TRIGGERnometry - Dr Mike Martin: Why We Fight

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

Dr. Mike Martin is a former British Army officer, a visiting war studies fellow at King's College London and author of Why We Fight: The Cognitive Basis For War  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-We-Fight-Cognitive-Basis/dp/1849048894 Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We are the experts. Our absolutely fantastic guests this week is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He's a research fellow at King's College London, researching war studies. And he is the author of this brilliant book, Why We Fight. Dr Mike Martin, welcome to Trigonometry. Hey, how you doing? And I got your name right as I didn't before.

As I didn't off camera. Sorry, just for anyone who's watching this, we're recording this the day after the election. So I'm incredibly hung over. Francis is incredibly disappointed that UKIP didn't win. Yeah, so. I've had two hours sleep. You've had to have asleep.

So we're all going to be stumbling around each other in the dark. But listen, man, your book is absolutely incredible, absolutely fascinating, talking about why people fight. But before we get into that, Tell us a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life? A bridge version. Yeah. So I did biology when I was at university first and I thought maybe I'll become a research scientist.

I thought that for about 10 minutes until I looked at the lives that research scientists had. And then I went travelling for three years. I lived in South America. I sailed across the South Atlantic. And then I joined the army. And I was in the army for six years. I learnt Pushdu, which is the language in southern Afghanistan. I'm in Helmand where the British were.

And I spent two years in Helmand working as a political officer. In fact, I was the first political officer for the British Army. So I developed that whole, I sort of pioneered and developed that role for the British military. And then after that, I've done various jobs, but remaining in conflicts. I've worked in Somalia, lived and worked in Somalia, also in Myanmar, worked on other conflicts and... All good tourist destinations. All good tourist destinations.

Mate, I don't understand why he went to Somalia. If you wanted conflict, just going to Croydon on a Friday night. So I worked in Somali land, right? Which is the... What was the old British protectorate? And southern Somalia. Mogadishu was the Italian bit. Yeah.

And I live in Stepney. in East London and I put the Somali interest office into Google because they're not, they've declared themselves as a state, but they're not actually a state, no recognises them, but I needed a visa to go and work there. I lived in, I lived in a flat in Haredgeisa. And I realised that the visa office for Somaliland was above my Tesco's metro in Stepney because there's a huge community of Somalis in my chapel and all the Somalis in the UK are in the port cities because they joined the British merchant navy in the 1800s when the Somalayan Protectorate was British protectorate.

And then they settled in all the port cities. They did their 20 years and then just got off the boat and settled wherever they got to. So the first mosque in Cardiff, the first mosque in the UK was in Cardiff. And it was a Somali mosque in Cardiff. So you see these links that started hundreds of years ago created diaspora in the UK. And then these conflicts are still ongoing. and there are these huge links to any number. I mean, that's just one example I've given you.

But actually, you see it in any number of countries around the world where Britain or France also has this, has these continuing links to conflicts, often that we're not aware of. Like, if I asked, you know, your average person in the UK... Francis? Francis. Were you aware of that, Francis?

No, I wasn't. But you go to Somaland, and they're all aware of it. Yeah, of course, because to them it's a huge part of the history. But anyway, sorry, I interrupted you just to make. make a little job. So you went to work there and you've traveled obviously incredibly widely. And now you're a research fellow, King's College, London, the War Studies Department. And your book really talks about why it is that we have conflict, why it is the human beings fight. But you yourself served in Afghanistan. Tell us about that. What was that like?

So there's this official narrative of the war in Afghanistan, which is, and you still see it on the media today. And it's, you know, very broadly it's a kind of black, white now. There's a government that is legitimate to elections or that kind of stuff. You know, UN supports it. And the West, the coalition, America and its allies are supporting that legitimate government. And then against them is this movement called the Taliban who are evil and girls' rights and they sell drugs. So it's a kind of good, bad, very simplistic dichotomy.

