It Could Happen Here - Evolution with Andrew

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

Andrew joins us once again to discuss the evolutions of species and their effects and correlations with the evolution of society. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

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Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to It Could Happen on the Internet, the only podcast. I'm Robert Evans. And today we've got St. Andrew back in the studio. We don't actually have a studio. That was a lie. That was a lie that I told you. You'd think I was cooler. St. Andrew, how are you doing today? I am good.

I'm good. Andrew dropped the saint. Oh, shit. I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. You're right. We should probably.

Yes, I'm sorry. I'm less good because I'm no longer a saint. Mwahaha. You got defainted. So, okay. If I understand Catholicism right, that means you undid someone else's three miracles? I know nothing about Catholicism. Oh, okay, well, there you go.

Pretty sure you have. This is a Protestant background here. My knowledge of Catholicism is that to be a saint, you have to do a couple of miracles, but the last one is always something to do with being dead like they just decide that whatever you do when you're a corpse is like oh it's a miracle oh catholicism andrew what are we talking about today um today we're going to be talking about something that um i would say more traditional traditional Catholics may have some disagreements with. Oh, no.

Traditional Christians may have some disagreements with, and that is... I mean, that is our entire audience, is the Vatican. This podcast is completely listened to by the Pope's Swiss guards. 100% Vatican situation. Yeah, we have deep penetration in the Vatican. That's an interesting choice of words considering the end of Pride Month, but, you know, we'll allow it.

All right. So, yeah, what are we talking about? We'll be talking about human evolution. Ooh. And particularly as it pertains to human cooperation. Okay. The origins of human cooperation.

Fuck yeah, I love this shit. I think that people tend to emphasize human competition a lot because capitalism wants us to believe that we are these competitive dog-eat-dog. I don't know where that term came from. By the way, I've always been curious about that. As far as I know, dogs don't eat each other. But it's an interesting phrase. I think it's kind of apt here.

There's this idea that we're just competing all the time, that we're fighting. It's just survival of the fittest. And only the strong survive. When people talk you know casually about prehistoric times it's this very it represents the stories that we've been told about it and it as a result it tends to be very you know competitive highly patriarchal highly violent just constant interpersonal violence i mean that was a justification used to you know reinforce the state right it was like or the state of nature

it's everybody against themselves and so as a result you know a state had to be introduced we trade some of our freedoms for the safety that the state is supposed to provide but as far back as prudon and really even further because yeah let's be real it's a very european concept yeah that's something that can be protected towards all human societies and all human philosophies um but prudon was one of the first white guys i guess um in his time period and in his field to really challenge that notion with you know mutual aid a fact of evolution of course the studies and stuff that he would have done um the knowledge that he would have shared have been you know known and studied by people before him but he was one of the first really bring all that knowledge together into one place um years later um an archanthro-anthropologist and primatologist was born.

I mean, she wasn't born that, but she became that later in life. In 1946, that would be Sarah Blaffer Hurdy. And so she made many major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, especially pioneering our modern understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both non-human and human primates. In 2002, she was recognized as one of the 50 most important women in science, and in 2014, mothers and others, together with her earlier work, earned Hurdy the National Academy's Award for Scientific Reviewing in honor of her insightful and visionary synthesis of a broad range of data and concepts from across

the social and biological sciences to illuminate the importance of bio-social processes among mothers, infants, and other social actors in forming the evolutionary crucible of human society. In essence, she got an award because she recognized the fact that the relationship between mother and child and, you know, how humans raise their children is vital in our evolution and in our becoming human. Yeah. I mean, that's, yeah, it's fascinating. I didn't know any of that. Yeah. I mean, humans, they, we, we do recognize now and we're starting to recognize more and more primatologists at least that, um, humans, other great apes rather, they do care, they share and they empathize a lot more than we may have originally thought.

But humans still win at, you know, the caring competition. I think we, because of even something like our facial anatomy and how we structure society is probably one of the more pro-social of, you know, the other great apes. Yeah. It's interesting whenever I, because obviously I've read stuff about like empathy and apes, but it's always in the context of the ones that we taught sign language to. The one I'm remembering particularly is, and I I'm spacing on the name that the scientists gave her, but one of the apes.

