The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Frans de Waal: Learning from Primates about ourselves: From Gender to Social Hierarchies

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Frans de Waal is not only my favorite primatologist, he is one of my favorite scientist-communicators. His books on primates, particularly on Bonobos and Chimpanzees—from politics to child-rearing and even culture—reveal a tremendous amount about our closest genetic relatives, and hence about ourselves. His newest book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, tackles a particularly hot topic at the current time, but as is typical of his books, this one is both entertaining, and touching, and packed with data rather than anecdotes. I was very happy to sit down with Frans again to talk broadly about the motivations for his career choice, as well as his many years of experience in the field. While we focused on his new book, our discussion ranged far more broadly over the importance of primatology as a new and useful window on humans. I have had the privilege of sharing numerous stages with Frans, as well as hosting him at a previous Origins symposium, and each time I come away with important new perspectives. This podcast was no exception, and I hope you too will come away from it with a different view of yourself and your relationship to the world around you—which after all, is again one of the purposes of this podcast.Speaking of new perspectives, I describe in the podcast how a video Frans showed me over a decade ago, involving Capuchin monkeys, as I recall, changed my own perspectives on occasions when I experience jealousy or envy, and I think it improved my own behavior, at least a little bit. Once you here him describe it, I wonder, if you then go to youtube and watch it, whether it will do the same for you. Either way, enjoy this entertaining, provocative, and informative discussion with a charming and insightful scientist. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers . Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I'm privileged to have a conversation with one of my favorite scientists and science popularizers, Franz de Vall, the primatologist. I enjoy every discussion I've ever had with him, and every time I listen to him lecture, I'm amazed. In fact, he's actually changed the way I think about myself as we describe and we discuss in this particular video. I often refer to a video I saw of his involving capuchin monkeys and cucumbers and grapes when I think about my own behavior. And that's one of the great things about Franz's work is it gives us a mirror on ourselves by looking at our closest primate relatives, especially if we're interested in trying to find out which aspects of our behavior might be socially or culturally influenced and which might be biological. One way to understand that is to look at the behavior of our closest primate relatives, which he does.

And in his new book, Different, which discusses gender and sex, as seen in very different lights with these two, in some sense, very different primate relatives of ours, he explodes a number of myths about gender and sex that we might have about hierarchy and gender and matriarchy and patriarchy in human societies and in primate. societies and the examples are fascinating I just I just eat this stuff up and he's such a lovely writer and and speaker and in our discussion we also talk about his own background which is really quite well relevant to this new book as you'll see I hope you're as fascinated and transformed by our discussion as I was and I as I am each time I talk to him you can watch this podcast commercial free ad free on our substack site Critical Mass if you subscribe now

subscriptions will go to support the Origins Project Foundation the nonprofit that runs the podcast and other activities so I hope you'll consider subscribing either way if you don't want to watch it there you can watch it on our YouTube channel or you can listen to it wherever podcasts can be listened to no matter how you listen to it or watch it I hope you come away from this entertained and also thinking about yourself slightly differently than you did before. Enjoy. Well, Franz, thank you so much for joining me.

It's such a pleasure to see you again, at least virtually. You're welcome. Every time we have been together, not only have I enjoyed it, but I've learned a tremendous amount. And there's something I want to do. I think I've told you this before, but you're one of the few people that has changed the way I think about the world and myself, specifically from listening to what you've done. And that to me is the very hallmark of science, but also is a testimony to your impact,

both as a scientist and as a communicator. You've done both so well over the years, and as someone who's tried to do similar things in my own field, I particularly appreciate and admire the quality of your work. Actually, every time I read a book by you or listen to you, I think how much I want to be a primatologist, until I think about how much about the about how uncomfortable the work would be. It's so much easier as a theoretical physicist to work in my study late at night.

Many, many people say they want to be a primatologist, but then they don't know they have to sit still for hours and wait. Because, you know, the primates take their rest and their time, and it's only, let's say, three minutes a day that is really interesting, you know? Yeah, well, that's exactly. Well, I mean, I must say that's probably true in physics, too, maybe even less than that. We're actually doing something useful. It's probably far less than three minutes a day. But at least you're right. I can get a cup of coffee and I can rock. And I don't have to presumably sit in what,

I mean, it's different if you're in a in a primatological center. But if you're out in the field, it's presumably sitting quiet is not so comfortable, I think, I would imagine. Well, in the field, people have trouble to find their primates. So that's why they get up very early because the chimps and the bonobos, they built nests at night. and then they go to where they know the nests are. They get up before the chimps and the bonobos, who are a bit lazy. And they have to wait there because otherwise they may not find them the whole day. You know, it's interesting because you don't, maybe you've written about that in some of your books. But, you know, what one reads about is the results of the, but never the sort of not so much the process, the, the lack of comfort or what you really need to.

Now there's some of that when you talk about being, you know, having thrown stone thrown at you or being attempted to be seduced by by, by a bonobo or something. It's really, but often not. But I want to, and I want to start with the personal. And in fact, what I was kind of surprised about with this book is you, you are, because it's relevant to your study, you're, you're more personal in some ways in this book in terms of your background. But this, this is an origins podcast. And one of the things I like to try and do is find out about people's origins, particularly scientists' origins, and what what drove them to be the scientists they are. One of the things that comes quite clearly in your book because you talk about it is that you come from a family of primarily males. Six boys. Six boys,

yeah. And my father, so that's seven men and my mother. Yes, and as we'll talk about later, your mother was the boss, but which is an important issue, which will come to try and overcome various stereotypes. All of you are tall, I assume, except your mother. Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, we're all taller than she was she. And how tall was she? Where is she? I don't think in feet, but maybe five feet or something, yeah. Oh, she's very small. Because Dutch people are the, I learned when I was there, the tallest people in the world. I won't tell you the experiments. I mean, I could tell by watching around me, but I actually did an experiment once it demonstrated, but maybe later I'll tell you about it.

It relates to... The Dutch are so tall because the country is flat and then you can see very far. It's an adaptation. Well, I learned that, yeah, even the average height of women is something like 5 feet 10 in American. Yeah, yeah. There are many women who are, you know, I'm almost 6 feet 4 and there are women who are taller than me sometimes. Yeah, yeah, it's really quite amazing. But aside from tall, and we may talk about tall being an important characteristic for men in gender selection, I want to go back further.

So obviously that the male dominance or the male prevalence of your family had an impact on you. But more important than that, I don't know what were your mother and father's occupations? What did the day? Your mother was in the... My father was a director of a district bank, a smaller bank, yeah. And my mother took care of the family. That family, okay. And as not unusual.

But why, I know you wrote that you were always interested in animals. You like to play with animals. You don't know why that came from. That was just a... No, I collected them. I had a whole little zoo, and I was very fond. And you can see the tank behind me. I'm very fond of aquatic animals.

and in Holland, since we have tons of water, they're easy to find, and so I would collect those. But you never thought of being a marine biologist, I guess, eh? No, no. I did become a biologist, not specifically primatologist, for sure. But I was interested in all sorts of animals. No, I think it's really important that, and we'll talk about that. I find it intriguing that as a biologist, you spend a lot of time in a psychology department, and I think that we'll talk about that. And in fact, you know, and I think it's very important some of your comments about about the difference between the fields.

But did your parents encourage, were you left free or did your parents encourage interest in science at all? Obviously, neither are parents had a science background. Did they go to, did you both of them go to college? Did your mother go to college or no? No, no, no. I was the first in the family to go. Oh, wow. And other brothers, they took more, one became an optician.

another one became a bureaucrat in Brussels and the EU. So yeah, a very different career. But you were number four, but you were still the first person in your family to go to college. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why? Well, why I went. Yeah. Because I wanted to do science. I think I was interested in science. When you know, in Europe, going to college is not as common because there's many, how do you call it? that professional schools many occupational schools yeah sure in fact i think that's a very healthy thing i've lived in switzerland for a little while and the fact that you know there are schools

not in fact what i i never growing up in the u.s it had never occurred to me that not everyone should go to college actually i grew up in canada for the same thing to that extent and and and then when i was in switzerland where only about 15 percent of kids are steered towards university i began to realize you know and then i was of course as a professor i and then watching my own children and their friends. I realize that most kids don't really know why they're a university. And so I initially wanted to go to do mathematics or physics. Because I had very good grades for these things at the high school. And I had a biology teacher who I hated. He was a very miserable man. He was not fun at all and he got angry with me a few

times and so my mom said but franz you've kept animals your whole life you have always had animals around you you need to do biology so i'm i'm so glad i got that advice because uh oh wow i had been turned off by this teacher this teacher was just terrible and you see how one person can affect you you know sure sure interestingly enough my i had an awful high school physics teacher i had really good science teachers for most of the time. And I wouldn't say it was awful, but he, he worked hard to, he was very dislikable. And, and, and, and, uh, that can have an impact. Although if your fundamental interest, as you say, can overcome that.

Uh, but when did you, you knew you wanted to do science, though? What, when did you know it? You know, we'll talk about when kids know their gender or think they know their gender. But when did you, when did you, um, uh, know you want to do science? I think because the books that I read were either adventure books for boys, you know, or they were books on animals that I could find with illustrations and descriptions of their life. And in that context, I learned that there were scientists who were working on that. So I thought, if you can turn that into a science, that's interesting to me.

You know, it's intriguing for me to hear that. I asked one of the reasons I asked that is that reading books was a, by scientists in particular was incredibly important for me. I read a book about Galileo, but then I read books by Einstein and in English Asimov and George Gamow and people like that. And that had a huge impact to me. And it's one of the reasons why I write. Would you say that that's similar for you in any way? Yeah, I think I write because I read early books by, let's say, Conrad Lawrence and later Desmond Morris. And I was fascinated by these books.

So the Morris story is sort of interesting. I had a professor at the university. I was in the first year, I believe. And this professor came in and he said, there's one book that I don't want you guys to read, which was The Naked Apid by Desmond Morris. Because it's not science, it's nonsense. And everyone is reading it, but you don't.

And so immediately the next day, of course, I had to get that book. Yeah, I can actually encourage it. Probably be a very good way to encourage students to read books, is to tell them not to actually. And it's interesting because I read Morris and Lawrence. And my interest actually, early on, I was much more interested in neuroscience. Well, I thought I was because I really didn't know what a scientist was. And my mother wanted me to be a doctor, had decided I would become a doctor. And so I want to be a brain surgeon. But I got quite interested in that. And then it was later that I kind of, the physics entranced me. But I do. I part, I, I, I, I,

kind of write it to writing as part for me of returning the favor. And I encourage young people to read, much as I like science journalists, I encourage young people to read books by scientists about science. Yeah, of course. Yeah, because they can speak, and I notice that, because I write so many books, you can speak in the first person. Yeah. I found this, and I thought that, and I met this colleague there. And so you speak in the first person, and in my case, with animals, I can say, I can say certain animals that I knew, you know, and I think it helps. Yeah, sure. It personalizes and it brings it home in a very important way to be able to be able to personalize things that way. And I had a editor once who said, everyone wants to learn things

from the horse's mouth. And I think we're the horses in that sense. And I have to say, although you're a little bit older than me, you're five years older than me, I think. You've written four more books than me, so I'm very envious. Anyway, but I also read that you were also inspired by, at some level, I know, when, by Nico Tinbergen. Yeah. And so what you want to explain that a little bit? Nico Tricenberg won. In fact, a very important Nobel Prize in the sense with Lorenz, the first time sort of given, as he said it, for people who just watched.

Yeah. And that's important issue. They got the Nobel Prize for, I say, medicine, even though they were animal watchers, basically. Because the work was really considered important. And Tinberger was a Dutch etologist, so a biologist who studies animal behavior. And I'm an indirect descendant from him

because my professor was Jan vonhofe, and Jan von Hov worked with Tinberger. And Tinberger was, of course, also the founder of Dutch etology. So I feel very connected to him. He was more of a scientist than Lawrence. Lawrence was more a flamboyant talker about animals. Yeah.

