Robert Sapolsky on science, morality, religion and human behavioral biology [Vert Dider] 2017

what science is and how and why it works [Music] good evening everyone my name is Alex I'm Olaf I'm the coordinator of the team of translators in webdiver studios so today we're interviewing our guest professor of neuroscience in Stanford University mr. Robert Sapolsky hello hi Robert she has written several books in on the topic of biology and behavior and in 2017 and 2018 a publishing house Alpena nonfiction is planning to publish three more books written by him in Russian language so you our dear viewers you probably know him as an author of the course human behavioral biology that you can find on our channel in Russian language and I would like to say thank you to our subscribers because the whole translation of the lectures was made possible by you by your support and also today most of the questions were submitted by our subscribers and we hope that Robert will answer them and I think we can start is it fine with you okay so one more time good morning Robert good morning and our first question is quite in the personal side so as we know you were born in the family of circuit immigrants so has anyone tried to teach you Russian and do you know any Russian words well I'm not sure if I actually count as being the child of Soviet immigrants in that my father came over as a boy in 1919 so I don't know he was quite Soviet yet at that point but it was certainly no more resourced and my mother came over as a fetus around 1918 they are of they were of the generation of Russian émigré who basically got to the United States and never wanted to speak a word of Russian again and there was never a question of coming back to visit so there was very little Russian growing up about the only thing I ever learned when I was in high school I was playing piano for a ballet school and I was actually quite terrible and the teacher was Russian and she's very stern and was not approving am i playing at all and I was fairly sure I was about to be fired so my father taught me on this one particular day to come in and this has been many many decades from saying this oh I have no idea if this will be the sound correct but I came in that morning and I said eustress Fatimid uncocks if I should buy a piece of okay option Photoshop then good then she was delighted and she didn't bother me anymore and I kept my job but I think that's basically been my only Russian since then but still none that very useful phrase actually it helped that the Russian I wish I knew it well I hope you have a chance maybe we'll teach you something okay next question going closer to your science so what what brought you into biology and at what age did you decide did you decide that you actually want to become a scientist well I was one of those people who figures out what he wants to do at an extremely early age I was actually about eight years old when I decided I wanted to study primate behavior out somewhere in the field in Africa um which I know is a fairly young age but I was quite set on that by the time I was about 12 years old I was I was writing letters to famous primatologist telling her how wonderful I thought they were I was my high school I was studying Swahili because I knew I would be going to work at Africa someday in East Africa so I I focused pretty early on it was not until college that I also became interested in neuroscience and moved in the direction of doing both laboratory work neuroscience and fieldwork primatology but I was one of those have been very very early age I knew what I wanted to do just a little side question how exactly at an age of eight did you realize that you want to study primate um well it's one of those when you when you meet people who do field research and as part of my work I've spent for about thirty years now I've been going back and forth between my laboratory work and studies of wild primates baboons in our National Park and in East Africa so when you meet people who do field work generally maybe about three-quarters of them come from families where they grew up having some experience with that their parents were missionaries their parents were researchers whatever so they were accustomed to that the remainder I find grew up and some just got a whole terrible urban area in the middle of something like that in my case in a not very nice neighborhood in New York City and at some point you study you discover the Natural History Museum and you suddenly realize oh my god there's like another world out there and that was my case the the American Museum of Natural History in New York City I basically like lived in there whenever possible and something about the primate section of it just caught something in me so it was at that age that I decided I was going to go do fieldwork some day that is that's awesome that's cool another kind of private question is your family religious and was there any conflict between religion and your thinking a curiosity oh man there's no conflict at all simply because I have absolutely no religious beliefs I was brought up very very strictly religious Orthodox and when I was 13 magically suddenly none of its thought to making any sense to me whatsoever and I have not thought about any religious beliefs since then my wife and I and our kids none of us are religious we are all atheists we're we're proud of it it's a strange minority to be in the United States so I personally do not see how you can be both a scientist and religious even though obviously there's many many scientists who are personally for me it's simply not possible so it was like 13 years old and just like something snapped um actually woke up in the middle of the night and I sort of had this realization it all sort of came all at once there's no God there's no purpose and there's no free will no doubt it has something to do with hormones and puberty is a form that it took and it's been gone ever since on and a lot of the teaching and writing that I do I think is explicitly challenging notions of free will in between the lines is challenging the notion that it is possible to have a universe with very structured rules and patterns and organization and not to have to invoke something or someone who designed at all on what mathematicians might call inner change properties and systems so I I do a little bit of propagandizing along those lines but basically whatever was going on that night in my brain since 13 it's been gone I have not been capable of anything like that since then interesting Thanks so okay the next question was is there a god so obviously already answered that and what are your biological reasons for being religious and could it be that being a religion is a necessary step in development of any civilization and yeah and you already covered the question of religious scientists so we are what's the neurobiology of being religious and if in your opinion it is necessary for a civilization all men don't think it's necessary at all I think in that regard sort of something I always emphasize