Yeah. Coco, when her reaction to like 9-11, because it was apparently like on the tv or some shit when it happened but like i i i never hear emphasized the same degree um or you know maybe i just have not sought it out but it's certainly kind of less uh less discussed as like evidence of empathy within um within like the societies that they built i guess like would be the term for them the little their communities i don't know whatever you want to call them yeah yeah i was interesting as well i mean coco was a gorilla um and regarding her sign language is actually interesting video essay talking about how i knew this about sign language then we assume but cuckoo is a gorilla and humans are more closely

related to two groups those being um bonobos and chimpanzees and we tend to look at chimpanzees which tends to be more you know violent and people use them as an example of all this is how humans naturally are despite the fact that you know we have millions of years of evolution diverging from chimpanzees you know our last common ancestor was like six to seven million years ago yeah that's a bit distant like yeah like i got famous five or six years and i consider us pretty like pretty far apart yeah yeah yeah i mean and then on top of that like there was enough time for some serious divergences to start happening you know like the fact that humans you know walk upright and chimpanzees is they still have you know that that four-legged gate it's actually something that i learned recently evolved on two separate occasions that being that particular kind of knuckle walk um yeah i just found that

kind of fascinating it's kind of besides the point um but yeah i mean we we tend to look at chimpanzees as our closest example but bonobosos, which are a lot more social, I would say a lot more cooperative and less violent than chimpanzees, actually share a lot of similarities in terms of our behavior. And they're also one of the few animal species that have been recognized as having sex for pleasure and not just procreation. So good for them. When we talk about evolution, a lot of it has been shaped by Darwin, even though science is not about figures and big figures and their big ideas. It's about the ideas themselves. But still, seeing as Darwin was the one who really introduced you know the idea of

competition the idea of all that in evolution those sorts of notions which came really out of his time in industrializing competitive world um it really overstates the rule of competition as a driving force in evolution. When in reality, cooperation was, you know, a far more potent force. When it comes to like pro-social human tendencies, you know, doing things to benefit others, that's what pro-social is. Dr. Hardy really comes down on the cooperation side of things in her book, Mothers and Others, where she brings together all this evidence that we are basically descendants of a Pleistocene species of cooperative breeders. Cooperative breeding is a practice amongst some animal species.

Other mammals do it, but I think we are one of the few we're the only great apes to do it and there are other primates to do it other monkeys that do it but none closely related to us cooperative breeding is basically the practice or the reproductive strategy um where where alloparental care is provided to the offspring of the children of certain parents in the group. Alloparental care is basically the practice of, it's basically non-direct parent care. Care provided by individuals other than the parents and so by having that network in place by having the process of our parenting in place that's how we were able to be so successful as a species in our distribution in our um you know establishing ourselves in all these different environments because humans spread

fairly rapidly around the globe and we've established ourselves and created cultures in all sorts of unique environments and honestly we are the most successful uh out of the primates in that regard so kudos to us and that is because of cooperative breed in. Did you just woo Robert? Yeah, of course. God. Yes. We had to ratio the rest of the primates, you know? Very based of us.

We literally ratioed them. Literally. Oh, we're ratioing everything on this goddamn planet except for chickens and no except for chickens corn corn has definitely ratioed us yeah for sure for sure cows too man oh yeah that's true that's true how is chickens and uh there's this one other creature i know for sure goats for sure. We have a lot of them. Yeah, but I mean, there's so many different species of goats, and there's only one species of human.

They're also magical. Yeah. I mean, what's the population of dogs? Actually, every time I look, it's less than you'd expect. What? 900 million? That's ridiculous. That's a lot less than i'd have expected i want more give me more

dogs 900 900 million is like rookie numbers like yeah i was gonna expect like at least a couple of billion just based on but no just nine yeah every time i look it up i i recall being like oh there's not as many dogs as i thought there were. I guess they went cooperative for years. Sure not. And only 400 million cats. Those are rookie numbers, cats. Come on, cats. Come on, cats.