Who didn't produce a table or graph in his life, I believe. Wow. So it was totally non-quantified. And Lawrence also became, of course, controversial after World War II because he was involved in the German army. And he had certain ideas that agreed with the Nazis. And so Lauren. was not the most popular figure after World War II,

whereas Tinberger was unblemished. It's interesting that those two men, they reconciled. Tinberger had spent some time in a German camp, of all things, and still, I believe, one year, and it was not one of these death camps, but it was a camp. And after World War II, Tinberg still reconciled with Lawrence, because he felt the field of animal behavior was so important that those two heads of the field of the field,

needed to get along. That's, you know, that is a very important lesson, especially in modern times where, where it's where, you know, it'd be interesting to see. Not that the Nobel Prize is, you know, the Nobel Prize suffers from any of the problems of any prize at some level. They work very hard, I must say, having been involved to try and ensure that they, they do a good job, the selection committees. But, you know, it's interesting to know whether in the modern times, had Lawrence's

relationship with the Nazis probably would have disqualified him from winning the Nobel Prize today. Well, the thing that bothers me about Lawrence is that he never apologized. Yeah. That's the least he could have done. He would say that these were wrong ideas and I shouldn't have had them, but he couldn't bring himself to do that. Yeah, I know, but but as a per, but the point is we set, we should, we'll talk about this, maybe, but I think it's important to talk about this as two scientists. We have to separate the person from their work at some level and, and, and, and these prizes are given because people are nice people or good people, but because their work is important and influential. And it saddens me to think that right now in the world, that notion is just impossible,

that people would be disqualified for not being nice people regardless. And you know, there was remember there was a big outcry when some, I think, well, the literature prize is very subjective anyway, but I think one of the recent European literature laureates was notoriously, um, sexist and and and but in any case um interesting but tin Bergen was the scientist I agree Lawrence was more of a yeah um flamboyant person but but um one of the things that I like was was Tinbergen said he was surprised that he won the prize because he was just a watcher he didn't sort of but not he was also he was also an experimenter yeah well exactly so he also was very advanced conceptually I think more than Lawrence so yeah he was an important

But Lawrence was a much more charismatic person. And I remember Ed Wilson told me once that they had visit by Tinberg and then later they had a visit by Lawrence at Harvard. And he said, Tinberg, everyone was sort of nodding away during the lecture. For Lawrence, everyone was wide awake and listening and very eager because Lawrence was just a much better speaker. Sure, sure, absolutely. But I wanted to harp on the watching because, you know, being just a watcher is really an inappropriate thing because and you point this out I think it's very important especially when as a primatologist the importance of watching and and one of the

things that I have to say you you you say you distrust self-reporting especially in psychology and and I not only completely agree with you but you know recently I just finished a new book which is called the known unknowns about what we don't know about the universe but I but the last part of it is actually about consciousness, which is something I had to spend a tremendous amount of time reading about. But one, what became clear is when people report things related to their consciousness, it's never right. It's always an illusion. And so watching what people do rather than what they say, not just for people, but obviously of primates, if you want to learn about human behavior or behavior in general or even cognitive processes, watching what people do

rather than what they say is an important thing to do. Yeah. So I've, I've, I've been I've been a psychology professor for 30 years, even though I'm a biologist. And that always bothers me. As soon as a student comes in and says, I have a new question that I'm going to ask, the first thing to do is make a list of questions, a questionnaire for their subjects. So instead of going out in the world and observe, you know, for example, you want to know about male friendships or female friendships, you can observe these things.

no, they're going to ask people about them. And of course, all people want to be nice. You all want to be empathic and loving and nice. And you're certainly not a criminal or a jerk, you know. So you describe yourself in certain tones. And so I don't trust these things at all. And I'm so happy that I work with animals who cannot fill out a questionnaire. So I'm forced to watch them, you know?

But you know, it's funny that psychologists do that in the sense, too, because one of the things I learned in the study of consciousness is tons of experiments, of experiments, especially in split-bred, you probably know about these famous split-plane experiments, where people will explain why they picked something. And you know it isn't because they can't have sensed it. And they'll invent a complete rationalization for why they did what they do, and which should immediately raise warning signals that people will invent, you know, that reason is the slave of passion. And as Hume might have said, and so it's, it's, and, you know, that's, I think the last thing I wanted to ask, well, there's two more things I wanted to

before we actually get, I want to concentrate on your new book difference, which I think is, which I've read in great depth and it's fascinating. I've read a number of your books, but I want to concentrate in the most recent book. But this career, you've done two things. You did a career change, not career change, but, and it's interesting. I was never trained as an astronomer. I've been a professor of astronomy for almost 40 years. I never took a single class in astronomy. And so I can relate to what you're talking about. But you also change countries as well. And that's presumably had an impact on your view about science and the way it's carried out. And, you know, other than you're concerned about self-reporting.

Any other? I also had an impact related to the topic of gender and sexuality. Because, you know, when I immigrated into the U.S., the first thing I needed to do is fill out a piece of a paper on which I declared that I was not a communist and I was not a homosexual. Yeah. And I'm from a country where homosexuality has been legal, same sex love has been legal for more than two centuries. Yeah.

And we were the first to have gay marriage. And so for me, to ask me whether I'm homosexual or not seems a totally irrelevant question, but they asked that. And so immediately I was confronted with the conservatism of the US, which I wasn't used to, you know. Yeah, in fact, we'll talk about that. And the interesting dichotomy, I hope we'll get to it, the interesting dichotomy, which you point out between the sort of sexual conservatism and at the same time, some, you know, advancement in terms of opportunities for women and education and other things. It's an interesting dichotomy. It's certainly, you know, I moved from Canada, the U.S., which was less

of a transition, but it's still fascinating to see that. And I think it's very important because as we'll, as you talk about it, as we talk about, the notion of culture. in terms of the expression of sexuality, which we'll talk about as gender in some ways. And the cultural aspect, virtues, the biological aspect is, of course, one of the key issues that you want to discuss and one of the key issues that scientists are looking at, and of course, lately, one of the key issues that's become so hot a topic in society. And we'll get there in one second, but I have one more question, which kind of fascinates me. You say you didn't have any children by, you and your wife don't have any children. a decision. I'm totally behind that, by the way. I don't think people should be pressured

into having children, nor do I think that a life without children is somehow any, necessarily any less full than a life with children. But I'm intrigued because as a primatologist, I would have thought you'd want a little child to experiment with. I'm just wondering if... I'm not sure I would make children to experiment on it. That is not necessary. to watch, well, not to, but to watch. I mean, the behavior of, I know that there's a lot in your book about behavior of children and you like to look at others. And I, you know, I guess you're, I mean, the difference in you and BF Skinner is you didn't want to put them in a box, I guess, and, and, and, and no, but to be perfectly honest, um, my wife didn't want children.

Uh, she, she felt she had no strong maternal feelings and she felt this was not for her. And, uh, I might have wanted children, but I was not going to spend 50% of my time on children. And so I felt if it falls mostly to her, if we have, let's say, two children, and sees the one who's going to do the main job, I am not the one to tell her to do that. Yeah. So if I had said, I'll stay home and I'll do most of the work. Yes, of course, we could have done it. But that was not my goal. And so nowadays, of course, men do quite a bit more than previously. And so maybe if we had lived, if we were younger now, who knows? It might have worked out differently. But at the time, that was sort of the deal between us. Sure. And you know,

that's interesting for no. I mean, that question is not irrelevant then because we'll talk about, you know, obviously maternal instincts among females. And but, but the point is there's a great diversity. And not only in diversity in the way that they have maternal instincts, but in fact, the fact that much of maternal, it will quote, instinct is learned. And let's begin to get there and begin to get to your writing. I was intrigued when I first saw the book. I wondered why you wrote it in some sense. I know it was a hot topic and therefore it's probably good for sales. But I was also encouraged right away because it's such a hot topic in current parlance that it's very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. There's so much nonsense, so much

emotionality attached to the debates. Vicious discussion, especially in the United States and in Canada and now around the world. But one of the things that intrigued me is, of course, one of the things you do so well is because we're related to close, closely related to primates, you can't help but explore what primates do and ask to what extent our biology and theirs is the same and to what extent our behavior is the same. And it gives you, it allows you to look at the same issues in a context that's less emotionally charged. It reminds me, I wrote a book called The Physics of Star Trek, one of my early books. And the great thing about science fiction, for the same reason is you can look at emotionally charged issues, but it's, it, relax,

the first interracial kiss was on Star Trek, for example, because you could never watch it on TV. But if it's in an imaginary civilization in the future, it's not so charged. And, you know, And I'm wondering if that's one of the reasons why you chose to write about this particular issue at this particular time. Yeah, and I noticed that in psychology, a lot of the discussions of human behavior are about what is desirable and not desirable behavior. So, for example, racism is bad, sexism is bad, hyacies are bad. They have opinions about these things. Whereas I think a science, you know, you don't need to have opinions. You just describe what you see and you try to explain why it is there.

So for example, sexism, I'm not, of course, in favor of sexism. But it is something to study and under what circumstances is it stronger and when is it weaker and those cultural differences there, of course. So I think as a primatologist, I can bring a bit of distance to that debate and say, well, in chimpanzees, it's like this, and bonobos, it's like that. And in humans, we compare the best with this species or that species. And so I can bring a little bit of distance,

but I'm always descriptive. As a primatologist, I'm always into describing what I see and not necessarily judging it or saying it's good or bad. So, for example, the way male chimpanzees treat females is not the way I think we men should be treating women. So for sure, I'm not in agreement. with what these males are doing.

But I just describe what they do. And I think other primatologists do the same. They just describe what they do. And then we try to explain why is it that way? Why do they handle things that way, you know? Yeah, no, exactly. In fact, you've pointed out early on in the book how the problem with doing that is people interpret, you're describing something as arguing in favor of it.

And you point out when the reaction when you talk about chimpanzees versus the reaction when you talk about bonobos, and people interpret you as endorses, endorsing both lifestyles. Yeah. So I wrote this book, Chimpanzee politics, which is about alpha males and dominance and stuff like that. And I remember giving a lecture one time for a large audience of psychologists. And afterwards, someone came up to me and said, oh, you love power. You're really into power. You think that's great. All these hierarchies and rank. And I had not said, I had not spoken about humans at all and spoken only about gyms. And immediately, and if I talk about bonobos, where I describe

sexual behavior and their peacefulness, people think I must be very into polyamorism or something like that, which I'm not, but I just describe what these animals do, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting. I wrote the word watching as one of the reasons, the importance of talking about gender in the issues of just watching the behavior and then trying to understand. And it's very important, as you point out, and there are some great quotes, but obviously, if they're the same behaviors in three different species that are genetically related,

then it's probably worth thinking about whether biology plays a role rather than culture or environment. And we'll talk about that. I tried to think of what I thought that, if I wanted to describe the central premise of your book, I would say that something like males and females are fundamentally different, but not as different as sometimes claimed at the same time, almost nothing is gender neutral.

Is that a good summary or not? Well, the best summary is very brief, I think, is to say that we need to bring biology into the gender debate. Yeah, absolutely. We cannot push it out as people do all the time. They say, oh, this is socialized behavior. Who knows? It may be socialized, but that's a hypothesis.

It needs to be tested, but they make it as a statement as if it's, the truths, you know? Yeah, sure, exactly. And we'll go into many examples of that. I hope I've written them down. There's so many great, I want to try and use the, rather than talking about generalities, I'd like to give your examples because they're so compelling. But I think your point about not, about looking at behavior, there's early on in the book

you say, in most mammals, males strive for status or territory, whereas females vigorously defend their young. Whether we approve or disapprove of such behavior, it's not hard to do. to see how it evolved. For both sexes, it has always been the ticket to a genetic legacy. Ideology has little to do with it. And I think that's the, and I think that the, one of the things I particularly appreciate is this, is this constant reference to, to, to evolution and evolutionary psychology. I think, I never remember how to pronounce his name. Teodosius Dabzansky said, And nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Yeah. And the notion of evolution as a basis for understanding why we have behavior is incredibly important. You want to elaborate on that at all? Yeah, no. As a biologist, of course, we always think in terms of adaptive value. What good does it do for the individual and its legacy? and that's always the question, even though there are behaviors where probably it's irrelevant

and we shouldn't be always driving at that question maybe. So sometimes we should drop it probably. But it is an important question always. And so if, for example, if you see that chimpanzees and bonobos behave very differently, with bonobos having much more of a sisterhood and a peaceful society, we biologists, we immediately ask, how did that evolve? that come from and what what are the circumstances that have made it possible for bonobos to

behave so differently from chimpanzees so we ask these questions yeah yeah in fact i think and that's the i mean of course i i don't want to stare even stereotype you or classify you unduly but the it's i found it often in a lot of a lot of your books and a lot of um well what i've listening to it certainly in this book the wonderful thing is to have two species to which we're equally related that are remarkably different. Chimpanzees, and there's no denying that chimpanzees societies are male-dominated and bonobos, and as you convincingly demonstrate, they're female-dominated, already kind of breaking a stereotype in the sense that, you know, that everything has to be male-dominated. And so recognizing of these two incredibly

divergent biological and social structures, but they're equally related to us, automatically suggest that a number of the standard stereotypes we have about gender and are just that, our illusions. But you do say that gender is a useful concept. Yeah. And at the very beginning, and we'll talk more about gender because you will have

a whole chapter about it. But I wanted to ask at the very beginning, why do you think gender is a useful concept? Well, I grew up in a biology where we never talked about gender. Yeah, okay. We talked about sex. Yes. And in animals, we always talk about sex, then when you get to humans, you have gender and gender is the cultural expression of your