is how Scandinavian countries over the last century have invented the most complete system of social support for citizens the best health care system the highest level of happiness the most tolerance the least violence have invented societies that have all of the pro-social behavior one would wanna see while at the same time over the last century the rate of religiosity in those countries has gone from quite hot and virtually zero so you don't need to get all the benefits of civilization in order it does not require religiosity in terms of why nevertheless every culture has ever been studied has some form of religious belief and within most cultures there's a high percentage of believers and the United States it's something like 95 percent of people who say well it's about 5% of people who say that they are certain that they are atheists so it's a very high percentage in terms of why that is the case humans like explanations humans like causality humans like simple chains of causality humans especially like that during periods of stress during periods of anxiety a sense of control a sense of predictability a sense of explanation is very psychologically protective against stress and I don't know if there's there's an idiom and expression in English called there's no atheists in foxholes where it's not surprising that towards the end of people's lives during periods of crisis during periods of stress people become more religious at those times um it's very good having an explanation and in a sense in terms of what is psychologically stressful about the unknown there's kind of a hierarchy of explanation in the face of the miserable frightening terrifying mysterious things that are inevitable in life it's very helpful to think there is an explanation for why it happened it's even better if you feel that the explanation has some sort of benevolent architect functioning somewhere behind it it's even better if you think that benevolent architect listens to people when they are making requests of him it's even better if that benevolent architect listens more to you and people who look like you and sound like you would pray like you it's a hierarchy of control and predictability and when it's done right it's very stressful juicing I'm one of the other interesting things in terms of not just religious belief but the type of religious belief has been really interesting work done of looking across culturally a traditional societies across the planet and what people have noted is if you look at hunter-gatherer societies um and you look at the sort of will they have they do not have gods that will be called moralizing bulbs their gods do not pay attention to humans they're not interested in humans they don't judge humans they don't give out punishment to humans you only find the invention of moralizing gods when you have societies that are large enough that they start having anonymous interactions with people as soon as cultures get large enough that you start having large towns things of that sort as soon as there's the possibility that you're interacting with strangers who you're never going to see again and who you could be rotting to anonymously that's right around the time that humans start inventing gods that care it out so somehow you're going to control these interactions with a person that you actually don't care about exactly that's where the pro-sociality begins to come in and there's even been studies cross-culturally the more people of the culture believe in a hell the more pro-social behavior there tends to be the more there's belief in the forgiving heaven the less there is it's you know it's inventing a police force mmm and if you live in a small hunter-gatherer band where everybody is at least a third cousin and you've all been in the same place for your whole lives you really don't need to invent a God who's interested in what you're doing your gods just care about like feasting and who's getting to sleep with who kind of think one of the gods are getting to do that not not among the humans so it's a very distinctive feature to the type of religion that one contacted that's interesting and I believe you have a special like colic lecture or even in your course there is a lecture on religiosity in so probably you'll get even more details than that ah okay continuing the topic of like cultural things and their biological reasons took like two questions in one first is what is human ego in terms of biology doesn't have any like or neurobiology does have any evolutionary reasoning why we have this thing that we call ego um well that along with the word that just terrifies me to use in the context of science because it makes me feel so overwhelmed that along with consciousness religiosity art aesthetics all of those the endless debate is are those things that have actively evolved is there an adaptive reason is their adaptive reason that like almost every culture has come up with something resembling music and something resembling us is their adaptive reason for any of this or is it baggage is it evolutionary baggage if you're going to have a brain with as many neurons as we have and with as many connections one of the emergent properties of it is going to be consciousness anesthetic and a sense of self awareness um you now see primitive senses of self-awareness and lots of other species but the human version is very very advanced obviously so the big debate is does that just sort of happen if you have complex enough of the system there are enough pieces that are interacting with each other um the scientist writer Steven Pinker has once sort of very sir has to be described it has so is art and consciousness and all of that is that just frosting on top of the cake is that under sensual does that just sort of come along with things or is it adapted for and I sure don't know the answer but I am very impressed with some of the things that complex emergent systems accomplish in terms of producing things that may have absolutely nothing to do with adaptiveness interestingly this question of G you get consciousness with enough elements of a system in there with enough neurons or enough silicon chips this question is very very pertinent these days in terms of ughter science artificial intelligence and machine learning and like on what side are you standing more or less like what side would you pick is it like evolutionary thing or it's just accident or just frosting I think it's probably an accident simply because a mid consciousness and this very extreme human capacity for long-term planning perceivable future imagining one things of that sort lots of adaptive advantages to that you can store food away because you know but I season comes eventually all that sort of thing on the other hand that's the building block of and anxiety and depression and things of that sort and those are not terribly adapted so I think it's a mixed bag I think once what very very complex system each wanted of producing which is mighty interesting in terms of implications for computer consciousness and actually