It's actually probably. I mean, it's probably for the best. They do a lot of damage. My dad always says my dad always says that we need more dogs in the world To fix the fucked up humans Yeah, I mean, I feel like There's a lot of pressure to put on dogs That's completely fair I feel like that's really our job To fix fucked up humans

Yeah No, no, no Well, I mean There's a lot of dogs for that I mean, cats and dogs are pulling a lot of weight as it is you know yeah they are pulling what are ferrets doing yeah yeah what are fish doing what are ferrets doing great question andrew fucking ferrets fucking ferrets yeah and like fucking goldfish right what are you guys what do you what are goldfish what have they been doing lately motherfuckers like get off your asses

and stop us from killing people goldfish stop the war in ukraine goldfish come on i mean to get to cut goldfish some slack they're busy dying because people don't want to take care of them yeah yeah they're like all of the people treat them like houseplants i didn't think we would have andrew being a goldfish apologist on this podcast, but here we are. I don't know correctly if I'm wrong, but I don't think goldfish have committed any war crimes or anything. Not that I know of. I think I'm within my right to defend them. They haven't stopped any war crimes either.

Plus, I mean, this is my personal guilt talk, and I've neglected my fair share of it. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories. stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRad Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise.

Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

You know, speaking of cross-species cooperation, when I was younger and living in Texas, there was this one day where, like, we're out in our, like, fucking backyard area, and we see, walking through the alley behind our houses this massive turtle probably three four hundred pounds like like easily like three or four feet

uh in in circumference on his shelf just like an enormous animal just like strolling around the neighborhood not a species that you that you see in texas wild so we like kind of try to corral him we can't lift him he's massive but we like corral him into the uh into our yard area and give him some cucumbers and eventually his person comes around and the guy explains that like yeah when teenage mutant ninja turtles came out a lot of people bought a bunch of different kinds of turtles thinking they were good pets but they didn't realize that there's a lot of the turtles that get sold like never stop growing like if you keep them alive they just keep getting bigger and so i he like and they smell bad only if they're the time he had adopted this turtle

and it lived in his yard and he said like yeah he's really strong like i have a good fence but every two or three years he'll just walk through it like most of the time he chooses to stay in the yard but every couple of years he's like i'm just gonna go on a walk and he's like yeah he just like breaks through the fence it takes him about a second like if he wants to do it that's like i don't know if you've seen baki have you seen baki no is this is this anime um and no this is not my my weeb coming out story i have not read or viewed much um in that regard but i started back here recently and in the first episode they establish that all these people are coming to tokyo right for like some kind of fighting competition okay and the way that they establish those people are dangerous

is that these are all like criminals on like death row and so like they're in the process of being put to death Like one person is You know Being Injected or something One person's being electrocuted One person's being hung And they all manage

To break free After they die And like break out Of the prison Easily This one guy He was imprisoned Underwater

He breaks out Of the underwater prison And swims Several miles Up to the surface And then swims all the way to Tokyo And it's like For some reason that turtle Breaking out of his enclosure

Whenever he chooses Just reminded me of Like they're trying to establish his power levels Yeah, no, he's too powerful To be contained And he's probably still alive because they live forever um which is again why they're bad pets yeah because what did you do about slavery yeah yeah yeah well that he may not have been around for slavery but what did you do what are

you gonna do the next time there's slavery turtle you? You know, are you going to stop it? I don't think so. You're a turtle. We'll be next time. Is there something you should be telling me, Robert? What is happening? Paying attention to the Supreme Court. It's not going to go well in the future. That's true. That's true.

Robert. What? Leave the turtles out of this. Well, if they stop the Supreme Court, I will stop shitting on the turtles you're just doing that meme from 2020 where people were like i gave up my plastic straws for the turtles where are they now yeah that was a thing yeah it was bad i don't remember that it's like come on just get it well i will say that mean, at least we're cooperative breeders.

