The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Ian Tattersall

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Ian Tattersall (paleoanthropologist and curator emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History) joins Lawrence for a nuanced discussion of a wide range of topics including the rise of altruism in humans, the evolutionary reasons for religion, breeding compatibility between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, the origins of brewing beer, and more. See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release.  And please consider supporting the podcast by donating to the Origins Project Foundation www.originsprojectfoundation.org Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

The Origins Podcast is now a part of the Origins Project Foundation. Please consider supporting the podcast and the foundation by going to www.orgensprojectfoundation. Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I have a delightful conversation with paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, who's one of the world's experts on human evolution, has written a number of wonderful popular books and was also curator of the Museum of Natural History in New York's exhibition on human evolution. It was controversial for obvious reasons, I guess, and it's a wonderful exhibit. But more than that, he's actually interested in many things,

and one of the things we talk about is his fascination with the natural history of beer, among other things. So I hope you'll enjoy listening to my discussion with Ian in this episode of The Origins Podcast. Ian, it's nice to be with you again, and I've often learned more about my species from you than others. And I hope to today. I want to start with, as we talk about human origins, I want to talk about your human origins, and not all the way back, but what got you interested in studying hominids in the first place? Basically, I stumbled into it. You know, I think that basically the only honest way to discover anything is by accident. Yeah. And, you know, I was raised

in Kenya. I was in a boarding school in Nairobi when the leakees were making their big discoveries. Okay. In in Alder by gorge, but I was in blissful ignorance of all of that.

And it was only when I got to college that I discovered that there was an area of anthropology that was biological. And I fell into it and very happily so. What were you doing in Kenya? Your father or mother

was there for, I mean, was it just a posting or were, were, were they? No, I think that, you know, after, after the, after the end of the Second World War, and for a decade and a half, at least, after that, you know, Britain was a pretty depressed and gray, gray place. And my father very cleverly discovered, he could, he could have a much better lifestyle in the colonies. And he could, and he could, he could have a much better lifestyle in the colonies. And he could do that because he was already working for London University. And he got a job at the University College of East Africa in Kampala in Uganda, where they were giving London degrees. So he could go there without burning his bridges.

Oh, fascinating. So what kind of academic was he? Well, he actually was an administrator. He was a classicist by origin, but an administrator at the time. And so he ran the administration. until, you know, Independence Hove interview, and it was time to go back to Britain. Did you ever think you're doing classics? I mean, that's a little bit of the way back towards human origins, but... No, I never thought of doing classics. I was signally bad at Latin, and, you know, I might have been discouraged from zoology

if I'd known that we used to Latin eggs a lot. Yeah. When did you decide that sort of focusing on early modern humans, or if you want to call it, that was too fascinating to give up? Well, that was a very gradual process. I went to college to study anthropology, basically because I already had some sort of background in the areas where many anthropologists used to go. And my experience with anthropology was with the cultural end of it. Yeah. And only later that I discovered there was biology, and I much preferred the biology. It's interesting to me when I hear you say that, because one of the things we're going to talk about is in one of your new books,

accidental Homo sapiens. In some sense, you say ultimately that when it comes to Homo sapiens, is this culture rather than biology that really matters? Well, that's absolutely right. That's certainly what makes human beings different. It's certainly the way they use culture. And I was guilty actually a couple of decades ago now of writing in a book that there wasn't really anything that we could learn about ourselves from looking at our past.

We couldn't learn perfectly well from looking around ourselves at ourselves today. And that was a pretty disrebitable thing for a paleoanthropologist to say. But I still believe it to some extent. And I think that in studying paleoanthropology, what we're doing is answering something very deep in ourselves that we acquired quite recently. And in a cosmic or geological sense. I mean, I've run workshops through our origins project. And one of the ones where I learned a tremendous amount was one where we did on the origins of human uniqueness, which is really partly the subject of your new book and what makes humans unique.

At the time, I found it fascinating because we invited geneticists and anthropologists. I remember well. Yeah, yeah, paleontologists, economists, all sorts of people. And it reminded me of that famous story about the, the people in the elephant, the geneticists, that it said it was genetics that made the economists. And everyone seemed to find a different reason. And it was, you know, it's still, it's a fascinating topic.

But at the same time, what's sort of remarkable is how early modern, early humans were, 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. And many, when you look at their cave drawings, and remarkably modern. Yeah, I think there's an astonishing thing there, because we are, We're looking back quite a long way in historical terms. We don't have to look back very far before we find creatures that are completely different from us. I think that, you know, for the first several million years of human evolution, early humans had been sort of extrapolations of what hadn't gone before,

but at about sometime under 100,000 years ago, there was a complete revolution. in the way that humans were interacting with the world. And oddly enough, that was already 100,000 years after people who looked just like us had been around on the landscape. Our species was born 200,000 years ago, but it didn't start acting in the way in which we act today until much later. And that are the species that look just like us?

Are you talking about Neanderthals? No, I'm talking about homo sapiens, modern humans. Yeah, early modern humans. Neanderthals were actually quite considerably different from us in the way they appeared. Yes, and maybe we'll find out, although I was reading your book and it seemed a little concerned about the ethics of producing some Neanderthals today. Oh, I don't think we would want to even go there. I think one of the points that was raised at that Origins event that you mentioned, somebody asked, well, what would happen if we cloned a Neanderthal?