But actually when you get to places like Helmand or, you know, Helmand is just a good example because it's an extreme case in Afghanistan, but the rest of Afghanistan, as a same stuff. It's not that dichotomy is not a black-white conflict. It's a kind of multi-focal civil war between different tribes and families and different drugs militias or landowners. And actually what drives the conflict on the ground level where, you know, why does somebody pull the trigger of a Kalashnikov at that level? It's land, it's water. It's food. It's free. It's feuds between grandparents that have echoed down the generations, it's tribal power blocks vying for control of the drugs trade. That's what's driving the conflict. It's not these big

ideological, this ideological schism that we understand from the media. And actually often groups, both on the government side, so people in the police, for instance, on militias that are attached to the government and on the Taliban side, change sides all the time. So on Monday they will be on the government side and the anti-government side. And what that tells us is that aid survival is most important, as you would expect, after 40 years of war. But it also tells us that people are out to ensure that they protect the family's land or the money they make from the drugs crop. And these selection of ideological labels are merely conveniences to help them achieve those much more important pragmatic aims. So why is it that

we're fed this narrative then? Why is it that, you know, a public service board like the BBC puts forward a narrative, which you're saying is false. It's really interesting. So after I left the army, I did, you know, quite a lot of journalism or working with journalists writing articles about Afghanistan. And something used to consistently come up, which was that the journalists living and working in Afghanistan or very close to studying the conflict understood this. They might not have had as much detail as I had. You know, I wrote my PhD on it and, you know, I spoke push-to. But they understood that it wasn't this, you know, black, white narrative. But when they submitted their 700 words to newspaper

X or spoke with their editors, you know, for broadcast or Y, without fail, the editor would say, no, that doesn't fit the narrative of the conflict. Because in the UK, particularly, there's only so much foreign news that is going to get into the news cycle. And there's only enough, there might be one Afghan story a day, right? For example, when the conflict was its height, in 2012, we had 10,000 British troops there, probably, if at lucky, one Afghan story a day. And if a British trooper died, that would be that story, right?

And apart from that, there were only a few narratives. So there was the kind of drugs, crop narrative. There was kind of the girls' education narrative, which actually was one of the, probably the thing that was the most successful. about the Western intervention in Afghanistan. And so there were a number of sort of almost cliched narratives that editors had as their filter

because how complex can you get in 700 words? And yes, people did long form and so on and so forth, but not many people read long form. Like the main news narratives had this very simplistic filter because people spend four minutes a day on average on UK politics, let alone a war in another country that people don't really understand why we're there. So people are saying that we shouldn't have got involved in Afghanistan, and it created the wave of terrorism that we see nowadays.

Is that true? Not really, no. I think when the Afghan Mujahideen were fighting the Russians in the 1980s, that attracted quite a lot of international. volunteers from say Egypt or whatever. And once the and the Gulf states and that

jihadi both people came there and funding from the CIA as well from absolutely but also from the Gulf states right? And what happened when the Russians left is a lot of those volunteers went back to Chechnya, Bosnia Algeria and so in the early

90s you see a number of Islamist inspired either kind of government falling or, you know, rebellions or, you know, so that was an earliest stage of the Afghan conflict. And it's the same conflict. These are not separate conflicts. Afghanistan has been experiencing a civil war since 1978 at least, right?

So the West intervening in 2001 absolutely didn't create that wave of terrorism. And then your other question was, should we got involved? I think, I think, again, if to look at more detail at the Afghan conflict, there were two decisions about the level of three decisions about the level of Western involvement in Afghanistan. One was do we go in after the Twin Towers? And I think broadly most people accept that that was justified because the, you know, Solomon Mildo was being given shelter by the Taliban,

etc, etc. I think the evidence was overwhelming that Osama bin Laden was involved and the Americans warned them. And I think most people accept that that was probably justified. mistake number one was in sort of 2004-5 was deciding rather than... Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality,

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I don't know, either handing it over to a UN management of the country. They decided that NATO was going to get involved and spread troops, garrison troops, around the country. And that was a terrible idea. And particularly, you know, one of the worst aspects of that was putting the British in Helmand. British have got history in Helmand. It's pretty much like everywhere else in the world. So if you think about the South of Afghanistan, the road through Helmand, so on, on, On the east of Helmand is Kandahar, and on the west of Helmand is Headart.

