Modern Wisdom - #085 - Professor Nicholas Christakis - How Evolution Shaped Our Societies

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

Nicholas Christakis is a Professor at Yale University and an author. Much of what I've covered on the podcast has focussed on evolution's effects on the individual, but today we look at how evolution has shaped us as a collective. Expect to learn... Why is it that we live in groups? Why can we (mostly) rely on the person we're talking to to not lie to us, or kill us on sight? Why can we recognise different faces so effectively? And why do we even have different faces in the first place? Extra Stuff:  Sign Up to Audible for a Free 30 Day Trial - https://amzn.to/2IQfiVS Buy Professor Christakis' Book - https://amzn.to/2Jac5iH Follow Professor Christakis on Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAChristakis Check out Professor Christakis' Lab - www.humannaturelab.net Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howdy friends. This episode of the Modern Wisdom Podcast is brought to you by audible.com. Now, those of you who've been listening to us for a while will know that we are massive fans of audible. It's a great way to consume extra content when you'd usually be sat twiddling your thumbs in an airport or in traffic. You can sign up to audible for free for 30 days. You'll get one free audiobook of your choice from the world's largest selection of audiobooks, and you can cancel any time within the 30 days, and if you do, you still get to keep the book. So my advice is if you do not have an audible subscription, follow the link in the show notes below, and try it out. I promise that you will not regret it,

and even if you do, you can get a book for free for Amazon. So sweet. On to today's guest, Professor Nicholas Christakis from Yale University had one of my favorite episodes of Joe Rogan's podcast so far this year. And I was super excited to get him on Modern Wisdom. We're talking about the evolutionary basis for society. Why we're not lying to each other or killing each other on site all the time? How come evolution appears to have biased towards us living in groups instead of on our own?

How we can tell each other's faces apart and why we even have different looking faces at all amongst an awful lot of other interesting stuff. It's super cool to be talking about evolution from this societal angle as opposed to the individual ones I really enjoyed today's episode. And I hope that you do too. Please welcome Professor Nicholas Christakis. Professor Christakis, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to sit down with you.

I really enjoyed you on Joe Rogan about six weeks ago. I fell in love with the content that you guys put out and you have been looking forward to speaking with you ever since. So what are we going to learn about today? Well, I think the topic that I've been thinking about lately is human nature. And the part of human nature that interests me

is not so much that part that we express within ourselves. So for example, you know, you could have be spiritual within yourself or you could be risk averse within yourself or you could be, you could have wanderlust within yourself. These are qualities that human beings, the world over might or might not express and that have been shaped by our evolution and by natural selection. The parts that I'm interested in are the parts of our human nature that we express between ourselves. For example, do we love each other?

Do we befriend each other? Do we cooperate with each other? Do we teach each other things? These are things that we also are naturally inclined to do. And those are parts of our nature that we express between ourselves. And the reason I think these are important is that for too long, in my view, scientists and people on the street, the citizenry, have been overly concerned with what I would regard to be the dark side of our nature, our propensity to violence and tribalism and lying and

and tribalism and lying and, you know, selfishness. But the bright side, I think, has been denied the attention it deserves because equally we are prone to all those things I mentioned, to love and kindness and friendship and so forth. And in fact, I would argue that those forces were necessarily more powerful than the evil forces. If they wouldn't, we wouldn't have made it very far. Yeah, well, that well, yes, but more to the point, we wouldn't be living socially.

If every time I came near you, you killed me or gave me false useless information, or took advantage of me in some way, I would be better off living as a solitary animal. So it must be the case that the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. Otherwise, we wouldn't be living socially. And so that's what I've been interested in thinking about lately. How and why did there are evolution not just shape the structure and function of our bodies, how our kidneys work, our pancreas works, not just our muscles work, not just shape the structure and function of our minds, how we think, how we cope with adversity, how we

are personalities, for example, but how as well as a structure and function of our societies, how did we come to live socially the way we do? Is it the case that the way we live, the societies we make, the world over actually have been guided by our long evolutionary past? And the answer is yes. Thinking to a lot of the conversations I've been having recently and a lot of the books

that I lean towards, and I know that a lot of the audience will do as well, I certainly think that there is, I'm discriminating towards the individual on those books. A lot of things to do with understanding our nature, recently had Robert Green on the laws of human nature, recently had... And what qualities, what qualities did he emphasize about human nature, for example? Oh, wow. So, he talked about the fact that if you have brilliance in the world, you can

be as talented as you want, but without the ability to understand others and communicate effectively, you will neutralize your brilliance and live a life filled with pain and misery. That was his sense of choice. Ah, which is... And again, so we've touched on two things. You've touched on the fact that it's important to talk about the social aspect. The group not necessarily always just the individual. You've also touched on the fact that talking in a positive light is something which appears to be lacking a little bit. And I would agree, I definitely agree on both counts. I think a lot about the fact that social media posts that anger people or agree with what they believe are the two