sexual orientation or identity. And so gender varies by culture is enormously individually variable. You have, because I don't divide gender by male and female, but more by masculine and feminine, and everything in between. So it's a much more flexible concept. And I think it's very useful because it relates to the environment, the effects of the environment, how you educate, your kids, what kind of culture they grow up with. Because, you know, chimpanzees and bonobos, they are very slowly developing. A chimps is adult when they're 16, meaning that they have an enormous amount of time to absorb things from their environment. And so I think the gender concept can be applied to them as well, because they also learn from the adult males around and their

mother, who's mostly the adult female they look at, they learn behavior from them. So I think it's a useful concept for humans, for sure, but it can also be applied to long-living animals like probably elephants, whales, apes, animals who live a long time and develop very slowly. And who are social in the sense that, I mean, gender is a cultural thing. I think you define gender early on as the learned overlays that turn a biological female into a woman and a biological male into a man. I thought that was a very good definition, although you described some other definitions. I think that that's a fascinating and excellent discussion because it talks about how, you know, we talk about gene expression, but in some sense, gender is almost the sort of

the cultural expression of sex. And if that's true, I want to ask a charged question early on. We'll talk about transgender later on and trans women. You know, there's a huge people. people get in hue and I'm sure I'll get responses that will be sometimes angry for even asking this question. But I think differentiating between male and female and man and woman in that sense, as you've done it, is a very useful concept, both scientifically and biologically. So would it be sensible within that context to say a trans woman is a woman, but not a female? Gee. I know, I know it's a charged question and we're going to get and I don't, and if you don't want to answer it, it's fine. But, but because you're, you know, people get canceled for making such statements. But the trans woman became a woman by a different route than a cis woman. Yeah, yeah, certainly. So the background is differently, the bodily, the background also differently. But she identifies as a woman and she integrates and acts like a woman. Yeah. So it's very hard to. to say, I know that's a very charged topic, but it is interesting that biology is definitely

involved because we know that for most trans people, it starts very early in life, maybe three, four years old. So long before puberty and long before the peer pressure that everyone is now talking about, long before that time, it starts. And it doesn't reverse. So a recent study, I believe said that only two and a half percent of children who say they are transgender, six years later has changed their mind. Two and a half percent. That's very low, meaning that they are very persistent in what they think they are. So it starts early in life. It's basically irreversible, which indicates very strongly that biology is involved. Don't ask me what kind of biology because we don't know about the genes, we don't know about the hormones,

we don't know. There's a little bit of evidence for brain being involved, but it's not exactly clear how it happens. Sure, sure. But you point out there are some lane differences, and we'll get to it. As I say, you have a whole chapter. I didn't mean to jump in, but I think that definition already, you know, I think my own feeling is that we, if we didn't get so hung up on these words, it would be easy to understand that there's a difference in some sense between being male and being, well, that being male is, expressed differently, being a, that the expression of being a male produces different sorts of men based on different cultural things and produces different sorts of, and similarly for female produces different sorts of women based on the, on that. And therefore, what we call man and woman is a very culturally ingrained concept. And therefore, you know, and that's really what I meant to say. Calling a trans man, a trans woman, a woman is in some sense, a cultural statement more than a biological statement. And that's the problem some people have.

Some people say, how dare you call a trans woman a woman when, of course, they may have, not have the correct genitals. And what I think could get around that kind of emotional discussion is saying, well, what we mean by what we in our culture mean as a woman is culturally, in some sense, what we interpret as a woman as a culturally tribe. It's a cultural definition and in addition you have to respect the opinion of the subject themselves. If they say, I want to be called a woman, I'm going to call them a woman. So for me that's sort of that settles the issue. If they one day, if one day they say we don't want to be called women anymore, we want to be called something else.

I'll call them something else. But I think there isn't a great flexibility there, a great cultural flexibility on what you call a woman or a man. And the biology, that's different. For the biology, the sex, as we call biological sex, is largely binary. It's not completely, there's a small category that is not binomial distribution. Yeah. But it's largely binary. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In fact, again, we'll get to it. I'm jumping ahead, but I thought, well, I might as well, you know, jump in with both feasts and point out some of the issues that will be elaborated by not just us talking, but examples that you'll be able to give. And I think it's interesting to me that, you know, I'm tempted to me to ask about pronouns or whether you get, because of course, pronouns are how people want to be referred to themselves now. Yeah. In your class, in your classes, do people list their pronouns

and now when you at the beginning of your classes and do you or? No, I retired before the COVID crisis and at that time, that time, yeah, that was coming up as an issue. It was coming up as an issue. It's now even more so. Yeah. We both avoided it. I retired around the same time and I before that became an issue. So I haven't had to deal with it, so I'm often, which is one of the many things I'm happy. I don't have to deal with anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, in the terms of gender diversity, as I described in my book, we have the same issue with the other primates. Yeah. I think that's so fascinating is that.

I describe a female chimp whose name is Donna. Donna, we'll talk about Donna, yeah. Who was born as a female, but acted like a male. And so we have that same issue going on. And in their case, of course, we're not talking about pronouns. We're not talking about what do you want to be called. We're not talking about that. But you see that same sort of diversity.

And so I find that fascinating. Yeah, Donna, I'd love to. I want to talk about Donna because some of the examples of her. And not only acted like a male, but was treated like a male. in many ways. And that's an important issue. But I think that before we get to anything, I think it's important to point out

and very important to point out that, again, the difference between while it's generally congruent, while gender and sex are generally congruent, and of course the problem, as you point out in English, is that we use sex in two different ways for an act and for a biological feature. But male and female bodies are different. And they are biologically different.

And to argue in any way that they're not is just to deny science. And at the same time, you point out, and this is one of the many areas where it is important to have some diversity. You know, I'm skeptical of what many people call diversity. But in medical science in particular, the need to be, if you're going to do, if you're going to study biology for a purpose of improving the medical, health of people. You have to have to have equal, you have to look at both sexes because they're different. And that's a very important development in medicine, I think, right? Yeah. Yeah, the bodies are different. Of course, there was a time where people said only between the legs, it's different. For the rest, it's the same. That's not really true. The brains are different. The bodies are different.

And we have that discussion now about trans athletes, for example, which is about how the bodies are different yeah and i don't see a reason why we would deny that and and no sane person except maybe for some extreme radical people but most people don't deny these yeah yeah i would i think i was my wife was attending a lecture i think by christina hoffs summers i think where she said that well someone said that they got really almost boot off the stage for saying that men were on average taller than women and people deny that's one of the simplest that's one of the simplest ones, you know. Yeah, I know, but I mean, if people deny that, if people are willing to be blind to that, that's in the face of evidence. And that's why I often call the secular

ideology almost a religion where you... So that reminds me of, there was a French feminist who wrote a book, Feminism, and Fem means hunger. Yeah. And she was claiming that men are taller than women, because in the families, they feed the boys more food than the girls, maybe in a time where there was a shortage of food. I don't know at the moment. We certainly don't live in these days that we have a shortage of food. But, you know, if you had seen my family of six boys,

what we could eat in a session is just, it astonishes me now, the quantities that we ate. And my mother must have despaired, like, you know, the number of potatoes and bread that we swallowed. And it was not because she wanted us to be tall. Yeah, it was just, we had to eat, you know. Yeah, and you talk about that. We'll get to play in young, and the fact, the energetics of young men.

I mean, these are biological features. And I think to end that sort of the introduction about gender equality, you say, pushing for gender equality doesn't require similarity. It's best to learn more about biology instead of trying to sweep it under the rug. And I think that's where we're going. And the fact that change, you know, you point out that gender roles change a lot with society, particularly the pill, changed a lot of the way, because it literally liberated women in many ways from the requirement of childbirth and therefore opened up other options.

But I want to go sort of to some extent, chapter by chapter. And the first chapter you talk about is play, young people play, which again is young chimp and young bonobo play. Where you see things that many people say, oh, that's stereotyping, that's socializing a girl by giving her dolls or anything else. Again, I'll give just a personal observation before I ask you a lot of questions, but this really hit home for me when I have a daughter. And, you know, we tried, you know, as modern parents to just sort of try not to influence what her interests were. But she had a huge interest in dolls, as it turned out.

But what really surprised me is when she went to nursery school, where it was, again, it was when I taught at Yale, it was quite a liberated nursery school and all this. But the minute, literally the first day, she came back. And then I saw it the second day. She said, she called the boys tractor guys. She said, you know, she walked in. And the boys, there were all these toys out there. And all the boys went to play with these tractors.

And she called them tractor guys. And no one had told them what to do. But it was just immediate. And then it really hit to me that that's behavior. You talk about tremendously in terms of both. I think maybe both chimps and bonobiles. but from chimps that when they're presented with toys, there's a clear gender difference.

So why don't you talk about that? So there's one universal difference in all the primates, not just chimps and bonobos, but there's 200 primates species. In all the primates, the young females are fascinated by babies and by infants and want to hold them and carry them. And as soon as a mother comes in with a newborn, she's going to be surrounded by young females who want to touch the newborn and hold it. And very few males are interested in that.

And the young males are all interested in wrestling. That has been documented in many primates. They mock fight. It's a way of developing their fighting skills, of course, but it's also a way of learning to win and learning to lose and to having fun while you are wrestling to contain your strengths. is very important for male primates who are stronger than females and stronger than the young to be able to control their physical strengths.

So the young males like to wrestle and the young females like to hold infants. And if you give them dolls, they will pick up dolls and hold them the same way. In the wild, young female chimpanzees have been seen to pick up rocks and wooden logs and carry them like an infant on their back, on their belly, built a nest for them. all of their training basically their maternal skills which they need to do because they're not born with the maternal skills so they need to train it's a very complex task to be a mother so for example imagine you are a female gorilla you have a baby the baby is in your lap how does the baby get to your nipple not by itself it will never get there it has to be helped it has to be brought there and so

the mother needs to know what to do and and if at a zoo there is a female there is a female gorilla pregnant and they have never had any babies there. What they do is they bring in a human mother who nurses her baby a couple of days in front of the gorilla so that they see how that's done. So an example is very important to them. So it's really for the young males and the young females, they're developing skills that they need later in life. And it's universal. It's in all the primates that have been studied. And in all human societies that I know of that have been studied. Young girls are more involved in child care,

recruited as babysitters, and the young boys are more on their own and do a lot of this wrestling business. They like the mock fighting thing. Yeah, absolutely. And again, we'll get people responding. And the whole point about all this is there's a great, everything is a curve.

There's a great, there are, as your wife is an example, there are women who don't feel maternal. There are chimpanzees who don't feel maternal. who don't feel maternal, female, and as you point out, and we'll get later on, that males in an environment, maybe we won't get to it because there's so much to talk about it, but in an environment where a male is the only one and has to take care of a child, in the case of primates, they'll become maternal, right? You talk about examples. That's the interesting thing. The interesting thing is that male primates, like male chimps

and bonobos, they do very little with infants in their adult life. Yeah. But, if a mother dies and there's all of a sudden an orphan, we know that they can do it. And they pick them up and sometimes they may carry them for four or five years. I mean, this is not a minor business for them. They really become the caretaker. And so they have that capacity, which I think in human society nowadays, we are trying to rely on that. Males have paternal tendencies and we're trying to rely on that now.

Yeah, we're learning to use it. I think that's a really important feature that whenever we talk about these kind of, I think you call it learning predispositions. They are, that's what they are. They're predispositions as T as Lawrence Arabia once said in the movie, nothing is written in the sense that, is that, yeah, sure, they're predispositions, but we are cultural and we're also conscious beings. And and as, and we'll talk about animal consciousness maybe later, but clearly both primates and humans can learn behavior and exhibit it if necessary. Yeah.

And but one of their two features of male behavior that I that I think are important that you talk about early on. Besides this need to wrestle and a little bit of what appears to be more aggressiveness. The energy, the the elevated energy of males, you know, we talk, I mean, that's part of the reason I think they need to eat more, right? Is that is that there is that they are much more energetic than, and again, then, than females, even in primates. And with humans, it has been tested by putting an accelerator on the hip of children.

And to measure for a whole week, how much do they move from place to place and the speed of movement? But they find in all the, I think it's 70 countries. I mean, it's many different countries where this has been tested. But they find in all of them is that boys are energetically more active than girls. And boys also have more. ADHD, what is it? ADHD, yeah. So, so that is related, I think. It's just a higher energy level. And I can relate to that because as a child, my mother said I had horse blood, but what she meant is I could not sit still. I was unable to sit still. So I can relate to that and boys have that

tendency more than girls, I think. But as you say, it's always statistical. It's always a statistical difference and there's always an overlap area between the two. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I still have a hard time sitting still. As my wife will assess. But, but, you know, and, but again, we, that's where knowing by not denying biology can help us in terms, again, if we're talking about equality in some sense. I remember one of the problems, you know, my daughter went to a single sex school when she was younger. It was an accident more as much as anything else that she happened to like it more. But what I noticed before that, I mean, she started out in a public school and changed schools because we moved cities when I left Yale.