And that road runs from Iran down to the subcontinent. Okay? And that was the same in the 1800s. So when the British invaded in the 1840s and in the 1880s, they did two-pronged push into Afghanistan, once over the Kaibaba Pass to Kabul, and once over the pass just south of Kandahar to take Kandahar. And when you take Kandahar, to defend Kandahar, the easy way to defend Kandahar is to stick troops in Goresk, which is what we did both times. Goresk is the main. city in Helmand. And the reason you put them in Goresh is because that's the only fair weather crossing of the River Helmand. So that is how you hold that entire line from

Iran to India, what was British India then, what was now Pakistan. So we put troops in there. There were tribal rebellions in Helmonds. The Battle of Maywan was just fought outside Helmand. I mean, everyone says, oh, that's a great Afghan victory. No, it wasn't. That was a victory of the aalizai and the norseye, two of the three biggest tribes in Helmand. And when we came back to Helmand in 2006 and said, we're coming here for reconstruction, the alizai and the norseye said, that doesn't work. And because they have, you know, Helmandis are mostly illiterate, it's about 10% literacy at the beginning of the, you know, in 2001, 8% literacy, half a percent for women. They have an oral history culture. And it's what my first book in Intimate War was about. And not only did

they have those narratives of we, the Al-Azai and the Norse I stood up, they also knew who the leaders of those rebellions were. So Abu Bakr Khan was the Al-Azai leader. His great-great-grandchildren were still Hans in, up in the north of Helmand Summ and became resistance commanders against the British. It was a, that was a catastrophic. catastrophic mistake and it comes from a complete misreading of our own history and the irony is that

you know we have the British Library with 14 million books in it and all the records of all the political officers British political officers 17, 1800s nobody read any of that and the illiterate Helmandis who had their oral history culture were well aware much more aware of our own history than us yeah it's fascinating stuff

but let's move on to talk about why we find because what you talk about in the book is a much broader look at conflict and why human beings engage in warfare and conflict more generally. Why do we fight? Why do we engage in conflict? So, humans have evolved like every other animal on the planet, right? We are part of the animal kingdom. And we've evolved to increase our chances of surviving

and reproducing what, right? This is kind of standard stuff. And so the question you have to answer when people are fighting wars is, what's the evolutionary advantage of fighting wars? Because there's a huge death rate. And huge death rates, I mean, let me give you an example of how big the death rates are.

In the First World War, the French, the cohort of French men that fought, so say 16 to about 35, a third of them died. a third that is that in any other world would be known as a negative selection pressure

yeah okay so why does war exist and actually that death rate is probably compares favourably to what the death rates were like from conflict in say the Stone Age even higher and so what you've got to do is look for mechanisms that humans have

that drive them to do things that are of an evolutionary advantage but then unfortunately also result in war. And there are two really obvious contenders. One of them is the pursuit of social status and the other one is this need to belong. And the pursuit of social status, particularly for men, has a huge evolutionary advantage.

Humans have been, you know, we're mostly monogamous now, but actually in our history, there was much, much, much more polygamy. and so... Good old days, as I like to call it. Having it... I thought you were the UKIP. Actually, if you know it's UKIP voters as a social conservative,

Michael. And therefore they don't believe in polygamy. Anyway, carry on. Sorry. We'll ignore your prejudice. You're bigotry against social conservatives.

And you are a gammoner. Yes, absolutely. That's absolutely clear. A wee little gammon. So, yeah, think about polygamy. like this. If the

because the higher up the social rank you get as a man this is the pecking order. The more action you get. The more action you get and more children you have. So if the top 50% of men

have two wives, the bottom 50% have none. So there's a massive evolutionary selection pressure to get in that top. We had Jeffrey Miller, the evolutionary psychologist on the show,

making precisely this point. Right. Yeah. So the competition for social status essentially for men in an evolutionary race, it's actually worth it

even if there's a 30% chance of being killed. Exactly. Because the bounty that you get, potentially at least, is so great. Evolution can never tell us what it affects will it have on that individual. What evolution tells us is across thousands of generations

and across millions of people what the averages will be. And if, say, the average death rate from war because of the drive towards social status and I'm plucking these figures out of the way, but just to give an example, you know, if the death rate is three out of ten from war, but the advantages of that same mechanism that drives social status are four out of ten, then that mechanism will remain in the gene pool.