most highly engaged posts on the internet. Presumably, that's going to lead to authors and it will trickle either up or down how everyone call it to academics to also think, well, if I want to write a book or have a paper or a study which is going to be highly recognized and interesting at the moment, it would appear that trying to maybe focus towards the darker side of human nature, the things that are bad, the things that maybe anger people, etc. maybe that's a bias. I'm not sure whether you think that's the case. Well, I mean, okay, so I mean, we have a number of biases. I mean, this attention to bad news is something which many people are thinking about. Like, why, if that's part of what you're

talking about is why do we, why do we focus on the nasty things that are around us so much? Part of the reason is that it is more advantageous to you to pay rapid attention to bad things, people theorize, than to pay rapid attention to good things. So for example, in our ancestral environment, it would have been more beneficial to you to pay attention to the location of a fire or flood or predators, for example, than to, which is all bad news, than to pay attention to the location of food, for example, which would be good news. Because one of them is going to kill you fast. And the other one, you know, might take a while, the absence of good news, let's say. So, so this is one of the reasons that it is thought that we humans are wired to preferentially attend to bad news. And you know why media constantly you know

feature stories of you know misery and destruction. People click on it and read it. So anyway, so that's part of I think what what is going on. But there was another part to your question. I lost track of the other part. So part of it is the anger and the leaning towards negativity and the other part is the focus on the individual rather than the group. I think the meritocracy that we're in at the moment with the Gary V. Hustle and Grind culture that we have going, says that your successes and failures

are yours to hold on your own. And I think that that leads people to look inward towards how can I make myself better? Yes. And not necessarily maybe think about the group. Yes, I take your point. I mean, a lot of these qualities that we have to distinguish between those aspects of the point you just made that relate to, that are culturally specific, you know, that have to do with the society we're raised in, or that are individually specific, the kind of person you are from those qualities that have been shaped by the long arc of our natural selection.

And so I guess what I would say is that while it is the case that there is a lot in our nature that makes us pay attention to our individuality and how we act. In fact, I'm going to come back to this point in a moment. Much more interesting to me and much more relevant to our survival is our capacity to work together. But let me let me say two things about this. First of all, this notion that we're individuals, which you take for which many people take for granted, actually it's kind of an interesting aspect of our species. So it is, if you think about it, every, you know, we humans are capable of being individuals. And not only are we conscious about it,

but we signal our unique identity. And we humans do that with our faces. So our faces, every human face is different. While in principle, every pancreas should work the same, every face should not look the same, every face should look different. And those regions of our genome that are responsible for the faces we're born with,

those regions are highly variable and highly recombinable in ways that explain, in large measure, the great variety of human faces. But not only do we signal our individual identity, not only do each of us have the capacity to say, this is me, not you, or not someone else, but each of us is capable of detecting other people's individuality. Our brain has regions that are devoted, a lot of energy and brain spaces devoted to the ability to tell the difference between people. You can look at it as see of a thousand people in a nightclub, for example, and you can

tell each person is different who is who on the dance floor. And this is important. So you go and you dance with your own partner, not some random person on the partner. That would be a bad idea. Yeah, and it would be awkward. And you want to reciprocate, you know, like, you know, this person kissed you and now it's time to kiss them back, not a different person back, for example. So to do that, but to do that, you need to be able to tell who is who.

And so this, all of this machinery, the face, the signals identity, the brain power that detects identity, all of this is an evolutionary luxury. Other animals don't do this. We do this. We do this. And one of the deep paradoxes about living socially as a mammal is that first we must be individuals. There's a lot of capacity that we have that makes us capable of being individuals and signaling our identity, which actually allows it that lies at the foundation of our ability to live socially. So, for example, this relates to our ability to be friends. How can you have friends with other people, unless you can track who is who?

In order to have a sustained relationship with Tom and not Dick or Harry, you have to be able to reliably tell, this is Tom, not Dick or Harry, and this is Tom yesterday. Now, this is still Tom. So this capacity to be individuals is very deeply connected to our capacity to live socially. So now I forgot how I went off on this tangent. How do you ask me about that? I want you to ask this. So you've touched on the fact that other animals don't do this.

All right. What do you mean don't do this and how so? Well, have you ever looked at a sea of penguins or cows? I mean, I guess farmers can sometimes tell their cows apart, but you know, a cow is a cow. I mean, there's a herd of cattle and we don't have any sense. Is that our interpretation of the cow or is presumably the cows must be able to tell each other apart? Not as unique individuals.

They can tell they're offspring. So for example, cows can tell this is my calf. I should feed milk to this calf, not anyone else. But they don't tell as far as we know, the difference between strange cows individually. Here are 100 strange cows. Oh, but this is this strange cow, and this is that strange cow. Elephants do it. Now, we're not the only animal that does it to be clear other social mammals do this.

