Modern Wisdom - #594 - Dr Richard Wrangham - The Incredible Evolution Of Human Violence

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

Dr Richard Wrangham is an anthropologist and primatologist, a Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and an author whose research focuses on ape behaviour, human evolution, violence, and cooking. Humans have the capacity for incredible benevolence and kindness, but also are able to be execute other members of our species with a uniquely effective ruthlessness. Why would evolution give us such differing capacities to chimps and apes and what can this tell us about our nature? Expect to learn the fascinating evolutionary story of human aggression through the ages, how humans actually selectively bred ourselves to become less aggressive, how our capacity for violence informed the evolution of morality, the true reason for why humans might have a sense of right and wrong, what would have happened to a hyper aggressive male ancestrally and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Goodness Paradox - https://amzn.to/3YVQz6Z  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Richard Rangham, he's an anthropologist and primatologist, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University and an author whose research focuses on ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking. Humans have the capacity for incredible benevolence and kindness, but are also able to execute other members of our species with a uniquely effective ruthlessness. Why would evolution give us such differing capacities to chimps and apes? And what can this tell us about our nature? Expect to learn the fascinating evolutionary story of human aggression through the ages,

how humans actually selectively bred ourselves to become less aggressive, how our capacity for violence informed the evolution of morality, the true reason for why humans might have a sense of right and wrong, what would have happened to a hyper-aggressive male and cestrally, and much more. This is a very, very cool conversation. Richard's work is phenomenal. He literally was one of the first assistants that went out to work with Jane Goodall, who was studying chimp behavior in the wild. 40, 50 years ago, maybe even longer than that. He is super legit, really, really wonderful storyteller. And I mean, some of the insights from this are, they really upend a lot of what I assumed and thought that I knew about human nature.

So yeah, get ready for this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Dr. Richard Rangham. Is it right to say that humans are an aggressive species, do you think? Well, yes, in some ways we are incredibly aggressive because we are responsible for more deaths of members of our own species than is typical of other animals. And yet at the same time, of course, the great paradox about us is that in some ways we're just incredibly nice, tolerant, and friendly and unaggressive. And for years, we grappled with how to resolve these two contrary sides of our personality,

but we cannot deny that part of us is a really aggressive streak. And we're seeing it at the moment in wars that occur around the world. And those of course have gone on through our history. What does it suggest about human nature or what our role is or what would be adaptive for us that we seem to be very effective at the barbell ends of aggression? Well, you know, one of the great questions about human nature for two, three hundred years has been, are we biologically predisposed to be aggressive, or are we biologically predisposed to be tolerant? Are we an inherently aggressive species that is tamed by society, or are we an inherently tolerant, unaggressive species that is made aggressive by society?

And you know, my view, and I think the increasing view, is that that question is misconceived, you know, because the answer is that we're both or and either, if you like, that whether or not you look at our tremendous capacity and even interest in committing aggression or whether you look at our tolerant aversion to aggression both of them are part of our biology So I think that what we're learning about ourselves is that we have to recognize that we are a mixture. And society is not

responsible either for taming us or for making us the sometimes horrible species that we sometimes are. You know, this is us. Take us all even. Who were the two philosophers that had this big push was one? It wasn't Foucault. Who was the one? Who was the French guy went and literally the words? The French guy was Jean-Jacques Russo. That was it. Sounds like Foucault. Yeah. Just before the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century and and you know sort of a very ironic really, you know, because he has become associated with the notion that we are inherently non-violent, and of course, everyone has such high hopes for the French Revolution, and then, you know, this wonderful, charitable, exotic, new

dawn of humanity turns into the guillotine, and then, you know, Napoleon, and so on, the disaster that befell the growing sense of civilization in Europe at that time. And then the other great philosopher, so Rousseau was associated with the notion that humans are inherently unaggressive, made aggressive by society. And then the opposite side was Thomas Hobbes, who was living in the time of the English Civil War in the second half of the 17th century. And he was impressed by the fact that you really had to lock your door and you had to worry about who your neighbors were because they might come and kill you. And you know, the civil war was a terrible thing. And so he was associated with the notion that there is something

just inherently competitive, cruel, violent about humans, and that what you need to be able to control them is a superior body, an ultimate authority, he called it a Leviathan. We would now think about it as the state, that time might have been the monarch to keep everybody under control. to keep everybody under control. And you can look at both of these great philosophers who have been representing these two opposing views, superficially opposing views, and think that in many ways both of them are right. You know, they had a lot to them,

and that's why people have sort of supported one or the other over these years. But you know, the wonderful thing is that we can now put the nature of human nature into a much broader perspective than ever was done by political philosophers who were basically of course sitting in their armchairs, you know, from the point of view of modern science. They weren't trying to really figure out what was going on in terms of the wet biology, or in terms of our evolutionary relationships. But we can do that now, and we can look at our close relatives, the great apes, and we can see elements of all these two contrasting

types of behavior in our cousins. And the fascinating thing about that is not that we can say, oh well, we have inherited a particular kind of quality from a particular kind of ape. But instead, what we can see is that evolution works in fascinating ways to generate in one species a certain level of some kinds of aggression, and other species at different kinds of aggression. And we can figure out that there is a logic to the evolutionary history that leaves us deposited in our case on the 20th century or 21st century, with a particular set of inherent tendencies. What do you think is the evolutionary story of human, what we are now, our ancestors journey through aggression? I think that we have to look back

at the last two million years, which is the time that we have been members of the genus Homo. You know, just around two million years ago is when the genus Homo arose. When for the first time you've got a creature that could walk into a clothes shop on Main Street and take clothes off the peg. They were our size and shape. They were smaller-brained, they were much more robust, they were big, big, big barriges and great, big broad faces, but they were, they were an early kind of human two million years ago. And I think that for the whole of the two million years, they were a species that were like wolves or chimpanzees or a few other species in being very good hunters and also very good killers of your own species. Because once you're a good hunter, you know, like a lion or a wolf or a chimpanzee,

then it means that you can hunt anything. And if you want to hunt a member of your own species, you're pretty good at that. That weaponry can be turned inward, yes. Yes, and it's not literally weaponry in the sense of a spear, you know, it's the weapons of your claws and your brain and your mouth and whatever it is. And in the case of a spear, you know, it's the weapons of your claws and your brain and your mouth and and whatever it is. And in the case of actually all the species I mentioned, the really important weapon is a coalition. It's your gang. It's ganging up for five of us against one of you. Because when you do that, then you make yourself safe. And none of these hunters will go out on their own and try and attack.