Yes. And it's the same with belonging, right? That was the most interesting part of the book, because I think most people will be aware of the first thing that we've talked about, but the idea that people fight and are prepared to go to war and be killed and maimed in order to belong to some kind of tribe. is fascinating to me. Tell us more about that. So whilst social status is a

positive thing you're trying to attain, you know, the high you have your social status, the more, as you said, the more action you get. But belonging is actually the opposite. So you've got to think back to where humans did most of their cognitive evolution, which was on the African Savannah, basically.

Between about 80 and 50,000 years ago, there was a huge burst of cognitive evolution, and about 50,000 years ago, we have it was called the Cultural Explosion. and so artwork and all that stuff, stuff, and in that environment,

humans lived in groups of less than 30. Kinship related, maybe a few non-kin members, but that was the group, right? And these bands were fighting each other, and they were surviving in the environment that had lots of wild animals. And in that environment,

not having a social group to belong to was an almost an immediate death sentence. Yeah. okay and so these feelings that we have towards belonging to something whether it's a tribe you know chiefdom an ancient empire a modern nation state a political party a football team a choir these are all triggered by the same mechanism which forces us to seek out a social group something to belong to and and we do that you know as I said because to not have a social group in evolutionary terms, and don't forget, we're still stuck now in 2020 with these mechanisms

that we've evolved over the last two million years as hominids, to not belong and was a death sentence. And if you look at how that mechanism evolved, it gives you a real insight into both politics and war. So think about it this way. If you have this mechanism which causes you to seek belonging, yeah, to find people to come together to co-join with. That only works if, as well as creating a drive towards an in-group, if it creates an out-group at the same time. You can't have one without the other. And why? Well, because if the mechanism evolved that said, trust everyone, pulling everyone towards you, make everyone part of your group, then another genotype would arise in the population that said take advantage of those people who are trusting all the time.

So the only way you can have a mechanism that says trust other people is if you say trust the in-group and don't trust the out-group. And this mechanism, which has a hormonal pathway, which is regulated by hormone called oxytocin and status is regulated by testosterone, but this hormonal pathway does two things. It creates feelings of empathy and trust within the in-group at the same time that it derogatises an outgroup and creates distrust. And it has all sorts of other effects. Like you can see heterogenely within the in-group, but you homogenise the out-group,

what we might call othering in social science. You know, these are very basic, mostly subconscious evolutionary mechanisms that we've evolved for very good reasons, both status and belonging, but that have the side effects of driving us towards groups. conflict. It's a fascinating explanation of why Francis is racist. Sorry, mate. It's fine. It had to be done, mate. I did. I just can't believe a Russian is

calling me racist. I mean, bloody out. Anyway. Well, you see, I'm just proud of it, whereas you have to hide it. Yeah, I have to hide it. Thanks to our returning sponsors at beer52.com, you can now sample eight delicious craft beers for absolutely free. All you have to do, guys is head over to beer52.com forward slash trigger and cover the postage which is £4.95. What's more as a trigonometry fan, you'll get two extra beers for free. So that's 10 free beers, which means you'll be able to stay in getting smashed whilst listening to hate speech. Or as it's otherwise known, Christmas in the Francis Foster household. You've never been to my house at Christmas. How did you know?

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Touching on the hormone oxytocin is essentially we're not even aware that we're being driven like that. So every time we join a choir, we wear a football shirt, we see to get a national anthem. You hear the national anthem. It's almost like we're getting a hormone

rush, which drives us to create these bonds and these groups. Have either of you two had the experience in, you know, singing a choir, football match, whatever, where you get a tingle down your spine? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that is that pathway. Yeah.

That's you feeling a sense of belonging and it triggers the oxytocin pathway that then triggers a bunch of positive hormones that then give you those feelings of pleasure. So by that logic, If somebody doesn't get as bigger hit from that as other people, they wouldn't feel as inclined to be part of a group. Right, right.