Yeah. And the first thing that occurred to me was, well, how would we know how to bring it up as a Neanderthal? So much of us is what we learn. If anybody and one of us were sort of brought up in a black box, we would be very, very different creatures from the ones we turned out to be. Yeah, well, I think that's the thrust that I get from your new book, is how much of what makes us us is not hardwired in a sense. biology, in the sense that we, the very basis of most of our civilization, including things that people think of as intrinsic aspects of our psychology, really come through the experience of being human, and the experience of being human involves being brought up in a human culture,

one or another. Exactly, yeah. Of course, because I grew up at a different time, I was trying to figure out when species seem to have a different meaning. I was always told species were things that couldn't mate and produce productive offspring. But then, of course, I know that I have Neanderthal genes and you do,

and clearly then these two species, Neanderthals and humans, did, at least for a while, we're able to mate effectively. And so it always confused me this notion of species. And I wonder, you know, just recently, I see a new branch on the hominid tree was claimed to be discovered.

And I'm just wondering whether I should believe any of that. I just wonder if you have one or two samples of individuals that look very different. And your book is all about the bell curve, but let me give you the hypothetical that I often think of. If I were in a watching a basketball game and the roof caved in, and all of us in the audience died as to the basketball players. And then a long time in the future, some anthropologists or paleontologists came and dug it up and found a basketball player and me, I'm sure they would say we're different species, don't you think? You know, I'm not sure that they would. There's something very distinctive about our species homo sapiens. It makes it different from all the other species that we know of

in the fossil record. I think one thing that we have to bear in mind when you're pondering the kind of question, which is really an important question that you have been pondering, is that every species has to descend from another species. That's the only way you get new species is through descent like that. That means that when they're newly separated, species are very closely related. And if they're very closely related, that means that there's probably some degree of genetic compatibility.

And often what separates species is the way they behave, the way they recognize potential partners and so on. So it's not really surprising that early on in the history of closely related species that if they come into contact, And in order to speciate, they have to be separated in some way. And if they come into contact, then there will be some minor degree of interbreeding. But what happened in the case of Homo sapiens and the Niannithals was that Homo sapiens went on its merry way to become the species that we know today. And that the Niannothals went on to become extinct pretty much identifiably themselves.

So that these were two populations. on different historical trajectories, as it were. And yes, they may have been closely related, and yes, they may well have exchanged a gene or two. But it didn't make a lot of long-term difference in terms of the evolutionary fate or even their ecological roles. Well, then these other hominid species

that have been discovered recently from Dennis. How do I say it? Denisola. Yeah, denisola. Dennis Owens and to, I don't know what this new one's called that's just been another. Luzon Ances. Yeah. Yeah.

And so what do you make of this? And were they contemporaries or? And what do you make of that, of how the human tree, the hominid tree has changed? Let me put a different way. So one of the wonderful things you've done and among many is create, I think, in the Hall of Human Origins at the Museum and Natural History. New York, which I've thoroughly enjoyed for the most part, except for a little bit of religion there that I didn't.

Well, yeah, we all have our opinions about that. How much would have changed since that's been developed? How much, with these new discoveries? Do they change everything, or are they just minor, minor alterations? One of the big problems when you do an exhibition hall like that is you're spending a lot of money and you know you're not going to be able to spend that kind of money again any time in the near future. So you have to sort of obsolescence-proof it as well as you can.

But the issue then is that that means leaving out a lot of stuff. You have to decide to talk about things that you think are going to be relatively durable, and that means leaving out all the interesting things du jour that you may have. And that's always a quandary that you have in a museum exhibit. But once it's in there, the chances that it's going to be material. changed over its lifetime of slim to none. If you had your druthers, if you had a chance now, what would you change in that? There is a lot that I would change mainly because that was a designer's hall. Oh, I see. When we did its predecessor, the whole of human biology and evolution,

the world was a very, a very different place. And a curator and a designer had to, to negotiate to come up with a final result. And you might have disagreed, but it was a sort of a face-to-face thing. And you had to come up with a result that made everybody happy. Now, as in virtually every area of human experience, things are done by committee. Yeah. Yeah. And so I feel much less of a sense of authorship in this hall than I did in the predecessor hall. But things have have moved forward, and the reason why we have the new hall, which is not so new anymore, is that, you know, things have changed a lot, and particularly the administration, the museum, wanted the molecular story to be told. And that was when they co-opted my colleague Rob DeSalle

as a co-curator of the hall. And that's when we started our long collaboration, which resulted in this book. A couple of books that come out recently. 10 or 12, I think. Wow, it's amazing. Yeah. It's funny, because from the public's perspective, part of the hoop law about it was the explicit notion of evolution as being,

in a time in which evolution was being confronted, our natural selection and evolution being confronted in the schools and in politics. And so I remember at the time, it was like, you know, this actually, you know, instead of it makes it explicit. Well, we've never really. being afraid of confronting that. And frankly, in New York City, we're in a relatively receptive place. We're not really on the front lines of that particular battle at the museum.

But we've never been afraid to confront this kind of thing. Back in 1984, one of the most exciting things that I've ever done in my lifetime was to be a co-curator of an exhibit of original human fossils in which we brought in original fossils from all around the world. I think we had 19 different countries and 50 or 60 different fossils from 19 countries in that exhibit. And we were really worried. We had security issues and we consulted with Chemical Bank as it was in those days, now Chase Bank. You know about security issues and how you protect things behind Armaged,

glass and whatnot. And we're very serious about that, but it didn't stop the museum from actually going ahead and having this show. Well, you seem to not mind confronting things. I mean, in the new book, basically you confront sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, a great deal of what is discussed as certain, the claim that in some sense, that biological evolution has determined many of your behavior characteristics. In fact, you basically discount that completely as far as I can see. And, you know, I found a few, I found something that, well, there's a lot in there that would cause me to think about this. One really interesting point you make about children is that, sure, we all have the same genetic, you know, homo sapiens, the same basic genetic makeup.