going further on the those things that like humans have but we actually suffer because of them because we have it the question about suffering and fear of death do any other animals besides humans know what is suffering and what is death and are they afraid of do they have the fear of death when there is no particular threat can they somehow imagine maybe like and predict without being actually without their lives being threatened can they feel the fear of death my sense is there's no evidence for that at all here's decent evidence with non-human primates figure early Apes surprisingly with corded birds like crows and Jays that are extremely intelligent they've got some capacity for long term planning they can hide food away for future use um things of that sort okay so they can have some conception of the future in terms of planning and such there's absolutely no reason to think that that extends to any of the big existential things that we deal with when thinking about the future um you look at okay you could look at a low-ranking baboon and he's sitting there minding his own business and a terrifying high-ranking guy shows up and walked past them they don't interact there's no threat there's no anything he's just sitting there watching this high-ranking guy walk past and once studies have shown is if you do what's called ambulatory cardiology there's a heart rate monitor on the amount of a leash oh he's sitting there perfectly quietly no interaction to this horrible scary aggressive guy but the guy shows up and walks past them and his blood pressure goes through the roof I'm terrified so here the question is what is he terrified of this he terrified of like this guy could kill me is he terrified of mortalities he terrified of psychological humiliation is it or is he just oh my god don't hurt me don't even notice that I'm here I think it's much more of a ladder there's no reason to think from any scientific standards that anything more resembling a future-oriented sense of fear exists hmm but I mean we people we do have a descending of like life and death and we have the fear of death so in terms of that slightly provocative question about what's your position on euthanasia like voluntarily committing suicide yeah um I I don't know the climate at your ends of the world where I'm in California is a politically very progressive part of the United States the particular area I live in is probably the most so anywhere in the United States so where I am it's not a it's not a controversial issue at all is simply a given people should have that rights people who are terminally ill people who have gone through sufficient psychological and psychiatric testing to make sure that this is not an acute depression but rather is criticism reached in a relatively mentally healthy state of mind it's just a given at this point that that should be allowed nonetheless that is a very very minority opinion of the United States and it's only the more progressive areas that are enacting any sort of laws allowing that but I mean still us how many you know how many states allow euthanasia out of 50 I don't my guess would be it could not possibly be more than four or five haha the most progressive ones right exactly one of them is right next door to California a state called Oregon which is fairly small and obscure and overall as a state is fairly left-leaning fairly progressive Bay a number of years ago passed a right-to-die law with that in physician assisted suicide and like everybody in the center the country sort of thinks that well if anything else ever happened you would just go to Oregon but it's very few um I think probably as most of your subscribers would have some sense of the United States is not only a very very religious country but it's a big particularly unprogressive type it's definitely a minority view on my part going to one of the interviews that you've given already you were speaking about criminal justice and freewheel and I think you said that in theory you can predict antisocial behavior based on the brain structure or based on genetics and what are the technical issues now which don't allow or other some principal problems that you can never tell by scanning the branded okay this guy is going to be like a criminal and this guy won't be it's just technical issues and we'll have it in the future I think it depends on how how assertively you define technical issues is being the first level the level of technology on how much we can how detailed we can see the structure and the functioning of the brain now yep at this point absolutely zero predictive power in that regard and first as a as a clarification I would not say that knowledge about for example genetics will ever give us that power genetics tells us next to nothing outside the concept of environment I would not say that brain structure of the type that you can study with brain imaging techniques will have much predictive power unless it's coupled with insights about brain function I think basically in theory if you knew about somebody's genetic makeup and fetal environment in which epigenetic effects occurred in their brain and their childhood experiences and what culture they were raised in and what their endocrine levels are like and what their brain is cetera et cetera all the way to like what color underwear they put on that morning maybe eventually there will be some predictive power with at this stage if you looked at the brain of someone and saw that there was extensive damage for example to his frontal cortex you probably have about 90% accuracy at predicting that they would be doing socially inappropriate things if you spent more than 10 minutes talking to them nonetheless there is no power to predict whether that's socially inappropriate behavior is going to be that they they are serial murderer or if they speak too loudly or stick their face too close to yours when they're talking or if they like make sure one out of or is with your mouths when they eat you know what the range of what counts is socially inappropriate behavior because a regulatory part of the brains been damaged is enormous simply by knowing there's damage there that's not going to tell you who's going to be the anti-social criminal and who is going to like Bourke loudly at the dinner table when that's considered sort of rude and poor taste you need to know a million other things about that person and in terms of you said about the frontal cortex and like being able to control basically to control your behavior to control yourself another question that comes up very often is about humans and instinct does the concept of instinct actually apply to humans and to what extent instinct whatever is meant by that influences and controls of the behavior or people can like suppress it um let's see the word instinct got sort of a dirty reputation among American scientists about fifty years ago just because it was viewed as it explains everything when it explains nothing and instinct is you know somebody hits your knee and your leg kicks out that's instinct