And, you know, it's amazing the degree to which very simple things that biologists have understood for, say, 50 years, haven't translated into our study of politics. So, for instance, you know, most traits, how tall you are, so that's a physical trait or a behavioral trait, whether you feel this sense of belonging, they tend to fall on a kind of bell curve, right?

So most people are in the median, they're about five and a half foot or six foot, or whatever the average height is, and they feel a kind of medium sense of belonging. But of course you get extremes. You get some people who can't feel a sense of belonging at all, and you get some who are, you know, mega-passion.

And these are the kind of political activists for a political party, you instance. And another thing that, you know, another aspect of biology that's sort of well understood in biology that doesn't translate at all into public debate is this idea that every trait, whether it's physical or behavioral, is as a result of your genetic inheritance multiplied by environmental factors. This nature-nurture argument is nonsense. It's both. Every single trait has both. And some have. slightly more heritability, so genetic component, some have slightly more environmental. But they are both involved, both genes and environment are involved in behavioural traits and in physical traits.

So you're saying that some people essentially might have a genetic predisposition to extremism of one sort or another? I think that, okay, so... Stop trying to justify them, man. No, no, no, no, because this is a... You know, this is a debate that is not aired. Yeah. Okay.

because, and the reason it's not aired, and the gender debate is another example of it. I was going to come to that, yeah, absolutely. So this is not aired, and there's a very good reason why it's not aired, okay? After the sort of eugenics movement in the 30s and, you know, that peaking with Nazism, effectively, there was a backlash within scholarship, because you've got these two views, right?

It's either genetically determined, extreme, the views are it's genetically determined or it's all social imprinting. We're born as a blank slate and then everything is kind of social imprinting, right? And as a reaction against eugenics and the Nazi movement, scholarship moved right onto this tabular rasa

blank slate view of humankind, but it's not that, you know, as I've said. There's an over-correction, essentially. It was an over-correction. And back to your question about, you know, is there a genetic heritability involved in terrorism. Okay, so I'm not aware of any data

that supports that view, okay? But that's probably because people haven't asked that question because it's hard to ask that question because of the reason I've just articulated. But, and it is, it is, you know, in science you have to get funding, you have to write research proposals,

all that kind of stuff, right? So there's a degree of, you know, as with everything, there's a degree of self-censorship. So people only ask, you know, scientists are only going to spend their time writing research, you know, funding proposals for things they think are going to get funding, right? It takes a tremendous amount of time. So there's a bit of that.

And there's probably some of it being turned down because it's a hot potato. Yeah. But, you know, it's 20, it's almost 2020, right? In a couple of weeks it will be 2020. And over the last, if you look over the last, say, 10 years or 15 years, the amount of knowledge and science that's been done into cognition, psychology, how our brains work, is extraordinary. I mean, it's moved on so much. And to not use that knowledge to our own advantage seems to me to be crazy.

I mean, something you said earlier was to what degree are we aware of this? know, there's two bits to our brain. There's the unconscious bit and there's the conscious bit. And in politics, we all think it's about the conscious bit, you know, the policies, the, what's the logically right thing to do? But actually, as in war, you know, politics and war are the same thing, right? They're just, they're on the same spectrum. You're just using violence as a means of communication rather than using words. And it's the old Klauswitzian, you know, war is a continuation of politics by other means. We think that politics and war can be understood rationally by, you know, doing studies of ideology and all that kind of stuff. But actually,

the argument in why we fight and the argument of, you know, the evidence that's come out in the last 10 years of how our brains work is actually that we're driven by unconscious things. We're not aware of them. And later on, our conscious brain comes and fits a narrative, a logical, conscious narrative to that already made decision, that subconscious drive that's already pushed us in that direction. Sounds like what's going to happen today after the election.