So as an infant, we're capable of learning any language. And, but yet by the time we're five years old, we've already learned not only a language, but a set of beliefs and values and prejudices that largely define who we are. And moreover, they can be completely different than the beliefs, values, and prejudices, and language of another infant. So in some sense, they're almost too. cultural species that are distinct. We may be biological species, but if you want to talk about other than it being able to procreate what a species might be, they're essentially two different

species. And so that culture, in some sense, overwhelmingly determines how we act. Yeah, no, that's the great conundrum of trying to define what we are as humans, because we all are born with a capacity to become an adult human in whatever way, shape, or manner of form, it happens to us. But, you know, by the time that we're, you know, not that old, we are culturally more distinctive from people on the other side of the world than most, you know, species, primate species are from each other, and yet we're all in the same species. So what being human means is to have a capacity to believe all kinds of things.

And all this feeds back into the fact that everybody makes the world in their own mind in their own way. You know, other species live in the world pretty much as nature presents to them. And sometimes they react to it in very sophisticated ways as indeed, you know, elephants and chimpanzees and so on do. but nothing else really remakes the world. We sort of disassemble the world into a vocabulary of symbols that, you know, words are the classic example of these symbols and reassemble them in our minds. And we live in the world in which we reassemble, as reassembled in our minds, really much more than we live in the actual world that is out there.

Well, you know, I get the sense that when I was, when I've been reading your work, if that's your answer to the question, what's, what the origin of human uniqueness, is this symbolic reasoning? In a sense, it reminiscent of ideas, at least that I've discussed with Nozomsky, that, that the ability in his minimalist interpretation, the ability to take a few variables and, and basically add on to the means you have an infinite with a few simple things, you can create an infinite number of sentences. And therefore, there's an incredible world of possibilities out there. And that that symbolic notion, which presumably I think you would argue is what came about

somehow around 100,000 years ago, is what changed everything? Yeah, I think that's key to how it happens so quickly. Because basically, a gnome is saying that there is a very small algorithmic change gives you this amazing emergent result. and it's what is what is extraordinary is not the change itself so much as as the result. And I think that's very key. I think where we would tend to, Norm, it really is the first person who really drew attention to the fact that language is a portal to thought. Just as much as it is to communication.

And he says it's more, not just as much. more important. Language was created not to communicate, but to affect the way we think. Yeah, indeed. That's what he would say. And I think that the language and thought are too intimately intertwined to say that one is more important than the other. And Noam would say we were thinking before we were speaking or before we were using articulate language. I think the two came in a feedback with each other because I can't see how the cycle could possibly have started without something like that. Because of this claim that basically, you know, the genetic basis that made the Homo sapiens,

but once we had symbolic thought that that basically changed everything. It was a sea change. And it will be a sea change for a variety of reasons we'll get into. Our evolutionary success means that we will not undergo the same biological stresses or selection effects that would produce speciation, as we'll talk about. But it reminded me, I couldn't help but thinking, it reminded me of Rousseau in some sense that we're born free but live forever in chains.

That the freedom of this infant, we have this biological basis. But the minute we're embedded in a culture, that creates a set of change that literally govern our process, the thought processes, more importantly, the way we behave, more than any other thing,

that we're changed by our culture. Yeah, I think that is absolutely the case, and there's no question about it. But once that infant has become an adult, it can still make choices. He or she can still make choices. And we retain an element of free will as an adult, probably we don't have as kids because we're just absorbing other people's values when we're kids. As adults, we can step back and look at situations. and make our own judgments and maybe even act on those judgments. And that is what I would think of as being free will. We can make choices. Well, for all attentive purposes, we can make choices. There may be very many factors that, so many factors that go into it, that there may, you know, one could argue that there's a deterministic effect in our.

Well, those are the change, but I don't think it's deterministic. Well, in any more sense, I mean, when you have so many factors, very small things can, It's hard to predict, it may, literally impossible to predict in advance, but there may be many factors that go into it, maybe, that affect our decision-making that we may not be aware of. But if there's so many, it's like the fly with, you know, the butterfly and its wings that can produce dramatic, some small effect if there's chaos and many factors,

that we can't predict what you're going to do in advance. So effectively, it seems like free will in any case. Yeah, well, the thing is that the only ironclad law of human existence, probably is the law of unintended consequences, right? So, yeah, we are this paradox. I mean, humans are just a bundle of contradictions and what they do leads to contradictory things. We're not talking about any kind of perfected organism here.

Well, there's a few key facts that it seems to me you're trying to dispel. Some of them wisdom in the field and some of them is misunderstanding of the nature of natural selection and evolution. One of the, I've had this debate, in fact, with a number of people is the notion that somehow evolution is directed towards perfect, you know, it's got a goal and there's perfection down there. And there's improvements. And of course, that's not the case at all.

Maybe you want to elaborate. No, I think it certainly is the case. Evolution is just a matter of what works at any time. And, you know, I spent a lot of my career offending evolutionary psychology or so on not. And quite honestly, in this book, I wanted to get away from that. I didn't even want to mention evolutionary psychology. Well, I did because I had a co-author and who feels very much the same way, the same way that I do and wanted to express it in his way.