And I think our tendency, our cooperative breeding tendency probably has something to do with the fact that we adopt other species as pets and as members of our family. Because you don't really see other animals doing that. No. see other animals doing that no you know um i think there was there's some kind of like fish or crustacean or something that that keeps another species like as livestock yeah there's a couple of species that do versions of that for sure right but i mean we love our dogs and our cats yeah our ferrets and our snakes and our tarantulas Our ferrets question mark Our birds

Yeah People are trying to like Domesticate foxes so we could love them too You know There are people who Keep big cats There are people who keep like caimans There are people who keep all kinds we just

you know it's like we got to catch them all you know like we just want to take all these creatures and we want to to love them i don't know what that says about us other than the fact that our cooperative nature extends beyond the boundaries of you know us as a species. We inherited very high levels of mutual tolerance, of perspective taken, and other pro-social impulses from ancestors who used our parental care and provisioning of the young to survive. I mean, we didn't invent complex cooperation. Our pre-human ancestors did, but we elaborated upon it.

Yeah, it's always interesting to me to think about that. I think back up to when the first time I ever went to a war zone was Ukraine, and it was this, we were in this little town called Avdivka that was getting shelled by the Russians. And there was this big, the way they do the heating over there, they have these vents going underneath or these tubes going underneath all the houses to supply them with like gas and stuff and there's this this big was this big central like kind of box thing and in one there's a few of them in the town and stuff that like is the i don't know i guess it's like the uh uh like nexus of a bunch of different like houses, whatever heating system. So it's warm. And the people there, like when the war started, a bunch of people fled and they left pets behind.

You know, sometimes they didn't really have a choice because it's war. So there were all these cats and dogs and soon all these breeding cats and dogs, all these kittens and puppies. Soon all these breeding cats and dogs, all these kittens and puppies and people who lived there had like turned that little junction box for the heating system into this like massive kind of open air cat and dog sanctuary. So like there were all of these like dozens and dozens of puppies and kittens just like living together in this big heating box in the middle of this, like being taken care of by all these local ladies who would scrounge up food every morning and make sure that they were all taken care of. And it was interesting, cause you could see all these like cats and dogs living together and all of these people coming together to take care of animals they didn't know. At the same time, like all of the people

were doing their level best to murder the folks like a mile and a half away and vice versa. So we contain multitudes human beings definitely i mean that's part of it too right like the fact that we are so eager to like share in others emotional states you know to empathize and the way that we are so eager to involve ourselves and and give and share with those who are unrelated to us. I mean, there are a lot of species that do not raise their young at all. And they're those that do and try to kill other people's young. And they're those that do and just take care of their own young. But, you know, we,

even in this like super individualistic capitalist world, we still find ways to like look out for each other. And I think that's beautiful. Yeah. Of course, you know, cooperative breeding doesn't mean that there's like constant, like Barney the Dinosaur, like cooperation and all the time.

There still can be competition and coercion, you know, all those different things. But behaviorally, anatomically and emotionally, modern humans are cooperative breeders. And the crazy part is those you know three um traits you know behavior anatomy and emotion those those traits do not evolve simultaneously so for example our physical features like our eyes and the fact that our eyes are able to you know we can see the whites in our eyes and that way we can put ourselves in other people's perspectives and that kind of thing we could see the emotions more clearly you know the fact that we we we're prone to sharing our smiles and the fact that um you know our vocal cords have such range to be able to communicate so many different things um while these are hallmarks of the fact that you know even before our super big brains developed we were already getting these treats that would

have helped us in cooperation but i wonder a lot of the time though, because a lot of these shapes were developed before language. It's like, what was the first word of humanity? What was the first sentence? What was the first thing we said? And how did other people react when the person said it? I can imagine that agriculture is something that developed independently um on multiple different occasions in different places but i still wonder like what those first conversations might have been about yeah i mean i think a lot of them probably would have been arguments with other people who didn't want us to do words um who were ultimately right you know uh if if only yeah yeah like yeah i mean i don't know it's interesting like i think it probably

like we we just did a couple episodes about um the history of of of gynecology um and one of the things that we talked about at the start was like, the prehistory of medicine, which which likely began in an organized way. By like, likely the first people practicing medicine in any way, we're we're pregnant women and women who had been pregnant trying to help each other survive pregnancy, right. And I wouldn't be surprised if that I mean, food gathering is obviously the other one. But I wouldn't be surprised if like, surprised if that i mean food gathering is obviously the other one but i wouldn't be surprised if like language started as a way to try and like communicate and better survive making babies because it's like super dangerous and also entirely necessary um and and something that kind of particularly benefits from communication so i I don't know. I wouldn't be shocked if that was like the first thing we talked about,

so to speak. Hmm. That makes sense. Yeah. But I'm also thinking as well, and it just occurred to me, it is probably possible that like the first language was not spoken language.