instinct the majority of humans wind up having some instances of aggressive behavior instinct instinct for being entrepreneurial instinct for being a capitalist instant it's just scientists got embarrassed using that word after a while because it meant be so little what I think is a much better way of describing it is whether humans have certain tendencies perco liberties potentials vulnerabilities that more readily happen than others perfect example of this on a classic view would be that humans for example instinctually are afraid of snakes and spiders humans have an instinctual phobia for that and that certainly seems to be the case until you look at people who have snakes as pets and give them baby names and love them and like have birthday parties for them or you see with kids you grow up in New Guinea chasing after spiders for fun and and cooking them up and they're the most delicious things and what you see in actuality is it's not that humans instinctually are afraid of say spiders or instinctually dislike them it takes less negative conditioning for somebody to develop a fear spiders than to develop a fear of like panda bears there's a predisposition for that it takes less conditioning to make somebody afraid of heights or afraid of being submerged in water than it takes to conditioned them to be afraid of sitting and looking at video game or some such thing with an awful lot of what used to be mistaken for inevitabilities one describing that perhaps could be instinctual instead we just have some strong tendencies but they are not universal and there's all these dramatic exceptions and it's about a lot of the biology behavior is just about tendencies and vulnerabilities and potentials that overwhelmingly for example is what the genetics of behavior is all about but all that you describe them in the spiders the snakes the height water that's all basically what you would call it think south federation instinct so I mean the details can vary yes but the whole idea of self-preservation of you know living of many copies of your genes as possible so basically procreating and having like sex with as many partners as possible isn't ten of these tendencies because an instinct in terms of human behavior I think in that regard for the most part yes for the most part in terms of obviously evolution having strongly selected for that for the most part yet yes until you see people who give up their lives for strangers until you see people who choose to be celibate and it's not that they are helping their close siblings pass on more copies of their genes they join some religious group where you don't reproduce until you see people who give away all of their life savings to strangers on the other side of the planet Bill Gates being a wonderful example that in many ways I'm so in a broad sense yep human set that pattern and when you work closely which course is always the most interesting is that dramatic exceptions to it and so that basically maybe like the role of consciousness overwriting that I'm a consciousness individual differences idiosyncrasies if you look at baboons long enough as I have you realize very few of them have read textbooks on evolutionary biology and sort of optimization of behavior and passing on copies and genes they make mistakes they have strange personalities this one always does this ridiculous stupid thing that you know is going to cause him to wind up losing a fight this one like if a nonhuman primate can have that stronger than idiosyncratic personality differences humans obviously do and just looking at the range of cultural values we have invented looking at the range of religions looking at the range of moral systems of what's okay what's terrible what's what will get you into paradise after life that well it's very very varied but yes it is within a broad backdrop of evolutionary pressure for passing on copies of genes and actually you're just talking about baboons and oh pretty often people in scientists they like observe some behavior in some species and then you transfer your observations like what you understood to other species for example you look at baboons and you kind of make make up your mind and some questions about how human behaves so how safe is it to do that I mean to to make conclusions observing one species and then apply those conclusions to another species um it's very very limited and there is a terrible temptation to decide that because you just Sam spent the last 80 years studying this one species of ant and like you dream about them every night and you understand what every that this explains it or this one species of whatever what you need to do is understand the variability across related species that are close to humans to understand the ways in which one particular species is a good model for us baboons are a wonderful model for psychological stress in humans which is why I study them out in the field they live in these ecosystems savannas that are extremely great environment so that baboons only have to work about three hours every day to get their food they live in these big organized treats so predators do not bother them much and what happens is if you're a primate and you have nine hours of free time every day and you're not worrying about predators you have most of each data - both - being absolutely miserable to each other generating competition on hierarchy and social stress they're wonderful models for studying westernized humans on the other hand they're terrible models for studying pair modeling behavior in humans because baboons are among the most polygamous primates that are out there they're terrible models for that I think where you get your most insight is seeing where humans fit with respect to a variety of other species and in that regard um I grew up in the scientific era where one of the sound bites was that humans share 98% of their DNA with chimps and chimps oh my god chimps they kill each other they're extremely aggressive they're hierarchical they have something resembling the start of organized violence very pretty and then Along Came bonobos and people appreciating what a totally different social system bonobos have and it was about 15 years ago the people figured out that we share 98% of our DNA with bonobos as well and here's what made you different 98% league yep it's about one and a half percent shared differences between chimps and bonobos but it about the half percent that makes for totally different world like if you have a choice in the matter you can probably much rather be a bonobo like a chimp in terms of having like a pleasant life we're not bonobos we're not chimps we're somewhere in between and in most regards we wanted to being in between with a lot of traits which wind up making us a very interesting species in a very confused one one that generates a lot of variability so obviously I I've spent my life studying baboons in one setting and studying laboratory rats in another I obviously think there's a lot that that tells you about humans but you have to pick your your domains carefully