Richard Wrangham: Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #229
the following is a conversation with richard rangham a biological anthropologist at harvard specializing in the study of primates and the evolution of violence sex cooking culture and other aspects of ape and human behavior at the individual and societal level he began his career over four decades ago working with jane goodall and studying the behavior of chimps and since then has done a lot of seminal work on human evolution and has proposed several theories for the roles of fire and violence in the evolution of us hairless apes otherwise known as homo sapiens this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with richard wrangham you've said that we are much less violent than our close living relatives the chimps can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are and how violent our evolutionary relatives are well i haven't said exactly that we're less violent than chimps what i've said is that there are two kinds of violence one stems from proactive aggression and the other stems from reactive aggression proactive aggression is planned aggression reactive aggression is impulsive defensive it's reactive because it takes place in seconds after the threat and the thing that is really striking about humans compared to our close relatives is the great reduction in the degree of of reactive aggression so we are far less violent than chimps when prompted by some relatively minor threat within our own society and the way i judge that is um with not super satisfactory data but the the study which is particularly striking is one of people living as hunter-gatherers in a really um upsetting kind of environment namely um people in australia living in a place where they got a lot of alcohol abuse there's a lot of domestic violence it's all a sort of a a society that is um you know as bad from the point of view of violence as an ordinary society can get there's excellent data on the frequency with which people actually have physical violence and hit each other and we can compare that to data from several different sites comparing we're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence and the difference is uh between two and three orders of magnitude the frequency with which chimps and bonobos hit each other chase each other charge each other uh physically engage is something between 500 and 1000 times uh higher than in humans so there's something just amazing about us and you know this has been recognized for for centuries uh aristotle drew attention to the fact that we behave in many ways like domesticated animals because we're so unviolent but you know people say well what about you know the hideous engagements of this 20th century the the first and second world war and and much else besides and that is all proactive violence you know all of that is is gangs of people uh making deliberate decisions to go off an attack in circumstances which ideally uh the attackers are going to be able to make their kills and then get out of there in other words not face confrontation that's the ordinary way that arm is trying to work and um and there it turns out that uh humans and chimpanzees are in a very similar kind of state that's to say if you look at the the rate of death from chimpanzees conducting proactive coalitionary violence it's very similar in many ways to what you see in humans so when not down regulated with proactive violence it's just this reactive violence that is strikingly reduced in humans so chimpanzees also practice kind of tribal warfare indeed they do yeah so this was discovered first in 1974 it was observed first 974. which was about the time that um the first major study of chimpanzees in the wild by jane goodall had been going for something like five years during of the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went until then they'd been observed at a feeding station where jane was luring them into to be observed by seeing bananas which is great she learned a lot but she didn't learn what was happening at the edges of their ranges so five years later it became very obvious that there was hostile relationships between groups and those hostile relationships sometimes take the form of the kind of hostile relationships that you see in many animals which is a bunch of chimps in this case uh shouting uh at a bunch of other chimps uh on their borders but dramatically in addition to that there is a second kind of interaction and that is when a a party of chimpanzees makes a deliberate venture uh to the edge of their territory silently and then search for members of neighboring groups and what they're searching for is a lone individual so i've been with chimps when they've heard a lone individual under these circumstances or what they think is a lone one and they touch each other and look at each other and then charge forward very excited and then while they're charging all of a sudden the place where they heard a lone call erupts with a volley of calls it was just one calling out of a larger party and our chimps put on the brakes and scoot back for safety into their own territory but if in fact they do find a lone individual and they they can sneak up to them then they make a deliberate attack uh they're hunting they're stalking and hunting and and then they impose terrible damage which typically ends in a kill straight away but it might end up with the victim so damaged that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later so that was a very dramatic discovery because it really made people realize for the first time that conrad lorenz had been wrong when in the 1960s in his famous book on aggression he said warfare is restricted to humans animals do not deliberately kill each other well now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals that deliberately kill each other and they always do so under essentially the same circumstances which is when they feel safe doing it so humans feel safe doing it when they got a weapon animals feel safe when they have a coalition a coalition that has overwhelming power compared to the victim and so wolves will do that and lions will do that and hyenas will do that and chimpanzees will do it and and humans do it too can they pull themselves into something that looks more like a symmetric war as opposed to an asymmetric one so accidentally engaging on the lone individual and getting themselves into trouble are they more aggressive in avoiding these kinds of battles no they're very very keen to avoid those kinds of battles but occasionally they can make a mistake but so far there have been no observations of anything like a battle in which both sides maintain themselves and i think you can very confidently say that overwhelmingly what happens is that if they discover that there's several individuals on the other side then both sides retreat nobody wants to get hurt what they want to do is to hurt others yes so you mentioned jane goodall you've worked with her what was it like working with her what have you learned from her well she's a wonderfully independent um courageous person you know who she famously began her studies not as a qualified person in terms of education but qualified only by enthusiasm and considerable experience even in her early 20s with nature uh so she's courageous in the sense of being able to you know take on our challenges the thing that is very impressive about her is her total fidelity to the observations uh very unwilling to extend uh beyond the observations uh we know waiting until they mount up and you've really got a confident picture and tremendous attention to individuals so you know that was an interesting problem from her point of view because when she got to know the chimpanzees of of gombe this particular community of casa kayla about 60 individuals oh so gombe was in tanzania on lake tanganyika she was there initially with her mother and then alone for two or three years of really intense observation and then slowly joined by other people what um what she discovered was that there were obvious differences in individual personality and the difficulty about that was that when she reported this to uh the largest scientific world initially her advisors at cambridge uh they said well you know we don't know how to handle that because uh you've got to treat all these animals as the same basically because um there is no research tradition of thinking about personalities well now whatever it is 60 years later the study of personalities is is a very rich part of the study animal behavior at any rate the important point in terms of you know what was she like is that she stuck to her guns and she absolutely insisted that you know we have to show describe in great detail the differences in personality among these individuals and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologist to think about what it means so what is the process of observation like this like observing the personality but also observing in a way that's not projecting your beliefs about human nature or animal nature onto chimps which is probably really tempting to project so your understanding of the way the human world works projecting that onto the chimp world yes i mean it's particularly difficult with chimps because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior that it's very easy to make those projections as you say the process involves making very clear definitions of of what a behavior is you know aggression can be defined in terms of a forceful hit a byte and so on and uh writing down every time these things happen and then slowly totting up the numbers of times that they happen uh you know from individual a towards individuals b c d and e so that you build up a very concrete picture rather than interpreting at any point and stopping and saying well you know they seem to be rather aggressive so the sort of formal system is that you build up a pattern of the relationships based on a description of the different types of interactions the aggressive and the friendly interactions um and all of these are defined in concrete and so that from that you extract a pattern of relationships and the relationships uh can be defined as relatively friendly relatively uh aggressive competitive uh based on the frequency of these types of interactions and so one can talk in terms of uh individuals having a relationship which uh on the scores of friendliness is two standard deviations outside the mean i mean you know it's in which direction sorry uh in both directions well i mean you know there will be obviously the friendly ones would be the ones who have exceptionally high rates of uh spending time close to each other of touching each other in a gentle way