And I was eventually happy to go along with this. The two things you really, really hit on are, as I say, sociobiology, somehow the sense that our social predilections and decision-making is determined by genetics and evolutionary psychology that certain, quote-unquote, universal facets of human culture are also determined, at least by our evolutionary basis, rather than our culture basis. And by evolutionary basis, I mean a biological basis, that can be traced in some way to our genetic heritage. And one of the examples you talk about,

which is interesting me because I've talked about this in a different context, and it caused me to rethink this, is the notion of religion. The fact that religion is ubiquitous in human society seems to suggest that there's some biological need for religion. And you counter that. So maybe you could sort of... Well, human society is very complex, And I think that religion certainly answers to the kind of need that societies have.

Interestingly, yes, all societies have some notion of religion, whether it's organized or not. Maybe we should say spirituality as a more generalized thing. I just take that word. But within every society, there are also people, of course, who are not having any of it. Yeah, yeah. And the fact that organized religion, religion is extremely suited to the kind of power structure that you have to have in societies, I think is a very significant reason for why it is so widespread.

It's something that helped societies to do whatever it was they had to do. So in a sense, because all humans live in societies, it turns out to be independently discovered an effective way of controlling power structures within that society. Rather than biological, it's just the circumstance of the fact that humans live in social groups. Well, it's biologically a result of the fact that we are able to conceive of things that we haven't seen and that we haven't heard of and we can't touch. So you biologically have to have that human capacity, which I think is basically that symbolic capacity. So that's where you say, in some sense seems to me that's where you say biology ends or

genetics ends. Somehow the genetic structure of humans produced a structure which produced a brain that had symbolic reasoning. And after that, that's it. I think you're absolutely right there. I think that basically the capacity is what underpins everything else. It's what makes everything else possible. But the way in which that capacity is exploited, the way in which things are pursued, differs from place to place. And it differs according to probably so many different factors that you could barely begin to model them. Well, you know, and a big part of your book is this bell curve notion,

the fact that there's variances within a population. And that part of that, in some sense, demonstrates the non-biological nature of how society's work because people can pick up on, at that time, in that cultural time what works and what doesn't. And it's no more, the fact that religion is ubiquitous is no more surprising, perhaps, than the fact that there are many other ways that organisms, including human organisms, have independently come up to solve problems. I thought, I can't help but poetically notice that in the book,

you mentioned the fact that beer is produced from rice in one place in barley and another, but it's an independent solution. And since contemporaneously with this book, you produced a book called The Natural History of Beer. I wondered if that was on your mind when you did it. Well, you know, I think that that particular phrase was written as a result of having been thinking about beer. But the books were published almost at the same time, but they were written quite far apart in time. Interesting. Because trade publishers tend to act much more quickly than the university.

publishes do. Yes, yes. But you specifically argue very strong against people who claim there's a gene for religion or a gene for homosexuality. And it's worth, I'd like to give you a chance to expand upon that because you'll do better than me. I mean, I read the book, but because one thing I want to ask about this is you present a very cogent, a series of cogent arguments, and I know part of it is you're trying to aim, and as they do in the last part of the book, to talk about possible solutions for societal problems that, you know, to argue that we're not genetically determined to destroy ourselves or not. But I wonder how much pushback you're getting from colleagues on this. Well, the book just, just came out. So, but your ideas presumably have been,

have been, you've been promoting ideas among colleagues for some time, I guess. Well, you know, we've been independently, you know, talking about issues that have to do with the degree to which behaviors may be inherited, you know, for a long time. And, you know, clearly this has not made us very popular with the people who believe that we are adapted to an environment that for some reason no longer exists and we therefore behave inappropriately. It's a very nice sort of out for you to say, oh, yes, well, we have infidelity because we're condemned to have it by our genes. You know, this is just one of the other choices, one of the choices we have to make. But there's more scientific basis for your arguments against, say, a gay gene

or a religious gene. And I think it's probably, I'd like to give you some time to sort of elaborate on them here. Well, there is a tendency, we have very reductionist minds, you know. Human beings are storytellers. I notice that you constantly harp

against a reductionist as a meso-particle physicist who's tried to, I mean, in physics it works pretty darn well. And so, but your argument is that this notion of reduction is reducing everything to our job. genes is this place.

Well, we have reductionist minds, and because that is the way the mind likes to work. And that's great for you physicists. It's not so great for anybody who's trying to understand. So let me just put it this way. Would you say reductionism is biological? I would say that's the way the mind likes to work. I think a tendency towards a favoring reductionist explanations is, sort of inherent in the way in which our minds are organized, which is basically biological.

But we're talking again, we're not talking about specifics of expression of this tendency. We're talking about the origin of the tendency itself. Yeah, yeah. Okay, but go on. So I interrupt you. So reductionism means we tend as to want to relate to one-to-one relationship between, say, and behavior. Exactly, exactly. That's what it boils down to in the case of human beings, in any case. And we like to be able to find a simple, straightforward, direct explanation

of one thing giving rise to something else. And we are entertained by that kind of, by that kind of notion. But it's often very, very misleading because in fact, things are much more complicated. than that. I mean, I think you should give evidence of that, right? We do. I mean, we pile up, you know, a certain amount of evidence. When we look at this, the evidence that has, you know, these studies are difficult to do, but the relating of behaviors to genes on a genome-wide, on a genome-wide basis. And this usually reveals that the, that we think, you know, are the basis of what makes us unique. You know, there's usually about a 50-50 split between environmental and genetic genomic effects. On the other hand, if you try to quantify the contribution of particular genes,