and by the way speaking about peculiarities of humankind and like being in between of course like one of the main questions that comes out of like the first lectures of your course is about the tournament species and pair-bonding species so what probably baboons would be example of a tournament species classic classic form and not a monkey bonobos that are bonding the Nagas are interesting they're another one of those exceptions to it they are they look like a pair bonding species in terms of a lot of their physical traits in terms of their low levels of aggression in terms of their female dominance but rather than having a monogamous pair bonding sexual system they're highly highly polygamous but it's not built around competition bonobos are at least as weird as humans are evolutionarily what a classic example of a pair bonding primate species might be given these Southeast Asian apes they pair bond for life so yeah you're right baboons are classic tournament species Gibbons are classic pair-bonding ones and there's humans who are halfway in between halfway by genetic measures halfway by anatomical measures halfway by formal aspects of how we work halfway in between in every regard and what does that explain that explains the fact why the majority of human cultures throughout history have been polygamous how nevertheless within the majority of polygamous cultures the majority of individuals have been impaired bonded marriages how nevertheless large percentage of people in pair-bonded marriages cheat on their marriages or the marriages don't last and how nevertheless the majority of Earth's religions and cultures have come up with myths and stories about how that's a bad thing to do we're like totally confused and whether you are a poet or a divorce lawyer you understand the extent to which humans are somewhere halfway in between and different individuals differ as to just how half way they are and it creates a great deal of complexity and interest and excitement and misery and sadness and heartache and we're very confused species because it's in that domain probably more than any that we're exactly in between all the standard evolutionary models and actually it seems like that's exactly the thing that they usually say that that what makes a human a human I mean though all that misery suffering like all the poetry and art but speaking about us being in between is there any chance or what should happen in order for humankind to split into two different issues maybe when one will be pair-bonding and another will be tournament all maybe one of these types of behavior just completely dying out being dominated by another one is there any indication that humanity will end up tournament or pair boarding or will split into two well I think that's very unlikely it's certainly going to make movies and television lecture less interesting that doesn't actually happen um I sort of like finding scientific version of explaining why that's the case is because traits like that show the evolutionary property it was called balanced equilibrium in a world in which everybody is tending towards a particular trait having this now rare or trait something becomes more valuable and that now shifts in the other direction and you know you you oscillate around a and average there and that's probably a trade in humans that shows frequency-dependent balanced selection much more interestingly is that people with very strong proclivities in one of those directions nonetheless fall in love with people with very strong proclivities in the other direction and all of their friends sit there and say oh my god what are they thinking this is never going over and maybe a lot of the time it doesn't work but copies and genes have been passed on along the way before it all falls apart yeah I don't think we're about to split in that way anytime soon as soon as you get your genes going on I mean it doesn't matter what happens with you basically yeah I think the one domain where that might happen is in the last sort of recent months or so it may be possible that things in the United States are eventually could produce two different species of people who voted for trouble if not there's already reports of some marriages falling apart because of that and this may eventually split us into two different species and we'll have to see what happens from there but a long hair bonding versus polygamous lines I don't think it's going to happen in that domain nope okay again speaking about human behavior and genetics and so on how can you study such a complex thing all of that in betweens and peculiarities of human behavior without getting into reduction in because that's one of the big problems when going into biology how how not to get too far in with like in reductionism yet we can evolve one with hope the biggest reason why people will not try to explain it was most interesting domains of humans and human behavior and human individuality try to explain it with strict reductionism is because strict reductionism doesn't work and doesn't explain a whole lot um nevertheless the usual response of most scientists that I've seen is when a reductive approach turns out not to have much predictive power the explanation is obvious the answer is obvious we're not reductive enough yet yeah more reductive and that's that's the dominant model here if you cannot clone something if you cannot get a DNA sequence if you not cannot get something down to the molecular level you're obviously going to like never be able to understand anything and reductionism like genetic reductionism may give a fairly good explanation on a very reductive level for why certain congenital neurological diseases involve changes in behavior it's never going to explain why the person sitting next to you is in the subtle ways that make life most interesting is a different person than you are knowing what is occurring in every single synapse in someone's brain that level of reductionism is never going to explain much there's all these non additive nonlinear chaotic properties to complex systems and we are a complex system but the trouble is you know ever since people discovered that science gives you more explanatory models than like throwing like goat intestines on the ground and deciding that can tell you what the gods are thinking you know five six hundred years of Western scientific and lightning and thinking the dominant model has been reduction reductionism is explaining everything it explains in very narrow things some of those network things are very important those narrow things allow us to invent vaccines for example um nevertheless it's not going to explain the most interesting aspects of behavior that is not to say that non reductive science is in some way any less scientific it's a very different type of science now well but can you give an example of non reductive sciences which are scientific okay armor the fact that well once again vaccines vaccines you start a vaccine campaign you come up with a vaccine for a particular disease and what you find is there's these