of grooming each other and by the way finding that those things are correlated with each other so it's possible to define a friendship with a capital f in a very systematic way and and to compare that uh between uh individuals but also between communities of chimpanzees and between different species so that you know we can say that in some species individuals have friends and others they don't at all what about just because there's different personalities and because they're so fascinating what about sort of falling in love or forming friendships with chimps you know like really you know um connecting with them as an observer what what role does that play because you're tracking these individuals that are full of life and intelligence from for long periods of time plus as a human especially in those days for jane she's alone observing it he gets lonely as a human i mean probably deeply lonely as a human being observe these other intelligent species it's a very reasonable question and of course jane in those early years i think she's willing now to talk about the fact that uh she regrets to some extent how close she became um and the problem is not just from the humans the problem is from the chimpanzees as well because they do things that are extremely affectionate if you like you know at one point jane offered a a ripe fruit to a chimpanzee called david greybeard david greybeard um took it and squeezed her hand as if to say thank you and then i think he gave it back if i remember rightly yeah [Laughter] no thank you right um oh it's almost like thank you and uh returning the affection by giving the food yeah if if they didn't you know it was a gentle squeeze yeah i mean chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard as that occasionally has happened um some chimps are aggressive to people um and others are friendly and the ones that are friendly tend to be rather sympathetic characters because they might be ones who are having problems in their own society you know so jomio in gombe used to uh come and sit next to me quite often um and he was having a hard time making it in that society you know which i can describe to you in terms of the number of aggressive interactions if you want you know but um just to be informed about it so all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted and in the community that i've been working with in uganda for the last 30 years we try extremely hard to impress on all of the research students who come with us that it is absolutely vital that you do not fall into that temptation now you know we heard a story of one person who did reach out and touch one of our chimps it's a very very bad idea not because the chimp is going to do anything violent at the time but because if they learn that humans are as weak uh physically as we are compared to them then they can take advantage of it us and that's what happened in gambi so after jane had done the um you know very obvious thing when you're first engaged in this game of uh allowing the infants to approach her and then tickling them and playing with them some of those infants had the personality of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later and so you know you had an individual frodo who was um violent on a regular basis towards humans when he was an adult and he was quite dangerous i mean he could easily have killed someone in fact he did kill on one person he killed a baby that he he took from a mother a human baby that he took off her hip when he met her on the path so it's a reminder that we're dealing with a species that are rather human-like in the range of emotions they have in the capacities they have and even uh in the strength they have they are uh you know in many ways stronger than humans so it's uh you you've got to be careful in the full range of friendliness and violence the capacity for these very human things yes i mean it's it's very obvious with with violence as we talked about you know that they will kill they will kill not just strangers um they can kill other adults within their own group uh they can kill babies that are strangers they can kill babies in their own group so you know they're this is a long-lived individual obviously these killings can't have very often because otherwise they'd all be dead um and uh we're now finding that they can live to 50 or 60 years in the wild at relatively low population density because they're big animals eating a rather specialized kind of food the ripe fruits um so it doesn't happen all the time with friendliness they are very strong to support each other they very much depend on their um their close friendships which they express through physical contact and particularly through through grooming so grooming occurs when one individual approaches another i might present for grooming a very common way of starting turning their back or presenting an arm or something like that and the other just riffles their fingers through the hair and that's partly just soothing and it's partly uh looking for parasites but mostly it's just soothing yes and and the point about this is it can go on for uh half an hour it can go on for sometimes even an hour so this is amazing you know a major expression of interest in somebody else when did your interest in this one particular aspects of jim come to be which is violence when did the study of violence and chimps uh become something you're deeply interested in well um for my phd in the early 1970s i was in gombe with jane goodall and was studying feeding behavior but during that time we were seeing and i say uh we because there were uh half a dozen research students uh all uh in her camp um we were discovering that uh chimps had this capacity for for violence um the first kill happened during that time which was of an infant and a neighboring group um and we were starting to see these uh hunting expeditions and this was the start of my interest because it was such chilling evidence of an extraordinary similarity between chimps and humans now at that time we didn't know very much about how chimpanzees and humans were related chimps gorillas bonobos are all three big black hairy things that live in the african forests and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits and walk on their knuckles and they all look rather similar to each other so they seem as though those three species chimps and gorillas and bonobos should all be each other's closest relatives and humans are something rather separate and so any of them will be of interest to us subsequently we learn that actually that's not true and that there's a special relationship between humans and chimpanzees but at the time even without knowing that it was obvious that there was something very odd about chimpanzees because jane had discovered they were making tools she had seen that they were hunting meat she had seen that they were sharing the meat among each other she had seen that the societies were dominated politically by males coalitions of males all of these things of course resonate so closely with humans and then it turns out that in contrast to conventional wisdom at the time the chimpanzees were capable of hunting and killing members of neighbouring groups well at that point the similarities between chimps and humans become less a matter of sort of you know sheer intellectual fascination than something that has a really deep meaning about our understanding of ourselves i mean until then you can cheerfully think of humans as a species apart from the rest of nature because we are so peculiar but when it turns out that as it turns out one of our two closest relatives has got these features that we share and that one of the features is something that is the most horrendous as well as fascinating aspect of human behavior then you know how can you resist just you know trying to find out what's going on so i have to say this i'm not sure if you're familiar with a man but fans of this podcast are so we're talking about chimps we're talking about violence my now friend mr joe rogan is a big fan of those things i'm a big fan of these topics i think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics so as you're saying why do we find the exploration of violence and the relations between chimps so interesting what can they teach us about ourselves until we had this information about chimpanzees it was possible to believe that the psychology behind warfare was totally the result of some kind of um cultural recent cultural innovation right that had nothing to do with our biology or if you like that it's got something to do with uh sin and and garden the devil and that sort of thing but what the chimps tell us after we think carefully about it is that it seems undoubtedly the case that our evolutionary psychology has given us the same kind of attitude towards violence as has occurred in chimpanzees and in both species uh it has evolved because of its uh evolutionary significance in other words because it's been helpful to the individuals who have practiced it and now we know that as i mentioned other species do this as well in fact you know wolves um which this is a really kind of ironical observation uh conrad lorenz who i mentioned had been the person who thought that human aggression in the form of killing members of our own species was unique to our species he was a great fan of wolves he studied wolves and in captivity he noted that wolves are very unlikely to harm each other in um spats among members of the same group what happens is that one of them will roll over and present their neck much as you see in a dog park nowadays and and the other uh might put their jaws on the neck but will not bite okay so now it turns out that if you studied wolves in the wild then neighboring packs often go hunting for each other they are in fierce competition and uh as much as 50 of the mortality of wolves is due to being killed by other wolves adult mortality wow so it's a really serious business the chimpanzees and humans uh fit into a larger pattern of understanding animals in which you don't have an instinct for violence what you have is an instinct if you like to use violence adaptively and if the right circumstances come up it'll be adaptive if the right circumstances don't come up it won't be so some chimpanzee communities are much more violent than others because of things like the frequency with which a large party of males is likely to meet us a lone victim and that's going to depend on the local ecology but you know so the overall answer to the question of what did chimps teach us is that we have to take very seriously the notion that in humans the tendency to make war is a consequence of a long-term evolutionary adaptation and not just a military