I feel like it may have been like a form of sign language, you know, because, you know, we have these hands and people tend to talk with their hands. So yeah. Oh yes. I think my hypothesis is that, you know, we use our hands to communicate things before we started speaking. I mean, the fact that we were able to teach apes, you know, other apes to use sign language,

I think that's a good sign that we can learn to communicate with that face. Yeah. I mean, it's also probably how our communication with dogs started, because that's one of the things that makes them special is they're pretty much alone in animals and that they like and kind of instinctively grow up understanding that when we gesture at them, it means stuff. If you point dogs will look where you're pointing a lot of the time rather than at you which is like

a rare trait in animals. So yeah I think you're probably right on the money there. Huh. I didn't even think about that. That's true. That's true. And of course that makes it fun because you could always fake them out and like throw something. Yeah yeah they're stupid. You don't know how to

fucking do, yeah, yeah. Anderson doesn't fall for that shit. I love fucking with them. She does not fall for that shit. I can't fake her. I can't fake her out. That's probably why she's the woman of the house. You're not wrong. Pretending to throw stuff at a dog and then it

goes running and then it realizes that you faked it, like that's the best. Oh, I can't relate. Cause if I tried to do that, she looks at me like a good try. Uh-huh. Oh,

okay. Sophie, where you need to go is Corgi con in San Francisco. One of these years. Well, they let Anderson in, even though she's only, she does.

She's only part Corgi. There's nothing, there's nothing but acceptance at CorgiCon. Did you hear that, Anderson? There's nothing but acceptance and hundreds of Corgis frolicking in the surf. It rules. She'll try to herd them all. They are all trying to herd all of them.

I'm into it. They are all very excited and don't know what to do with each other. It rules. and don't know what to do with each other. It moves. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows,

presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes

with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say

this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. So as the book progresses, Hardy spends some time talking about how we are similar to and different from other great apes.

So we learn about how we use eye contact and smiles to bond even from a young age um you know we spoke we tend to hear about it but the fact that babies cries are so attuned toward attention and capturing the attention of people um yeah these are all in like bastards yeah yeah yeah i mean i was i was a screamer apparently you know i used to rel rel ball ball and ball and ball in fact one story i was told was that the neighbor called and was like is something happening to and my parents were like nah nah, he's just crying. There's like three o'clock in the morning. But I mean, look at me now.

Now I'm bawling for justice. That's right. Yeah. One interesting trait that humans have is our willingness to like share our babies with others other great apes you know those mothers they tend to have like constant contact and care with their children you know like they don't let others touch their children at all probably because like other mothers tend to want to kill their kids or cause harm to their kids yeah so they tend to be very protective of them whereas you know as alloparents we are you

know full-fledged cooperative breeders you know we have not only shared our young with others but alloparents have also been you know been recorded breastfeeding the young of others, you know, and masticating and passing like hard to digest foods to infants. I'm mixing up my terms a bit in terms of, you know, what, what is a primate and what isn't ape versus what is, you know, just whatever. But marmosets and tamarins, which are calatricids, or calatricids, calatricids, they are also cooperative breeders and they're very fast breeders as well.