So we do it we have this capacity for individuality. Certain other primates do it elephants do it both african and asian elephants certain cetaceans do it there's very interesting evidence from dolphins that dolphins have names. do it. There's very interesting evidence from dolphins that dolphins have names and that they, when they whistle to each other, they have a particular whistling sound they make, which identifies themselves like a call sign. Like you might say, you know, Delta 214, this is tower come in. And that means, you know, that's identified. That's how the dolphins repeatedly say, I am speaking now, this is me. And the other dolphins say, oh, you know, that's identified. That's how the dolphins repeatedly say, I am speaking now. It's is me. And the other dolphins know, oh, you know, that's, you know, that's Chris speaking, not Nicholas. They can tell the difference. Yeah. So, so, um, and now some birds can do it too incidentally. There's some evidence that certain very social birds can Ravens do it. Ravens are bad

asses. Yeah. Ravens are very bad. I don't know about Ravens and individuality I'm sure it's known. I just don't know the answer. Ravens are crazy clever, man. Yes, very very funny about Ravens and Sethlapods. They're not too little obsessions of the moment. Yes, I think if you come back in in 20 million years, I think Ravens may be the ascendant species on the planet and a hundred million it may be octopuses i can't wait for the war between the ravens and the octopuses now they'll die out we'll die out then the ravens will be ascendant then the ravens will die out the act of as it'll be underwater sweet and then they will evolve

there's actually a lot of debate about whether in other planets, submarine animals could evolve into sophisticated civilizations because of the impossibility of having fire underwater. Yes. Some people speculate, most people think that would not be possible to be a professional mammal, a trestial animal, to have a civilization. But other people think that's just us being anthropomorphic that in some alien planet, there could be very smart

underwater creatures that, for example, develop the capacity to create air bubbles into which they put fire. Oh, wow. Or they have other technologies we can't imagine that they manipulate the natural world in some way. So who knows? But anyway, it'll be octopus as a hundred million years.

That's my prediction. You can come back and let me know if I just didn't work out as I predicted. I got you. Have you ever read Children of Time by Adrian Chikovsky? No, but I do talk about science fiction, utopias, and dystopias in my book, because one of the things that I try to do is I try to imagine sort of counterfactual types of social order. So I look at science fiction authors to see,

you know, what kind of crazy social worlds did they come up with, and to what extent do those resemble or not resemble our own? Yeah, I think if you've got room in the reading schedule over the coming months, highly recommend children of time by Adrian Czajkovski was I think Pulitzer Prize Award or some some crazy big prize award. And in that future civilization of Earth creates a rapidly evolving amendment to the genome and then throws a bunch of

monkeys primates onto a planet which is habitable and they've all got this particular amendment and thinking is we will go to sleep for a long time and over a shorter period of time like a couple of million years they will go from being normal primates to these highly ascended beings. like a couple of million years, they will go from being normal primates to these highly ascended beings. What happens is all of the, this doesn't spoil the story, thankfully. All of the monkeys burn up on entry

and it turns out that the only couple of species that are left to absorb this particular kind of genetic information are spiders and ants. And you see what happens over a few million years and Adrian rolls the clock forward about how they all evolve. One of the things really interesting that he touched on was when you have young planets, you don't have the mineralogy, mineralogy, you don't have the minerals.

Yeah, you know, not mineralogy, it's a minute. I can't remember the word right now. Go on, yes, you don't have the right mineral resource. You don't have the right mineral makeup to be able to create like smithing and stuff like that, because it's just not not existed for long enough to have those fossil fuels, et cetera, et cetera. So they create biological technology.

It's absolutely fascinating. They make a computer, essentially a computer, out of a pheromone controlled ants linked together in a hive. It's really, really cool. But getting out of the realm of science fiction and back to the real world, I totally get what you mean. The fact that we are a social species, the fact that we can tell each other apart, it shows that

there has to be a degree of collaboration. And also, a lot of what we've been learning about recently, listeners will remember William von Hippel's episode, which is fascinating, talking about hair bonding, talking about the fact that you have to spend a lot of time with the partner to protect the child. All of this, I guess, lends credence to the fact that we're an incredibly social species. Yeah, I talk about pair bonding, and one of the things that many people take for granted is that, you know, we could be a species that just had sex with each other, but we don't just have sex with each other, we are attached to each other. We tend to be attached to our partners. This is very rare in the mammals. It's common in birds, actually,

which is another interesting thing again. But in mammals, you can have a one-off kind of reproductive interaction, and you don't stay together in a kind of monogamous way for a sustained period of time and multiple offspring being produced by the same union. But we do do that. And in humans, that sense of attachment is expressed or felt as love, that we love our partners. And there's interesting ideas as to why we do that. You already alluded to one of them. One has to do that. If you have love between partners, you can have more successful, higher number of surviving offspring. So the male will stick around to help invest in the young, but he will only do that if he can be, this is the theory, if he can be confident that those are his offspring,

not another man's offspring. And one of the ways a women will signal that to the male, the females will signal that a male, is by love, by expressing love for them in a way. Anyway, so there's some interesting ideas about the evolution of pair bonding, why we have this phenomenon that is all around us, that if you stop and think about it, it is unnecessary. We could be essentially reproducing species without having an emotional attachment, and yet we do feel this attachment, and the reason is why it's part of our nature, what purpose is it serve. And one of the purposes is what you alluded to it. It's felt to enhance a reproductive fitness.