ideology or some you know sort of local patriarchal phenomenon um and of course you know his a reading of history a judicious reading of history fits that very easily because war is so commonplace it's not an accident so it's not a construction of human civilization it's uh it's deeply within us violence so what what's the difference between violence on the individual level versus group is um it seems like with chimps and with wolves there's something about the dynamic of multiple uh chimps together that increase the chance of violence or is is violence still fundamentally part of the individual like what would an individual be as violent as they might be as part of a group if we're talking about uh killing okay then um violence in the sense of killing is very much associated with a group and the reason is that individuals don't benefit by getting into a fight in which they risk being hurt themselves so it's only when you have overwhelming power that the temptation to try and kill another victim rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it the the average number of chimpanzee males that attack a single male in something like 50 observations that have accumulated in the last 50 years from various different study sites is eight eight to one now sometimes it can go as low as uh three to one but that's a that's getting risky but if you have eight you can see what can happen i mean basically uh you have one male on one foot another male another foot another male and an arm another male another arm now you have an immobilized victim with uh four individuals capable of just doing the damage and so they can then move in and tear out his thorax and tear off his testicles and and twist an arm until it breaks and uh and do this you know appalling damage with no weapons what is uh the way in which they prefer to commit the violence is there something to be said about like the actual process of it is there an artistry to it so if you look at human warfare there's different parts in history preferred different kind of approaches to violence it had more to do with tools i think on the human side but just the nature of violence itself sorry the practice the strategy of violence is it basically the same you improvise you immobilize the uh the victim and they just rip off different parts of their body kind of thing yeah you have to understand that these things are happening at high speed in thick vegetation yes mostly so that they they have not been filmed uh carefully you know we we have a few little glimpses of them from uh one or two people like david watts so he's got some great video but uh we don't know enough to be able to to say that it's hard for me to imagine that there are styles that vary between um communities you know cultural styles but it is possible on one thing that is striking is that the number of times that an individual victim has been killed immediately uh has been higher in uh kibali forest in uganda than in in gombe national park in tanzania it's conceivable that's just chance we don't have real numbers now but was this um i can't remember exact numbers but you know 10 versus 15 or something um so maybe they damage to the point of uh expecting a death in one place and they just finish it off in the other but most likely that sort of difference will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers you know human beings are able to conceive of the philosophical notion of death of mortality is there any of that for chimps when they're thinking about violence is violence like what what is the nature of their conception of violence do you think do they do they realize they're taking another conscious being's life or is it some kind of like optimization over the use of resources or something like that i i don't think it's i can't think of any way to get an answer to the question of what they know about that um i think that uh the way to think about the motivation is uh rather like the motivation in sex so when males are interested in having sex with a female whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans they don't think about the fact that what this is going to do is to lead to a baby mostly you're right mostly what they're thinking about is i want to get my underway and um i think that that's a similar kind of process uh with the gems you know what they are thinking about is i i want to kill this yes individual and it's hard to imagine that taking the other individual's perspective and thinking about what it means for them to die is going to be an important part of that in fact you know there's reasons to think it should not be an important part of it because it might inhibit them and they don't want to be inhibited you know the more efficient they are in doing this the better but you know i think it's interesting to think about this whole motivational question because it does produce a rather haunting thought that there has been selection in favor of enthusiasm about killing and in our relatively gentle and uh deliberately moral society that we have today it's very difficult for us to face the thought that in all of us there might have been a a re residue and a more than that sort of an actively uh an active potential for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else but i i think you know one can sustain that thought fairly obviously by thinking of circumstances in which it would be true that the ordinary human male would be delighted to be part of a group that was killing someone what you've got to do is to be in a position where you're regarding the victim as dangerous and thoroughly hostile but the pure enjoyment of violence there's uh i don't know if you know this historian dan carlin he has a podcast he has an episode three four hour episode that i recommend to others it's quite haunting but he takes us through an entire history uh it's called painful tainment the uh the history of humans enjoying the murder of others in a large group so like public executions were part of long part of human history and there's something that for some reason humans seem to have been drawn to just watching others die and he ventures to say that that may still be part of us for example he said if it was possible to televise to stream online for example the execution and the murder of somebody or even the torture of somebody that a very large fraction of the population on earth would not be able to look away they'd be drawn to that somehow as a very dark thought that we were drawn to that so you think that's part of us in there somewhere that selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing and the enjoyment of observing uh those in our tribe doing the killing yes i mean and that word you produced at the end is critical i think you know because uh it would be a little bit weird i think uh to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people in your own tribe being killed right yeah i i don't think we're interested in violence for violence's sake that much it's um it's when you get these social boundaries set up and in today's world you know happily uh we kind of are already one world you know we you have to dehumanize someone to get to the point where they are really outside you know our recognition of a tribe at some level which is you know the whole human species but in uh ancient times that would not have been true because in ancient times there are lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers uh in which the appearance of a stranger would lead to an immediate response of shooting on site because what was human was the people that were in your society and the other things that actually looked like us and you know were human in that sense were not regarded as human so there was a kind of automatic dehumanization of everybody that didn't speak our language or hadn't already somehow become recognized as uh sufficiently like us to escape the the dehumanization context and so hopefully the story of human history is that we are that tribalism fades away that our dehumanization the natural desire to dehumanize or a tendency to dehumanize groups that are not within this tribe decreases over time and so then the desire for violence decreases over time yeah i mean that that's the optimistic perspective and uh and the the great sort of concern of course is that um small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts and then dehumanization happens and then violence is released as hannah aaron says you know there currently is no uh known alternative to war as a means of settling really important conflicts so if we look at the big picture what role has violence or do you think violence has played in the evolution of homo sapiens so we are quite an intelligent got a beautiful particular little branch on the evolutionary tree what part of that was played by our tendency to be violent well i think that violence was responsible for creating your homo sapiens um and that raises the question of what homo sapiens is yes yeah exactly so you know nowadays people um begin the the concept of what homo sapiens is by thinking about features that are very obviously different from all of the other species of homo and our large brain are a very rounded cranium a relatively small face these are characteristics which are developed in a relatively modern way by about 170 000 years ago say you know it's one of the earliest skulls in africa that really captures that but uh it has been argued that that is a um an episode in a process that has been uh started substantially earlier and there's no doubt that that's true you know homo sapiens is a species that has been changing pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there and it goes back to 300 000 years ago 315 literally is the the time the the best estimate of a date for uh a series of bones from morocco that have been dated uh three or four years ago at that time and have been characterized as earliest homo sapiens now at that point they are only beginning the trend of sapionization and that trend consists basically of grassonization of making our ancestors less robust shorter faces smaller teeth a smaller brow ridge a narrower face a thinner cranium all these things that are associated with reduced violence okay so that's that's saying what that's homo sapiens beginning so it began sometimes three three to four hundred thousand years ago because by three hundred fifteen 000 years ago you've already got something recognizable so you're you're more on that side of things that there was this gradual process it's not 150 170 000 years ago it's it started like 400 000 years ago and it's just it started three to four hundred thousand years ago and and if you look at 170 it's got even more like us and if you if