you usually find that the top, you know, the top 100 or so genes that are associated with particular behaviors only account for a tiny percentage of all the variation that you see out there. So it's, there's a very, very, there's obviously some, this is a genetic predisposition that underlies all our, behaviors, but that are the expression of those behaviors is, uh, is, is a function of, of many, many, many more things and many, many, many genes. And genes live in an incredibly complex environment, you know, Richard Dawkins, you just, uh, you know, was, was, was, was very happy to, uh, to, to, to look for genes for this and for that and for the other thing. But genes actually don't act alone. And, um, you, um, you,

cannot really change one thing, you know, in the genome without affecting many, many, many other things at the same time. So every change there is in that genomic equilibrium involves a trade-off of some kind or another. And that's been actually known for many, many years. Eric Lennemberg wrote about it in the context of neurolinguistics back, you know, half a century ago. I was perfectly happy to sort of buy the argument that ultimately genetics, if you knew the genetic makeup of a human being, you'd know, and you had infinite computer power, you'd basically be able to determine the people they were and how they'd behave. But one of the things that sort of struck me immediately as arguing against that is the work

that's been done on the microbiome, on the fact that ultimately, when I think I'm making decisions of what I want, that the microbes in my gut seem to have as much of an impact on my decision-making and my character and not only what I like to eat or not, as anything else. Yeah, there's certainly, certainly we are, every one of us as an individual human being is actually an ecosystem. And we're affected by all the components in that ecosystem. And again, those components are so varied and diverse that it's very, very hard to single out the action of any one of them. It's very, very rarely that you can impute anything in this realm

to, say, a single gene or to a single cause of any kind. You know, people often ask, well, if we're evolving, what's the next step? And you point out that that culture that's something it is well-known, that culture has changed everything. And not just that, the density of humans on Earth has changed everything. But you just make some statements that, so there's a quote that you give very at the beginning of the book,

which I found fascinating, and I can see in the context of where you're heading about our future and talking about the nature of choice, you say part of being, what the quote is, part of being human is the inhumanity of it. That's exactly right. I think we begin the book with this quote because this is essentially the theme that humans are paradoxical creatures, humans are bundles of contradiction. And there's just as much of what we would call inhumanity in the world as produced by humans as there is humanity.

And that's, you know, another thing that sort of contributes another illustration of this sort of belker of effect. that you've already mentioned, that everything that humans do is counterbalanced at the other end of the distribution by things that other people do. Oh, you could be humane and inhumane in the same day. It's an extraordinary thing. We are these bundles of paradoxes. You're not the same person when you've got to bed at night as you were when you get up in the morning. You know, humans are constantly, in flux. But what you can guarantee is that we're going to be inconsistent. There's a great quote somewhere in the book that I thought I wrote down, that exactly that. Basically, everything, every time you generalize and say humans will, behavior will respond this way, there's a, there's a, there's a

counter example. Yeah. And often in individuals on a day, on a daily basis. Yeah. Yeah, I think one thing, I was reading a biography of James Boswell once, who was, of course, Samuel Johnson's biographer. And the guy who wrote the blurb on the back of the book or the summary of the book, the teaser, was citing, you know, all the contradictions in Boswell's character traits. And I thought, oh, my gosh, this is the human. condition he's describing right here. This isn't James Boswell. This is, this is humanity.

Wonderful father, whoring, whatever. It just goes on and on. And, you know, a pedant who writes the best biography ever. I mean, it's sort of, it's, it's, it was a, a writer of tedious dougarole and also of the most powerful biography in the language. I'm not sure I want that, I want to quote the blurb in the modern. If anyone, if I ask for a blurb, I'm not sure I'd want that one. You don't, you want half of it. if I get to choose the half. But I found there are two quotes in here which I wrote down, which seemed to be, are they consistent?

One was every individual is a sum of his or her genetic predispositions. And another is that nothing in the fossil record exists that can predict who we are. So how can I reconcile those two things? Well, I think that basically the solution is in this phenomenon of emergence, where you put two unrelated things together and then something completely different emerges. Human behavior is certainly an emergent thing that would never have been predicted from anything

that we see before in the archaeological record. I think in the archaeological record, we see an increasing sophistication among our predecessors, our precursors. They are getting better, are better at exploiting the environment. They're developing more and more sophisticated technologies, not continually, but in a sort of stepwise way.

They're becoming more complex creatures. But they're becoming more complex along a certain trajectory. And then suddenly, when our predecessors began to behave in a symbolic manner, or hellbrokers, you know, and all the rules changed, as you said, you know, it's literally a change in the rules. And that is because of an emerging quality that gives rise to this symbolic ability to reconstitute the world in our heads and imagine it can be other than it is. And since we've got clever hands, we can do something about that. The question, the one, if I try and be generous and expand the notion of revolutionary psychology, to certain general predispositions that give rise to a whole slew of different behaviors.

Could there be a predisposition to solving problems in a certain way? Or certainly the predisposition to living in social groups, to creating effective social groups. So that there is a genetic basis to, and it seems to me that your whole discussion is based in the fact that we live in social groups, And those social groups have evolved. Another milestone, as far as I can see in the development of Homo sapiens at least, is the shift from hunter-gatherer to living in agricultural communities,

which produces a whole bunch of different stresses, social stresses, and you might say environmental stresses that change the way we behave. Yeah. Well, that too is entirely emergent. And of course, you become, once you switch your trajectory, you're kind of a prisoner of that, you know, until the next emergent thing happens. But yeah, I am certainly not here to knock evolutionary psychology.