A wolf doesn't go out and try to attack a bison on its own. It knows perfectly well that it would be incredibly dangerous thing to do. But if you have ten wolves in one bison, well now you're talking. Some of them can nip the wolf, it's a rear end while the others are confronting it at the front and so on. There's great advantage in numbers. And that is the way that humans have always tended to attack and kill other humans.

It's through the advantage of numbers or surprise or other tactical arrangements that enable them to kill safely. So, if you're asking, what is the evolutionary story of human aggression? I think the story that carries all the way through to modern warfare is that we were good at hunting and we turned the hunting ability against members of our own species when it suited us to do so. And just, you know, we see this in war nowadays because war consists of a series of asymmetric attacks. We bombed their side,

they don't they bom us. It's an asymmetric attack in the sense that it's a pretty premeditated planned attack when it's pretty safe for the attackers. What's not safe is what happens later when they attack us. So that's one kind of aggression. Wolf-like, chimped-like, lion-like, that's humans throughout the period of the genus Homo. The other kind of aggression is something that is probably the big event that changed everything happened around three or four hundred thousand years ago.

And this is the invention of or the development of a sufficiently skilled language that groups of men were able to kill members of their own group using that same coalitionary ability, that same gang. But the huge complication when you are forming a gang against a member of your own group is how the Dickens do you know that the ones that you hope are going to be in your gang aren't going to turn against you. And you, as say the instigator of a gang, let's go and get that guy, might suddenly turn it on to me, the victim, and they all turn against you. The, the codish and read dynamics become terrifying if you are trying to organize a group against a member of your own group. It is different from

when you're attacking a member of another group because then you can all agree. We hate the different members of another group. But the emotions are mixed when you're talking about individuals within the same group. And the solution to that is sufficiently good language where individuals can talk to each other and get a real sense of reassurance, slowly developing, you know, just floating in ideas. So, you know, that guy is a little bit weird recently, you know. And eventually getting confidence that, yes, okay, it's a grie. You know, he really deserves to be sent back to the witches and we'll get him and we'll all agree.

Now this ability to execute another member of your own group changes society hugely because until then almost unimaginably for humans as we grow up in society today, we would have had a really bullying system. I mean, maybe it is imaginable if you remember high school, you know, where there is some guy at the top who really throws his weight around, you all high schools are like this, but it does happen from time to time. And throws his weight around and just, it takes advantage of his ability to physically dominate everybody else. All animals do this basically,

all the primate, the chimpanzees and the gorillas, even the bonobos, all the monkeys. You have some top male, and he takes out and everybody else, and what is it, what is he get? He gets, well, the females, and he gets the majority of the mating, he gets the best food, he gets into fights a lot, of course, but he just bullies everybody. And once you get this ability to form a coalition that can kill a bully in your group, then all of a sudden everything changes, because nobody dares to be the bully that exerts his power, the tyrant that takes everything for himself. And all of a sudden, you get changes in society,

and then slowly you get changes in the evolution of our aggressive tendencies. And what you're doing when you take out these bullies is you are doing when you take out these bullies is you are doing two humans, what farmers have long done to domesticate animals or to wild animals as they became domesticated. You are selecting inadvertently, in the case of humans, in the case of humans, for the non-bullies, for the less aggressive individuals. And at this point, we have to stop, just take a breather and say, there are two kinds of aggression in animals in general, humans in no exception,

that have very distinctive dynamics. And the one we first talked about, the one that is involved in hunting, is a premeditated form of aggression, which is not necessarily involved in the emotions very strongly at all. It's a very deliberate kind of aggression, saying to yourself, that I have a goal, I want to go and kill that animal, or that person. I want to go and steal that goal, that person. I want to go and steal that goal and if I have to kill someone to do it, I'll get it. And then the other kind of aggression.

So that was called proactive, premeditated predatory. The other kind of aggression is reactive. It's when you as a man come into your home bedroom and find another man in bed with your wife. You just lose it. This is not premeditated, thoughtful, unemotional. This is impulsive, it's defensive, it's reacting to a threat. You just lash out and you are very emotionally aroused. And the aim here is to just get rid of that threat, chase the guy out of the bedroom window, kill him, do whatever. And it turns out that these two kinds of aggression, proactive and reactive,

are somewhat different in the way that they are controlled in the brain. And they can be following different evolutionary trajectories. So you can maintain a high level of proactive aggression and have a selection acting against your reactive aggression. And that's what happened in humans starting about three or four hundred thousand years ago when proactive aggression kept going. We have great hunters all the time, but reactive aggression started going down. We became much less reactive in our aggressive tendencies. How do we know that? How do we know that date? It's beautiful. When you select a while down and choose to have the successive generations, being those that are the result of breeding by the less aggressive,

the less reactively aggressive individuals, then they show elements of some quite surprising biological traits. And we know these traits very well because they occur in domesticated animals. All these different lines of domestication animals, unrelated lines, dogs, cows, goats, cats, they all tend to have white patches of fur on them. Why do they have white patches of fur? It's not because

a farmer needs to have a cow that's got a white patch on his forehead or a horse that's got white toes. These just occur spontaneously. We know this now because there's this wonderful Russian experiment starting in the 1950s by a guy called Dmitri Belayev and he started breeding foxes and lo and behold, within a few generations of foxes got wide patches of fur on them. Why is that? It's because the foxes he chose to breed were the ones that were least aggressive. He would walk towards the foxes when they were about six weeks old, when they were just