Yeah, and so why are we- And I should say, I mean, the book I talk about, this sense of attachment is seen, of course, at homosexual unions, it's seen in polyandry, which of course not reproductive unions, it's seen in poly homosexual unions. It's seen in Pollyondry, which, of course, not reproductive unions. It's seen in Pollyondry. It's seen in Pollygyny. It's seen in monogamous cultures. So the important thing that's very constant, the world over is not how we pay. It's seen in arranged marriages. So even the love is seen as a dangerous phenomenon in countries that have arranged marriages, it's dangerous before marriage.

Even in countries with arranged marriages, love is seen as a very much to desired outcome of marriage. So it's seen as a desirable and normal property to love your mate. And if you measure using some various psychometric scales, sort of the sort of the passionate love scale is one of them, a partner is you looking at arranged and marriages and non-arranged or so-called love matches within a few years of marriage is no difference. In fact, there's evidence at the divorce rate,

more than a little evidence, at the divorce rate, of course, it's complicated to know why, but the divorce rate is also lower in arranged marriages. So anyway, no matter what the marital system and there are many all over the world, one of the universals is that people love their partners, which is beautiful actually, if you think about it.

I mean, one of my arguments is that these qualities that are universal also are good. And in fact, that's one of the reasons that are universal is that they were fitness enhancing. They made our world better for us. I recently did a podcast with Caleb Jones, who is a very big non-monogamy advocate, and that found that incredibly interesting to hear his point of view. And the listeners will at home, I don't know, Del, too deeply into that,

but I'm thinking an awful lot about what it is that he was talking about, and he also alluded to the divorce rate, the increasingly rapid- Well, there are some people, I mean, just as a moral matter, I have no issues with polyamory. And I don't think, and there's certainly some people who find that very appealing and I think that's totally fine.

I mean, they can find each other and their adults and they can do in a free society what they want. But there is no, to my knowledge, no successful society or even commune that has endured long and I discuss this in the book that's been organized around polyamory. It's a very unstable arrangement for a large group of people. It's not necessarily unstable for couples. I know many couple not many. I know a couple of couples that practice polyamory among themselves, but I don't know of any society that's organized that way or even any commune that has survived more than one or two generations organized around polyamory. Interesting. Many have tried. You know, the reason, you know, the, you know, the reason. It's very interesting actually.

So, um, so if you think about the establishment of utopian sects or communes, they have a problem, which is that they want the group members to have allegiance to the whole community, to the, you're supposed to feel a member of the whole community. And this is why, for example, in many communes, not all, and also in certain totalitarian states, the family unit is a threat to the loyalty that the individual is the allegiance they feel to the state or to the commune. So they try to break down the family.

Kim Butz is an Israel tried to do this also, by the way, sort of break down the family unit. Also, they try to break down friendships. For example, in East Germany, everyone was, you couldn't have friends because there could be, you know, Stasi agents. Everyone was ranting on everyone else. So this type of breaking down intimate connections or friendly connections between people is often seen as necessary in order to foster allegiance to the total group, the totality.

Very O'Learyan. Yes, yes. But here's the thing about sexuality and love of partners. So some communes address the problem that humans naturally love their partners and wish to be in love and wish to be loved. This is a very natural thing that most people feel and all societies manifest. This could be seen as a threat to the maintenance of kind of social cohesion for these utopian sects or, for example, we're talking about now, but they have adopted very different practices to address that. Some sex have tried to adopt polyamory. So they say, everyone can, there's no, we don't want

any sexual jealousy. Everyone can have sex with everyone else. Brave New World. Yes. So, but again, for the reasons we just discussed, technically, others can't represent opposite extreme. Nobody can have sex with anyone else, it totally is totally celibate but both of those extremes are serving the same purpose. If you think about it, both those sex that want you to have sex with everybody and those sex that want you to have sex with nobody in both of those cases they're trying to break down a kind of intimate connection to particular people. They're trying to anonymize or atomize the experience. So the paradox is that

in communes, these very opposite practices actually are in the service of the same end, which is to foster allegiance to the group. The shakers, for example, famously prohibited sex, which of course makes it very difficult to sustain the community against campy produce. But anyway, I'm sorry, there's a depression within a depression. I get it, I get it. I mean, you've touched on a point that I wanted to go to there, which is the fact that humans naturally seek some sort of companionship.