Rapid, rapid breeders. So, you know, good for them. It's also typical of our species. We tend to be very fast breeders and that's why we reassured all the other great apes what i find interesting as well is that we'll be able to breed so rapidly despite the fact that our um do you remember um the word for like carrying a child no i didn't i'm just blanking right now uh preggers? No, no, no. I think you're thinking of the incubation

period. Is that what you're trying to think of? Yeah, but that's such a... That feels like a very dehumanizing way of putting it. I'll just say that carrying a baby, and the cost

that it incurs on a woman's body, on a human's body um it is like a whole thing it's a whole thing yeah i mean if we keep all of having so many in one lifetime despite the cost necessary to raise each i mean other animals they have like mates in seasons and you know they have set amounts of children they could have in their lifetime but no you know we could just i mean there are stories of women who have had like dozens of kids which is you know unfortunate circumstances because you know in those cases it tends to be um not necessarily willing but the fact that we are capable of having many kids is

lends toward the importance of having support systems in place because other animals don't tend to have more children they can care for. If that is, you know, they care for children. A lot of them just eat their kids if they can't care for them. Exactly. You can't do that once. It's a, you know, they care for children. A lot of them just eat their kids if they can't care for them. Exactly. Get a cat do that once. It's a, you know, makes sense. Yeah.

Whereas we kind of evolved to have support systems in place. Speaking of eating babies, kind of. Absolutely. There kind of is a dark side to that. Because even though we tend to have you know these children and stuff and we tend to we're supposed to have these support networks to care for them the practice of infanticide is actually something that has a long long history um in human practice where if a mother determines that they're not able to raise their child, they don't have the support systems in place to care for that child, different practices would typically be used to deal with that child.

you know, deal with that child. And that's, of course, what makes the anti-abortion stances so inhumane, you know, because... Yeah. The whole reason that abortion is so important is because it protects the, you know, the autonomy and the agency of, the agency of people who can carry children. And yet in this world, it continues to atomize us and individualize us and separate us, stripping certain people of their support networks. So weakening our support networks is still expected to and punished heavily if you

do not just pump out as many children as you can and it's sick it's really sick yeah that's not great when it comes to those support networks most people are familiar with you know extended family Most people are familiar with extended family. Like, for example, grandparents. And in fact, infant survival is significantly affected by a grandmother's presence. Which is why humans tend to live long past their reproductively viable period you know human females live after menopause for a pretty long time in comparison to other species and of course their grandmothers and their of course fathers their sisters and godparents and really a lot of other cultural systems in place,

even polyandrous mating. I think I mentioned that in a previous episode. There were also forms of, like, bi-local flexible residence patterns where, you know, you always have kin around to take care of your infants and i would say that it's it's kind of tough because a lot of people these days you know struggle with their extended families um it's very much a cool um i love you but i'm

glad we live in separate kind of situation yeah you know like extended families definitely have a lot of pros and cons um which is why we actually find i think interestingly a lot of examples of chosen families um throughout different societies. And also even there's some evidence that that might have been the case in the past as well, where unrelated people would form groups together. As one example, I remember reading about, and of course this can't necessarily be extended to prehistoric times, but I've seen it in multiple different hunter-gatherer situations,

where you have this clan system in place, and you can, no matter how far you travel, you can expect to receive care from members of your clan. In North America, I think it was like the Bear Clan and the Elk Clan and all these different clans. In Aboriginal Australia, they also had different groups as well. And so people were able to interact with each other across huge distances and settle in different places and connect with others to find kin, couldn't quote kin, even though they weren't necessarily directly related.

Yeah, there's a couple I mean there's a book called sex at dawn that I read many many years ago that's about kind of like the evolution of human sexuality and how some of it's been like how different cultures have looked at things like like what makes someone a parent um and there's all these different attitude like before we had kind of the scientific understanding of like where, you know, how, how babies are conceived that we have now. There were all these different attitudes, like this idea. And I forget the name of the people who, but they still exist with somewhere in Latin America. And their belief was essentially that when you got someone pregnant, that was the start of the process. And then after like conception,

the person with the baby would go around and pick. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. I remember that. He wanted for the baby. And the idea was that like, well, yeah, when they fucked that person's like essence gets added to this forming child. And one of the things that that does socially is it means that it means that for that community children weren't seen as having one father they were seen as having a bunch of fathers all of whom were like responsible for teaching the kid and raising it which is like oh that's a very sensible way to uh to organize your little society is to have is to is to ensure that