It's not as if we pulled her out of the public school. But I would, you know, because I was sort of well known, I would be going to the public schools and, you know, they want me to talk about science in grade two or three. And, you know, and then it's always amazed me. First of all, I would be talking about basic things, but the teachers were still uncomfortable, which they pervade to their kids. So kids became uncomfortable with science. But what I noticed, as teachers notice, is you ask a question, and the boys are putting up their hands in there. And you have to re-realize that because if you don't, you're going to only take the questions from boys. But once you recognize that boys are more energetic, they're going to put up their hands, they're going to rush to the front of the room.

Then you can use that fact, and you can call on the young girls to try and equalize it. But if you ignore that fact, then you're pervading that inequity if you want to call. But you know, even in adult audiences you have that. I think there are studies on that is that man ask after lectures two and a half times more questions than women. Yeah. And so I often, after a lecture, I consciously go like, man, I'm not a woman. Yeah, me too. I try to equalize things because men like to speak and like to speak up, you know.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, you talk about in the book, and I know as a lecture I try and do the same thing. I also try and do it sometimes, sometimes it also depends on the place. Sometimes young people need to be encouraged to ask questions. Sometimes they're the only ones who are asking questions. And so it's a cultural thing. But the other thing you point out, and I think, you know, I think you mentioned Margaret Mead in this regard.

But again, from an evolutionary perspective, you point out that men need to have the need to excel. that, you know, for a variety of reasons, and I ask you to go into them, but you say men need the opportunity to reach their potential. Men need to feel fulfilled and successful, need to excel at something to be better at it than other men and better than women. Every civilization needs to offer men opportunities to realize your potential. A recent survey of 70 different countries confirm the difference. Universally, men put more value on independent self-enhancement and status, whereas women emphasize the well-being and security of their inner circle as well as people in general.

Yeah, this relates to Margaret Mead. Yeah. She was the one, she wrote this book, Male and Female. Yeah. She's often taken as the example of someone, a scientist who has shown that culture is extremely important in gender. Yeah. But in her book, she has a chapter where she says there are some universal differences. And this is one of the things she mentions is that women always can make children,

which is an incredible capacity that men just don't have. And men, they want to be better than anybody else in something. It doesn't matter what it is, maybe, but they enhanced the status that way. And she described that as a universal difference. And in one of the editions of her later book, when it later came out, she even put that if she would write a book now today, she would put more biology in it because she felt biology was more important than she had suggested in her earlier writing. So I think it is important for people who quote Margaret Meath on this to realize that she was not completely on board with the absence of biological differences, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. But I think that I want to focus on this for a bit because, again, I'm going to bring up some culturally charged issues. But I think it's important because, you know, you say, let me make this clear. You say somewhere in your book, we have three main ways of finding out whether human preferences have a biological origin. The first is to compare ourselves with other primates that lack our cultural biases, which is all of them. The second is to look at large number of human cultures to see which preferences are universal. And the third is to test children so early in life that culture can't yet have influenced them. And of course, you've focused on the former. but all of these are important scientific ways of probing this.

And so this universality is important. And it should allow us to address culturally or emotionally charged issues a little more dispassionately, not as if it does in general, but it should. And I want to, I want to, there's two issues related to this need for men to excel in a competition, which is an evolutionary basis, which will sort of go into in a bit. One is something that concerns me right now is the fact, as you know, as a professor as I've been, and you've probably been able to see it as I have. Right now, in the United States, the composition of undergraduates is 60% female and 40% male. And down the road, that is going to have serious social consequences. Because the ability to excel or the opportunities that are,

provided people, at least in American society, and to some extent worldwide, or at least in the Western world, are related to your educational credentials, at least, if not output or expertise. And with a society with 40% women being more educated than men, you know, 60 to 40, that's significant differential, that is likely to impact on men's sense of being able to excel and the opportunities available them. Do you want to comment on that at all? Well, I'm not a student of human society. I think the man who don't do

college, they do maybe something else that is constructive or helpful. And they may have an alternative career like they built a computer in their garage or something like that. Yeah, well, some of them do that and become billionaires. A lot of people do. So there may be other ways

of them to achieve something. I wouldn't all hang that on college. education, you know? Yeah. Oh, I agree. In fact, it's very important that that is an option that many men have that women don't have, for example.

They can, many of them can go into, women can go into construction or become roofers or become, you know, and, you know, very, very useful and important and often lucrative jobs. And so that's one of their explanations for why there are fewer men, but it's been, but it's been decreasing over time, as you know, and that's a- And also, you know, the competition is usually besinder, generally. Yes, that's important. So if you look at primate societies, that's very obvious. So for example, bonobal males who are not dominant over the females, the females collectively

dominate the males. The males are most worried about their status among males. Yeah, sure. Whether the females dominate them or not is a sort of secondary issue. It, of course, limits their behavior a little bit, but the main issue is where do you stand among the males? And I think in human society also, if you look at where the competition is and where you wanna be status-wise,

you look at your gender, your gender mates, basically. Yeah, that's another universal we'll get to, is that there are, in this imaginary egalitarianism that some people like to hope for and impose in their views on other primates, it's all imagining there are hierarchies built out. And the point is, it's not so much hierarchy of male versus female,

as hierarchy within males and hierarchy within females. That's a really important takeaway from. And sometimes the hierarchy among females is neglected in the sense that the textbooks, the psychology textbooks, they say men are hierarchical and they try to be autonomous and competitive and they don't have real friendships because they are so autonomous.

And women are non-hyarchical. But you know, the word packing order comes from hens, not roosters. And the whole animal kingdom is full of female hierarchies. Alpha females in all the primary groups, sometimes very important alpha females. So, like mama. Yeah, like mama, the chimpanzee. So female hierarchies are everywhere.

And when humans were tested, there was a psychologist who did experiments. She would put five men in a room or five women in a room. And they would have to decide something among themselves. The man had a hierarchy more quickly, a packing order, more quickly than the women. But the women always had one in the end. So that story is really not true. Hi there. After writing my last book on climate change, the physics of climate change,

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I'm going to apologize, because I, you are, you are a primatologist, and as you say, you're not a climateologist. of human society. But one of the utilities, you even say in the book, is to use what we learn about science to understand ourselves better. So I'm going to ask you some questions that are, that occurred to me upon reading the book and that are not in the book. But so this need to excel, as we pointed out is a, is a, and I just talked about 60 versus 40, and your point about different opportunities for men, it's one thing. But so, but I want to bring up another charge concept, which I've written about and I face a lot. And it's this need that's increasing

demand within academia to have demographic equality, equal number of men and women, especially in my own field of physics, where they traditionally have been male dominated. Now, there are interesting aspects of this. First of all, as is almost impossible to say, it is possible that, and in fact it's demonstrated in a number of cultures, that women who have the opportunity to do science don't necessarily want to do physics. There are other areas of science that interest them more. And in fact, intriguingly, the cultures, the societies that are viewed as most gender egalitarian, you know, the countries and the Nordic countries and other ones, if you actually look at the disparity in terms of gender, in terms of doing, say physics, it's even greater than it's heard that. Yeah. And so it's clearly in some sense it's not that we're forcing women out of science

where there's some difference in interest and maybe we'll get that. But a colleague of mine pointed out to me and I've privately that he thought that there was another reason, that physics in particular, the kind of physics we do, but physics in general is an intensely competitive discipline work. I mean, it really, it's hard to be a good family member to be a good spouse, a partner, father, mother. I remember my supervisor once I would I used to go up to Canada to see the woman who eventually married. And he got very angry that I used to go on weekends. And he said, if you want to be a physicist, you can't care about anyone. And and and but but I'm wondering whether that that need to excel, that competitiveness is

another thing that is another reason you tend to see more males and females and in, in, in, in, not due to a lack of ability or to do math or physics, but due to just a gender preference. But you know, all the academic fields that I know are very competitive. Academics kill each other. I mean, yeah, absolutely. They basically define themselves by my theory is better than your theory. And my data is better than your data.

And in my field, of course, in primatology, we have lots of women. We probably have more women. I would say we have more women than men at the moment. Yeah. But even in my field, there is a lot of academic competition. I once saw a presentation by a businessman who wanted to compare academics with business people. And he had this odd slide where he had a graph and he would say cooperation, science, working together, seeking the truth. That was science.

And then business was all competition. I think he could easily have flipped that because in academia we have tons of competition. And we have women in my field who are competitive with other women and with other men also. So I'm not sure we're making a huge difference in that regard, but there is plenty of competition. Yeah, of course. But as we also point out, the distributions, there are broad distributions. I was, yeah, your point about competition is a good one. I guess you're right. And I shouldn't, it's probably pro-kill of me to say as a, as a physicist, that it's somehow more...

But you know, women in my field have made a difference. Oh, yeah. In fact, they have not changed the way we do science. That is sometimes what people think is that we do science differently. The science has done the same way. But they have brought different perspectives. Like you may have a bunch of primatologists who studies baboons and all they see is the males. The males are twice as big as the females. All they see is the males and they see is the males. They ascribed the whole social structure to the males. When women came to study baboons, they saw different things.

They started to pay attention to the females. So they do bring a different perspective, you know? Oh, absolutely. You've anticipated. I have a whole section on that because that's very important. Because again, you know, I see these things from my perspective as a non-primitologist of physicists. Where I'm told that, you know, it's really important to have, you know, great diversity in studying physics. I happen to think that from everything I've seen that females and males,

and there's no difference in the way physics is done or racially or anything else. But, you know, your field is one where you brought this up where I said, there is a clear example where diversity is important. Because you just point out the different perspectives, because you're watching, what you watch tends to be, of course, culturally and gender or influenced. And so when you're watching, watching behavior, biological behavior, then obviously the biology and the gender of the person

watching is very important. We've had that same discussion about female sexuality. So for ages, female sexuality was sort of downplayed by biologists. You know, the males needed sex, but the females, they just accepted sex, so to speak. And the sex drive was much stronger in the male, of course, than in the female, in their opinion. Now we have a totally different view. We're paying attention to the clitoris, but paying attention to female pleasure and female proactivity.

And one of the biggest words in our field is female choice. So it's not just the males who choose with whom they made. It's the females, of course, also. And so yeah, that's a big issue. Oh, it's very important. In fact, yeah, as a trigger warning for people, if we get there, we're going to talk about the clitoris, masturbation, and all sorts of other interesting things.

But you do, we've already talked about it. But you downplay instinct early on and you, it says, you say instinctual behavior sounds inflexible, not worthy of attention because surely acquires no pain power. The term instinct has fallen out of favor in the study of animal behavior. Even though all animals have inborn tendencies just like humans, these are supplemented by lots of experience. This is true for a natural activity such as flight. Young birds can be incredibly and clumsy while learning to take off and land. As for hunting, nest building, and indeed mothering. Very few behaviors are instinctive in the sense of requiring no practice.

I think that's a very important aspect. You do in the next chapter talk about gender, which we've talked a lot about. I don't want to harp on it. But something I didn't realize, and I think maybe a lot of the listeners won't realize, I didn't realize the term gender wasn't even invented until 19. By John Money, is that right? Yeah, John Money. Jean Money was a very controversial figure, but he, and he founded the first gender clinic,

and he was dealing with people that he, he knew, they were born as one sex, but they identified as the other one. And so he needed a word for that. And the only words that people had until their time were bad words, like weird and abnormal and crazy. and he didn't like these words. And so he went for gender, which he borrowed from grammatica, grammar, where gender is used for king and queen.

You know, that's a gender difference in wording. Later, he became controversial because John Money was involved in Canada in a little boy who was turned, they tried to turn into a girl. The boy lost his penis and he said, or part of his penis during a circumcision. and he said, why don't we remove everything and make a girl out of him? And they tried that. And for 14 years, the child didn't know what had happened, but it was very unhappy child, extremely unhappy child who was not happy with being a girl and tried to play with boys

and do boys games and stuff like that. And so he thought he had proven that you could change the gender of a child at will. But he had actually, because later that same boy committed suicide because I had such a bad experience, I think. Later it turns out that he actually proved the opposite of what he wanted to prove is that you cannot easily change the gender of an individual. It is not all up to because that child had received hormone treatment, surgeries, education, socialization, the whole thing dressed in dressing. and all of that, long hair, all of that didn't make a difference. So he proved almost the opposite in the end. And he was considered the charlatan by some, because he may have suppressed evidence.

You know, he was not really in that sense a scientist. He had a sort of ideological involvement in the case. Yeah, he had, exactly. He let the ideology get in. Yeah, I think David Reiner is the person's name, but they, who killed himself. And indeed, as you point out, he proved. but biology cannot be ignored. You can't.

It basically was a counter example. But, but the fact that the word gender wasn't invented until then, I think is interesting. And it has taken over a discussion. And as you point out, it is great confusion. The confusion between gender and sex

exists everywhere in the literature. And as you point out, even in your book, you'll sometimes use one, when you mean the other, because we all tend to do that. And, and, and,

and, and you give a bunch of definition. But I think since we spent a lot of time on it, I don't want to talk about it. I think I forget whether you said this or what's a quote from someone else that gender is the cultural coat that the sexes walk around in. I don't know if that's your words, but it's a lovely description of that. Yeah. And we signal our gender and the point about that is that cultural coat is time and space dependent. Different cultures do it differently, but also it's time dependent.