And by removing the ability to go deep with either some people or anyone, like everyone or anyone, you force people to look for this connection elsewhere and that's where the state comes in. So is the reason that humans are a state? Yeah, like the state, the state can't take the place. You see, one of the things that's all the true is that in our ancestral environment being alone was deadly. So we, for reasons I discussed in the book, we explore the origins of friendship and some

theory as to why we develop the capacity to buy, we live groups, all of this stuff which has to do with coping with the dangers in the environment. So feeling we evolve this kind of sense that being alone could be dangerous and risky, and we crave intimate friendships that we can all, every human being that is listening to this, almost everyone knows what I'm talking about. When I say you have an intimate friendship, someone you trust, and you talk to them, and you have a sense that they know you as a person and they value you as special and unique you're irreplaceable to them each of us is totally replaceable

to strangers but we are irreplaceable to our friends right we are unique individuals and that friendship is special so so this this all this apparatus that we have, all these emotions and sensibilities and behaviors that sustain friendship, in a modern environment where you're interacting with people anonymously or where you go to bureaucracies and you interact with bureaucrats. So now instead of interacting with people face to face as individual people, you interact with them as replaceable cogs in a system. They're just, you know, it's the person at the Department of Motor Vehicles who's you're interacting with and they're doing their job. And we all sense that as awful.

And the reason we sense it as awful is because on some level, we recognize these are not, our evolved psychology is sorry, warning, warning, warning, these aren't your real friends. You know, these are real friends you know these are these are these are not real relationships and so we sense that kind of anno me and this is why incidentally I also think that a lot of online interactions make people so miserable because our evolved psychology wants real intimate face-to-face deep sustained social relationships and instead what we get is you know acquaintances and and that's emiserating I think. So anyway so it's connect all of this stuff is connected actually. Absolutely. It's interesting that you touch on the online connections because you know it's a

trope to say we're more connected than ever whilst feeling more alone, etc, etc, all that sort of stuff. Do you think there's something specific about the face-to-face interaction, about the fact that I think it's more than half of communication cues are nonverbal and a WhatsApp chat doesn't quite fulfill that need? Yes, I mean, for example, in promoting the book or supporting the book, I've done a whole bunch of interviews and I've noticed that quite a few of the, like you, quite a few of the more sophisticated podcasters,

even if there's gonna be an audio-only file, they want to do video. That's, in fact, I asked you at the beginning, I said, we're gonna do this video, are you gonna record the video, or are you just, we're just see-t ya. Well, why is that? It's because the conversation is more natural, more fluid. I can see are you laughing at my joke or not?

You know, I can see you're getting bored by what I'm saying and I should move on. Never. You know, all of those things. Yeah, all of those things, you know. So, you know, those are fundamental parts of how we communicate. Got you. So going back to the real beginning, the evolutionary So, you know, those are fundamental parts of how we communicate. Got you. So, going back to the real beginning, the evolutionary, I guess, prerogative for why we are a social species, is it simply that a human on its own is a human

that's dead and are main advantage as evolving humans was that we could coordinate well as a group. Does that appear to be? There are many things that have made us one of the most descendant species on the earth. Humans, I think, have the broadest or one of the broadest, humans have the broadest. I think ants also have an equally broad, but set that aside for a moment.

One of the broadest geographic ranges of any animal species. So everyone knows that some animals live in some places, but not in other places. But there's no place humans don't live. We live all over the world, from the Arctic to the quater, in deserts, in snow-covered plains. We live everywhere. And the reason we do that is not because of our bodies. We haven't adapted physically, although we have also, in some cases, done adapted physically. It's because of our cultures, because of what we can teach each other. It's because of our ability to accumulate knowledge. So, slowly over generations, people invent kayaks, or they invent parkas, or slowly over generations, people invent technologies to find water in the desert. And because of those innovations, we are able to transmit that knowledge from person to

person. So in order to survive, we have to be part of a community that has this type of knowledge. A teenager, we do a lot of work with a hodza. Actually, we don't anymore, but we used to, which is one of the last forager groups on the planet. They live around Lake Ayasi in Tanzania. There are only about a thousand of them left. These people hunt and gather for their food

just like every human did until about 10,000 years ago. Just to interject, what period of history did they align with? The Hads are still alive. No, no, what would they be representative of in our past? The way we lived until about before the agricultural revolution, till about 10,000 years ago. So the huts, the huts, a hunt and gather further food, they have no material possessions to

speak of, they sleep out under the stars. And they live in this environment in Tanzania around like a Yasi. And if I dropped you there or me there, we would be killed in an environment. We would die in an environment that a Hatzah, you know, seven-year-old could survive. Larishism, you know. Yes, yes. And it's not because of the differences in our bodies. It's because we have none of the knowledge. And so the knowledge is of course transmitted socially. It lives. The knowledge lives in the

interstices between people. That's where the knowledge lives and survives across time. Then it comes into my brain and then it goes into your brain and so forth. So it's spreads across these connections, this knowledge, and is produced by groups of people, this knowledge. And so this is what it makes it possible for us to survive this living socially. I think one of my favorite quotes from Warren Buffett is that compounding interest is the eight hundred or eight hundred of the world. And it's occurring as we see in front of us with knowledge, right? I can put my hand in a fire, burn my hand, and then tell you and you know not to put

your hand in a fire without having to go through it. That fact alone, cumulating over however many generations leads to me and you talking over Skype. Correct. In fact, in fact, you could take, you could take, you could take the average British, you know, high school student that studied calculus, let's say, and when they were 17, and if you move them back 500 years, they'd be the smartest mathematician on the planet. I mean, this, you know, this, the, the, and, and we get calculus, which, you know,