young ones. He would write down the distance that the human would get within the fox, as they approach the fox, when the fox said, that was it reacting. Then he would breed from the ones that allowed the humans to get closest, the least reactively aggressive. closest, the least reactively aggressive. And in 10 generations, they got white patches of fur. Hello, there's something mysterious going on here. And we're beginning to get a handle on what it is about the biology that says when you select against reactive aggression, you develop these symptoms of the domestication syndrome like white patches

of fur. Another one is floppy ears. There is no wild animal actually there's there's only one kind of wild animal that has floppy ears. Do you know what it is? Elephant? Yes, very good. Ailedays. Boom. That's what Darwin pointed out. He said, but all the domesticated animals, you will find some individuals and some groups that have got floppy ears. And the floppy ears, they're associated with young ones in wolves, but in many dogs, they retain those floppy ears all the way through an adulthood. Into adulthood. So this is another feature of the domestication syndrome. Well now obviously humans don't have floppy ears. All white fur. Well, we don't often have white patches of fur, but there are some features of the domestication syndrome that are associated with our bones

and they are things like relatively slender light-boned comparator ancestors, shorter faces, smaller chewing teeth, males becoming more female-like. males becoming more female like. And guess what, all of these things started happening around 300,000 years ago and just became more and more developed with time. And so that's why we can say that was selection against reactive aggression starting at that time. And that's why we've ended up relatively reduced in our So, human's are ancestors develop the ability to first off, uh, co-alitionally hunt that then allows them to take down

bigger prey. That is something which can get turned inward, but for the next one and a half million years you have the problem of coordination up until about 400 to 300,000 years ago. When you get language, especially advanced language, you have the ability to coordinate more effectively, not only do you have the literal weapons of the size and the shape and the fists and the teeth, and now the tools that we've been using, the spears and the arrows, perhaps, but you also have the ability to plan in advance to be able to also gauge the reliability of your other co-olitional members in advance to be able to also gauge the reliability of your other co-oitional members.

And to be able to say, right, we're going to take him down because he's been a dick. So it's time for him to go. What that ends up happening is a self-domestication of humans by humans, where the most aggressive, mostly males, I'm going to guess, will be pruned off the top. The ones that are too tyrannical end up being executed by the remainder of the group. What this means is that those ones, some of them very well may have ended up reproducing before they were executed, but on average you're going to have a lower level of reproduction from those individuals. And if they have sons,

like the aggressive sun hypothesis, I suppose, if you have aggressive sons, they are more likely to be killed before they have sons and so on and so forth, which means that over time, the most aggressive males are removed. Now, this is a relatively short period of time. 300,000 years ago, it doesn't sound like long for us to have been doing this, but as you've identified, and only the space of between five and ten generations of foxes, you're able to see a pretty rapid anatomical change with regards to the fur. This is met with certain anatomical changes in humans, which includes shortening of the face, less aggressive, less powerful jaws, less large teeth,

reduced brow ridge, I'm going to guess. And then you said that men or males became more female like, which I'm going to guess means less muscle mass, overall lower bone density, et cetera, et cetera. So for the burgeoning professional athletes, amongst us, maybe a little bit unhappy that those males were selected out of the group.

And we see this with the difference in strength between ocean chimps, right? That a chimps could easily rip a human limb from limb or so. I've heard. And that means that we have very much not only adapted to the selective pressures outwardly that the environment gave to us, but almost kind of adapted to the selective pressures outwardly that the environment gave to us, but almost kind of adapted to the selective pressures that we placed on ourselves socially through this execution.

Is that about right? Yes, absolutely, exactly. So we have been very responsible for our own evolutionary trajectory for the last quarter of a million years and more. And you say, you know, it all seems to be relatively recent and it's true, but of course we have an excellent fossil record. And so, you know, we know very well that there have been these changes going pretty continuously for the last quarter of a minute years and more. How can you talk about psychological changes compared with our ancestors who are no longer around? It's not like you can study our ancestors 300,000 years ago. You can see the anatomical changes,

but even those are mostly wasted away apart from what's left in terms of brunt, bone and teeth structure. How can you talk about the implied psychological changes? Well, I mean, the only way we can really do it confidently is through this correlation with the bones. And there are some correlations that are still very fascinating today. I mean, one of them is concerns the breadth of the face in relationship to the length of the face. It turns out that in a number of animals, humans is one of them. If you look at males,

males who have a relatively broad face are more aggressive. There have been a bunch of studies which show that this is true for humans nowadays. So, you know, the breadth of our faces has been reduced, is become in males more female like, relatively narrow faces. Here's a lovely example of a study, which I think makes a couple of important points. There was a Canadian team that looked at ice hockey, as we would call it or hockey as we would call it in the states. Looked at a number of college hockey teams and a number of professional hockey teams hockey teams and a number of professional hockey teams and looked at the number of minutes that individual players spent in the penalty box for being too rough, for being too aggressive. And of course it's interesting to think about this because what we're going to see is that the players who had broader faces spend more time in the penalty box on average. But the referees are not really particularly aware of this because they've got helmets

on, so you can't, you know, you see it's difficult to even know. It's not like it's prejudice by the referees against the broad faced community, right? Exactly. That's right. An important point in this study was that for each of the studies, each of the teams that they looked at, there was a positive relationship between breadth of the face and the number of minutes spent in the penalty box. But in no case was it significant, statistically significant. It's not a very strong relationship

within each team, but in every team it happened. Every college team and every professional team, I think it was a total of 12 teams. So the overall significance was very clear. But you cannot look at an individual man and say, yeah, you've got a broad face. We know that you are an aggressive type. You're going to punch me.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Wow. It's a trend. OK. So what is, you mentioned about the changes that would have happened with regards to mostly male to male aggression.