As you point out in 17th century France, right? right? I mean, men walked around in high hills and, and, and, and, and so what we regard as the signals of, of gender are culturally dependent. But it has deep roots. Deep roots that are modified by culture. And, and, and I think, um, yeah, the way we dress and do our hair and all of that, I consider extremely superficial. So from the, from a primate perspective, that's, those are superficial changes that our culture, installs, you wear pants and you wear dresses, which is, I'm not particularly interested in that. Yeah, yeah. I have also no equivalence in the other primates. But in the other primates, you can also see from a long distance, whether it's a male or a female

that walks by. So the sex differences are easy to see. And it's remarkable how quick we humans are. There are tests of that. Within a second of seeing a picture where you only see the, you don't see the hair and you don't see makeup. only see this part of the face within a second with almost a 100% accuracy. We say that's a man or that's a woman. Yeah. And you actually actually even for but but it's not just humans. You

point out how good primates are. In fact, you give I thought of I don't know if I forget if it was here or later on that you give a lovely example of your first experience when you were studying chimpanzees of a trick you tried to play on them and how it backfired. You want to talk about that for a second. Yeah, this was more, this was not a serious experiment. We were students. We were students and we worked with young male chimpanzees and these young males they had each time a woman walked by, this was in a building, believe it or not, in a psychology building. Each time a woman walked by, they would get erections and they would be sexually interested because they were, they were lonely. There were males too, you live there. And so we thought, let's try this.

And so we dressed up in dresses and with wigs and we changed our voice and we walked in. Nothing happened, absolutely nothing. So they looked right through us. And I've always wondered how, because there's so many animals who make an immediate distinction. Dogs do it. Maybe olfactorily, but birds do it, cats do it. All sorts of animals make an immediate distinction between men and women. Or male and female.

Male and female, maybe. Yeah, male and female. I always wonder how they do it. It's interesting because that humans can do it, I can understand. We are our own species and we are specialized in recognizing this. But how did they do it with us, you know? Yeah, no, exactly. And I thought you gave some examples of chimps or bonobos or whatever, even across the moat

that would relate very differently to men and women researchers. Yeah, so bonobos, since bonobos have a sisterhood and are very tight to the female, they don't accept a man like myself necessarily. So the female bonobos, they might be interested in me. They would sometimes show their genitals to me and wave at me. And they might flirt with me. That's a possibility. But they didn't accept me as a member of their society.

Whereas my female student, Amy Parrish, she described that she once was standing across the moat and that the female bonobus threw food at her, which they never did it. me, but it was like, we're eating, so you eat also, you know, at the same time. So they accepted her as a member of their society. Exactly. And by the way, as I was writing and preparing with that, that was another reason I made a mental note of why it's in, in primatology, at least, it's very important to have diversity of researchers. That's another reason it's important to have female researchers because, because you can't help but influence the, the group you're studying on at some level or at least interact. You're not invisible. And, and, well, that's, of course, that's also true for other animals. I don't know if you know about the mouse study. There was a mouse study, I think five years ago where they found that male experimenters with mice get different results than female experimenters. No, I didn't know that. And then they did an experiment, I believe, where they, the man were not in the room. They would just put a t-shirt worn by a man in the room and that affected outcomes also. And it says,

if the mice are a bit more nervous when there's a man in the room. I think there's a bit more tension because they perceive a man as maybe potentially more dangerous than a woman. Something like that. But anyway, the... It was an olfactory thing by putting on the t-shirt would be... Yeah, it's all factory, I think. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's amazing. That is interesting. Well, I think that the other thing that's important that you talk about in gender is the need for role models is the importance, not just the need, but the importance impact of role models. Again, in the primate world, in chimpanzees, in learning fishing, eating, raising infants,

young chimpanzees follow role models of older chimpanzees. And again, Bonobos very importantly, maybe you could comment on that. Yeah, I call that self-socialization. Yes. I think we are pre-programmed as a species to self-socialize. people always think that we as adults, we socialize our children, but I'm not convinced of that. I think our influence as adults is more limited than we think. Children look up at certain models.

They may see them on TV, but they may see them in real life. And they tend to identify with models of their own sex, except for, of course, for trans children, who may be identifying with models of the sex they identify with. And then they emulate these individuals. They want to be dressed like a princess or they want to have a sword like a knight or something like that. So they identify. And I see the same thing in the other primates. We don't have a ton of studies on that.

I think we need to study this more. But we have some evidence. For example, a recent study on orangutans where young females adopted exactly the same diet as their mom. That there's hundreds of plants and fruits there. The young females ate exactly what their mom ate. The young males, they deviated from that, probably because they're watching adult males who come by and other individuals. And there's several other studies that indicate that young females pay a lot of attention to their mom,

young males pay attention also to adult males that are around. And so they self-socialize also to some degree, which is why you can use the gender concept in their case, because they learn probably some of their behavior from the adults that they try to emulate. Yeah, and I think understanding that as a reality is important. And you point out, I think it's so important to say that to fight gender inequality, which does exist, although I would argue sometimes overemphasize, does exist, certainly. You can't do it by getting rid of gender.

You do it by understanding gender, and I think that's the really important thing. And I think that's something which is really an issue now. So many people are trying to argue that we have to just get rid of gender completely. We won't be able to. We won't be able to because it's biological. So of the term gender inequality, I think we have focused on the wrong term. It's not the gender that is the problem. It's the inequality.

That's the problem. And so we need to work on that. It's obvious that we have a problem is that because even though people may think that the situation is better now than it was, let's say, 50 years ago. It's amazing that how long it took to get voting rights for women, that women could have bank accounts, that women could have certain jobs. It's just amazing how we have tried to, as a society, to keep women down. Yeah, absolutely.

And that is still continuing to some degree, look at the abortion debate and all of that. So the inequality is absolutely real and we need to work on that. Oh, you know, I think it's important. And racism is real in various places. What we, what I worry about is seeking it out and looking for it might not exist or, or making the key identifier of how we behave in every ways. And, and, you know, and I've been fighting that a little in academia where I, I tend to think, you can say I'm deluded, but it's a relatively, in terms of sexism and racism, it's a relatively enlightened environment compared to the rest of society.

And as someone who was a chair of a physics department, for 40 years, we've been trying to combat the inequities that existed before that. But you're absolutely right. They did exist. But we should. So I have that same discussion when we, when people say that it's natural for man to be dominating the society. Male dominance is the natural order, so to speak. I have a lot of trouble with that kind of talk. Because first of all, I see female leadership in all the primate societies. And sometimes even in a male, but the males are physically dominant, like in chimps, you may have female alpha males, alpha females who are extremely powerful. And like Mama. You're the whole book about her and you talk about Mama a lot.

How do you talk about Mama here? Because, you know, I want to give some of the examples. Why do you talk about her a little bit? So that's in a so-called male-dominated society. isn't that's not even bonobos. Yeah. Mama, Mama was alpha female for 40 years,

meaning that she saw a lot of alpha males come and go. Because they don't stay in power for that long. Yeah. And she was even alpha female and she could barely walk anymore and was blind, largely blind. But she had so much power because a male could not dream of being the alpha male if he didn't have her support. So the males were awfully nice with her and with her children, because they needed her as a political partner, basically.

So that indicates that then you wonder, who's the most powerful in the group? Is it her or is it a male? So even in a male-dominated society, the alpha-female can be an extremely important individual. And then we have the bonobos where the females are actually at the top. So, yeah. And so the natural order, when people say the natural order is male dominance,

I have a lot of questions always. Yeah, it's, the question is, what are you looking for? People look for size or physical strength, but that doesn't always mean dominance. And I think the same is true. You know, I can't help but make these connections to human society when I hear about power structures and privilege. And while, as you point out, while a society has in the past, especially, but has inequities, People who claim they're powerless often are not so powerless. And you point out that females, even in male-dominated primate societies,

carry a great deal of, often carry a great deal of power. I think the same is, but I think the same is true of human societies. And one of the things we, in our current world where people love to be victims, they don't recognize the power they have. For example, one of the, you've written about empathy a lot, I know a book about it or more than one, and it's been one of the, I think one of the areas that was your initial area of study was empathy because you're clearly a very empathetic person, but at the very least. But it is true that females, and I think it's true in primate species as well, from what I can tell from reading your

work, are more empathetic in general, and certainly more understanding of social cues and social interactions, which means they can utilize them more often more effectively than men to achieve goals, even if they don't seem dominant. And therefore, they have power that they might not think they have. So do you want to elaborate on that at all? Well, the thing is physical dominance is people always think that physical dominance is so important. But if you go to a store in your city and you want to speak to the boss, you don't walk up to the biggest fellow in the store and assume he's the boss. That would be ridiculous. And the same thing is, with primary societies, the biggest male is not necessarily the dominant male.

It may be a small male who is more diplomatic and more strategic and has better friends, you know, he may be the dominant male. And so physical dominance is one thing, but political power is a different thing. And females can have a lot of political power. And yeah, empathy can be used for strategic purposes. Empathy can be used. Empathy is not by itself. necessarily positive people have to think that but empathy can also be used for

negative purposes and strategic purposes yeah and that gives sometimes females a lot of power so yeah the the issues are always more complex than people think and it's unfortunate that my book is not simple i mean i cannot tell a simple story because the primates have culture and humans have biology and so it's not as simple as people think well that i think that i'd get rid of the word unfortunately i'm that the whole point is it you can't there is nuance and in this world of sound bites and ideology and demands and decision you know we have to realize that there's getting rid of nuance gets rid of most of what's important in in the human life and other lives and and and yeah and i so you know one can be

condemned for saying you know i've as a professor one can say oh the professor is all the power and students don't have any power well that's nonsense that just is nonsense because Students have a lot more power in many ways than they're represented. And they can manipulate that power if they want. And to not recognize it or to say just because of some label of stature that someone has power, or because of their size, or because of their gender or their sex, is to misrepresent reality. And I think that's what's so useful about the examples you have in the book.

And the good students will take down your theories, for example. Of course, the best students will. That's what they're, that's what they're there for. And that will be the ultimate power trip for them. Yeah, and it's what we're, and if we're any good, that's what we should be training them to do. Right? I mean, that's the whole point of it.

Exactly. And, but you do point out, I want to, this higher, I'm going to tell you some notes I made, and then I want to go through with the rest of example. But I remember making some notes early on about if I were going to sort of summarize key things from the book. One is that hierarchy is common, that dominance occurs within both sets of genders. It's not unique to males. That cooperation and friendship, while there may be differences in quality, also occur in both genders,

that men are not less cooperative within males necessarily, that also that both genders work best within their gender and that male role models are important for males and female role models are important for females, which I think is an important lesson. It makes us sound like it, I remember, you know, I taught I was chairman of a physics department in Cleveland, and the inner city in Cleveland, as it is in many American cities,

is a tragedy. And one of the tragedies is that, is that there are lots of households, especially for young blacks in inner cities in Cleveland, where there's only one parent. And you would come, and I always hesitated. You know, the standard conservative argument is, well, without a father, you know, you need it. This is the argument against same-sex marriages, for example, without a father, kids are at a disadvantage. But, and that's, that is not necessarily true.

But without male role models, young males are. Are it is a advantage. That's very different than saying that either a single parent is not a good parent or that you need, you can't have same-sex marriages. No, that's very important. For example, if you have captive chimpanzees, like I've worked all my life with captive chimpanzees, and you get a young male who could become the alpha male of the group and he's adolescent and he comes in. And he has never lived with fully adult males. You know you're going to be in trouble. You know that that male has not learned. his lessons in his life. He's going to be out of control. He's going to beat up everybody because he's stronger. And he has no limitations, basically. And the best example of that was with elephants in South Africa, where they had a park where because of the ivory hunting, all the big bulls had disappeared. And the young bulls became unruly. And they started to kill rhinoceros and other wildlife. And they started to have.

attack females and they became very unruly and dangerous. And the only way for them to solve that issue was to bring in some fully grown bulls from another part who within a day, within a day, everything was settled. They didn't need to do anything these males. They just walked around and being big and strong and no one messes with them. And within a day, everything was settled. And the testosterone levels of these young males went down. They came out of must that is there. So, yeah, having adult males around is very important for young males to learn certain self-discipline, basically. They learn that from the adult males who will put limits on their behavior. And just their mere presence, they don't need to do anything, just their mere presence.