paradoxical things that happen that as you start to vaccinate a population you will often get a wave of the increased rates of the disease for a short time afterward and there's some sort of population biology dynamic that explains that involving math that I've never understood for frontal cortex you damaged 80% of the neurons and somebody's frontal cortex and they are now at an increased risk of being a murder but they're also at an increased risk now of being somebody who during the wedding ceremony um farts loudly and realizes doesn't like that's it that's the way in which there and help are violating the rules of society okay so let's get some more reductive information on them so they have this much frontal damage and what were their testosterone levels like that morning now you've got like 80 point one percent predictability okay well let's throw in did they grow up in a culture that believed in physical punishment of children a lot okay eighty-one point one three percent particular let's add on more factors more factors and what you eventually realize is when you add on those factors they are not working in a linear additive manner there's all sorts of synergistic effects that go on there reductionism you know if you want to figure out this is this is the metaphor that I always used if you want to figure out why a clock like an old traditional classic clock why the clock is no longer working it's very good to use science it's much better to do that than to like sacrifice a sheep to the gods and hope that the clock will make the clock tick better what you do is you have a reductive problem you take the clock apart and you break it down to its component parts and you find the one little piece there that has something rather broken and you fix it and you add the pea is back together and you've got a clock that works if you want to understand why say a cloud does not rain why there's a drought you don't answer that by dividing the cloud in half and studying half of the cloud and then study there but you haven't solved it yet so let's divide each half of the cloud in half again and again line' and eventually you're going to understand the cloud down on the most reductive level and put all the pieces back together again and you have cured the cloud of not graininess it's not a reductive explanation for that humans are much more when they have problems are much more like flouds that don't rain and they are like watches that don't keep time right we're not reductively simple sense but just like hypothetically do you think it's possible in some future somehow actually have a possibility of like 99.9 accuracy in predicting human behavior by studying some of these reductive different facts I mean like hypothetically um down to atomic level I don't know in theory you could get to 99% knowledge or 99.9 percent or 99 etc etc um but that probably still won't do much good and the reason for this is psychologically it's a similar case to we could eventually cure 99% of the causes of death among humans we're even ninety nine point nine for nine getting point nine one nine nine etc etc and unless we get to the point that we are fundamentally a different type of like living system than anything science understands at this point fundamentally no matter how many diseases you cure there still is always going to be a leading cause of death that is still going to terrify us and still keep us awake at night and still break our hearts when I loved once it comes to it and in the same way even if we could explain 99.9% of human behavior in a reductive way there will still be surprises surprises that make us delighted at the unexpected things that humans can produce in terms of amazing art or amazing personalities or whatever there still will be surprises in terms of unexpected damaging behaviors that constitute the scariest things we have to live with and can society solve these problem what I suspect we'll do is we expand our realms of anxiety and happiness and excitement and anticipation and capacity for being surprised and all of that to fill in whatever space of lack of knowledge there is at that point reductionism is never going to explain everything and we are always going to still be most surprised by the things that are unexpected but just to make a clear father it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to get to know as much as possible oh absolutely you know I do reductive stuff in my lab we stick genes into brains of rats and try to change their behavior and for what we do arm that's perfectly fine we're we're medieval peasants in terms of what we're capable of doing which is to say like some of what my lab is focused on is can we do gene therapy alter sort of the genome and rats and neurons in their brains so that they're more resistant to anxiety or depression they're more resistant to stress and yeah we could do that we've discovered some genes that do that and aren't we amazing and we can show that and it works it worked in like 51 percent of the rest up and you do your statistics and then you figure out okay so here's what's so you do this and you do n now or up to 57 percent particularly and you know for us we're we're primitive we're Neanderthals and what we're trying to do with our science if we could come up with something that takes care of 75 percent of anxiety disorders that's great you keep trying you come up with a vaccine that's 93 percent effective that's much better than zero percent effective of polio wonderful all of that despite the fact that I'm in a one in a hundred thousand cases of polio vaccinations instead produce a case of polio yeah if you're practical and you want to fix stuff reductive science is absolutely wonderful and more power to them and more power to me and people in my lab doing it nonetheless philosophically that's not the way you're going to explain everything because you're never going to be able to explain everything hmm and just a quick Athenian question about again like the seduction things are famously Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene concept I think that can be called somehow reductionism I mean when you take it out put it down to one gene just like trying to make up itself just very briefly your pinion on the whole approach to the problem um Richard Dawkins is an amazing scientist and an amazing communicator most evolutionary biologists these days I think subscribe to what would instead be called multi-level selection in some cases selection is at the level of single teams in fact in some cases selection is at the level of little stretches of DNA that do not even constitute complete change but instead are these viral retrotransposons that make copies of themselves for their own sake with no function whatsoever so selection could be another level of stretches of DNA DNA comprising an entire team selection could be on the level of the entire genome so rather than selfish genes selfish genomes but increasingly people appreciate that selection also occurs on the level of groups and some circumstances an old