you look at at a hundred it's got more like us again and if you look at 50 it's more like us again it's all the way it's just getting more and more like the moderns so the question is what happened between three and four hundred thousand years ago to produce homo sapiens and i i think we have a pretty good answer now and the answer comes from violence and the story begins by focusing on this question why is it that in the human species we are unique among all primates in not having an alpha male in any group in the sense that what we don't have is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male and the answer uh that has been portrayed most most uh richly by christopher boehm and whose work i've elaborated on uh is that only in humans do you have a system by which any male who tries to bully others and become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha bonobo or an alpha baboon or anything like that any male who tries to do that in humans gets taken down by a coalition of beta males um that coalition yes it's a really good uh picture of human society yes i like it okay so and that's the way all our societies work now yes um because individuals try and be alpha and then they get taken out yeah i mean we don't usually think of ourselves as beta males but yes i i suppose i suppose that's what democracy is exactly yes exactly um okay so well so at some point alpha males get taken out well what alpha males are are males who respond with high reactive violence to any challenge to their status you see it all the time in in primates some peter male thinks he's getting strong and and uh you know maturing in wisdom and so on and uh he refuses to uh kowtow to the alpha male and the alpha male comes straight in and and charges at him or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes or and then take an opportunity to attack him the um all of these primates have got a high tendency for reactive aggression and that make enables the possibility of alpha males we don't we have this great reduction as i talked about earlier and the question is when did that reduction happen well cut to the famous experiments by the russian biologist dimitri believe who tried domesticating wild animals when you domesticate wild animals what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression you are selecting those individuals to breed who are most willing to be approached by a human or by another member of their own species and are least likely to erupt in a reactive uh aggression and you only have to do that for a few generations to discover that there are changes in the skull and those changes consist of a shorter face smaller teeth a reduced maleness are the males become increasingly female-like and reduced brain size well the changes that are characteristic of domesticated animals in general compared to wild animals are all found in homo sapiens compared to our early ancestors so it's a very strong signal that when we first see homo sapiens what we're seeing is evidence of a reduction in reactive aggression and that suggests that what's happening with homo sapiens is that uh that is the point at which there is selection against the alpha males and therefore the way in which the selection happened would have been the way it happens today the beta males take them out so i think that homo sapiens is a species characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression as a kind of incidental consequence of the suppression of the alpha male and and the story of our species is the story of how the beta males took charge and have been responsible for the generation of a new kind of human and incidentally for imposing on the society a new set of values because when those beta males discovered that they could take out the previous alpha male and continue to do so because in every generation there'll always be some male who says maybe i'll become the alpha male and they you know so they just keep chopping them down in discovering that they also obviously discovered that they could kill anybody in the group females young males anybody who didn't follow their values and so this story is one of um one in which the males of our species and these would be the breeding males have been able to impose their values on everybody else and there's two kind of values there's one kind of value is things that are good for the group like thou shalt not murder and the other kind of value is things that are good for the males such as hey guess what when good food comes in males get it first yes so i mean it's fascinating that that kind of set of ideals could out-compete the the others do you have a sense of why or maybe you can comment on neanderthals and all the other early humans why did homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish and all the other ones all the other branches of evolution died out or get murdered nowadays when when homo sapiens meets homo sapiens and we don't know each other uh initially then conflict breaks out and the more militarily able group wins you know we've seen that everywhere throughout the age of exploration and throughout history so i'm i'm rather surprised you know the conventional wisdom uh that you see nowadays in contemporary anthropology is very reluctant to point to uh success in warfare uh as the reason why sapiens uh wiped out neanderthals within about 3000 years of the sapiens coming into europe 43 000 years ago and people are much more inclined to say well the neanderthals were at low population density so they just couldn't survive the demographic sort of sweep or the disease came in and you know maybe those things might have been important but you know far and away the most obvious possibility is that sapiens were just were powerful they had everyone agrees they had larger groups they had better weapons uh they they had uh projectile weapons bows and arrows to judge from the um little microlith uh bits of flake um which the neanderthals didn't you know nowadays there's evidence of of interbreeding uh quite extensive interbreeding between sapiens and neanderthals uh as well as with some other groups and sometimes people say well you know so they loved each other they made love not war i think they made love and war and you know it wouldn't necessarily mean too loving i mean if you just follow through from typical ethnographies nowadays of when um dominant groups meet subordinate groups they didn't know each other then uh you can imagine that neanderthal females would essentially be captured and taken into champions groups maybe you can comment on this uh cautiously and eloquently what's the role of sexual violence in human evolution because you mentioned taking neanderthal females you've also mentioned that some of these rules are defined by the uh by the male side of the society what's the role of sexual violence in this story i think you've got to distinguish between groups and within groups and you know i think where the world has been slowly waking up over the last several decades to the fact that sexual violence is uh routine in war and that to me says that um it's just another example of power corrupts because uh you know when frustrated uh scared elated soldiers uh come upon females in a group that has been essential dehumanization of then they get carried away by opportunity it is not always possible to argue that this is adaptive uh nowadays because you know you get lots and lots of stories of um women being abused to the point of of being killed uh you know she'll be gang raped and and then killed there's lots of terrible cases of that reported from all sorts of different wars but you can see that that could build on a um a pattern that would have been a adaptive if happening in under sort of much less extreme circumstances uh you know the the war is is very extreme nowadays in the sense that you get battles in which people are sent by a military hierarchy into a war situation in which they do not feel what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt which would have been that if we attack we have an excellent chance of getting away with it nowadays uh you know you're sent in across the somme or whatever it is and and there's a very high chance you will be killed and that's totally unnatural and a novel evolutionary experience i think then there's sexual coercion within groups and um so that takes various kinds of forms you know but nowadays of course i think people recognize increasingly that the principal form of sexual intimidation and rape occurs within relationships it's not stranger rape that is really you know statistically important there's much more um what happens behind the walls of a bedroom where people have been living for some time and um just two sort of you know thoughts and observations about this uh one is that it may seem odd that um that males should be i should think it you know a good idea as it were to impose themselves sexually on someone with whom they have a relationship but what they're doing is intimidating someone in a relationship in which the relative power in the relationship has continuing significance uh for a long time and that power probably goes well beyond uh just the sexual you know it's it's to do with domestic relationships it's to do with the man getting his his own way all the way it's power dynamics and uh the sexual aggression is one of the tools to regain power gain power gain more power and that kind of thing yeah exactly and and in that respect um it's worth noting that although this wasn't appreciated uh for some time it's it's emerging that in a bunch of primates you have somewhat similar somewhat parallel kinds of sexual intimidation where males will target particular females even in a group in which the norm is for females to mate with multiple males but each male will target a particular female and the more he is aggressive towards her then the more she conforms to his wishes when he wants to mate so a long-term pattern of sexual intimidation so there's that aspect the other aspect i would just just note is that males get away with a lot compared to females in the any kind of intersexual conflict um you know so the punishment uh here's one example of this the punishment for a husband killing a wife uh has always been much less than the punishment for a wife killing a husband um and and you see similar sorts of things in terms of the punishments for adultery and um and so on and i bring this up in the context of of males sexually intimidating uh their partners may be wives or or whoever because it's a reminder that it's basically a patriarchal world that we have come from a patriarchal world in which male alliances tend to support males and take advantage of the fact that they have political power