No, what that is. What you've just described, Michael, is Facebook. Yeah, pretty much. Right. Yeah. But actually, I mean, in terms of the genetic heritability of something like the predilection for extremism, I mean, every other human behaviour is

to some extent driven by our genes. So it would be... It would be extraordinary if there was not a genetic component towards being a suicide bomb. Yeah. Well, that makes perfect sense. And I suppose the ethical consideration there is, well, if we invent some way of telling who's a terrorist, are we going to start putting them in camps or whatever? And for other criminals as well.

Yeah, absolutely. That's something I'm personally massively in favour of, of course. But let me ask you this, because. Because you mentioned the gender thing, and I think one of the most misunderstood and also fundamentally unhealthy concepts that has emerged in recent years is this idea of toxic masculinity. The idea that men are trained by society to be violent, to rape, to behave in all of these ways, right? but based on what you're talking about is fundamentally men from an evolutionary perspective evolved to engage in violence in certain context right so what do you make of this idea that kind of the nurture of the way that we nurture men in society is wrong and bad and that's why you know we're all toxic and evil so um i want to be really clear that what i'm about to say is not is not kind of going, well, that's the way it is, you know, okay. And, you know, men, that's how men are.

He's about to say that's the way it's, isn't it? As he ripped his show. I'm a liberal with a small L, right? And so what is, okay, let's go back to, you know, we've spoken about testosterone, right? Yeah. And we've also spoken about how we've also spoken about However, everything is genes, times environment.

Yeah, behavioural physical traits. Okay, so testosterone. The average man has 20 times the level of testosterone as the average woman. Okay? That's a fact. We have an overwhelming weight of evidence that demonstrates that. Is that not due to the patriarchy? And now, of course, you know, those bell curves that we spoke about,

the male and the female bell curves were overlaught. Yeah, of course. Which is where this discussion comes up about trans athletes in sport. Yeah. Trans women in sport. Yeah. Okay. But you'll see two very clear peaks.

If those are the overlapping bellcans, you'll see two very clear peaks. Okay. 20 times, men have 20 times. Yeah. And so what does testosterone do? Well, most people think are testosterone, the sort of common misconception is that testosterone makes you violent and aggressive. Okay? that's not actually what testosterone does.

Tastotosterone causes you to seek status. It's a status-seeking hormone. Now, it turns out that being aggressive and violent, a certain percentage of the time works to help you get status. So that's why people have, that's why there's a common misconception. But what it does is it causes you to seek status. And why do men have 20 times a testosterone and women? Because having a higher social status,

because of polygamy, pays off for men more than it does for women, okay? One man, many wives is much more common than one wife, many men and has been throughout a revolutionary history.

So there's a much higher status payoff for men in reproductive terms and they're off of women. The reason for that, by the way, is because women are taken out of the reproduction game for nine months, right?

And men are taken out the reproduction game for 10 seconds. And so... Five if it's a good one, maybe. Yeah, you need a nap afterwards there, don't you? In terms of your sex ratio, there's the women of the rare of sex.

Absolutely. So, you know, that's why men seek states more, have higher levels of testosterone. So, you know, I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Everybody knows that men, particularly when they're 17 to 25, are chest puffing. Yeah. That's what they do. They peacock. Yeah. Yeah. And that's not a, well, it is a social cliche. And the reason it's a social cliche is because there's a hormonal basis for it. Yeah.

So is that. to say that there are no aspects of, say, misogynistic behaviour that aren't learnt. No, of course there are aspects of misogynistic behaviour that are learnt. But there is also, you know, genes, times environment. There's also a inherited component, an inherited component of this for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of males on the planet. Okay. Now, come back to this other idea of like unconscious versus conscious, right? that's a tussle within our brains.

And of course you can bring up boys, for example, in a way that recognizes that they have 20 times on average levels of testosterone that girls do, which means they will chest puff and they will peacock and they will do those things. And so you can bring boys up with that knowledge. And this is why men are risk takers, for instance. And I just think, you know, to come back to this idea of why aren't we talking about this in politics, it's not helpful to say toxic masculinity is a learnt behaviour and we all need to, I don't know, bring up our children in a general neutral way, right? Which I don't pass any comment on. I'm just saying that's one of the arguments.