discredited version of this called group selection and that was sort of thrown in the toilet in the mid 1960s contemporary group selection thinking is not that way at all it's most easily summarized in that there's circumstances where an individual a will leave more copies of genes than individual B because if some trait but there's circumstances where groups of the individual bees function together will leave more copies of their genes than groups of individual a's on that level group selection is a contemporary issue in evolutionary biology and in some circumstances that works it's very rare it only works in species that tend to divide themselves along moderately related trades all of that humans humans are the most subject to contemporary group selection effects so some of the time absolutely it's selfish genes some of the time genomes some of the time stretches of non-coding DNA some of the time it's in a group level what's most interesting in that field days is people trying to figure out under what circumstances which type of selection is more tolerant so it's like I mean I think it wasn't your very first introduction or lecture like skipping from buckets about it's never getting too obviously too good not to get too comfortable in one bucket because you know otherwise you won't want to leave it and you'll make mistakes exactly speaking about like changing parrot like different approaches and other stuff in one of your lectures I think it was first a second lecture you were speaking about menstrual cycle synchronization and you said something about pheromones and this beautiful example about like hamsters that were the dominant hamster like synchronizes a subordinate hamster and that the same thing applies to humans and there was this example but I said later on there was a lot of critique to that approach into those studies that humans don't even have pheromones and so on and so on so can I actually finally clarify that because there was a huge discussion in the comments section under that like check oh that's so exciting to think about that happening humans definitely have pheromones they have the neural pathways that process them and that tends to be a somewhat different olfactory processing system than the traditional ones something called the vomeronasal system which the dogma always was that the human system is completely atrophied out of existence still there it works a bit but in terms of the specific of menstrual synchrony the first report of that in humans was in the early 1970s and it's been very controversial since then um some reports some studies replicate the finding others don't I don't know that field well but my sense is the explanation for that is something that is just so classically a human sort of thing for every social species out there our social being closely socially a socially affiliated with another individual always translates into being close physical proximity to them two baboons who are closely affiliated and I use a word here that's perfectly scientific that our two friends and a lot of time each day in close contact it's not until you get westernized humans that you could have something resembling a best friend on the other side of the planet or even a best friend who you see at work each day as opposed to your roommate in your college dormitory room where the person you're like renting a flat with or whatever and it turns out that there's some confusion as to whether the synchrony is more about physical proximity roommates for example or if it's more about social proximity best friends who spend a lot of their time socially together I think that's where a lot of the confusion has come and I think some of the sort of more subtle work in that area these days is trying to piece apart physical proximity from social proximity I think by the time you get to humans social proximity is a stronger element in the urban people originally appreciated but it's like that too humans are socially like a friend they're friends and socially close but like far away physically and that what makes their physical trait a lot traits alike or is it was reverse that maybe they were always physically similar that's why they have become friends yep all of the above absolutely and each reinforces the other um I don't think there's any suggestion that say for example you would get menstrual synchrony with your best friend who you've never met we like you met online and and who's in like Swaziland or something no there there there seems to be a need for certain amount of physical proximity um but and you're absolutely right that similar trade select for friends select for mating partners that reinforce a similarity even further in lots of cases yeah they reinforce each other hey once again we're a complicated species and then probably one of the last questions then later discovery or discoveries in biology or neuroscience so whatever from your field ok later discover it from your field that you consider to be the most important ah one area just in terms of usefulness is functional brain imaging fMRI you mean I got exactly the ability the ability to see what's going on to somebody's brain without having to take it out and slice it up and put it under a microscope and to do it under subtle interesting circumstances amid that there is a tremendous temptation to get too excited and carried away with what it can tell you it has limited time resolution and at limited spatial resolution you can only test this in people lying inside or very artificial machine you can see but that can tell us a whole lot um that can tell us about correlations now this tends to happen in the brain when you do X another extremely exciting domain is the ability to actually go in and manipulate something and in that regard one of the most exciting techniques is this transcranial magnetic stimulation where you can go in and magnetically activate or inactivate temporarily certain parts of the cortex just underneath the skull you can't penetrate too deeply into the brain so you can only look at cortical function the effect lasts for very short periods but there are now studies where you go in and you manipulate activity and some of these cortical regions and you change how pro-social II people play an echo and economic game you change people's decisions about the moral correctness of behavior you change how much money someone is willing to give in a hypothetical charitable situation that's no longer just showing correlation that's actually showing that these are neural pathways that are actually mediating these behaviors so those approaches are incredibly exciting at the other end I say this while having exactly zero wisdom and knowledge about any of this um but people are going to eventually understand the math of complex systems and chaotic systems enough that it can be applied more readily to human brains and human behavior I am like beyond terrible at math and I can't begin to have any hopes of understanding it but at this very integrative holistic end that's going to eventually be an area of tremendous