at the expense of females and i would say that that all goes back to what happened three to four hundred thousand years ago when the beta males took charge and they started imposing their own norms on society as a whole and they've continued to do so and you we now look at ourselves and you know jordan peterson says we are not a patriarchal society well you know it's true that the laws try and make it even-handed nowadays between males and females but obviously we are patriarchal de facto because society still in many ways uh supports um men better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts so beta male patriarchal [Laughter] if we're looking at the evolutionary history okay is there uh maybe sticking on jordan for a second is is there um so he's a psychologist right and what part of the picture do you think he's missing in analyzing the human relations like what needs what does he need to understand about our origins and violence and the way the society has been constructed oh i i don't want to go deep into into his missing perspectives you know but i just think that um that what he's doing in that particular example is uh focusing on the legalistic position and that's great that um you know you do not find uh formal patriarchy in the law anything like to the extent that you could find it 100 years ago and so on you know women have got the vote now hooray but it took a long time for women to get the vote and um you know it remains the case that um the women suffer in in various uh kinds of ways you know you know a woman who is uh has lots of sexual partners uh is uh treated much more rudely than a male who has lots of sexual partners uh there are all sorts of informal ways in which uh it's a rougher being a woman than it is a man and uh if we look at the surface layer of uh the law we may miss the deeper human nature uh like the origins of our human nature that still operates no matter what the law says yeah which is you know human nature is awkward because uh it includes some unpleasant features that uh when we sit back and reflect about them uh we would like to uh them to go away yeah but it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned to try and have sex with um at least one woman and you know often lots of women yeah and so women are con men are constantly putting pressure on women in ways that women find unpleasant and if men sit back and reflect about it they think yeah we shouldn't do this but actually just it just goes on because of human nature so maybe looking at particular humans in history uh let's talk about genghis khan so is uh this particular human who was one of the most famous examples of a large-scale violence is he a deep representative of human nature or is he a rare exception well i think that it's easy to imagine that most men could have become genghis khan uh it's possible that he had a particular streak of psychopathy um you know it's it's striking that i by the time you become [Music] immensely powerful then uh your willingness to do terrible things uh for the interest of yourself and your group becomes very high you know stalin marty tung these sorts of people have histories in which they do not show obvious psychopathy but by the time they are big leaders they are really psychopathic in the sense that they do not follow the ordinary morality of considering the harm that they are doing to their victims i you know what kind of experiment would we need to discover whether or not anybody could fall into this position i don't know but you know lord acton's uh famous dictum was power corrupts an absolute power corrupts absolutely and then the point that people often forget is the next sentence that he said which is great men are almost always bad men and that is right it is very difficult to find a great man in history who was not responsible for terrible things i think there's some aspect of it that it's not just power i think men who's been who have been the most destructive in human history are not psychopathic completely they have convinced themselves of an idea it's like the idea of psychopathic uh stalin for example i don't hitler is a complicated one i think he was legitimately insane but i think stalin has convinced himself that he's doing good so the idea of communism is the thing that's psychopathic in his mind like a bread you construct a worldview in which the violence is justified the cruelty is justified so they're in in that sense first of all you can construct experiments unethical experiments that could test this but uh in that sense anybody else could have been in stalin's position it's the idea that could overtake the mind of a human being and in so doing justify cruel acts and that seems to be at least in part unique to humans is the ability to hold ideas in our minds and share those ideas and use those ideas to convince ourselves that uh proactive violence on a large scale is a good idea so that i i don't know if you haven't supposed though i mean but but uh it seems to me what really motivated my uh stalin was not so much uh communism uh as the retention of power so once he became leader and in the process of becoming leader he was absolutely desperate to get rid of anybody who was a challenger he was deeply suspicious suspicious of of anybody uh even on his side uh who might possibly be showing a glimmerings of uh willingness to challenge him so you know when he uh apparently had uh uh kirov uh murdered uh kirov was a great communist uh trotsky was a great communist uh you know all all his rivals uh and i mean when he went into the towns and and murdered people by the tens of thousands they were all communists a lot of them were coming explicit communists that's right but but what he was worried about was that there were rivals to him i suppose the thought is i am the best person to bring about a uh a global sort of embrace of communism and others are not and so we have to get rid of those others well i suspect you're being very charitable here but i mean maybe you're you know enough about starting to realize well so the point i'm making i i do quite a bit is from my understanding and sense of course we can't know for sure is he believed in communism this wasn't purely a game of power now he got drunk with power pretty quickly but he really believed for i believe his whole life that uh communism is good for the world and that i don't know what role that belief plays with the not more natural human desire for power i don't know but it just seems like as we agreed he's killing a lot of communists on his on his journey hmm but it's not that doesn't that calculus doesn't work that way there's humans who are communists and then there's the idea of communism so for him in his delusional worldview killing a few people is worth the final result of bringing communism to the whole world but it was more than that again because i mean he really wanted power for uh the soviet union and and uh so surely the reason that he um he uh orchestrated the export of wheat from ukraine and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation was because he wanted to sell it on the market in order to be able to build up the power of the soviet union you know alternative view of communism might have been well you know let's just make sure everybody survives and make sure everybody has enough to eat and we'll all be mutually supportive in a communal network but no but he wanted the power for the country well i guess exactly so that it's not even communism the set of ideas or like marxism or something like that it's the country i guess what i'm saying is uh it's not purely power for the individual it's power for a vision for this great nation the soviet union yeah and similar with hitler the guy believed that this is a great nation germany and like they it it's a nation that's been wronged throughout history and needs to be righted and there's some dance between the individual human and the tribe yes no absolutely yes and so so just like chimpanzees uh you know we are fiercely tribal and the tribalism uh resides particularly in male psychology and uh it's it's very scary because once you assemble a set of males who share tribal identity then they have power that they can exert with very little concern about what they're doing to damage other people do you think this so nietzsche will to power we talked about the corrupting nature of power do you think that's a manifestation of those uh early origins of violence what's the connection of this desire for power and our proclivity for violence you know what we're talking about is um tribal power right power on behalf of a group yes and uh yeah that seems to me to go right back to a deep evolutionary origin because you see essentially the same thing in uh in a whole bunch of animals you know they that most uh of the sort of cognitively complex animals live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries and so what you see in chimpanzees is echoed in almost all of the primates the difference between us and chimpanzees and humans on the one hand and other primates on the other is that we kill and they don't and the reason they don't is because they never meet in the context where there are massive imbalances of power so two groups of baboons you know there's 30 on this side and 50 on this side fine nobody's going to try and kill anybody else because the serious risks involved but nevertheless they are tribal so you know they will have fairly intense intergroup interactions uh in which everybody knows whose side is on who is on whose side and um the long-term consequences of winning those battles non-lethal battles is that the dominance i get access to larger areas of land more safety and so on with chances are better record of reproductive success subsequently do you think this from an evolutionary perspective is a feature or a bug our natural sort of tendency to form tribes so what's a bug oh sorry this is a computer uh programming analogy meaning like it would be more beneficial is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes from an evolutionary perspective yeah yeah but but but what is that what does it mean what does a bug mean yes right i mean well yeah it's like where's evolution going it's beneficial from you know it's beneficial in the sense that it evolved by natural selection to be to benefit the individuals who did it yes but if you if by bug you mean something that from the point of view of the species it would be great if you could just wipe this out right because the species would somehow do better yes as a result then yes but but then you know males are a bug oh come on now it's uh there's some nice things to males uh speaking as a male i the fact that there are some nice things to males