like the kids coming up have as many adults who are like responsible for them as possible, which is broadly speaking, the best thing you can do for kids is to have a bunch of adults be interested in their, their, their success. Exactly. Because I mean, like, if you have like one of the best hunters in the village raising your child, and you have the best craftsman in the village raising your child, and you have the best fishers village raising your child and you have the best craftsman in the village raising your child and you have the best fisher village raising your child that child is going to have a very well-rounded education yeah you know it's going to be able to learn a lot of different skills that they're going to need i mean that's just one of the many positive effects of having multiple caregivers on the development of a child's world view and sense of self their concept of self and others, their concept of empathy, the

concept of independence, how they view the world as either dangerous or insecure or giving and welcoming. And so, I mean, we are so used to this nuclear family worldview, which is these independent households that we don't consider the fact that having a broad range of people raising them is actually crucial to their personal development as children, to their human development, really, having all of those different perspectives

and stuff in place. And I mean, that's part of what Hrity talks about, especially in her final chapter, that being how in modern times the accumulation of property, the emergence of patriarchy, even the stuff in the post-industrial era,

all of these would prompt a shift from cooperative breeding, from cooperation between groups to war between groups, especially with property. Because when you have property, you have a need to hold on to that property. And the whole idea of property is you and yours, the exclusion of all others. Right, you know? And so at the end of her book, she also speculates we might be losing our art of nature. Because we are continually evolving um but she wonders what might the potential evolutionary effects be if we are rearing children who are not living in

intimate contact with a variety of caregivers because especially within those first two years of life infants reared in responsible caretaking relationships develop innate potentials for empathy, mind reading and cooperation and collaboration. I mean, these behaviors are the outcome of complex interactions between both genes and nurture. So the question is,

how can these innate potentials remain more than potentials. You know, I mean, because the development of them is far from guaranteed. A lot of children these days are raised without extensive social contact. I mean, even in the era of COVID, where a lot of children are isolated at home, especially at the height of the pandemic,

I really wonder if we will see like a mocked, like distinct generation of like, within a range of two years of children who just aren't as socialized. Because for those first two years of their life, they were kind of isolated. Well, those first few years of their life they were kind of isolated or those first few years of their life they're kind of isolated because there's this lack of empathy lack of cooperative skills and lack of attachment that may cause us to miss the mark it's really trauma, but trauma doesn't necessarily stop people from continuing that trauma, from reproducing and carrying that on. And so I really am really curious as to see what the effects of that might be and also what we can do to try to curb that negative impact. last question she asks is really will humans in the future still be empathetic and curious and about the emotions of others because of our ancient heritage or kuna care and i'm paraphrasing here or will these systems that we have in place evolve us in a more Machiavellian direction.

Well, I guess that's the mystery that we're all going to get to watch unfold in pieces, at least over the course of, you know, the rest of our lives and everyone else's lives. It is, I don't know, I think the overall arc of it speaks more to the things about us that are good and to increasing cooperation, because that is like the story of the last couple hundred thousand years of human evolution. Although at the same time, some of that, a lot of that cooperation has gone towards fucked up ends as well. that cooperation has gone towards fucked up ends as well like i mean all of the good and the bad things happening right now are are one way or the other examples of cooperation right like it's it's uh um yeah i don't know let's hope things get better i hope so too and i think we could do more than hope i think we cannot act yeah we're going to have i mean like that's the thing right like part of how specifically in the united states i mean but

internationally too the right has gotten so much over the last really five or six years in particular is cooperation across borders and across like ideological differences like there's there has been like tremendous sustained cooperation that has allowed them to amass power um the power that they're currently exercising and the only thing that's going to actually counter that is the cooperation um an organization of a much larger amount of people like there's not that many of those folks it's why they've had to be so organized there's a lot more of us but we're also can't stop fighting about shit so it is it is like we are going to have to evolve in real time to cooperate better with one another and more effectively in order to in order to wrench the

wheel back that's true anyway let's not lose hope let's not lose hope and let's not lose your pluggables Andrew yeah yes you can follow me on Twitter at underscore St. Drew

and find me on YouTube at Andrewism hell yeah hell yeah well folks that's gonna be all for us here today that it could happen here

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