Isaac Newton and, and Leibniz invented, actually just as an aside, we learn calculus. We are taught calculus at the speed at which Newton invented it. It's astonishing. Isaac Newton takes a year to invent calculus. I mean, it's just, the man is just unbelievable. False of nature. Ah, anyway. So, and now, but the point is, you're born today and you inherit all this stuff that everyone before you, all the domesticated animals, other people domesticated these animals,

thousands of years ago. All the domesticated plants, all the roads which were built in England starting with aromas. Calculus, which was invented by newton 500 years ago it's yours for free all of this stuff how to smelt iron you know all the knowledge about iron and fishing how to fish hooks i talk about fish hooks in the book like the invention of fish hooks the wheel you go fire you go on and on and on all of this stuff which was just given to you when you were born was accumulated by other humans across time. And it's this that makes us so powerful as species, because we have, if you think about it, rather pathetic bodies. I mean, there are very few animals our size.

I don't think there's any animal our size that we could... It could take in a one-on-one battle. I mean, we probably have a dough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A dough would kill us. Yeah, you're probably about the same weight and biomass is maybe like a cheetah or something like that. Well, we've died of a cheetah.

I mean, I can't even think what is an animal that's about the size that we could kill. Penguin? Penguin is not our size. Obviously tiny animals, you can kick a penguin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, any tiny insects, they could kill us too. They're poisonous spiders, everything else.

But my point is, we have pathetic bodies. It's not our bodies that are making us powerful on this planet. It's our culture, our brains that are making us powerful. I've got one of the most important questions to ask you right now, Professor Chris Stachis. And it would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 20 duck-sized horses? 20 duck-sized horses. What's your strategy going to be? You kick one and move, kick and move, kick and move.

Yeah, and I mean, you actually move to the place where you fell the first opponent. And you pile these bodies of like 300. Well, you said 20 like in 300 the movie. Ah, right. Yeah, you just got mounds of these dead duck-sized horses everywhere. Well, cool. I think. So I asked one of the fittest men on the planet, Dan Bailey, this question as well, and he gave the exact same answer.

So you are on a level with elite athletes with regards to your answer. Well, I spent years training in the martial arts, but that's another story practicing Duck size horse kick-out No practicing to get your black belt. They put you in a ring with four guys and and You have to learn how to fight against multiple opponents and you know, it's not easy It's for various reasons anyway. They're basic techniques you can use So if I if this situation occurs, I'm going to call on you.

So, I'm way, way, called Joe Rogan instead. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He'll kick them into the next week, won't he? Yeah. And so, we've talked about kind of our evolutionary past. Moving into where we are now, did you reflect in the book on what the advantages and disadvantages of modern society are doing to our desire for social cohesion? Yes and no. I'm interested in the long arc of our pre-historical past. We've evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and it's only in the last 10,000 years

that we've even had history at all, that we've had historical or political or cultural, well, not cultural, we've had a long time, but specific kinds of cultural forces acting on us. So I'm interested in the ways in which our capacity for social interaction and living together were shaped at a time that preceded the invention of cities or the invention of the internet or anything like that. Now, these cultural products, the cities and the internet and everything

else, are also shaping our evolutionary trajectory, but that's not the main driver of the way we live socially today. For example, my Greek grandmother was born in a little village in southern Greece, and if she's not alive anymore, she was born over 100 years ago. But if you could, if you had asked her when she was alive, what, you know, when she was a 10-year-old girl, how many friends did she have? And she would have said, I have one or two best friends and there are four or five of us girls we hang out together. And this little village in southern Greece, you know, 100 years ago. And if you could ask my daughter, Lena, who's now 21, but back, let's say, when she was

10, you know, 10 years ago, you asked her the same question and she has an iPhone in her pocket, she would give you the same answer. So something deep and fundamental about our nature, about this desire for one or two best friends, most people, not everyone, about about 90%, 92% of people in developed countries have at least one best friend or one intimate, very intimate social contact. 8% of people, 8% of no one, which is very sad. Some of these people are elderly widowers. Their spouses died. Everyone they know has died. Others of them have other sort of disabilities that make it difficult for them. But anyway, so most people have the sense of they have one or two best friends and they're four or five of, you know, your intimate friends that you hang out with.