What is interesting or is there anything that you know about changes which occurred to females? Were females self-domesticated at all throughout this period? Yeah, it's harder to know. I mean, we don't have the same kind of evidence concerning females. So you're saying that the female from 300,000 years ago would have been able to walk into the department store and garner fewer looks perhaps than the male because on average they would have changed less. Is that right to say? Well, we'd have to give her a

makeover before she went in, obviously. Yeah. What we don't have with females is the equivalent evidence of the changes that were happening in males, independent of the males. It seems to me very likely that females were indeed much more independent aggressors in those days. But we don't know. The reason I say that is because in some ways females have changed, particularly strongly, compared to our sort of ape-ish past past compared to males.

The males are still a little bit more brutish, a little bit less refined, a little bit hairier, a little bit more like our apish ancestors and the early forms of homo. So females, in many ways, changed particularly strongly. They've become feminization has really changed them from what they probably were, which was a much more male-like set of individuals. But we don't have at the moment any kind of really clear story

involving how that happened. It was that just an incidental consequence of selection on males. It doesn't seem very likely, but it's a theoretical possibility, or was there intense selection on females to become less aggressive themselves? That could well be the case. Oh, interesting, because the ability, the male male ability to coordinate more complex coalitions to physically take down a male would have had a similar impact on female capacity to form coalitions.

I've been learning a lot about intersexual competition, your Joyce Benensins of the world and so on and so forth have been on the show a lot. And the female capacity for gossip and coalition making, breaking, backbiting, venting and all the rest of it is otherworldly. And it has to have been the difference as well between the way that males display power struggles, aggression, the competitions for status, who it is that they're concerned about with status, the fact that

men are positively inclined toward a member of their group who is stronger than them or better than them at a thing because typically that coalition would have meant well, if we've got to go take down that mammoth together, Richard, you look like you've got a good set of biceps on you. That means that we can you can grab it and I'll get it with the spear or I don't know how you take down a mammoth. The women on the other hand, have such an unbelievable divergence in the way that they go about things. So it seems like it would make sense to me

that this increased coordination, co-alitional capacity would have caused women during that period as well to have opened up a whole new world of... Intrigues. Yes, for sure. Yeah, and it's very plausible. There's another dynamic as well, which is that the evolution of patriarchy. What do you mean, though? Well, humans, I think, can be thought of as having two kinds of patriarchy. One is the sort of more individualistic, the type that occurs in animals, where a male

can beat up on a female just because he's bigger than her, because he's stronger, he can dominate her. But there's another type as well, and that is what you might call institutional patriarchy. Well, within the group, there are rules that develop in the society as a whole, that benefit men at the expense of women. What would be an ancestral example of one of those? live one of those? You could say that females who have adulterous relationship are going to be punished more heavily than males who do, which is something that happens pretty much

universally, you know, across societies. It's extremely common and you never get it in the other direction. You never find that males are punished more heavily than females. So, you know, I think what's going on here is that you have an alliance among the males. They don't like it when females are adulterous because each of the females belongs to a particular male. Let me fold a very interesting piece of information that I learned a couple of weeks ago. I want to say that this was maybe Christina Duranty or someone else who taught me that or someone else who taught me that women condemn promiscuity more, the more suns that they have. Because they want the male parental and certainty, they want to tune that down. So women who have suns show an increased

distaste for promiscuity. And I thought that that was absolutely fascinating. Yes, I wonder. I wonder how much it's just it's just the men that would have been behind the condemnation of the promiscuous women. I mean, you know, you roll intracexual competition into this and you say, well, I have a man. What we actually want to do in almost like a form of capital punishment to be able to show this is what happens if you do that. Now if you are a single woman, that's one fewer competition, one fewer competitor within your mating market for a future potential mate.

And if you are a partnered up woman, that would be one fewer potential competitor for your existing mate. And if you're a woman who has sons, that is one fewer potentially promiscuous male parental uncertainty inducing partner for one of your sons, so I actually think that there might be some motivation for women here as well. Yeah, and then if a woman has daughters, then she would quite like her daughters to be able to have the choice of choosing which man she has for which which baby. Pramyskios women have got I mean, aside from the whole slutshaming thing, there are a lot

of pressures from pretty much everywhere and a lot of incentives from both men and women and cesterly hand in the modern world to really, I mean, that's not to say that there isn't a Gainesed male promiscuity to, but it definitely seems like, yeah, there's a lot of pressure for women to tune down that promiscuity. Yeah, and I mean, so when you had men taking it out on the tyrant, in other words, taking it out on the alpha male by ultimately killing him, so they're controlling anybody who is taking more than his first share of the females, which until then he always did as the alpha male.

The alpha chim takes a big share of paternity. But after that, then it's a really important feature of belonging to the alpha alliance that every male gets a female. What's the alpha alliance? The alpha alliance is what I call the the group of males who are responsible for killing the tyrant. Ah, okay, okay. So they become the leaders of the society. And of course, once they have discovered that they can kill the tyrant, then that means they can kill anybody.

Including each other. Including each other. Including each other. So there's this tremendous selection for in favor of conformity, in favor of all the emotions that show that you are part of the gang. But also, it imposes tremendous pressures on females. Because from now on, any female who goes against the norms that are imposed by the alpha alliance is going to be vulnerable to herself being executed. And you see horrendous accounts in the hunter gatherer ethnographies of the 19th and 18th centuries, where people were still getting glimpses of what it was really like to be hunter-gatherers before the missions had come in, and the governments

had come in to get rid of all of the more violent forms of interaction. And you get these stories of a woman who has committed adultery, she gets killed. A woman who has even seen the sacred trumpets of the men. Killer. What do you mean, what sacred trumpets? Well, men often have rituals that are associated with the reasons or the justifications for males being dominant over females. So, you know, the sacred trumpets, you know, these are things that literally you can't find in particular societies, but they're iconic of the justifications that men produce. Why should you always get the best food, which they tend to do? The meat, the females will get some, but the males will get the best The females will get some, but the males will get the best, the best opportunities.