doesn't mean that they're not bugs you know maybe they're quite nice bugs but it'll be much better for the species as a whole not to have to have males who impose this violence on the species as a whole yeah as somebody who practiced controlled violence and doing a lot of martial arts yeah it uh i'm not sure it does seem kind of fun to have this kind of controlled violence also sports also i mean the question of conflict in general i guess that's the deeper question don't you think there's some value to conflict for the improvement of society for progress that that this tension between tribes isn't this like uh experiment a continued experiment will conduct with each other to figure out what is a better world to build like you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas to go to war with each other it's like the united states with the 50 states and the it's the laboratory of ideas don't you think that is again feature versus bug um it this kind of conflict when it doesn't get out of hand is actually ultimately progressive productive for a better world well what do you mean by conflict i mean you can have conflict in the sense of people have different ideas about the solution to a problem and so their ideas are in conflict they can sit down with it and uh on a log and chat about it and then decide okay you're right or i'm wrong or whatever um but but if by conflict uh you mean a great idea to build a nuclear bomb and set that off then no you know i don't see why it's a good idea to have all this violence yeah there's i i wonder i mean it's not a good idea but i wonder if human history would evolve the way it did without the violence oh i'm sure you're you're right probably uh humans would not have evolved in in the sense that we have but i would hope that uh the course of uh violence in evolution will continue in the way it has so you know there's all sorts of indications um that the importance of violence has been reduced over time and you know this is made famous in stephen pinker's book but others have written about it too that the the frequency of uh death from violence in every country you look at has been declining that's just great and so you know the amazing thing about this is that even when you take the death due to the first world war and the second world war the 20th century appears to have been statistically meaning rates of death per individual the least violent in history so we haven't got very far down the course to non-violence but i don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it i think it's ridiculous frankly you know excuse my frankness uh to to say that uh violence is a good thing um i think that it would be a wonderful concept if we could evolve somehow to a world you know 3 000 years from now where violence is really regarded as uh simply appalling and that you know they look back on our time and can't believe what we were doing yeah but of course violence takes a lot of different shapes as we start to think deeper and deeper about living beings on earth for example the violence would commit and the torture would commit to animals and then perhaps down the line as we talked offline about is with robots and that kind of thing so there there's just so many ways to commit violence to others and some people now talk about violence in the space of ideas which of course to me at least is a bit of a silly notion relative to use that same v word for the space of ideas versus actual physical violence but it may be that a long time from now we see that even violence in the space of ideas is is quite a manifestation of that same kind of violence and so it is interesting where this is headed and i think you're absolutely right a world a non-violent world does seem like a better world i wonder if the constraints on resources somehow make that world more and more difficult especially as we run out of resources well it's got to be very very different from what we're doing nowadays and it's unimaginably different if we could imagine it then maybe we could work towards it at the moment nobody knows how to work towards it well that's kind of the stories of humans as we we don't really know the future we're trying to try to add hog kind of develop it as we go and sometimes get into trouble yeah that's the violence but it you know george orwell's vision in 1984 was of of you know two or three world powers each so powerful that nobody could could diminish the could destroy the other but the notion of an evolutionarily stable relationship among heavily armed world powers just does not seem as though it's reasonable at all that's to say uh you know we've we've now got 170 or 190 nations in the world uh dominated by a few big ones uh all with arms pointing at each other and the notion that we could just carry on having peace talks and making sure that uh these arms uh don't get uh involved in some kind of massive confrontation seems incredibly optimistic some kind of major change has to happen uh whereby you know and some people would like to see all the weapons go that'd be great you know i i'm a member of that that sort of group that tries to to see that happen it's going to be very difficult to see it happen um another kind of concept is the nations themselves will dissolve and will become one one government that itself is a terrifying vision because the capacity for abuse by a single world power would be so problematic and in addition how do you get there without a war in the first place so you know at the moment we we have no reasonable kind of future in mind but i'm sure it's there somewhere it's just that we haven't yet to find it and a lot of people like in the cryptocurrency space argue that you can create decentralized societies if you take away the power from states to define the monetary system so they argue like if you give if if you make the monetary system such that it's disjoint from anyone the control of any one individual any one government then that might be a way to form sort of ad-hoc decentralized societies just they just pop up all over the place that's a really interesting technological uh solution to how to remove the overreach of power from governments yeah that's right absolutely and and it may well be that uh that the future will emerge out of some sort of quite surprising direction uh like that is it nevertheless surprising to you that we have not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons so the mutually assured destruction that we've had for many decades from somebody who studies violence how does that make sense to you well i mean i'm surprised only in the sense that um accidental the the the fact that we have not had an accident yet uh has been quite remarkable yeah because all the accounts are that we've come very close to having very serious accidents where people either side of misread intentions or apparent launches and so on uh so yes i think it is remarkable there is a a nasty um generalization that can be made that uh the longer that um powerful states go uh without having wars then the worst the war is afterwards and you know you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense because basically what's happening uh with these tribal groups that the nations are at the moment is that after a big war like the second world war they established new kinds of dominance relationships and then during the periods of peace what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships change because some nations become poorer some become richer some become more militarily powerful and so on generally economy and military goes hand in hand so you know right now china uh emerged from the war is a relatively low status state and is now high status so if this were chimpanzees you know what would happen is that you would predict a conflict because you need to have a readjustment of the formal dominance relationships to recognize the the new in practice dominance relationships recognized by the economy in the military so the longer that you have of a period of peace following a war then the more these tensions of unresolved changed dominance relationships build up and the longer they take to occur then uh the more uh challenging uh are going to be the conflicts that's a terrifying view because we've been we've been out of conflict for quite a bit that's right maybe it's building up so it's a scary view but on the other hand you know things have changed hugely with the advent of nuclear weapons because at least that conforms to this psychology that is very clear in other animals which is you don't want to get into a fight if you are going to get hurt so that's the whole principle of mad mutually assured destruction and it's doubtless being why powerful nations like america and and russia have not used their nuclear weapons since 1945 the you know so if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches then maybe the fact of mad does fit into human psychology in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions without using them but we haven't yet really faced that challenge you know i mean the soviet union collapsed because of uh the poor economy but with china you know desperate to take back taiwan and america shifting its focus on the pacific the potential for something going wrong is clearly very high so what's the hopeful case that you can make for a long-term surviving and thriving human civilization given all the dangers that we face well i i can't really exactly make one i would just say that we're talking about the dangers obviously the dangers are there yeah um but but what i would sort of think about is um the notion that that surprises come from all sorts of different directions you know and um i mean you you're you work in robotics and you know i can well imagine that there will be advances in robotics and in some way i can't even conceive will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict something about you know by the time chips have been planted in human brains and we're all instantly sharing information in a way that we never did before will this change the nature of uh human existence in such a way that these conflicts get resolved so remove the conflicts but keep some of the magic the beauty of what it means to be human so like still be able to enjoy life the richness of life the full complexity of life because you can remove conflict by giving everybody a pill and then they go to sleep right you still want life to be amazing uh exciting you know uh interesting and so that's where you have to find the balance well it's yes i mean it's all science fiction stuff and and uh so how it's going to work out totally unclear um i don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing i mean first of all you