And then they're broader circles. The point is the technology didn't change that, right? I mean, Chris, this is a cultural constant. In fact, we've done this. We've looked around the world in my laboratory. We've mapped networks in Uganda and in Tanzania and in India and in Honduras and in the United States and wherever you go, you find the same thing. People organize themselves in the same way. So it's not to do with the

technology. Does that specifically maximize fitness? Do you think, or did it over the years, like the likelihood of surviving? Yes. Yes. I think that the specific mathematical structure of the social networks that we make, and we've done some other evidence on this using a variety of tools from genomics and also some actual anthropological tools, that the mathematical structure of networks that we make, I believe, have been shaped by natural selection. How so? Okay, well, this is a little hard to explain. So it's a bit of a tangent, but we've got it. We've got it. Listen, the listeners are rubbing the

hunts together. They're ready to go. Come on. Okay, so here we go. So there's a very fundamental property about human social networks, which is that we have this thing called degree assortativity. Degree is the number of connections that each person has. So it's how many friends you have, you have, you have a degree five, you've got five friends, I have degree 10, I've got 10 friends, someone else has a degree two, they've got two friends. And degree of sortativity means people with similar numbers of friends are preferentially connected. So popular people, befriend popular people, and unpopular people, befriend unpopular people, okay? and unpopular people befriend unpopular people, okay? This property of degree of sortativity

is the opposite of a property known as degree disassortativity, which is a way the airport network is organized. So unlike human social networks which have degree of sortativity, popular people are connected to popular people or unpopular people are connected to unpopular people. In the airport network, it's the opposite, right? We have a hub and spoke system. So the unpopular airports with few connections aren't connected to other small

airports with few connections. They're all connected to London and Gatwick and Chicago and Denver. And if you want to get from one place to another place in an airport network, you've got to go from New Haven, Connecticut to Chicago. And then from Chicago, you can go anywhere. You can fly to any city. So in two hops, you get there because the network is organized in this degree disassordative way. Now, if you think about it, in which of those two kinds of networks, if an epidemic, if you infected a random person

in these two networks, a degree assortative and a degree disassortative network, in which of those two kinds of networks, would you get a bigger epidemic? Oh, yes. You should have the intuition that you'll get a bigger epidemic in the degree disassortative network because in the degree disassortative network, the first person that gets infected,

the next step, they are connected to the most popular person, and then that person spreads it to everybody. So in a degree disassortative network, epidemics will spread very rapidly. Whereas in a degree assortative network, like humans make, epidemics can be contained within one part of the network. So one unpopular person gets an infection, and they infect their unpopular friends, and they are all infected over there.

The rest of us are okay, because they're not connected to the popular person, let's say. The story is more complicated than this, but this is the gist. So what's very interesting to me is that of all the kinds of ways that we could form social networks, we form them to have this property of resistance to epidemics because we form a degree of sortative networks. And amazingly, elephants do the same thing. This is discussed in the book. And so wail, so to orcas. And so other social mammals, when they go about making their friendship networks, even though our last common ancestor with those with elephants was 85 million years ago, they independently have

converged on the same way of social socially organizing themselves that gives them this sort of epidemic resistance property at the population level. That's so fascinating. So yeah, so these are some ideas about you know In response to what you asked That's really fascinating and it makes complete sense. Yeah, I totally understand I think um One of the things that's come to mind, Dunbar's number, which is the supposed upper limits, upper bound that a human can have in terms of friends, did you look at that and I've never delved into this, is that like a gospel or is there some criticism of that?

Yeah, so Robin Dunbar is a very famous physical anthropologist at Modeling College at Oxford. He is well known for this finding, which is a correct finding, which is that human beings, it's not the upper limit, it's that on average, our capacity to track social relationships that is at about 150.

And he made this prediction based on a comparative analysis of different primate species and the size of their groups. And there's been abundant evidence sort of confirming his ideas in this regard. And the notion is that you are able to, our brains are endowed with the ability to, and he uses as a kind of approximation of what he means by knowing someone is knowing someone is if you can pick up your conversation where you left off, where you left it off before. So you remember enough of who they are and what kinds of things you're discussing so that if you meet them again after an absence, you can pick up the conversation. And so the number of people we can do this with

is about 150. We can know if these people are friends or enemies, we can also know something about the relationships of all the pairs of people. So you know, if you have 100 friends, you know, does this person like that person or not get along? And for example, many of the listeners will have this experience.

Some listeners will have gone to high schools that had small, but I know the word is different in British English and American English. So when I say class, I mean, the group of people that are in, you know, your year, exactly. So there might be in your school, let's say it's a private school and they're a small year of let's say a hundred students. If you went to such a school, you know that you know every other student and you knew something about the relationships of every other student.