Why should a man get, well, you know, that's what the gods say. Who said the gods said that? We go off and we talk to the gods. The sacred trumpet. The sacred trumpet. I see. So this, this is what particularly interests me, that we were sort of moving now from the realm of individual anatomical, psychological, and then societal, civilizational changes into morality. Now, we're kind of moving ourselves across into values and virtues and what is upheld

and how the interplay of all of this works. I'm a right in thinking. Well, actually, how has this impacted morality? what is upheld and how the interplay of all of this works. I'm a writing think it well actually how how has this impacted morality? How how did these changes inform the evolution of human morality in your view? I think that the emergence of what I'm calling the alpha alliance, the the gang that is able to control the tyrant, is essentially simultaneous with the evolution of moral principles that are based on the concept of right and wrong. So there's a kind of morality of sympathy that you see a little bit developed in higher primates and maybe dolphins and so on, where there is a tendency of individuals just to understand, to be empathic towards another individual who is suffering.

And some people call that morality, and that's fine, you can call it morality, but it's not a morality based on the principles of right and wrong. Morality is based on the principles of right and wrong, is much more arbitrary. The right and wrong varies among different societies. What is right and what is wrong? And I think the way to think about it is that once you have a power group, the Alpha Alliance, that is capable of executing anybody in the group and are therefore able to impose on the group their ideas about what benefits them from a selfish perspective. What they do is to say, here is right behaviour and here is wrong behaviour. You know, right behaviour is and then they'll lay out a series of

things that are good for the group as a whole. Like, we're not going to steal from each other anymore, okay? Anybody caught stealing? We're going to punish you. If you carry on doing it, you're dead. But they also have a different kind of moral principle as well, which is purely selfish, not just good for the group as a whole, but good for the men. If there's any problem with food supply, the men get the first choice. If we find that a man or woman have been having sex that is outside, let's call it marriage, well, man can be understood, but the woman, that's no good. So I think that the morality begins with the concept of right and wrong. Right and wrong is the result of what benefits the alpha alliance, the group that can get rid of anybody and kill anybody because they have that ability to talk about it and do it.

And there are those two ways in which they think of right and wrong. One is what's good for the group as a whole, and the other is what's good for the men. And the reason that it would be adaptive for everybody within a group to conform to that is that anybody who decides to transgress it is going to pay a very high individual price. Yeah. So, yeah. In your view, does that mean that our sense of right and wrong is basically us working out how to avoid being killed by small groups of alpha males? That's pretty much exactly right.

There are moral philosophers that are throwing themselves off bridges at the moment hearing this. Thinking, no, there must be more. Well, I think this is an area of discussion that has not been sufficiently aired at the moment. at the moment, but I feel very comfortable thinking that this all derives from power dynamics, that the sense of right and wrong is ultimately a sense of how to protect yourself from this evolutionary novelty, which is the fact that individuals can be killed at very low cost to the killers. Do you have any inclination? Is there any suggestion that this sense of right

and wrong exists outside of culture that, you know, is it that each generation must learn what is right and what is wrong and you or is the something which is embedded in us genetically which gives us an inclination to what this to or a predisposition perhaps well i mean we're clearly very conformist. As a as a species. And you know children and a very young age, and learn to conform, and they learn to impose rules on each other, or when I say learn to, they do it almost spontaneously. So that certainly suggests that the basic norm psychology is being called, has been inculcated into us. But what you're asking are there specific versions of what's right and wrong?

I'm not convinced about that. You know, there might be something like involving theft, you know, some very basic principles involving harming each other. But most of these things are subject to some kind of fluidity. Yeah, so I guess some sort of inherent feeling of fairness, maybe like discussed a version or your discussed threshold stuff like that, you know, if you were to do something that made you feel very traumatized yourself, you know, the fact that soldiers deal with things like PTSD would be pretty maladaptive if we were just supposed to be pro-act, how

would you say, unboundedly proactive aggressors. You would just come back and why would there be an issue? I did the thing, I did the thing that I'm supposed to do. Speaking of that actually, has there ever been, have you ever discovered or could you imagine a situation in which proactive aggression was selected against in any animal? Well, if you take our two closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, you can make two strong claims, I think. First of all, that bonobos have much less practice of aggression than chimpanzees. And secondly, that common ancestor was much more like a chimpanzee

than like a bonobo. And the reason you can say that is that there's an outgroup, which is the gorilla. And gorillas are much more like a chimpanzee than a bonobo. In terms of their anatomy and probability of psychology. So what that means is that there's probably been selection against proactive aggression in Bonobo's comparative chimps. Interesting. Wasn't there something unique about the fact that Bonobo's had a female lead coalitionary self-domesticestication Root. Yeah.

Can you explain that? Why females? Why not male? We've just spent half an hour explaining about how the alpha alliance and the guys and they take down and so on. What power do women have in a very close relative of us? What power do women have in a very close relative of us? Yes, right. It's fascinating. It's similar and it's fascinatingly different. I think it's similar because you've got the same evidence of self-domestication in the bones,

in the anatomy of bonobos compared to chimps, as you do in humans compared to our ancestors, or by the way, compared to Neanderthals. A difference is that in bonobos you still have alpha males, whereas in humans you don't have alpha males in the primate sense. And so the self-domestication that's happened in human in bonobos does not involve removing the alpha male. Alpha males don't get killed. And we certainly don't have a really good handle on the dynamic in Benovo's, but what you see nowadays is that when a male

gets out of hand, he's not taken down by males. He is taken down by females. So you get a male who challenges a female over a piece of food, say. And she gives us a squeak, and the five females who are closest all rushed to her aid, and they all go chasing that male. And he runs off and is terrified and rightly so because those females can impose a lot of damage. Like any gang, they're pretty effective, and they can bite his knuckles off or give them some nasty wounds. Maybe in the end, we'll see

some evidence of killing like that, I don't know. So there's something very different that's going on in the self-domestication of bonobos from humans, it's not directed at, or the current behavior is not directed at eliminating the tyrant males. What it is directed at is stopping the males from being aggressive towards the females. What's different? Why? What's the pressure that's different there between humans and bonobos? Well, it may not be the pressure that's so different as the ability. So, you know, you could argue that the pressure in bonobos might be just as great for males to take out the tyrant male.