somehow get rid of males i think i think you really need to get rid of males because males are the source of uh of of a major problem which is the lust for power and the resulting conflict but you don't think the males are also a source of beauty and creation no no i mean i i i don't have anything against males as you know as individuals that sort of thing and and males have clearly done a lot i mean they've been incredibly exploratory and creative and what they've done in in art and music has been wonderful and that sort of thing on the other hand i'm not sure there's anything particularly special and i think that probably females could do the same thing just as well when given the chance yes including the dark stuff i i mean a partial part of me is not understanding the so there is a evolutionary distinction between men and women but i tend to believe both men and women if you look out into the future can be destructive can be evil can be greedy can be corrupted by power so if you move males from the picture which are historically connected to this evolution of that we've been talking about that women are going to fill that role quite nicely and then it'll be just the same kind of process we not the same but it'll be new and interesting there's a there's a sense that the the will to power craving power committing violence is somehow coupled with the with all the things that are beautiful about life that if you remove conflict completely if you remove all the evil in the world it it it seems like you're going to um you're not going to have a stable place for the beauty for the goodness like there's always has to be a dragon to fight for the way if you look at human history now you can say the the reason i'm nervous about a sort of utopia where everything is great is every time you look through human history when utopia has been chased you run into a lot of trouble or again sneaks into this evil this craving for power now you could say that's a male problem but i just think it's a human problem and it's not even a human problem it's a chimp problem too it's life on earth problem intelligent life on earth problem so like it's better to um not necessarily get rid of the sources of the darker sides of human nature but more create mechanisms that the kindness the the goodness as the goodness paradox your book that that is incentivized and encouraged empowered well look i don't think it would be utopia if you got rid of the males right and certainly females capable of conflict i just think it's a gamble worth taking if you could actually do it you can certainly find females in history who've done unpleasant things but nevertheless you know we have a very strong evolutionary theory which explains why males benefit more by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do and so if we want to talk about reducing conflict yes then it would reduce it to get rid of males now i understand this is a fantasy yeah and it i think it's a fantasy that people would be able to talk about fairly soon because reproductive technology is getting to the point where it's quite likely that human females could breed without the use of males and so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies it's a it's a really interesting thought experiment i will agree with you that if given two buttons one is get rid of all women and the other buttons get rid of all men um realizing that uh i have a stake in this uh choice uh you're probably getting rid of all men if i wanted to preserve earth and the richness of life on earth i would probably get rid of all men i don't know i don't think you ever stake in it you know i mean but you're saying that because you're a man yeah but i don't see why being a man should make you any more interested in having a male future for the world than a female future you know you've got just as many ancestors who were male as as were female well my problem is i'll have to die well that's going to happen anyway i know but like i prefer to die tomorrow not today you know i you know i prefer to snooze hit the snooze button on the whole mortality thing but it's interesting but this is not suggesting that males have to die in order to make room for females it's just you know you you all you have to do is just say don't let's have any more males born interesting of course you know the difficulty is that that because we're tribal you know some country somewhere would say well we're not going to do that yeah and then guess what they'd take over yeah because they're male so that's why it's impossible to imagine actually happening uh you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna take that and actually think about it i don't know i'm uncomfortable there's a there's a certain kind of woke culture that i've been kind of uncomfortable with because it's not women necessarily it's more just there's a lot of bullying i see there's a lack of empathy and a lack of kindness towards others that's created by that culture so but you're speaking about something else you're speaking about reducing conflict in this world and looking at the basics of our human nature and its origins in the uh evolution of homo sapiens and thinking about which kind of aspects of human nature if we get rid of them we'll make for a better world it's an interesting thought experiment but it is only a thought experiment i mean you know it's got no practical meaning uh right now yeah and and i take your point that um you know males get a hard rap nowadays uh in some ways because uh the balance of uh social power is moving uh against um i mean you know quite rightly in a strong sense of course against all the nasty things that males do but what people sometimes fail to remember is that um life is very hard for males who don't have the power who don't have money who don't have access to women you know i'm sympathetic to uh in cells i i'm not sympathetic to them using violence to solve their problems but i am very sympathetic to the fact that it's not easy simply to be told by um well-off um feminist uh middle-class people uh that you shouldn't behave like this or you shouldn't feel like this because you do yes that's who you are i mean the the in general just empathy and kindness male or female i have uh i believe will be the thing that builds a better world and that that's practiced in different ways from different backgrounds but ultimately you should listen to others and empathize with the experience of others and put more love out there in the world now that's hopefully is the way to reduce conflict uh reduce violence and uh reduce that that whole psychological experience of being powerless in this world problems to become the best version of yourself and that you know but no one's going to disagree with all those fine sentiments right but that yes but that's that's an actionable thing is actually practice empathy right like saying that um somebody should be silenced or just like this group is bad and this group is good i just feel like that's not empathy empathy is understanding the experience of others and like respecting it like i mean that that's that's what it that's what a better world looks like that's what the reduction of conflict looks like it's like as opposed to uh saying my tribe is right your tribe is wrong uh forget the violence and non-violence part that just that act of saying my tribe is right that tribe is wrong removing that from the picture that's the way to make a better world that's the way to reduce the violence i think not necessarily removing the people who are causing the violence you have to get to the source of the problem i don't mean the evolutionary source but the just the the mindset that creates the violence is usually just a lack of empathy for others yeah but you know i mean you can't just teach that because there's our evolutionary psychology puts us in particular directions so you don't think do you think it's possible to learn through practice to resist the basics of our evolutionary psychology the basic forces yeah i mean lots and lots of training you know lots and lots of education uh can do it the the famously most peaceful society uh that anthropologists have recorded uh involves a tremendous amount of of teaching including some punishment you know it's a society in thailand you you have to beat it out of children to make them nice so it's carrot and steak you know the point is that you do not find societies in which people are spontaneously showing the kinds of behaviors that we would all love them to show it requires work it requires work what is your book titled goodness paradox what are the main ideas in this book well the paradox is the fact that humans show extremes in relationship to both violence and non-violence and the violence is that we are one of these few animals in which we use coalitionary proactive violence to kill members of our own species and we do it in large numbers just like a few other species and the non-violence is were particularly extreme in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence and i i told you the story of of how we get there you know so what's so extraordinary about us is that uh most animals uh are either high on both or relatively low on both so chimpanzees are high on proactive violence and reactive violence bonobos are less than chimpanzees on both of those but still hundreds of times more reactively aggressive than humans are what we've done is retain uh proactive violence being high and got a reactive violence really being low and so we have these wonderful societies in which we're all so incredibly nice to each other and tolerant and calm and and can meet strangers and have no problem about um leading to any kind of conflict at the same time as we are one of the worst killing machine species that's never existed so what's so extraordinary about this is that if you look at the political philosophers of the last few hundred years you've got this fight famously between thomas hobbes and jean-jacques rousseau or literally you've got the fight between their followers you know so the followers of hobbes say well hobbes was right because he says that we are naturally violent and you need a leviathan a central government or a king to be able to suppress the violence so we're naturally hurried and we can learn to be good whereas jean-jacques rousseau is interpreted as saying the opposite that we are naturally good and it's only when culture intervenes and and horizontal ideologies come in that we become uncivilized and so people have have had this endless fight between are we naturally corrupt or are we naturally uh kind and and that has gone on you know for years and it's only in the last two or three decades that anthropologists like christopher