I think the really cool thing that evolutionary psychologists are doing, you know, whether or not the initial assumption that behaviors are driven by genes is true, it has led them to look at human behaviors in great detail and in a structured kind of a way

and it has led them to learn a great deal about the regularity in human behavior and what can be predicted about human behavior and maybe what can't. And I think that's an extremely valuable thing. So, you know, no, I'm balanced. I'm very happy to have evolutionary psychology around. And I'm not here to say that it's a bill of goods at all. Well, but I guess what you would say is that the range of behavior that can be predicted

is small compared to the range of behavior that can't be. or at least the prediction is based more, if you were going to make predictions, you'd based it more on the culture in which someone is living than on any evolutionary history to arrive at that culture? Well, there's a history of diversification of cultures.

And, you know, cultural evolution is, which, you know, basically, you know, if current demographic conditions continue to obtain, we're not going anywhere biologically, but we're certainly going somewhere culturally. And what happened 100,000 years ago is that we acquired a capacity that we began to explore at that time. And that exploration has led us through this transition out of hunting, gathering into sedentary lifestyles.

It's led us to literacy, you know, it's led us to rockets to the moon, it's led us to all kinds of things. We've got no idea where there's stuff. We don't know if we're, you know, if it's an exhaustible capacity or an inexhaustible one. It's really, really, really exciting to be exploring this. There's an interesting part of a chapter where you talk about the future of evolution. People's claims about, oh, the future, we're going to have big brains, big heads, we're going to be progressively lighter in our bones, and maybe we won't be able to walk.

And those arguments are based on, once again, this notion that some natural selection is affecting us. And your point is that doesn't work at all. Maybe you could explain why. Well, I think that what we tend to do, any time we predict the future is, first thing we do, we look at the past. And the temptation is to predict the future by extrapolating what we find in the past. And certainly when we look at our own past, we find a very strong tendency. We find our brains have been getting bigger, you know, among our precursors for a long time. They were obviously interacting in the world in more and more complex ways. There is a distinct trajectory there.

The only thing is it's thrown off at the last minute by our new way. of manipulating information in the brain. Since when, by the way, the human brain has gotten smaller. Homer, we're famous for having smaller brains than Neanderthars. We also actually have smaller brains than the Homo sapiens who lived at the same time as Neanderthars, and were still behaving like Neanderthars. But once we started behaving in this new way, using a new mental algorithm, which turns out presumably to have been more frugal metabolically,

we found out we didn't need so much brain, and brains have gotten smaller because they're an expensive thing to have. If you don't need a big brain, you're not going to have one. The other situation that I found impressive was the fact that, yeah, okay, that by a lot, that so-called trajectory of evolution was a fallacy, but it's also not that there's a continual progression, but there are these sharp shifts that, again, depend on, and cultural circumstances, the ebbs and flows of climate, for example, that produce immediate

changes, but then are addressed culturally and may not, therefore, represent a future change. Well, now they are. But if you look back into the past, there were basically four major technological shifts. And technology is what we have a record of in the material record, and we can look at. I mean, there's only a tiny, tiny reflection of what the entire social and cultural situations were. But technology, we do have a record in the form of stone tools. We have the first stone tools. Well, let's not worry about arguable things that are very old.

But definitely, stone tools made in the way in which we think of stone tools regularly being made about two and a half million years ago. It's a very simple thing. It's a, you take one lump of stone, a river cobble, and you whack. another cobble with it. And you get a sharp flake if you do it right, if you do it right, which is not so easy. You get a sharp flake. And you can use that flake for cutting.

And it doesn't matter what it looks like. No matter how big it is, how small it is, it's a sharp edge that counts. For a million years, people made stone tools basically like that. For a million years, the concept of stone tool making didn't change. And then at about 1.6 million years,

ago with a little outlier back to 1.78, but that's an outlier. People started making tools to a particular shape. They started making what they call the hand axe, which is you take a lump of rock and you shape it very carefully with multiple blows on both sides until you get this big teardrop shaped implement. And that was obviously a very successful implement, and that continued to be made right up until about 160,000 years ago. And then at about 300,000 years before the hand axe dropped out, the next kind of conceptually new stone tool came in. And that was the prepared core stone tool,

where you carefully shaped a lump of rock again with multiple blows on both sides, and you prepare a platform and whack, and then whack the resulting thing. and get off a big flake with the cutting edge all the way around the periphery, continuous cutting edge. So here we're talking about a period of two and a half million, or nearly two and a half million years,

with only three technological changes. Now, suddenly when a homo sapiens comes along and starts behaving in a what's called a symbolic way, suddenly that that pattern of highly episodic change completely disappears and people are making stone tools you know in or in their own fashion and and you know within 50,000 years you've got you know you've got the computer yeah well in fact I think you make the claim and I assume I thought it was I was trying to think if I believe it maybe dot Dogs might be different, but they've been engineered.

You said there's no other species that resembles less what it looked like two and a half million years ago than humans. That's true. And that is simply because of the cultural evolution of the last 50,000 years. Is that what you're saying? No, I'm not saying that, no, I'm not saying that the first homo sapiens who looked just like us were behaving like their predecessors. but they had come a tremendously long way in their physical structure that we can pick up in the fossil record. This is a separate question.

Humans have changed radically in two million years in a way in which no other lineage of mammal seems to have done in that particular period anyway. And that radical physical change is something quite. quite extraordinary, but it's independent. It's independent from this change in the way in which we manipulate information in our minds that occurred suddenly about 100,000 years ago. That is a separate, that's a separate event. And we became, at that point, we became culturally different.