And that would be a very fair argument, because we know about the distribution of paternity in vanobos, and we know that even though you've got this relatively pacific, self-domesticated form, it is still the case that the alpha male is getting just as higher proportion of the paternity as occurs in chimpanzees, namely, you know, 70% in small groups. I mean, it's really high. But what the Banova's don't have is the human ability have is the human ability for the subordinated annoyed, frustrated, in-cell-type males to be able to get together and attack the tyrant. I think because of this difficulty of forming a confident coalition. Presumably those males, those underlings would have the same ability of coordination and

coalition as the females though. It's not like the females have something specific that the males don't. That's true. What the females have, unlike humans, is an ability to spend time together on a relatively permanent basis. So that whenever a female is frustrated and annoyed by a particular male, then there are always females there to be able to attack him. And that's unlike humans where in all societies, humans break up by day and go off in small groups, and a man can find an opportunity to beat up on a female when there are no females around to support her.

I suppose as well being patralocal, at least on average, where the woman perhaps gets married off to the husband, maybe is displaced slightly geographically away from kin. Kinship issues may help. And then in addition, there's the fact that Once you've got them alpha alliance who have already shown that they can kill the tyrant male then once you have language any male who says you know I was attacked by half it doesn't females the other day, you know, I can't believe it And he goes and tells his mates then, and all of a sudden, you've got a very powerful male group that can do something

about those females. Interesting. Okay, so getting back to the morality thing, so I think this is really interesting. You mentioned before that men, typically throughout history, have come up with some would say arbitrary and fantastical solutions and excuses for why they may be given preference in certain areas of life. Does this make the mythology and the storytelling around a lot of this essentially just plausible justifications for what men want to do. Yes, for what benefits the the male alliance. So I think the story of human society, you know, major, major story of human society is that it is designed around what benefits the group of males that have taken power. So they take power from the alpha male, they have a monopoly on

violence. Their monopoly means that one of rules is, we're not going to tolerate violence within our group. So that leads to a series of moral principles associated with that. I think the basically you're right that the morality of a group is intimately associated with what benefits the males as a group. And that might mean that some individuals are frustrated because the rules that have emerged out of the group are not necessarily beneficial for a particular male. You know, the male who is the cleverest or the strongest or whatever.

He has to conform to the rest of the group himself. But from the point of view of the group as a whole, these moral principles were for their own benefit. And so religions are, of course, very male biased in terms of the way they work, the precepts that come down from on high, God, God are typically personifications. They are personifications of something. And what are their personifications of? Well, I think the answer is the personifications of something. And what are the personifications of? Well, I think the answer is the personifications of the interests of the male group. A lot of third rails here, Richard. First off, we've come for morality and

cleanly decapitated that one. And then next to the entire institution of religion at large as being a more elaborate storytelling justification, but I can completely see the logic. I can completely see how it would be the case that, emergently, there needed to be a more sophisticated, ethereal, harder to refute. It couldn't be something rational, it couldn't be something that was provable or disprovable here and now. It couldn't be like the number of cows that somebody had killed or whatever. It couldn't be like the number of cows that somebody had killed or whatever. It had to be the special trumpet, the magical trumpet of the gods or whatever. But there wasn't, there was something that you said about a special path

if women walked on a particular path. And in quite a lot of these societies, small-scale societies, you have areas that are restricted for males only to use. And if females, even by accident, you know, not knowing about them, because they're a new female in the group or something, walk on the male path, then they can just be killed. Interesting. Because it's so important for the males to maintain complete control over the male cosmology. The male. There was a lot of evidence that you found for even kin,

kin executions or whatever. There was a story, I think, of a mother strangling her son in his sleep because he'd slept with somebody else's partner at some point. This to me seems like a very, this should be selected against incredibly heavily. Why would you choose, in terms of fitness adaptation, why on earth are you going to kill your own sun as opposed to trying to take on maybe the entire, to me and you've sunned, let's take on the entire tribe. What's your understanding?

Well, no, you're right, that this is very extreme. And in terms of the ordinary expectations of individuals being expected to favor their own kin against non-kin, it doesn't really work. But I think it reflects, is the incredible power of the dominating group with its ability to impose its own morality on everybody else. And they may come a point at which a cynical examination of an appropriate strategy would say, if I support my son, who has been irritating others in this group, then he's going to get killed

and I'm going to get killed and all our family is going to get killed. And it may just behoove me to recognize that this individual is dragging us all down and I'll get rid of him and then we'll all be safe again. The big picture here is that the ability to kill the ability of a group to develop rules that they can enforce is behind so many of the complexities of human society. Complexities and patterns that are very different from what we see in any other animal. I think we've just massively underestimated the extraordinary revolutionary effect

of the development of capital punishment. It changes all the power dynamics. What happens when we reach a period of human development, of civilizational development, where we now have a surplus of resources? But actually, it we now have a surplus of resources. But actually, it isn't even more interesting question. Have you thought about what would have happened, how the local ecology, the local resources and mating market could have influenced the response to aggression? So for instance, if there was a period shortly after a big war with

a local tribe where there was a high female skewed sex ratio, for instance, or if it was a period after an ice age where there was a more abundant amount of food to go around. Have you considered how the human aggression response might have been adapted to those kinds of situations? Well, not really, but the sort of gut feeling I have about this is that male desires, male motivations male desires, male motivations are almost infinite. You know, think about the fact that emperors in various different societies around the world, China, India, Peru, when they get absolute power, you know, they're not quite the same as alpha males in chimpanzees, but they have the power equivalent in some ways. What do they do? They just get infinite, I mean, essentially infinite numbers of females.

