that 23andme actually does they do they do show like what foods you'd be more likely to be allergic to and what things might be most likely to be directed and that's a great start but what we really need is to polygenic scores to tell you how do you process leafy vegetables how do you process fats how do you process all that stuff yeah and so because you know genes account for most of our weight that's most of the variance in our weather or obese or not but nobody was obese when you and I were kids Brian tons of people are obese now so what those genes really are is genes to sensitivity to something change in our environment either activity levels of the foods reading or how process they are or how much carbs or whatever we don't know but that's what we're actually genetically sensitive to because all of us have the same underlying problem that evolution didn't really worry about obesity because the problem was the opposite starving yeah and so we're not really good at telling when we're full and there's interesting evidence that suggests some really lovely studies that show that really one of the key guides of appetite was variety when you eat a lot less variety your that's when your stomach tells you you're full really much more reliably but as you add variety to your diet which everybody on earth can do now well everybody's got any money on earth can do now that actually you you short-circuit the best mechanism we had to tell us to stop eating yeah that's interesting and now is an argument that people who are experts on nutrition are making about one of the more recent diet plans that people using the carnivore diet is that just eating only meat and there's a lot of people that are doing that and they're finding that they're having all these like really rapid decreases in autoimmune diseases and rapid recoveries from eczema and seborrhea and psoriasis and the people that are a lot of people are saying oh it's the meat meats great for you meats great for him and some nutrition experts saying more likely this is a calorie like you're at a calorie deficit right and by putting your body into a calorie deficit you're almost like in a state of fasting and you're decreasing your body weight because almost universally all these people that are there talking about the positive benefits of these diets these elimination diets and just eating one thing one of the things that they're showing is they lose a shitload of weight right and so the thing is that I suspect you right that either they're cutting out what for them is the perpetrator and who would ever know out of the 4,000 things right or it's literally the losing weight and then hopefully they're taking multivitamins to make up for all the stuff that they're not getting right yeah I don't think they are a lot of them are not doing that it's really interesting I've been following it pretty closely and I've had quite a few people in the podcast including really intelligent guys like Jordan Peterson is on this and does in salt right and for me that wouldn't work although I am I meet in fruit basically and then very little else what about grief you leafy green vegetable I know I should but I don't like them so I yeah I edible oh I know I should so I my my wife makes them and I'll eat a little bit of it but like a little kid yeah I know I know but in my way it's like no I know and your 8 year olds right now by the way it turns out there are genes that make people find broccoli more disgusting and and more at a more bitter versus less bitter so some people really have their tongue says no broccoli is recalled as being a little baby gene but the one thing I would say there's this really lovely study done with that musics and what they did is they fed people a couple different foods and you try a few and then you eat one until you're full and then when you come back to I don't know if you know this work like Paul rosin started with them musics if you if I if you're densely on music so I talked to you I leave the room I come back five minutes later you don't know who I am and you got brain damage when I come back with lunch literally you lead a second lunch we have such poor mechanism that tells us we're full we think we do we think oh I've had a great dinner I'm really full but we don't realize is that's really driven a lot by the knowledge that we just ate Wow and so what rosin found when he went back in debt he had eat lunch to you're full he goes back in says have time for lunch and literally they all eat it again and so what's what's amazing about these studies is then this follow-up study what they did is they served a music sore control for people foods that they sampled and food that they till their full so you sample potato chips and then you eat a tuna sandwich and now I come back to you and say if you're a normal and I say do you want to eat a potato chip do you want to eat a tuna sandwich if you're normally say well I just had lunch I'm not really that keen deed either of them anymore if you're on music you say I don't want a tuna sandwich but yeah I'll have some potato chips and so you don't even need to know you ate it and and so your hunger mechanism is still there but the fact is you've had a lot of tuna sandwich and that's controlling your appetite it's making you feel like you don't want to eat it anymore and so in the same sense you go to steak house you think well I love this my favorite steak I can eat a forever and then you finish it or not and then you think oh I'm stuffed that somebody goes dessert actually yeah that does sound good because now you're shifting and you're eating something else and so I suspect that what guided our ancestors was the fact they had no variety what's for dinner was not a question you ever asked when it whatever dad killed him whatever mom dug up like there's two things there right right and so you're gonna gorge on the meat there's not a vegetarian hunter-gatherer on the planet you when you when you're hungry every day everybody loves me it's not only whatever you can everybody loves it and every time together Society Mead is a big deal someone comes home with a big kill it's a big deal when you can afford to be very well fed suddenly you can start to think differently and even have different preferences but you don't if you're on together and so literally if dad killed a giraffe you're just stuffing as much to rough me down the pipe as you can and it makes sense of you to then evolved okay you're gonna get nothing new out of the giraffe you eat other than you're gonna pull it out the back end it's time to shut this dinner down right but if you told me oh look we've we've got this other thing that's how well there's nutrients in that I don't already have and so you could imagine getting hungry again that's what the data suggests well it's interesting because that's kind of the argument that these carnivore diet people use is that that is the most beneficial food because that's the food that you look forward to the most it the right but don't forget you only need to do this within every meal so if you sit down for your favorite lobster dinner just have lobster and then that doesn't you have to eat it for lunch or for breakfast tomorrow now you can have whatever pancakes whatever it is the key is within every meal minimize your variety because that's where the effect is having itself it doesn't have to carry over time it doesn't mean you eat lobster every single meal you know what's interesting that's that's actually the Gracie diet there's a jiu-jitsu family called the Gracie's that started the UFC and world-famous Brazilian jiu-jitsu family but just a family Philip killers and one of the founders I believe is Carlos Gracie invented this he invented a diet that was basically you shouldn't mix foods together if you're eating fruits you should eat fruits by themselves you've meet you sheet that by itself and that in combining all these things together your body produces a variety of different enzymes you don't get as much nutritional absorption now that may be I have no idea I don't know I don't understand the underlying bioscience but what I do know the psychology suggests that you'll stop eating sooner if within any one meal you have less variety so permit a psychological level we've we appear to have evolved to not want that anymore when we've had enough of that be it a taro root or mom dug up or a giraffe our dad shot so these sort of evolutionary traits that are inside of our bodies they would they would sort of encourage us to eat much more if we have a variety of foods like if you're eating at a buffet in Vegas yeah versus if you just eating chicken that's not chicken you'll eat as much chicken as really you need and then I don't want any more chicken but if there's chicken and mashed potatoes you keep going and then coleslaw and our ancestors never face their problems to date we don't know how to deal with it right and the other side of that coin and so what Steve Simpson did this guy who did the early study on protein and locust he took his biology students on field trips and he would doctor the food to increase the protein in the food or decrease it in the food but it's the exact same foods like you're eating the same roles in the same sushi but he's you know increasing the levels of protein in those foods and then I'll it's a buffet and all he does is weigh the food when it starts and when it finishes across all the students eating it and he found that as the protein levels go up the amount of food that people eat at the buffet goes down so there's these two parallel mechanisms one were made of protein and so that seems carbs do Drive appetite but not nearly as strongly as proteins do so you the tolerance and how much carbs you lead is huge the tolerance how much proteins you lead is very narrow and he finds that of course and he finds that in crickets and now he finds it in humans and then I think the other side of that coin is this variety and the bad luck for us right now is we live in a world where especially if you're poor proteins are expensive and hard to get so you're gonna have these high carb diets and then everybody can have variety and variety is probably a really bad thing that is so fascinating is that our good fortune yeah is our demise exactly in so many ways I mean you know we evolved to seek out fat sugar and salt because there supply another now you if you eat them every time you see them you're stuffed right there everywhere man I mean everything you eat is fat sugar and so exactly and then the other and it's not just what you eat we also evolved so if there's a novel purchase person the opposite sex who comes along boy what a rare event that was maybe that sugar exactly you should jump on that train right because that'll give you new genetic opportunities but you look out the door there's novelty everywhere it's super hard it's hard to stay married in the city than it is in the country it's hard to stay married if you're celebrity than if you're a nobody because those people are just a novelty constantly they a variety constantly and the rest of us well you know there may be variety out there but they're not interested in me so it's kind of irrelevant anywhere all right bill thank you so much totally my decision I can't wait to read your book excellent up for everybody it's available right now assumption deep go get it you fucks this is awesome thank you so much thank you really fun a lot of fun thank you bye everybody [Music]