And okay, so we now, I think people often say, well, if, you know, and that's another argument of people use against evolution. Well, if you look at evolution, how come, you know, survival of the fittest, how come we behave the way they are? And of course, the point is that culture dominates. We are thinking beings, culture dominates. And, you know, and as you know, for a long time, altruism was a lot of people tried, said, how can you explain altruism if it's survival of fittest? And there's lots of arguments why, genetic arguments, while altruism is a, is a good thing as, as you know. People tie themselves in knots because they want

a reductionist explanation. And your argument is, well, they're so, they're not, they're not, in a cultural sense, there's a reason for a thinking species that can imagine a future to be altruistic that has nothing necessarily to do with any natural selection that occurred before. No, what I'm saying is that basically altruism and selfishness, you know, belong on the same curve. Yeah. And that, you know, altruism is simply a outlier on this curve of what you call, I don't know, cooperation or however you might want to put it.

saints, you know, on altruistic saints on the one end, and you have, you have selfish monsters on the other end, and most of us are somewhere in the middle. And so that arguing that all, so trying to argue for the extremes, you don't need genetics to argue for the extremes. You just need a variability. You don't, you don't need a special explanation for altruism. It's one of the things that is available to people. People can be altruistic. They can be selfish. And so there's the universe of possibilities made possible because of symbolic thinking. Exactly. And we exploit all of them.

Because we can make the choices. We can make choices. But social systems select. I mean, as you say, religion may be selected by social systems because it allows that group of people. It's not a genetic selection, but it's to effectively have a power structure that works well when compared to other power structures. Yeah.

I mean, in fact, you know, cultural evolution is just as much. a huge evolutionary experiment as biological. But the difference is it's so much faster. It's so much faster. It is. As fast it can spread laterally within a generation in a way in which genes can. And well, you argue, and I think not just you,

but in general, that because of our evolutionary success, the whole notion of speciation for humans is just out the window. Because speciation requires, certain conditions which no longer exist in humanity. Maybe you want to talk about that. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's, that's, and this is entirely independent of culture. Yeah. The fact that we, we can't expect speciation derives from the fact that we have a gigantic population in the world, was it closing in on eight billion people, packed cheek to jowl

across the entire habitable surface of the world. In the, while we were evolving, our predecessors lived in tiny populations that were scattered in little population nuclei over gigantic landscapes. And they were living in demographic conditions that were very highly conducive to a lot of evolutionary change. Now those conditions for evolutionary change do not exist anymore. You can't frog march a huge population down any one biological direction. The genetic inertia within very large populations is just too. is just too great. The idea that, I mean, you know, from Darwin's discovery of finches in

different islands is that in order to have speciation, you need to have a population that's real, first of all, well, that's separate from other populations, relatively small. So some mutation can, can fortuitously, if you wish, dominate that population. And then, and then, and they're separated. So eventually they become sexually incompatible, like other things. No, that's it. That's certainly true for mammals such as ourselves. You know, other organisms have different mechanisms. But mammals like us, yes, we have to have isolation before we can have speciation. Now, I didn't read this in your book at all, but I've heard the argument given that there is a root for speciation for humanity.

And some people are excited about it. When we send small groups to Mars, let's say, if we do, and I'm, dubious in the near term, that those groups will, there's not, there's not going to be a lot of back and forth because going back and forth is just hard and difficult. And so we will have a small group that we will send to another, maybe another planet. And over time, that, that could speciate. What do you think of that? In theory, in theory, that is, that's absolutely correct. All you need is a, is a small genetically unstable population to incorporate, genetic novelties, which are naturally going to arise because of the mutation that is constantly

going on in the genome. So, yes, theoretically it's true. But how are you going to keep that population alive without some kind of a lifeline and connection to Mother Earth? That's going to be tough. It's going to be tough. Well, maybe, but I think it might be tougher to have that lifeline than actually to have the, it's the travel back and forth. That's the problem. So anyway, I travel back. and forth and you have the problem of maintaining a population on Mars with, you know, Martian resources. Well, it's, look, it's all science fiction. I think people's notions that Mars is going to be, oh, yeah, we're going to get there,

we're going to be able to survive and have a function. I think it's largely science fiction. But if you could get a population, a small population of Mars, and it could somehow establish itself and exist in isolation from, homo sapiens, all bets would be off, yeah. So enough about humans, let's talk about beer, what really matters. So, to be fair, you wrote a real meaning of life. Yeah, the meaning of life, that's right.

Beer of the universe and everything. But to be fair, you wrote a book also called The Natural History of Wine. But first of all, which do you prefer beer or wine? That is a really, that's a really good question. I guess I've been drinking beer longer than I've been drinking wine, but probably not very much, very much longer. we did the book on on natural history of wine

and after it was published I sort of stopped drinking wine not in anticipation of the of the beer book but we had to do a lot of research for the beer book that was maybe you're drinking a lot well you know you have to beer is a very cultural thing

you know and and and beer culture is something to behold and so we went October Fest. For example, and that was one of the most eye-opening cultural experiences I've had in a very long time. And we've been drinking a lot of beer, and fortunately, you know, 30 years ago, there was not much interesting beer around, if any.

And if you'd ask me this question, whether I preferred beer on wine, 30 years ago, I would have unhesitatingly said wine, much more interesting, much more diversity, you know, much more to entertain the palate. But boy, craft beer brewing in the United States particularly. Yeah. Has become so creative and so inventive in the last 10 or 20 years that you cannot any more longer, I think, argue that intrinsically wine is, is. more interesting than beer. Beer is offering many, many, many different things now. And in a way,

it's, you know, beer is a product of its maker more than wine is. Yeah, yeah. You know, wine is supposed to have tell-war. Wine is supposed to be an expression of place. But in the case of beer, you know, it's really the expression of the maker. Right? Yeah. It's a creation that's not, Yeah, it's not dependent on the grapes as much as the process. Right. So in winemaking, the winemaker is supposed to get out of the way and let the wine make it. So that's the traditional sort of expression.