And I would say for fathers and families, this is probably also true. They don't need to be harsh or disciplinarians. Just being there is already probably enough for the younger males. important and you also point out it's also true for especially when it comes for infant upbringing it's important for young young adolescent chimps or young women to to to have role models uh as well they need it in fact they don't it's not not being the maternal instinct may be there but being a mother is not natural nor is nor is learning how to work within the the female social structural natural and they need older women to older females to to uh to to learn from especially probably

in but in benot why do you talk about bonobo society and the female um well the reason the discussion we're having now relates to that very first issue actually i talked about which is a dominance that hierarchy is common and and and and that there are hierarchies you know we all the the the jargon is there's a hierarchy and males are at the top and females are at the bottom and we've got to change that. But one of the things you learn from is that there are that hierarchies are everywhere and this notion of egalitarianism is an illusion and a day and a delusion in many cases. Your first example was was actually I think when you joined a feminist organization in in in in in in in homes. Yeah. Yeah. Of course that's another that's another story that you sometimes

hear is that men are more competitive than women. I don't believe that from what I've seen in my life. And I don't believe that based on what I know about primates, is that there's plenty of competition. It is male competition is often more physical. So you see it more easily. So there was a scientist, a Finnish scientist who studied their schoolyards, children. And she would say that if you watch the children, by the end of the day, you have seen many more boys fighting than girls. If you ask the children by the end of the day, have a fight, the girls have as many fights as the boys. So that's a bit the difference is the girl fights are indirect, often based on gossiping or talking about somebody or turning away or

and nowadays with the social media that has exacerbated of course things. So the style of competition is quite different, but there's no absence of competition among females. Or absence of hierarchy. Yeah, no. And in fact, let's talk about hierarchy, because am I correct? Did you introduce the term alpha male and are you responsible for that, for that? And I think you say you apologize for it in the book a little bit, right? I don't apologize. So the term alpha male comes out of wolf studies from the 1940s. And it just meant the top male. That's all it meant. That's the point. If people, Alpha male is now a derogatory term. And it should, and it, and it,

It shouldn't be a derogatory term because you point out, I mean, over and over and over again, that alpha male, sure there's archery, but alpha male is not someone who beats up everyone, who dominates everyone. Alpha male is someone who helps social cohesion. And so why don't you, you say it better than me. So when I wrote chimpanzee politics, I use the word alpha male quite a bit for the top male. Yeah. And later it was used in Washington by by politicians to to describe certain politicians. Yeah. And you can imagine which types they are. Yeah.

And so then it became sort of negative label, which I had never intended. It was used in the business world for someone who basically has the biggest office and beats up everybody and lets everybody every day know that he's the boss. So it became a type. It's not the top male anymore. It became a kind of type of male, a bully. And now sometimes in chimpanzees we do have bully alpha males.

They do occur. and they are not very popular. Was Nikko? Was this young alpha male, Nico or something? He was too young, I think, to Alfa. He was 17 when he became alpha male, which is really young. And he acted as a bully, didn't he act as a bully?

And eventually got to come up and... Well, he was not very respected. It's interesting that the females would not let him break up fights. So, for example, alpha male, a good alpha male, breaks up fights and stops the fights, among others. But if Nikki, a young alpha male, tried to do that, the two fighters would go after him and chase him off. So they did not accept his leadership, so to speak. Even though he was the alpha among the males, that didn't mean that all the females were on board with that.

But I've known alpha males who are extremely popular, who were good at defending the underdog. They would defend females against males, the young against the old. they would keep the peace and unity in the group. And then they become extremely popular. And everyone wants to keep them. If they are challenged by a younger male, everyone is going to support the alpha male because that's the one we want to keep.

And if he's a bully, they don't do that. They don't defend his position. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting examples. And there are examples, I think, where Mama worked to exactly do that, to defend a popular alpha male who without her support would have, lost his his his position in that society right mama was very systematic in that if if during the day

a female had supported a wrong male so to speak she would by the end of the day she would punish that female she would she would get her yeah so i think she was very systematic on it you know yeah no it's it's amazing and and and and this notion of alpha male and alpha female which isn't used in our colloquially, but exists in all of these societies as well, in all primate societies, and likely in ours as well. You point out that one of the problems is that psychology books become ideology books, that words like power and dominance have a bad connotation, even though they exist. And one needs to talk about them, but we're not supposed to talk about them because they're bad and somehow by talking about them,

it suggests we condone them. And I'm so surprised by that because if you live at a university, well, you have lived all your life at universities. Yeah. It's one big hierarchy. Yeah. You have the chancellor or the president, and then you have the deans,

and then the associate deans, and then we get to the heads of the departments, and then it goes all the way down to the first year undergraduate students. It's one big hierarchy, but no, we don't have that. Oh, no, we don't. We are egalitarian, you know? Yeah. No, no, exactly.

I mean, and that hard. And it's important to know how to work well. And that's just like any society. The people who work best and in the Bonobo society or with mama to function best, it's not to ignore that hierarchy, but to understand how to work within it to get what you want. Which is, which is what I think most professors do. I've watched quite a few faculty meetings, of course. And I'm myself, I'm usually not involved in the power struggles.

I'm really more an observer. I find it interesting to compare. And I've seen a coup one time. I've seen in the beginning at the faculty meeting, there was a professor who was very important professor and always walked around very proud of himself. And then one day, they voted against him. He had a certain candidate that he wanted to push forward. they voted against him. From that day on, his powerful pose was gone, and his voice had dwindled,

and he took retirement within a year. And I think I basically saw what I've seen in chimpanzees too, and also may lose his position. Oh, yeah, no, it's probably, you know, one could be a, I'm sure they've done this. Actually, Robertson Davies is a wonderful writer who probably was acted like an anthropologist looking at academia. it would be, you know, it would be, it is very similar to those societies. You're right. And as someone who's had various roles in them from a professor to eventually become chairman of department, actually probably as chair, the biggest, certainly, you know, I became chair of chair of department relatively young. I was 38 and I'd come from a relatively junior position, sort of at Yale, where if you weren't an old professor, you're always junior. And the biggest shock to me was

learning how to how to that that not only that hierarchy existed but how to function within it how to essentially become an alpha male how to how to how to take all these competing competition and egos and other things and learn how to function that you never learned that as a professor right you're always on your own and so it was a shock to me and so the being the alpha male is actually a very stressful position people always think it's wonderful to be alpha male but there is a baboon study where they look at fecal samples and they extracted cortisol, which is a stress hormone. And of course, what you would expect is that the low-ranking male baboons, they have high cortisol, so they have high levels of stress.

But the highest level is the alpha male. Because the alpha male needs to look over his shoulder the whole day because there's other males who want to take his position. Yeah. So he may be alpha male and it may look wonderful, but actually it's a stressful position to be in. And so, okay, so that the fact of the alpha male, alpha male as sort of gets a bad rap is clear.

But actually, it's a good segue because you talked about baboons right now. And part of the bad rap that alpha males get or males in general came from early baboon studies. As you spent a whole chapter on. And baboons are not as closely related to us as. No, they're monkeys, first of all. So they have tails. And they have a very big size difference between male and female, much bigger than we have or bonobes and chimps have. they have enormous canine teas, the males, and so they have another advantage over females.

Yes. And there was an early study where they threw them together at a zoo in the wrong sex ratio. I think they put 95 males with five females, and it became a bloodbass. And that study was popularized and was popularized over and over as this is how primate society is. The males fight over females. They are very dangerous. The females have no say whatsoever in the society. So it became, even for baboons, this was not correct, but certainly for a comparison with us, it was not correct. And so it's a very unfortunate circumstance that this early study from the London Zoo became so influential.

And then, and of course, you talk about some people who will not name, who unfortunately promoted it tremendously and among the popular culture. Yeah. And yeah, anyway, I'd rather not name those people. They deserve to be the dustbin of history. But it's the recognition that it's not such. That's one example. You talked about feminist primatology, which is sort of good and bad, I think, at some sense.

The sense of recognizing by female primatologists, both my, actually, one dog is a male and one's a female. They're both objecting to what we're talking. They both have opinions about this. Yeah, that's right. Actually, I think there's some of the door, but I hopefully I won't, I won't, if they stop barking, then the door has been, I'll be right back. Hold on one second. Anyway, okay, so having having had the animals, my animals here make their point, my male and female dog, the feminist primatology was, it gave an opportunity. Am I right that you mentioned earlier for, because, because female primatologists began to look at more more of the female relationship, that was sort of the beginning of understanding that that there were different,

that it wasn't that the role of sort of alpha males was different and the role of and the dominance patterns in society were different, right, in primate society. Yeah, and it changed our view of how mating was arranged because we had this impression that the male hierarchy was older was to. it like the alpha male does most of the meetings and gets most of the offspring and and females have very little say in it. It's until we started doing paternity testing where we discovered all of a sudden that there were lots of males who were siring offspring who were not very high ranking.

They might be young upstarts, you know. And that meant that at night or behind the bushes and this female cooperation of the there was something going on that we didn't see. And this is the story of primatology, is that we discovered that the male hierarchy, yes, it's real and it's important, but it's certainly not the only thing that's out there. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, it overcame, and bonobos are the key. Even in Chinxauer, the sisterhood of bonobos are key.

Counter examples where female group power is an incredibly important thing. but it also it also removed the illusion of no female choice or or or or or that females were passive sex partners which that that notion you know not just minobos and dolphins where where as you point out i mean they're they're they're active seekers of sex and the fact and also the the illusion of monogamy of sort of social monogamy versus biological monogamy, which which appears, biological monogamy seems to be much more of an illusion than ever. Imagine, not just by doing these, I was fascinated by these paternity tests where you point out, yeah, most, it, if you're looking, if you're watching, it looks like most of the mating

happens by the dominant male. But they've saw her, you know, something like 25% of the, of the, of the, or some small number of the total number of of you know we we have that bias even in human studies of course is that when you test on a campus and you ask ask the students on campus how many sex partners they have the boys have many more than the girls yeah you give this great example i was going to ask you elaborate on this is great and people couldn't understand how this is possible because it's of course mathematically not easy to achieve that yes um and and then they found with a fake lie detector test. And that's one of the reasons why I don't like questionnaires at all.

Because they had this fake lie detector test where they put kids on a sort of machine. And all of a sudden, the girls had more partners than before. So as many as the boys, I think. And that's what you would expect. And that's why questionnaires, you know, I would hope that psychology one day gets rid of them and starts observing things again. And the psychologists who work on children, they do that. I have most in common with child psychologists

because they work with nonverbal children sometimes or they don't ask as many questions. They test them in the lab, and I can relate to that. That's much better work in my opinion. That's why I would have loved to hear about your experience as a father. But in any case, that's in a different part of them. That's in a different multiverse.

But you're right. To make it clear, you know, that example, was a great example. This lie detector test. The point is when the students, there was a dramatic change in response, when the students thought they had under a lie detector and therefore assumed it was known where they were lying, the number of sex partners changed. And this illusion that women are less promiscuous than men or unless, and you know, have fewer sexual partners or or less all of that in human society's illusion and now you've discovered in primates. And the other area you point out, I think, was that this was first most demonstrated in birds, right? Wasn't it?

And the bird studies were the first. Yeah, because birds, everyone talks about all these partners for life and kind of David Attenborough kind of beautiful, beautiful scene in a, in, you know, their partners for life, but it's not the case. Maybe you want to elaborate. Yeah, we always admired the birds for their monogamy, but it now turns out not to be as perfect as we thought. Yeah, for sure. And, and, um, and, uh, and, uh, The point that, from a evolutionary perspective, while I know you had differences with Richard Dawkins and his interpretation of selfish genes, the point is that reproduction is selfish not in the sense, it's a misinterpretation, I think, of selfish, right? I mean, if he made that mistake, it was a momentary one. The selfish gene doesn't have to do with selfishness in individuals. No, no, my disagreements with Dawkins are minor. Yeah, yes.

because we are both, you mentioned Tinberg in the beginning. He's a student of Tinberg. Yeah, he's a student. We're both from the same school of salt. Yeah, and then the point, yeah, the point is that, but it's reproduction. I mean, that's, that's the, ultimately, we're driven to reproduce. And, and, I have no, I have no beef is that part. No, no, I know.

And no, in fact, you utilize it. I think that's the point in your book is that, is that there are many things we do when it comes to the mating game that are not that don't appear to be good for our own uh our own status our own longevity but rather are important for be to be able to get a mate to be able to get a mate and and many of the things we do as humans and are not are you know the evolutionary meaning of fitness is a different as you point out it's a very different meaning of fitness than then you know it's not being in good shape and being muscular or anything else necessarily, the evolutionary meaning of fitness is what allows you to propagate your genes in some sense.

Yeah, so for female sexuality that actually matters because you may ask, why would females have a lot of sex with a lot of partners? Exactly. Because you could say just one good partner would be sufficient a couple of times and she would be pregnant and would be fine. Yeah. So this has been a puzzle. that women anthropologists like Sarah Hardy or biologists, Patty Gawati, they have theories about that. It's why female sexuality is so proactive.