Info

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 2,034,068

Rating: 4.7657938 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE #1201, 1201, William von Hippel, Bill von Hippel, The Social Leap, psychology, comedy, comedian, jokes, stand up, funny, podcast

Id: 7Dtv8ibI1vk

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Length: 180min 24sec (10824 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018

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👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/AutoModerator 📅︎︎ Nov 13 2018 🗫︎ replies

Joe is chomping at the bit to bring up Stoned Ape Theory.

👍︎︎ 215 👤︎︎ u/chartbuster 📅︎︎ Nov 13 2018 🗫︎ replies

lol Joe is so mad he ragged on Sex at Dawn

👍︎︎ 224 👤︎︎ u/Hell0Sh1tty 📅︎︎ Nov 13 2018 🗫︎ replies

Anyone think Joe got offended by his comments on testosterone and parental abilities?

👍︎︎ 212 👤︎︎ u/theidealnumberoflett 📅︎︎ Nov 13 2018 🗫︎ replies

Lol at Joe getting to the end of his DMT rant and then not remembering how he even got there. Went full autopilot.

👍︎︎ 96 👤︎︎ u/Reptile00Seven 📅︎︎ Nov 14 2018 🗫︎ replies

JOE!!!!! not every dad takes TRT and shit that makes you’re head grow, you are not the norm.

👍︎︎ 89 👤︎︎ u/SirHypeTheDank 📅︎︎ Nov 13 2018 🗫︎ replies

This feels like culmination of all the past 1,200 episodes of chimp talk.

👍︎︎ 85 👤︎︎ u/TheFlash304 📅︎︎ Nov 13 2018 🗫︎ replies

It's so funny to watch how much Joe's skepticism differs depending on the guest.

Some health blogger states an opinion Joe agrees with: "It's crazy that mainstream science hasn't accepted this."

Professional scholar discusses studies published in prestigious journals: "I'm going to stop you right there."

👍︎︎ 240 👤︎︎ u/sau1_g0odman 📅︎︎ Nov 13 2018 🗫︎ replies

Good Joe, you're being skeptical. Almost too much so in this case maybe. My question though is why don't you question Christopher Ryan's hypotheses like that?

👍︎︎ 161 👤︎︎ u/Cryptoride 📅︎︎ Nov 13 2018 🗫︎ replies