Where actually I think it would be much more beneficial to say, okay, there are actually these differences between men and women. And so we can construct our society in a very clever way that gets to the ultimate goal. If we agree that we all want to get to complete equality between the sexes, I find it would be much better way to get to that eventual goal if we say, these are the differences and therefore we're to construct our society to get to that point. Rather than saying, no, there are no differences. It's all to, you know, to know, to get to where you want to get to, you have to know where you are.

Yeah. And if you think you're in the wrong place, you're not going to get to where you want to get to. And it's one part of the book that I find particularly fascinating was how you were saying that a lot of fights are caused by a perceived loss of status between the two combatants.

So, you know, if they walk away from the fight, they've somehow lost status, their status is diminished and therefore they have become an inverted commas weaker. Yeah, I mean the statistics on this are stark. Okay, so in criminology

95% of murders are committed by men. Yeah. Of which, about two-thirds of those, are what are called trivial altercations is what the criminology category is. And what a trivial altercation is is a fight over a pool table?

Or... And the beauty about this is this, goes through time. So we have records from the 1200s in England where people started fights over games of chess or mistresses in taverns and stuff. You see the same pattern throughout England has 800 years of murder statistics and stories and judgments. So we have this long, long skew of data to look at it. And that is the reason that, um, that is the reason that, um, men commit, and they're also the victims as well as the perpetrators of the vast majority of murders, because they are the ones that seek status over each other because, and this is where if you drill down in statistics,

you find that not only is it men, but the vast majority of those men who commit murders are between the ages of 17 and 30, and they're from lower rungs, lower social status. So they're sort of unemployed, maybe they're illiterate or poorly educated. They don't have a job. but they live in deprived areas. And that's because, effectively, what's been triggered in their brain is, I'm in a low part of the social rung, so I need to climb up it. And so you see higher levels of violence.

And, you know, there's so much evidence for this. In China, when they institutes the one-child policy, they did it region by region, so they didn't do it all at the same time. And of course, what the one-child policy does is it creates female infanticide because there's a preference for sons. So that skews a sex ratio. So where you have the one child policy coming in, you get more men and lower women, right? Which means that the men, when they get to 20, are competing for a smaller, that cohort when it becomes marriage age, they're competing for a smaller number of women.

And what you see is a very, very small change, like 0.0. I don't have a statistics like, off the stop my head, but 0.1's 0.3% change in the sex ratio leads to kind of 5% more violent crime and murder when that birth code. cohort reaches, reaches marriage, you know, reproduction age. That makes so much sense. That makes so much sense. I mean, this is obvious stuff.

It should be, shouldn't it? I mean, all of the stuff you're saying, it should be part of how we talk about these things because it kind of, it's just a very logical and simple explanation

of what, and we've instead invented all these complicated concepts that not necessarily that all that helpful, are they, you know? I, you know,

there's something called Occam's razor, right? Yeah, which is when you're trying to study a problem, you'll come up with loads of competing theories. More often than not, the most simplistic solution, or the one that has the fewest assumption leaps in it, is the one that will turn out to be true. And when we're doing stuff like, I don't know, the patriarchy, or like international relations or theories about war, why people fight wars, when the social science tries to unpick these things, because When social science tries from pick these things, when you're starting with a kind of rational actor model, the people are rational actors that make decisions that are best, that are the best decisions for them in irrational terms, they benefit the most from those decisions. You have to construct quite elaborate social models about population level movements and forces and all that kind of stuff.

whereas and it's very hard to test those models empirically and to gather data it's very hard in social science to gather data because effectively what you're trying to do is let's say you're trying to measure the degree to which an ideology penetrates in a population, right? Does ideology drive violence?

Let's say we're trying to test that, right? The answer that you get to that question will depend entirely on how you define ideology are we going to do a question? Are we going to speak to you? How are we going to define that? And how I define that will give me the answer.