But beer is down to the beer maker. Yeah, no, I mean, by the way, I live in Portland. And if you've visited there, I've been told Portland has more per capita craft beers in any other place in the world. I know that every time there's a new thing in the newspaper, there's a new beer created with the name of that event in the newspaper. Oh, yeah, well, it's really a beer vana that you have there in Portland, no question. Although I think Asheville, North Carolina makes an argument for having more breweries per capita or the population.

I see that in a lot of things. These claims are made. But so, and it's, so first question is, which goes back further in time in human history, beer or wine? That's a really interesting question. And the, the answer is nobody is sure. But the very first alcoholic beverages that we know have the characteristics both of beer and of wine. Interestingly enough, the very earliest alcoholic beverage, I think is from China.

And it's a 9,000 years old. And it's known from chemical residues. it used, you know, on the inside of pots. And those pots have this, had contained a liquid that had some cereal in it, had rice, it had honey, and it had fruit from Hawthorne. So it had some of the characteristics of beer, some of the characteristics of meat and some of the characteristics of wine. So what they call extreme beers now are sort of going back. in that direction. There's kind of a return to the origins. A return to the origins. Do you think there's a, do you think there's, I can't help but ask this,

do you think there's a genetic predilection to want to have beer? Well, you know, there's a very interesting thing. You know, humans have, have an unusual tolerance for alcohol, you know, much more than most mammals and much more than most primates. And it turns out that this, the, the mutation in the alcohol dehydrogenase gene that allows us to tolerate much more alcohol than most primates occurred in the lineage that led to the African apes and humans, maybe at around 10 million years ago. So it's not just humans to have this. It's chimpanzees have it as well. But there's no examples of chimpanzees making, fermenting as far as, right? There's no example of chimpanzees

making fermented beverages, but there is an example of chimpanzee stealing fermented beverages. Oh, really? What happens when they do? Well, there's a plantation, a place called Basu in Guinea, in West Africa. There's a place where they have a plantation of raffia palms. and raphias are these big, expansive palm trees from Madagascar. And you can make palm toddy from them by binding together the stems that give rise to the fruit and taking the sap that drips from them. And so the plantation workers were making toddy for themselves, but they had to be away working most of the day.

and the chimpanzees would sneak in. And very interestingly, what they would do, they couldn't get their hands into the containers that the palm toddy was dripping into and get enough out. So what they did was they took leaves, chewed on the leaves to make a sponge,

dip the sponge in the liquid, and then help themselves to the to the toady. And they'd be dipping there, dipping, dipping, dipping, 10 times a minute sometimes, you know, for quite some time. Necessity being the mother adventure. Well, I want to head towards thinking about the future as we conclude our discussion a little bit by alternating between optimism and pessimism. So if part of being human is in humanity of being human, and if humans have a bell curve,

so that whatever behavior we want, there's always an awful part of it as well as a, quote, good part and you know you can define those things in whatever ways you want right it's it certainly suggests that awful behavior will persist and in fact we're seeing you know we see evidence and and produce results which are which which which work against which it's sort of anti-select for our own future from climate change to other things but you argue not only effectively by choice but I found a quote near the end of your book when I began to feel like Doomsday was around the corner in reading your book.

Oh, no. I think you often do, anyway. I found this quote in an Assyrian clay tablet from 2,800 BC, which I just love this quote now. I can't believe it. So it's inscribed with the following gloomy description. Our earth is degenerate in these latter days.

There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. bribery and corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents. Every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching. I just love that in 2,800 BC. Somehow we've survived past that. So maybe predicting doomsday in the near future is also equally inappropriate. You know, I mean, there is certainly something to this.

Human beings, and in fact the biosphere itself, has turned out to be a lot more resilient then perhaps we might think. But yes, there is a tendency, I think, to have a bit of gloom and doom and the doomsayers are always with us, but then the polyanhas are out there as well. And as usual, human experience is going to turn out to be somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in the middle. But I think you try and end an optimistic note that we have the choice,

that nothing, in the words of Lawrence Arabian, nothing is written, that we have a choice and we have a range of intelligence and a range of choices and behaviors, and that therefore it's not clear that we can predict the future in that regard, and that there's hope, there's hope, I guess, is what you're saying. Well, the only thing I can predict is that if we screw up, we'll only have ourselves to blame. Yeah. Right? As to what is going to happen?

We won't have genetics to blame, is what you're saying. And we can't blame genetics for our present. And I don't think we're going to be able to blame genetics for the future. I think, you know, we are, we are as a species sufficiently mature to make informed choices. And it's only if we don't make those choices that things are not. necessarily going to go adrift. Well, look, I think that's a wonderful way to sum up part of our discussion and to actually sum up what we're trying to do. Inform choices, you would argue, are our hope. And for me, having informed discussions like this, so fortune certainly favors the

prepared mind. And it's wonderful to be a have a lot of these discussions about to prepare our minds, to think about what we are as humans. And ultimately, one of the purposes of of all intellectual activity is to review and reflect upon ourselves and reassess our place in the cosmos. And I've certainly been spurred not only in the past but now in the present by discussions with you to think of what it means to be human. And I want to thank you for coming to talk about that. Well, it's been a lot of fun. I wish I'd talk to you about this book before I wrote it. Thanks. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Dahl, John and Don Edwards, Gus and Luke Holwerta,

and Rob Zebs. Audio by Thomas Amison. Web design by Redmond Media Lab. Animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects and music by Riccolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.