excitement and investment as well um not coincidentally if you can sit down somebody and you could probes on their head and you magnetically manipulate what a couple of hundred thousand neurons just underneath the skull are doing in terms of ionic flows and the person's moral values change for the next 45 seconds it's a pretty major attack on any old like nice like ancient notions we might have a free will that sure pets are weakened any arguments for it as far as I'm concerned and blah stuff kind of like dangerous technology that opens up a whole bunch of possibilities like manipulation on behavior may men um possibly although not a whole lot worse than to behavioral manipulation techniques of now I know this there's this ridiculous just asinine new field that's sort of beginning here on that people are called neuromarketing yeah how you study the brain in order to more effectively so crap to people that make me do it and or people going to release like clouds of oxytocin into the air and department stores to make people want to buy more stuff that's work no quite possibly people who wind up having sex with people who they wouldn't otherwise if they meet them in up to Arbonne store there's probably work in terms of selling them selling them something else but probably a product let me take an angle shops like okay in that domain it's going to be the greatest thing ever um yeah they're marketing advice is from Robert Sapolsky Yeah right yes yes this this is why I've been studying baboons all these years I knew it would finally become using hey hey yeah absolutely all these areas of science carry within these dangers of manipulation and we have known historical shortage of scientists or pseudo scientists or people who've been ready to grab and misinterpret and distort and lie about the findings of scientists to do awful things to humans so yes that danger I think it's ever bigger with brain science well we all hope just that that will never happen but who knows ah yes and just one of the one of the questions that were just like we all are wondering and it's not very significant again very personal when is your birthday because you Expedia page just tell gives of the year and it even doesn't it says that you were born in 1957 and you are 59 or 60 doesn't give a date what's up to that I have no idea for period on this friend of mine kept going on a with on my Wikipedia page and changing my middle name and then my son decided to start doing that also so that was the way on for a while that least the English language one has the correct date I still don't know who put up the page it's April 6th so I have about two more months until I turn 60 and I am not happy about that at all and do not be very mature about it when that happens but that's not sure what my birthday is okay thank you now we have some unique information and we can seek for your VTP damage probably oh well I guess we're yeah we ran out of time and it's just like great whole bunch of thank yous to you from us and everybody who is here and all of our subscribers and yeah everybody just loves your lectures actually and thank you yeah we really appreciate that and just just one more little thing so we also have the thing where we make some t-shirts with the scientists and some scientific like topics and so as your lectures became so popular we we've actually already have one we have one for you and we can zoom in can we zoom in so I guess if you can you can see it as years so it's a handful oh yes created faded by hand and like unique things but one problem we have we don't we could have come up with a quote here so actually you can see so that's you and but we need a quote to put down here so maybe we couldn't come up with one maybe you have some idea what what quote can we put under your portrait what would you like be how the notion of that in Cyrillic there is is very exciting actually looking at that it occurs to me that if I lost some weight I can actually look a lot like Rasputin given that picture well we want to say it's like the first the first thing that people think that is hard read from Harry Potter if you do have some resemblance I mean and like always like animals and having a beard actually my children have pointed that out the big problem though is that I am on the very short side was a similarity breaks down there but yes I would I would much rather be mistaken for Hagrid than for Rasputin that's very amusing actually for a quote I don't know how about we're a very confused species evolutionarily no that's that's actually I'm not good that sums up lots of things of your work thank you very much that was actually that will be put here and then we will send this exact issue because it's a ladies t-shirt we'll send that to a girl who actually was translating she didn't want to be asked one of our translators sucia da da Jana she's a doctor and actually she's neurologist and she's not professional translator but she took up responsibility to start translating your lectures and Chief John I think like we've done five and she's done like three of them which is yeah challenging actually but she's done a good job so this one will go to her with your quote and maybe you have something to say to our audience to the I don't know whole Russia to our hundred hun 180 thousand subscribers or even more well this is a certainly a dizzying possibility what can I say I certainly wish my father had lived to see the bazzara T of this moment of the possibility of a t-shirt with my face on it in Russian thank you for watching these thank you for being interested in science I hope a greater percentage of people in Russia are interested in science then the percentage in the United States are I think there would be a line on it we are working on it well good I'm glad you guys are we're not doing a very good job of it at this end of the planet I don't know good luck to everyone think scientifically think very cautiously before you do something um remember we're complicated confused species then we're a very vulnerable fragile one thank you for translating the lectures that's that's been very exciting for me to think about sort of these being sent around Russia it's very pleasing you

Channel: Vert Dider

Views: 151,311

Rating: 4.861289 out of 5

Keywords: human, behavioral biology, science, religion, Robert Sapolsky, Stanford University, Vert Dider

Id: VrQkl7PaA1s

Length: 72min 17sec (4337 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/IlyaFromRussia]

In February 2017, Professor in Stanford University and author of Human Behavioral Biology lectures Robert Sapolsky gave an interview to Vert Dider, where he answered questions from subscribers on science, religion, morality and the most interesting aspects of human behavior.

[u/Pandaloon]

Saw him on the Daily Show a few weeks ago. I want to get his book.

[u/mr3LiON]

I've watched his lectures about biology of human behavior on YouTube. This guy is a blast. I so regret that back in my days I wasn't interested in biology this much, because my teacher was such a downer.