One of the theories is that it's a way for them to prevent infanticide. If males are friendly with females they had sex with, which is what we think is a rule that males generally follow, because they don't know about paternity, but they, if they, if they, follow the role being nice with females they had recently sex with they're going to favor their own offspring in some way if that's the rule that males follow then for females they have a lot of sex with a lot of males is actually advantageous and so we have these evolutionary explanations for female sexual proactivity another one is to to introduce genetic diversity if you're a bird and you have a mate maybe you want to have among your eggs a few eggs from other mates you know so uh so genetic diversity

is important. So we have theories about it. And we don't know, well, actually, it's more than theories. You point out, and I'm glad, I mean, I was going to discuss all of those things, but I'm glad you brought them up. But you point out in even human societies, we know that we, it's more than just a theory. There are societies like the Barry tribe, I think, in South America, where specifically females have sex while they're pregnant. And it's viewed in the society as, you know, that every man who's who's had sex with that woman has a plays a role in some sense in in in in their in offspring yeah yeah it's very interesting that these things happen yeah and and and we have of course

a Victorian view of monogamy as being the perfect arrangement but there's many societies have very different arrangements yeah very different arrangements and in fact it's as you say it's it's a it's a social it's a social binogamy and it's much and it just the reality of the world is, you know, as I think, I remember reading a study that at least in across almost all species, at least 10, in species where they're well-defined fathers, at least 10% of the children are not, it's certainly true for humans throughout history, 10% of children are not the children of their fathers. Oh, yeah, those are hospital studies I've heard about. I'm not sure what I believe about them. 10% sounds extremely high, but yeah, it's possible. In any case, it's, um,

But what you point out is that sexual, I was fascinated. Let's talk about sex for a little bit. Now, not just gender sex, but sex, because the bonobos is peculiar. But that sex plays a huge role in power and in interactions, specifically in bonobo societies. But that sexual selection flavors potential mates rather than rather than that as I say, rather than your own longevity or your own, you know, the things you do for sexual selection. But I was, I was amazed. I can't.

The chips, the chimps and faces and butts were just amazing to me. That example. I was, why don't you tell about the example? I was talking to my wife about it when I read it because I thought it was the ability, the importance of, anyway, why don't you talk about it? Yeah, so we did a study to see if chimps could make a distinction between, faces of males and females and categorize them and we thought the easiest way would be to match them with a behind that is because the behinds of males and females are totally different that the females

have these pink balloons and the males don't have them so that's totally different that's for the so we saw we we did tests on touch screens with chimpanzees to see how they would categorize these things and and by accident we found out that they recognize individuals by their behinds that if you show them a face of a chimpanzee and the behind of the same chimpanzee, they match these things, but you show them the behind, even if it's of the same sex individual, but of a different one, they don't match these things. And so we discovered that they recognize each other by their behinds, and we wrote a paper, and we got the ignoble price. The ignoble price for that. And then later Mariska Krette in the Netherlands, she did the same thing

with humans. She also had pictures for bonobos and chimpanzees on touch screens, but also for humans. And human males are actually better in recognizing behinds than human females. Yeah, the behinds of others. And she found the same thing in the chimpanzees is because the chimpanzees look much more at behinds than humans do. And so the chimps are actually better at it. So it's a sort of a strange story. But what it does mean, is that we have a whole body image. So we recognize people probably mostly by the face, but we have a whole body image.

And that's why if you look at a crowd of people, you can find your wife, for example, just from behind, without knowing her clothes or nothing, just by the attitude and her body and how she sits and all of that. We recognize that and we eat it. And it's important, again, from evolutionary perspective, to be able to do that, I think. And, but the other thing you point out is that,

Sexual selection is so important, obviously for all species for which sex is a method of reproduction. That the status of a female changes within this within a society within, I don't know whether it's both bonobos and chimps. When they go into, when they're pregnant, and also when they're in, in, in what a estrus or whatever the word is for that, right? Their status, the way they're treated is the changes. Do you want that? Yeah, so a female who has a swollen genital swelling, meaning that she's fertile, she gets privileges. She can, for example, if there's a cluster of chimps who are eating meat and she normally would stay out of that because she's not high ranking enough,

when she has a swelling like that, she just goes into the middle and she grabs some of the meat. Her status is enhanced. And this has been described for wild chimpanzees, has been described, has actually been experimented on in captive chimpanzees. So their status fluctuates, they have more leverage when they have these swellings, especially with males, of course. And they learn that and they know that, right? And they take advantage of that.

And I think you do make the point, and I think it's worth making the analogy to humans, that, you know, again, it happens with young women when their sexual sexual, when their breasts develop, you're noticed by young boys. And so what I think is, so what we tend to emphasize in our society is the risks that that develops. But what we don't emphasize is the opportunities. And I think young women also, just like bonobo, female, but no one knows the opportunities of that. And there's another moment of change, which is when a female becomes a mother. And she becomes a mother for the first time.

She's going to be more respected. And so I've noticed that in monkeys when I did my monkey studies, but that's also true in in apes. Yeah. Is when a female arrives with a first child, she's going to be treated differently by the group. Yeah, absolutely. She of course also gets protection very often. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you point out that many, many times that changing, that being a mother suddenly produces very different behavior. And it changes also the physiology.

We know that for men, for example, human man who are primary caretakers. Yes. There are now neuroscience studies on that. For example, a man of a gay couple or a father who has lost his wife and is now the primary caretaker for the children. His brain changes. His oxytocin is elevated. His testosterone goes down. he becomes a different character.

He becomes more maternal, basically, in everything. So it's interesting how flexible we are as a species. And I think that needs to be emphasized always, is that we have human biology, but biology also sometimes follows our behavior instead of dictating. Yeah, that there's that's why things aren't simple. And I think we have to reckon, it's that interplay, as you point out,

between genes and environment that works both ways. cannot be ignored in either direction. And I think that's one of the many lessons that are, I think, is a really important lesson that comes through from this book when it comes to gender and any, and other characteristics. I want to get, as we get near the end of this, I want to, we get to both the final chapters of this book and some more general questions I have for you. You do point out near the end that violence is violent behavior is more characteristic of males. There's no doubt about it.

And it's true among, at least among all primate species. And it's true in all human societies. And, but I think what you also point out, however, is that that violence, often what people don't realize is often it's male against male violence, not male against female violence, which is, so when, you know, the interpretation is that males are more violent automatically has led in our society to the notion that males are more violent against female, all the time but certainly in our primate cousins it's mostly male males are males may act in a dominant way but they're rarely extremely violent to females right yeah the size difference

between male and female this males being larger is driven by male male competition so the more male male competition you have in a society of primates the bigger the males are going to get because that's what they worry about the status among among each other yeah that's they can use this against females, this size difference. That's a sort of secondary. And they do. They do show violence to females, but it's less common. In the chimpanzee is less common.

In humans, it's less common. Most of the homicides in human society are male to male. But yes, they can use it against women. And I've argued that maybe the fact that we have separate families who have separate homes very often has exacerbated. this situation in humans. Humans have more rapes than other primates. Humans have more violence, I think. And during the COVID crisis, for example,

when people were locked up in their homes, domestic violence increased in humans because of that situation that we have. So we have a society in which women have fewer defenses against. Because in a primate society, if a female is attacked by a male, there's at least other females who can help her out. And they do that. And Bonobo society is the prime example of that. The females help each other out in these situations.

And does it also often the males all help out too? I mean, if there's a bully? Sometimes, yeah. Especially high-ranking males may do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I want to, I think that's an important point because one of the unfortunate generalizations, or at least, yeah, generalizations made from the fact that males in all these species are more violence,

is that males are inherently a danger to females, which is not true. And in particular, one hears about rape culture. One hears about the fact that somehow in our genes, as a masculine genes, is rape. And you point out that rape occurs very, very rarely, if at all, in at least in primate cultures. It seems to be a human cultural activity more than a biological one.

Yeah, so in the primates only in orangutans, It is fairly common for younger males, not the fully grown males, but the younger males do rape females. In other primates, it's extremely unusual. In chimpanzees, it's very, very rare. In bonobes, it's totally absent. So rape is more a human pattern, yeah. And one of the things that actually, when it talked about violence, and I think, well, there's been a recently a big public, there was a big case of some celebrities related to the question of who, of who is being abused. And the point is that males are often the targets of violence

and are viewed as expendable, not just in war, in human cases, but one of the things you point out, which I was interested by, you point out that when asked whom they would hypothetically push in front of an oncoming train to save others' lives, nine out of 10 participants of both genders preferred to throw a man rather than a woman onto the tracks, which I thought was a very interesting, you know. Yeah, you know, men are expendable.

I always, since I was born right after World War II in Europe. Yeah. I always have to think of that. If I had been born 50 years earlier, I would probably have ended up in an army. I would probably have been killed on a battlefield. And we see that now in Ukraine. We see that women and children can leave the country.

Men cannot, they cannot step on a bus and leave the country. It's just going to be impossible. They're going to be blown. blown up in the air. So during wartime, being a male is not an advantage. It's in the peace time, and that's why we have the general discussion, I think, to some degree, is during peace time, you see the male privileges, and we say we need to reduce them or eliminate them. But during wartime, being a man is really not an advantage. Yeah, but also, yeah, but I mean, I'm going to push back a little bit. You're absolutely right. Those are two generalizations.

But it's also true that in peacetime, being a, I still think most violence, certainly most violence in the primates, and I think probably most violence in society is still male on male. Yeah, yeah, it is. And so it's not, I mean, we have this illusion that somehow, as I say, males are always the abuser or the aggressor and or are never the victim of violence. And often there are the subject of that. I think when one sees that, and certainly in the primate societies that you've discussed anyway, that that, and it comes out of the wrestling and everything else, the fact that males tend to want to

want to be physical in a non-sexual way with other males. But as you point out in one of the later tractors, they also like to be physical, physical in a sexual way with other males. And that's the, the, the, the, the, you wouldn't call it homosexuality so much in the sense that there is a unique male-male-male sexual bonding. But in both in chimps and in bonobos and perhaps, I think you probably talk about other primates, male-male-male-sexual relationships are not uncommon. No.

At all. And of course, in bonobo societies, where sex with as far as I can tell, anything that moves is common. Female-Female, there's a huge... Female-female sex is very important there, because it is political also. It has an effect on that sisterhood that they need to have to dominate the males.

Because they collectively, female bonobos cannot dominate males on their own. They need a sisterhood to do that. Which is an important lesson, I think, for society in general, that if we're concerned about, you know, that as you say, that having, that females in a bonobos society can be dominant, as they are dominant,

but only dominant as a collective, in some sense, because they have that sisterhood, and that's probably irrelevant and important lesson maybe in our society as well as we think about these things. But to conclude the book, I mean, I think I wrote at the end of the last chapter, which is called on dualism. I wrote biology, biology, biology, biology, biology, biology, biology. And the point is that we are as this notion that our gender, which is a, which is a, a mental, a cultural and mental construct as much as a, you know, as a much as a biological one, you point out a very important statement, I think, that that our bodies are the product of evolution. So our brains are too.

And to come out to somehow argue that, that, that they're, that, that, that, that, that, that, that gender is a social construct that has nothing to do with, that has no basis in biology, it's just, there's no sense to that. You know, it's very much a masculine idea. So it comes from the Greek philosophers and all sorts of male philosophers since then, is that the mind is sort of separate from the body. The body drags us down, the flesh is weak, all of this, but the mind sort of floats up in the air and especially the male mind of course the male mind is absolutely wonderful and superior to everything else superior to animals superior to women superior to children you name it the male the adult male mind is absolutely superior and and you see that reflected in for example

the fact that it's almost only men who want to preserve their brain they want to put their brain in some freezer and they think a hundred years from now, we're going to unfreeze it and all sorts of wonderful thoughts are going to come out of it. I don't know how they see that. Or you have these hermits who locked themselves up and tried to deprive them of food and women and all sorts of things because their mind is the only thing that matters their body. So it's a very masculine thought. It's true. I never thought you never, you don't hear of female hermits very often, do you? No. It's a very masculine thought that was adopted. it into the feminist movement at some point where they started to say that the body was not so

so important. It's the mind. It's the mind that's most important. But the mind is part of the body. The mind is not, at least the brain is part of the body. And the mind sits in the brain, so to speak. Maybe. According to some, it sits in the whole body, actually.

Yeah, yeah. Not just in the brain. According to some, it's an illusion. But anyway, go on. Yeah. Yeah. So that whole mind-body dualism is nonsense from a biological perspective. It doesn't exist.