But in biology, for instance, like, there's not many ways I can define testosterone level. Like, that's it. I'll take a blood sample and I'll do that to 20,000 people. And then I'll come up with, you know, 10,000 men and 10,000 women. And I'll come up with, you know, two bell curves that overlap, but have different medians for the levels of testosterone. I don't wish to disparage the social sciences, but I think there are some questions where we could, to a much greater degree, there's much more explanatory power in things like psychology and biology. And I was invited to give the annual lecture at King's College London this year at the War Studies Department, which was very, you know, very, very, very. kind of them, frankly. It was a great honour. And that was exactly the argument that I advanced,

which is that there are all sorts of fields, disciplines that we can bring to bear on the study of war and international relations that will give us a much greater explanation of what's going on rather than these models that we constructs that rely on our own definitions of things that are hard to kind of pin down in empirical models. And you were talking about war and conflict there. And one of the things that I found fascinating in why we fight, your book, you talk about the fact that when we construct

these complex theories about why there's conflicts, why we do these things, we think of nations as fighting. We think of nations as making decisions, whereas in fact, it's a few usually men who are making these decisions right at the top. And typically

they are competing for status between each other and frequently the wars are essentially caused by chest puffing from these guys. Right, right. Right. So, and this is where I think it will go next, right? If we let's

say that we kind of look at these social phenomena for an individual level, right? Because the moment we're trying to study them at a societal level and that's you know, we've probably reached the limits of what we can explain. So let's say we go actually, we're going to at it from an individual level, you know, I don't know, we're going to measure hormones or we're going to do, right? Like you say, to try and identify this sort of status, you know, chest

puffing. Then the next challenge after that is, right, and we haven't even got there yet, but the next challenge after that is, once you've understood the individual basis for this stuff, how do you then abstract that to the population level? Because you've got, effectively, you've got a relationship between leaders who pursue belonging, but mostly pursue. status, right? That's the drive that drives leaders, obviously, right? And you have followers who pursue status a bit, but mostly pursue belonging, right? So you have this tension between leaders and followers and between the drive for status and belonging. And what followers give leaders is they fulfill their need for status, right? Because they create the group that the leader can

lead. And what leaders do for followers is they create the sense of belonging by articulating a framework and a narrative for that group which helps people belong to a group. So there's a, you know, these ideas about, you know, elites and how they are, you know, just controlling the masses and all that kind of stuff. Now, there's a tension between the two. Like, human society always has this tension. And it comes out in politics and it comes out in war. And so the real challenge is, once we've rerouted ourselves in the individual, how we then abstract that and try and understand

population level, how population level dynamics abstract from the individual. Yeah. All right. We've got time for basically our final question, man. Oh, is it we got? All right. Is that we're absolutely zip through? Yeah, we've got to let Mike go because he's running late because we started late because

of the fucking election. We stayed up until 4 a.m. last night. I'm having lunch with my godmother, so I can't be late for that. Yeah, exactly. We've got to let him go. Okay, cool. So the question that we always end our show is, what's the one thing that we're talking about, that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be talking about.

Within national politics, within international relations, within the study of war, within conflict reduction, within terrorism, all of those fields would benefit greatly from bringing in what we've been talking about understanding how evolution, how hormonal levels, how unconscious drives, actually shape all of that stuff much more than the rational actor model that we've hitherto use to explain those phenomena. And that has huge implications from societal change around gender debate. It has huge implications for, you know, the world's getting unsafe and we might be heading into a global war. So understanding how those drives drive conflict. And it has huge implications for things like understanding the impact of social media on disrupting our politics

and perhaps destabilizing political systems, which obviously has, you know, concurrent knock-on effects to, you know, leading into conflict. So we've really got to get our politics up to speed with the last 10 years of cognitive research. Fantastic. Well, I think it's absolutely brilliant what you're doing, what you wrote about, and what you've said today is just, it's such an obvious and simple explanations to explanation to many very complex problems, right? But the explanation is very simple if we were just willing to look reality in the face.

Although it doesn't stop you from being deeply problematic. Well, I'm super problematic. We've given up on not being problematic on the show. Guys, make sure you get this book. It's absolutely fascinating. As you can see, Mike, as a brilliant guy and very interesting. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to follow you, are you on Twitter or anywhere like that?

Yep, yep, threshdthought.com. Perfect. We'll put that in the links, and we will see you with another brilliant episode in a week's time. Take care, guys. See you next week.