And if you contrast that, for example, with a, um, with a municipal school, that's run by the state, which is bigger. And there might be a thousand people in your year or 500 people in your year. You know, you didn't know all those thousand people those thousand people and you didn't know the relationships of all those people. And that's a limitation of your of your brain, of our brains. So, so this is what Robin Dunbar's arguments are about. Do you think that that was maximizing evolutionary fitness as well? I do remember when I spoke to, I think in our ancestral environment, we didn't need to

could brains that could track larger numbers of people because there weren't bigger groups. I see. Apparently, I was again, William von Hippel is the closest podcast that I've done to what we're discussing at the moment. I think he alluded to the fact or at least positive that groups over, he said around about 50, he thought would tend to disband. He thought that groups, at least when we're talking, Australopithecus, that kind of a hero, that those groups would disband into groups of 50 because the larger groups end up being, I can't

remember the reason why, but he, I think he thought that was the case. Yes, and he may be right. I don't know the answer to that question. There's a, there's a lot of suggestive evidence about the group sizes of ancestral hominids. We can certainly study living primates and do comparisons, and that's what Robin Dunbar did for his analysis. I got you. So moving forwards as we go on, obviously you have looked at the past. Do you have any predictions about the future? Do you have any sort of suggestions for the future? Well, I mean, one kind of speculative set of ideas

that interests me right now is what I call hybrid systems of humans and machines. So increasingly, the relationship between human beings and technology is an ancient topic. Homer talks about this in the Iliad. What's the role of bronze spears in warfare? We invent a new technology and it has certain implications, for example, or Odysseus uses the Trojan horse to get it to the city. That's a technology.

And you had the Luddites breaking the looms in England. So there's lots of, our relationship technology is complicated and long-standing. But what's different now is that we are beginning to endow these machines with a kind of volition of their own. I mean, they're not obviously human. They don't really have their own desires, but they're able to act independently and they're living amongst us. So we have digital assistance, like Alexa, for example, or we have autonomous vehicles

on the car on the road. So you're driving down the road and they're mostly human drivers, but there are also some autonomous vehicles that are driving down the road doing their thing. Or online, you know, we have your Twitter friends and, you know, I'm on Twitter and some of the people that follow me, I think are bots, you know, and so there they are. They're in this system. They're humans and some bots that are interacting. I call this a hybrid system because it's hybrid between humans and machines. But what's interesting to me hybrid between humans and machines. But what's interesting to me is not the interactions between a human and a machine. It's the ways in which the presence of those machines, acting as if they were human,

modifies how we interact with each other. Let me give you an example. So you add a bring an Alexa into your home and the people who design the Alexa, make it want to make it very obedient. They're not interested in you having to do you could just say you know you know play a little Richard you know or play Beethoven and the machine does what you add or you know order milk. You don't have to say please could you order some milk or would you please you know do this or whatever you don't have to

be polite to the machine. Yeah.. But think about how the addition of this machine into a home might train a child to be rude. And it's not a problem if the child is rude to the Alexa, but then the child goes to the school yard and is rude to his or her friends. And so now we have a rude group of children that has arisen because of the introduction of this machine into the social system. Or you think about driverless cars in a world in which we have only

human drivers, they're all human, and eventually we'll have a world in which they're only autonomous vehicles. None of us will drive cars anymore. You'll go to racetracks to drive cars. That's like 30 years from now if not sooner. So, and those cars will be will be Bluetooth enabled and they will communicate with each other and they'll move in a kind of laminar flow down the highway or they'll train with each other and they'll be fine, there'll be no collisions, it'll be all fine. But between now and then we're going to have a hybrid system of humans and machines. And the question is how should we program those autonomous vehicles so that as they move

among us, they improve rather than degrade our behavior. So for example, the carmaker might want to design the car to move very smoothly so that the occupant of the autonomous vehicle has a nice pleasant ride. But now the human drivers behind this vehicle might be lulled into a false sense of security and become inattentive. And so when they veer off to go and go to the part of the highway that has just human vehicles, these inattentive drivers might cause more collisions. Now the person who bought the vehicle, the autonomous vehicle and the designer of the autonomous vehicle, doesn't care at all about those people who are killing themselves over there because of the new bad driving practices. But we should care. So one of the things I'm concerned about is the ways in

which these new technologies in the future are going to reshape our social interactions, are going to modify how we live together and might potentially threaten some of these fundamentally good qualities about how we have evolved to live together that you and I have been talking about. Do we have any mechanism to work with this? Because to me, it doesn't feel like that. I'm going to guess that this is something we're going to have to learn as we go. But yes, it's going to be tough like every other technology we've ever invented.

But I think as I said, this technology is a little different because it's cutting at the core of how we live together. Now there are other technologies that are also nuclear weapons, another serious problem. The technologies are close global warming, another issue, burning fossil fuels, etc. But this is a technology that is going to affect what we're talking about, which is our social interactions, how we live together as a species. And it's something that I'm giving a lot of thought to in my laboratory at the moment. Well, hopefully you will be able to illuminate us further

and maybe in five years' time we'll have the sequel, the Future Blueprint or something like that. And then moving on, where can the listeners find you online if they want to find out a little bit more Well my laboratory is WW human nature lab.net and Of course we've been talking about my book blueprint the evolutionary origin of a good society which is available everywhere and On my lab we have videos and papers, scientific papers and all kinds of other information.

People want a delve deep. It will be in the show notes below, along with the links to blueprint and your Twitter. Yes, I'm on Twitter, of course. You are incredibly interesting on Twitter. I'm looking forward to reading through some of your stuff. I got saved for this evening. Professor Chris Stach is a really appreciated time. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you for having very much, Chris. I'm very grateful.