You can take hierarchies in these empires where you look at the most powerful individual man and he might have a harry of 10,000 women and he acts like a breeding bull where two females abroad to him every day whose menstrual periods have been monitored so that they're most likely to be fertile on that day. The logistical nightmare. Yes, and even the emperors themselves complained about the obligations here, but nevertheless, that's what he can go for. But then the vice-emperor, whatever they call, the people under him, they get a certain proportion and then under him another proportion.

And so all the people in the government hierarchy have got their own rich number of females. The trickle down effect of whatever they could go on. Of power. So when you say, maybe everyone would just sort of stop and give up and make nice if they had lots of access to lots of females, it seems to me more likely that what would happen is that there would just all be competing for all of these females again.

Desire would expand appropriately. So I can see that absolutely in a post agricultural world. The interesting thing to fold in was the first question that I bailed out of, which is there has to be some sort of a change in terms of how tyranny or aggression is treated when one individual can start to accumulate far more resources. Once we get to the stage, once we've got the agricultural revolution, once we stop being nomadic, once we stay still for long enough to actually be able to accumulate defensive fortifications and stores of food and all the rest of the stuff. It seems to me that that would maybe not be a hockey stick the same as the introduction of language, but should have made a change to the dynamic of how humans relate to each other sufficiently. Because before that period, how many women

are you going to support? A hundred thousand years ago, how many women can one man support realistically? Yes, that's right. And of course, you probably know what the famous study is, the TV in Northern Australia, where you had Hunters and gatherers, in general, becoming more polygeneous as you went further north in Australia. And as you go further north towards the warmer regions, you find that it's increasingly possible for women to look after themselves without any male input in terms of the accessibility of plant and animal resources. And the animal resources are generally very small, they're

sort of lizards more than buffalo, in other words, any. And you had intents, politically, with men having, say, 20 20 wives and the support or went in the opposite direction to the one you were talking about. That just say a man would say, oh my goodness, I'm not gonna get enough food unless I have at least five wives. And now I have 20, then I get lots of food

because the women were supporting the men. It's not a woman. But you saw is it an element to some fact that when there is a surplus of resources, the requirement for women to date suboptimally for one of a better term, there is less pressure for them to do that because them on their own are more likely to be fine. They don't need the male protection in this way. Well, yes, they don't need the male support. And so, you know, in contrast to what you had in Africa, probably, where there were large

animals that did contribute significantly to the economy and were men were needed to be able to provide for females in that way. Well, that doesn't happen. Then as we were saying, it's increasingly possible for a few men to dominate access to the females. And you had a very interesting system where it was the elders were really quite old, like, you know, 40 years old. Almost like a gerontocracy type thing.

It was very gerontocratic. That's absolutely right, relatively few old men. They had a hard time of it because there's no lights of course, so they go to sleep, go to bed, or they'd have the evening meal with maybe 25 files for the 25 women that are the wives of a particular man, and it was all too easy for some women to go out of the firelight and go and meet bachelors and get into trouble that way. And so the bachelors were supposed to go off a long way. They were supposed to go and live in a different part of the bush for, you know, 10 years or something before they were allowed to come back and be part of the system at all. Have you considered in the modern world the changing dynamics that we have of

Peace, relative peace, in our time, the lack of requirement for men to do both big game hunting and warfare, the condemnation generally of both proactive and reactive aggression, whether that be socially or legislatively, and also the increasing female achievement and independence that they have from men, that in terms of resources, education, employment, you know, a sperm donor and a good education will get you a long way in being able to raise a family without the requirement of a male. Have you considered what the goodness paradox or the approach, our humanities approach to aggression looks like in this current version of civilization that we're in now. Well, I agree that it raises questions about male roles.

You know, I see all this stuff in the news about adolescent boys feeling frustrated that they're not able to be as male as their perceptions would like them to be, and the way that Andrew Tate and his philosophy are, appallingly, appealing to boys. And I agree that it kind of raises some really big issues about the future, about whether or not it's gonna be satisfactory for males to be increasingly powerless, increasingly unnecessary. But I've not considered exactly what's going to happen. It's not always easy to appreciate, I think, the fact that the same essential dynamic, as you can see,

in a group of hunters and gathers that is 20 people, is I think at play in our society today. In the sense that we have moral and institutional systems that keep violence in its place. And if you are violent in a small hunter-gatherer society, then you will be subject to an arrow in the back. And everyone will say, yes, he deserved it, you know, or maybe planted it in advance. And the same happens nowadays with us.

If you are too violent, then you will end up nowadays in prison, and presumably that will lead to a reduction in your reproductive success. And we all have developed a whole series of sensitivities to these complex rules that keep us in control. Now, you're asking, is it possible that these rules will get so burdensome and so ad variance with our male spontaneous tendencies to do the equivalent of go hunting, that somehow the system will break down. I tend to doubt it, but it's a future that we haven't been to before. So, who knows what's going to happen?

I went for dinner a few weeks ago with David Bus, and I was sat down and I've been pondering this question for a good while. Now, Richard Reeves, who wrote a book called of boys and men. He's a policy, wonk type guy from Washington DC, but for nominal buckets, very short. You'd really enjoy it. It's called Of Boys and Men. Just one New Yorker book of the year 2022, actually. And I asked the question of David and his partner, who is a very accomplished social psychologist, what you some men in 2023. Really, what role do they have when big game hunting and coalitional warfare is outsourced to the state

in the form of armies and law and a supermarket? Really, really what role do we have? Because we're seeing women outperform men in education, on average, they're more conscientious, they have fewer geniuses, but they also have fewer ADHD, autistic, retarded members. Then when you sit them down and you put them into an office, the kind of knowledge-based office work that we have now also seems to lend itself towards women's predispositions, at least in part. And now that they are able to achieve educational and employment parity with men, they don't need them quite so much anymore.