There is no mind separate from the body. And so we need to get rid of that. We need to respect biology and respect the brain and respect our background. Yeah, one of my favorite paragraphs, I'll have a lot of favorite paragraphs, is outside science and sometimes within, a common belief seems to be that while our bodies are products of evolution our minds are ours alone humans aren't subject to the same laws of nature as animals and we feel and think the way we do because we freely choose so i consider this to be a form of

neocreationism it neither denies nor fully embraces evolution as if evolution came to a screeching halt when it reached the human and only the human neck thus leaving our lofty heads alone and and i think that that this notion um you know you try and argue that that that kind of dualism is part of the problem. And the notion, and it leads to notions that are counterproductive related to gender in humans. The fact that gender plays, the two notions, that gender is somehow completely socially derived without a biological basis, and the fact that somehow we can ignore gender and live in a gender neutral world are both denials of biology. And your book is a testament to that,

the evidence against that by looking at amazing examples of which we've discussed a few with the with the different primate species. To add an optimistic note to that is that I think psychology is changing. I've seen psychology change over the last 30 years that I was a professor there because of the neuroscientists. They're increasingly neuroscientists, and they know that a rat brain and a human brain, and that's why they compare them. They work in much the same way.

We have a bigger brain, but otherwise they work in the same way. And I think the neuroscientists are changing. Psychology used to be quite separate from evolution and biology, and that is changing. So I'm optimistic. But psychology, I'm quite optimistic, about anthropology less so,

because I think they keep going back to humans being unique and special and different from everything else. Yeah. Well, yeah, no, I think there's a reason why neuroscience has the word science in it and psychology doesn't. But anyway, that's my personal. That's a personal. I probably get angry letters about that too. But let me read the last two paragraphs of the book because I think it's important. Everything we do reflects the interplay between genes and environment.

Since biology is only half of the equation, change is always within reach. I think that's the point you're making is that there's hope for us. Okay, few human behaviors are rigidly pre-programmed. I'm a biologist, but I'm also a firm believer in the power of human culture. I have direct experience with how gender relations vary from country to country. Within bounds, they're subject to education, social pressure, custom, and example. And even the few aspects of gender that resist change and seem unalterable offer no excuse to deprive one gender of the same rights and opportunities as the other. I have no patience with notions of mental superiority or natural domination dominance between the genders,

and I hope we'll leave those behind. It all comes down to mutual love and respect and appreciation to the fact that humans don't need to be the same to be equal. A beautiful way to end, but we won't end there. Because I have three or four general questions for you related not to this book. But it's a very, you know, I really enjoyed it. And as always, I learn, you know, my perspective of my self-changes for the reason they, you wanted to as I learn more about the universe. This is why I'm a scientist. As I learn more about how nature works, I'm often surprised and it affects the way I think about myself. And the book

difference is not a, it's not a political scribe or in any way. It's a, it's a scientific discussion with amazing examples, some of which we've discussed here from from a bunch of species with whom we share a tremendous amount and undoubtedly share biology. Let me ask you, I know I know the answer, but I've thought about this because I've been writing about consciousness, especially talking to a number of neuroscientists who don't think animals other than humans are conscious. Sure. And I know, and let me let me talk, why don't you talk about animal consciousness? You, I think, judging from your writing and your experience do not think that there's clearly you feel primates are conscious in essentially almost every way that we are.

They're self-aware. Do you think they're self-aware? They plan. They all of they, they can tell, they have a, they understand the me, do you think they understand the me inside their bodies as you, yeah. So yeah, my sometimes I'm very cynical about the question of consciousness because I say, you tell me what consciousness is and I'll tell you if the elephant has it and I never get good answer. Well, you know, let me, let me point out in my book, I point out that someone pointed out to me that you can tell how much we know about a field by how many books are written about it. And there's so many books written about consciousness that tell you. And indeed, when I tried to read a lot of them, what amazed me is no one defined was people were very hesitant to define what

they meant by consciousness. Yeah. Wasn't there a book, was it by Dennett, consciousness explained. Yeah, yeah. And by the end, I still didn't know. Yeah. After reading all those books, Well, I'd love you to read that final chapter of my new book because I tried to get it accurately, but certainly I came to the conclusion. The book is about known unknowns, what we know we don't know. And what's very damn clear to me is that we don't know consciousness. So you have Rumsfeld as endorser? Well, no, and in fact, actually, it's interesting. I don't know when this will come out before the book comes out.

But it's called the unknown unknowns in the UK. But my American publisher wants to change the title for that very, for that very reason. that you pointed out because it is a Rumswell quote. But my feeling, by the way, is that while I disagreed with almost everything Donald Rumsfeld said or did, I listen to people and sometimes they say something intelligent. So back to consciousness. Of course, I think there's continuity between us and the other primates in self-consciousness and consciousness and sentience. I have written a whole book about emotions, which I think includes feelings, which are internal states of consciousness.

But, you know, there are certain things that we humans cannot do without being conscious. You cannot plan a party tomorrow for your friends without consciously deciding who's going to come, what music you're going to play, what you're going to drink, what kind of food you serve. You have to consciously think about all these things. Now we know from studies on the primates that they can plan ahead. We have observations in the wild of them picking up tools and using them two hours later at a different location. So they must have been planning to go there. But we also have now experimental studies on birds and primates that show that they can think ahead to future events.

I don't think that's possible without a consciousness. So that level of consciousness, I think, of knowing what you know, that's called metacococon. We have experiments on that, planning ahead, episodic memory, thinking back to specific events. We have evidence for all these things. And they are conscious states in humans. So I do believe that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And certainly planning ahead is a key.

And as far as I know from having read about this, that actually it is just birds and primates that really have those are the right now the only two that clearly have an example. Yeah, that we have experimentally demonstrated, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But some people would argue that, okay, that that's, but that's different than knowing about I and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, and thinking that there's, you know, that I, you know, some people would argue is the sort of definition of, you know,

it's least a characteristic of consciousness. I, clearly I as an object of, you know, danger and, uh, it was clear, but I, but I is both a subject and an object. And, And my sense is that you feel that there's no difference. If people make these statements, I'm always inclined to be the empirical scientists and say, how do we know that an animal does not have that? Yeah. So, for example, if you are a monkey and you're in a tree and you need to jump from one branch to the next, you need to know about your body mass and can that branch keep my weight.

And you need to have a lot of experience with your body in the environment. So you do need to have an eye. Well, whether you can reflect on the eye, that's a different thing. But I would then want to know, how would I know that, you know? That's the key point. And actually, that's really good. I guess we share so many things, which is one of the reasons I like you so much, I think. But my problem is that we'll never, I don't, I mean, we'll never know. One of the, as much as you hate self-questionnaires, it's a way to find out at least what people think they're thinking. Yeah. And unfortunately, I mean, I think one of the things that we can observe behavior, but, and we can learn a lot from behavior, but that still doesn't tell us what's going on inside their heads. And while with people, the only way we have is to ask them, and often that is a false clue of what's going inside their head, there are many more opportunities. But because with animals, I think it's one of those things. It's just always going to be a mystery because I don't, as a scientist, unless you can imperil know what's going on side their heads. And I don't know of any way to do it. Well, it's a question.

But with animals, you know, I've written this book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals? I know. I have that book, by the way. And so with animals, we have an enormous history of people claiming they cannot do this. They cannot do that. There's a long history of maybe, I can list probably 30 claims like that that have now been forgotten. We don't talk about them anymore because we have now a new experiment that shows. So if people say they don't have an eye and cannot reflect on the eye, I need to see proof of that. Otherwise, I'm going to assume continuity. Yeah, I think it depends what you're, I think that's it the point is. For you, it's innocent to proven guilty. For some, it's guilty till proven innocent, the sense of you're going to,

based on everything you've seen, you're going to, unless you have evidence against it, you're going to assume there's no difference. I met cognitive scientists, neuroscientists who basically say yeah I really want I know I want to believe my dog is conscious but unless I have evidence that they are I'm going to believe there aren't I mean I'm I have two dogs and a cat but I and I when I look at my when I see my dog feeling guilty I cannot help but no think that there's an eye there but I also know how well that I want to believe and I loan as a scientist the biggest fallacy the big easiest person to fool is yourself and sure I want I want to believe my my dog is as a level of consciousness and I'm sure it doesn't. So at some level, you know, I have to be skeptical. But okay,

I love that discussion. The last two things I want to talk about are morality and atheism, which, because you've also written a book about that. And as someone who's called and, you know, who's labeled as a big shot atheist myself, because I've spoken, you know, because I have concerns about religion, both secular and non-secular religion. But I think your point being that morality is in some sense biological is is innate and you want to talk about that a little bit yeah i usually say that there are moral ingredients or building blocks that we have inherited so it's not like morality was developed from scratch we we have empathy for example and a capacity for empathy which which we share with all the mammals and what that does is that you are interested in others

and the situation of somebody else and how they're doing are they doing well are they doing poorly so empathy creates that and i don't think you can have human morality without that capacity if if you are psychopathy you have zero empathy i'm not sure you can be a moral being you would only think utilitarian like in the sense of how do i get away with certain things you know so um i think there are certain building blocks like following rules a sense of fairness, empathy. There are certain building blocks that we have put into our moral systems. I'm not sure that a chimpanzee, I would call a chimpanzee a moral being in the same sense as we are.

But some people attack me over that and say, why not? My main reason is that chimpanzees don't have a discussion over what kind of moral rules to follow and don't have a justification. They don't tell you, this is why we do it. way. They don't have that. But then others say that there are human societies and some anthropologists they will tell me, the human societies, you ask why are you doing it this way? They will say, that's how we've always done it. That's the only argument they give you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They don't have a justification system for their moral system. Or their justification is just, as you can show is clearly false. People will invent, people will invent justifications for things of why they're doing without because, because reason is a slave of passion. For me, I agree with you completely in that sense. But there's one thing I add, I think, because, you know, I think Hume also said you can't get aught from is. But my point is, I don't think you can get aught without knowing what is. So for me, the second aspect of morality that this is why for me science is so important. Yeah. Is that only if you know the rational consequences of your actions, can you be moral? If you don't know them, then everything's random. And so, so while it may require

one step beyond pure science. Science tells us empirically how the world works. But that's why I think but the gap between is and alt, Yume was much less absolute about that than his followers. Yeah, yeah. The followers, they called it Yume's guillotine or something like that. Yeah, yeah. But Yume was much more circumspect about it. And remember, Yume believed in empathy. He thought that empathy and simply, he called it sympathy at the time, that sympathy was central to morality, the moral sentiments. So that's an is right there. Humans have sympathy. That's an is that goes into the moral system. So I feel a certain kinship is hum, even though he weren't against the is-ought divide. But his followers, the philosophers, they used it to shove

biology completely out of the picture, which I think is incorrect. Oh, absolutely. Well, I'm well known as having, well, people think I'm an enemy of philosophy. I'm not, but I, but I'm, but I'm, but I'm, but I'm, um, skeptical of many things. And, uh, and, but I think that you're absolutely right. But I think that for me, that's why I think a system based on testing empirical evidence and rational, rational analysis of that will lead to, leads to effectively something very close to morality. When you know the consequences and you can decide what ultimately is most rational, well, it's pretty darn close. And that's why I, you know, and I think it means that science has produced,

you know, I guess I agree with Steve Pinker in this regard, that science is produced on the whole, the Enlightenment has produced a world where which is more, I don't like the word morality particularly, but a world which is more ethical or at least has improved the situation of the world because we because we bet and when we start foregoing the use of empirical understanding and testing how the world really works in order to govern ourselves. And unfortunately, we're seeing it more in my mind almost more and more today. Then we then we have a dangerous future. And let me end then with saying that you changed my morality or at least my ethics. In a very important way. I think I've told you this before, and you were kind enough to give me your little video, which I own.

Even though you told me to destroy it, I keep it and watch it. And that's the famous video of the monkey and the cucumbers. Yeah, yeah. I asked you for it. And it's a great to, I love it. It means a lot to me. And it is an example. Well, why don't you just say the example?

And then I'll tell you what it means to me. Well, that little video clip is the most watched animal experiment in the world because I think it's 200 million. people who have now seen it. Great. And more people should see it, I think. And the video clip was made 10 years after we did the experiment. Oh, wow. Because we had done the experiment with maybe 20 monkeys, a lot of different monkeys.

They would get different kinds of rewards for the same task. Two monkeys side by side. One of them would get grapes. The other one would get cucumber. And grapes are much better than cucumber. If you give both of them cucumber, They both do the task many times, 25 times in a row, without any problem. As soon as she started giving one grapes and the other one still gets cucumber,

the cucumber monkey doesn't want to work anymore, gives up on and becomes angry and agitated. Angry, angry and throws the cucumber away. We won't even eat the cucumber and shakes the cage. It's such a beautiful. And I look at that and think about it. And my wife and I talk about it all the time because so many times in my life, I ask myself, am I being a monkey? When I think about something was perfectly good,

but then I'm looking at something else and it's the grape, and suddenly what I have is no longer good enough for me. And then I sit back and laugh and say, hey, oh, don't be a monkey. And my wife says it to be all the time, because of that video, don't be a monkey. So I have you to thank for that, and it has changed my life as much as anything else.

And my knowing you and I, We've been together and I have enjoyed our discussion today and I've learned a tremendous amount from you. And I thank you for everything you've done and I thank you for your collegiality and friendship. So thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. It was a great discussion. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation.

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