And then the previous roles that men had, that they would have relied on, that Andrei Tate sort of gives a little bit of a nod and a wink to, those are no longer required of men. And kind of the nerfed kitty version of that, which was capitalistic conquering and upward mobility, or if it was 500 years ago, you were commanding a legion of surf, so you were a barren or whatever, right? Whatever hierarchy you choose to have that was still very easy for me meant to dominate. All of those are fallen away now. And I asked one of my slottest friends who's thought about intersectional, intersectional dynamics, mating attraction for what,

40 years, 50 years, something like that. And he didn't have an answer. And I think that folding in your work around aggression, around where morality may come from, adds what may be a slightly bleak but very interesting new area of spotlight onto this. Discussion which is that a lot of the morality that we were working off of the back of was built in order to protect some of men's interests. And now in a world during which those interests have been emancipated so much that anybody can access them, the gatekeeping no longer works. We've seen the downfall of all of the things

that we spoke about, whether it's spirituality with or without religion, the advent of scientism, the rationalist world, all of this is slowly just chipped away and degraded at all of the different little gatekeeping of a scientist and the rationalist world. All of this is slowly just chipped away and degraded at all of the different little gatekeeping elements that we had that would keep this going. And then the final decapitation was the fact

that women didn't need men for resources anymore. And yeah, I do, I'm going to Doha, it looks like to do a debate on, literally on masculinity. They want me to be the like the card carrying traditional masculinity is under attack and we need to stop it from happening No, I'm not convinced that I actually agree with that position, which is maybe gonna make me bad as a Debater for that side, but I certainly do feel a lot of sympathy, both for myself and for a lot of other young men who go, well, okay, definitions and roles within society need to change to adapt to what is happening in the society, right? It would be pointless for us to all value

a man based on how much of a warrior he is when we're not at war, for instance, right? So you need to reflect the roles with the ecology or with the local environment, whatever's going on right now. But you can get to the stage where you erode and dissolve and evaporate so many of the constituent parts of what a concept used to mean to the point where it essentially means nothing anymore, whether word masculinity would not resemble anything compared with what it would have done previously. Therefore, it's basically it's a moot point and we now need a new word to talk about what men are. So,

yes, very, very, very interesting. Richard, I absolutely adore your work. I think this is a fascinating intersection of morality, of anthropology, of evolution, of psychology, of all of the stuff that you've gone through. Are you working on anything next? Can we expect anything from you soon? I think I'll probably develop the ideas about patriarchy a little bit more. I think the questions that you're raising are really big, you know, really important about what is the role of men. The one thing that I thought that you didn't mention just then is kind of an odd one in a way, but men have got a tremendous role as fathers of sons, helping to bring to real sons because it does seem as though

sons benefit very often from having a male father figure but but it's a funny thing that because the father's very often don't know exactly What it is that they're trying to do? Correct in raising their health. It's not high status You know to be a state state home dad is still not high status. It's not high status for men to other men and it's not high status for men to their partner.

Yes. So we also have this evolutionary mismatch of relationships where the woman outends the man. The man is 50% more likely to need to use a reptile dysfunction medication. It's twice as likely to end in divorce. It's four times as likely to end in divorce if she contributes more than 80% of the household income, did it all the way down? I mean, I wasn't literally thinking that he has to be a stay-at-home dad, but just to be a dad at all, you know, because I mean, I think one of the fascinating problems going to arise in the pretty near future is that women are not going to need men for reproduction. Yes, that's already happening. I have a friend who has got a PhD, she's a self-made millionaire, 37 years old. She's done not IVF but whatever embryo selection sperm donor thing,

selection sperm donor thing and she's she's ready to go. So that's that's halfway there, but I bet you that it won't take many decades before we don't need sperm at all. How would that work? What would you do? Well, you know, there are there are birds that are pathogenic that have reproduction without any sperm. And it seems to me that people will increasingly be able to discover what it is about sperm that is necessary for an egg. And it won't be long after that before you figure out a way to have two over a fuse.

And so we'll be able to have a baby with each other. Oh, wow. There's no theoretical reason why that shouldn't happen. We are racing to we must find a new thing for us to do, Richard. Or we are racing toward obsolescence. I feel well, yeah, but if you think about the species as a whole, you know, I mean, this, this is, this gets fantastical, but it seems to me that ultimately, if you really want to envisage a stable, a relatively stable future for the human species, I think it'd be a very

good idea if, if there are no Y chromosomes, because the ultimate source of violence is the Y chromosome. We're in a clearly less given to what we might call irrational forms of aggression than man are. And I would think that it would ultimately behooves us in a world of new kinds of reproductive technology for a moral agreement in whatever kind of social structure we have in the world for the Y chromosome to be put into a test tube

like smallpox, and for it not to be put into a test you like smallpox and for it not to be manifest in. Is that ethical to talk about essentially an entire gender's eugenics removal from the future of civilization? There's a question for you. Well, we have decided to touch the final third rail just to leave that there. I've never even thought about that before and I have no idea what to think about it other than I don't quite like the idea of all men going and leaving. But I also thought before I read your book that Human Morality hadn't occurred as a byproduct of alpha alliances. So we'll see.

Richard, look, I like I say, your work is fantastic. Great conversation. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. When you come up with something new, let's discuss it. I would love to discuss it. And if you do end up coming through to Austin at any point, David has told me that we need to go for dinner. So if you do fly through Texas, make sure that you add an extra day into your trip. If people that are listening want to check out more of the stuff that you do, why should they go on the internet? Well, I studied chimpanzees and we have a website called Kibali chimpanzee project, K-I-B-A-L-E, Kibali chimpanzee project and look up the goodness paradox.

Richard, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks Chris. you