bohm and bruce naft have said look you know it's obvious what the answer is we are both of these things and what is so exciting now is i think we can understand why we are both and the answer is we come from ancestors that were elevated on proactive aggression that were hunters and killers both of animals and of each other i think you've got to include that as almost certain uh from the past and um and then now we've we've taken our reactive aggression and we've down regulated it and that's given us power it's given us power because once you get rid of the alpha male once the beta males take over and force selection in favor of a more tolerant less reactively aggressive individual the effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable of focusing on things other than conflict and so we have social groups in which individuals instead of constantly being on edge in the way that chimpanzees are with each other um are able to interact in ways that enable them to share looking at a tool together or share their food together or pass ideas from one to another or support each other when they're ill or whatever the issue is cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective so you asked earlier you know what did i think about why sapiens was able to expand at the expense of neanderthals so dramatically around 40 000 years ago and the answer is uh that whatever it was it had something to do with the sapiens ability to cooperate yeah that was what gave them bigger groups that's what enabled them to have a far more effective way of living and i suspect it was to do with the weapons and and military aspects but even if it wasn't that the the greater cooperation that sapiens were showing uh would have been hugely important so sapiens then had groups of uh you know who knows exactly how big they were but um uh scores of of people uh to judge from their remains uh whereas the neanderthals were living in um widely separated small groups of you know maybe maybe as many as 15 or 20 people sometimes um where they saw others so rarely that they were inbreeding at high levels you know fathers uh having babies with their daughters very different world very different world and that's probably what our world was like before we got sapiens before we got serpents and it's fascinating that there was that kind of violence against so once you get the get rid of the alpha males you have now the freedom to uh to have kindness amongst the beta the beta males like not not kindness but collaboration that's the better word yes right much more correlation not just among the males but among the beta males but also among the gamma males and the uh and the females yeah i don't know what a gamma male is but i imagine there's a whole alphabet well i don't know about hill alphabet but i think the the big letters are the married men yeah and and the and the unmarried men ah you know because now the married men were had a problem with the unmarried men right i mean you you see it in ethnographies of hunters and gatherers recently where uh the unmarried men would be given rules such as i mean the very extreme rule in northern australia was uh you cannot come to the camp uh for months you have to go away and live uh somewhere out in the bush yes because we don't want you anywhere near our wives and and then another kind of you know rule is um if you are in camp you must be in the fire light all the time otherwise we don't know what you're doing out in the dark so you're real enough to control them because you know the men who had lots of wives did not want those horrid bachelors sneaking around the piece i love this you also wrote the book titled catching fire how cooking made us human what's the central idea in this book the subtitle how cooking made us human refers not to homo sapiens but to homo erectus so human there means the genus homo and homo erectus is the first full member of the genus homo in the sense that it looked like us just with a sort of slightly robust more robust build and a smaller brain i and the central idea of catching fire is that it was the um control of fire that was responsible for the emergence of homo erectus and therefore the genus homo which happened two million years ago and it was a an evolution from a um a line of australopithecines and australopithecines are the creatures from whom we evolved they were present in africa from something like six or seven million years ago up to um actually up to one million years ago and then a branch led off to homo around 2 million years ago and the way to think of australopithecines is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright so they were erect bipedal walkers they were like chimpanzees in the sense that uh they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee they were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee a little bit smaller actually and they had big jaws because they were still eating raw food they had big teeth and big jaws and then around two million years ago the line of australopithecines which ended with a an intermediate species a kind of missing link area because it's not missing called habilis sometimes called homo habilis but more properly i in my view call australopithecus habilis that gave rise to homo erectus and homo erectus here's how different it was it had a smaller mouth a smaller jaw smaller teeth and to judge from its ribs and pelvis smaller gut in addition it had lost what australopithecines all had which was adaptations for climbing in the trees and that meant that homo erectus must have slept on the ground and since it slept on the ground it should have been able to defend itself somehow against predators and i can't think of any way they could have done that unless they had fire so there are two major clues to why it was with homo erectus that our ancestors first acquired the control of fire one is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos and all the other primates do and the other is that there was this striking reduction throughout the gut reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus and in the gut itself and that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans which is that our guts are about two-thirds of the size of what they would be if we at raw food to judge by the great apes so at some point in our revolution we acquired the skill of cooking and skill of controlling fire at no time between two million years ago and the present do we see any changes in our anatomy that can as it were justify uh the enormous change that happens when you are an animal that learns to control fire but at two million years ago we have exactly what you'd expect namely the guts becoming smaller because the food is becoming softer and much more easy to digest so you don't have to work so hard in your body to digest it and as i say a commitment to sleeping on the ground which i think you'd be absolutely crazy to do nowadays uh on a moonless night uh in the middle of serengeti unless you had fire i've slept out quite a lot in various parts of africa uh in the bush and you will not catch me just lying on the ground um in an area with lots of predators unless i got a fire with me you're going to get eaten you're going to get terrified and you're going to get eaten okay so there's a million questions i want to ask so one is is it very naturally coupled the discovery of controlled fire and cooking with fire is that an obvious leap well what here's what we know we know that um all the animals that we've tested like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw okay so this is true for all the great apes you know we've tested them um that's fascinating by the way why is that that's just like a property of food i suppose yes i think what it is is that um animals are always looking for any kind of way to get food that is easier to digest and there are various signals in the food such as the amount of sugar there the amount of free amino acids because the amino acids can be tasted and the physical qualities of the food be particularly important how tough the food is always prefer softer food provided it it feels safe you know it tastes safe and these kinds of sensory cues are all there in cooked food you know it's uh it's soft it doesn't have so many uh toxins it's not so noxious to taste um easier to chew so everyone loves it spontaneously uh your dogs and your cats prefer cooked food or raw food well maybe you can say that's the consequence of domestication but even you know as i say all of the great apes not you test naive ones and uh they prefer it cooked if they can so so then obvious once you have fire you're going to accidentally discover that food changes when you apply fire to it and then there's going it's going to be the crate the big crazy new fad yeah you took the words out of my mouth i mean if if they have fire at all and you know their food rolls into it five minutes later it tastes better than before how big of an invention from an engineering perspective do you think is the discovery of fire do you think for the uh for homo erectus homo sapiens do you think it's the greatest invention ever yeah i think i think that that the control of fire has been ultimately responsible for essentially how grandiose do i want to be here you know the entire human story uh going back to homo it is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal and perhaps the biggest way in which it is likely to have changed this is it reduced the difficulty of making a large brain so you know the story here is that the constraints on brain size are energetic you and i have brains that are something like 2.5 of our body weight uh it consumes around 25 of all of our calories so it's disproportionate there are other expensive organs in our body as well such as the heart and what's different about their brain is that in addition to us being able to fuel it in a way that other animals can't we also have reasons for wanting to have an even bigger brain whereas we don't want an even bigger heart so what those reasons are is unclear but with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain cooking makes it possible because it's supplying more calories and it is enormously reducing the amount of time that it takes to chew your food so if you were a gorilla and you wanted to have a bigger brain you might say okay well let's just eat some more but gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day in the sense that they are eating for maybe seven or eight hours a day in in some seasons uh that's just chewing and then they've got to sit around and digest their food because they can't just eat all the time they've got to take a break while the food is digested in the stomach and then passed into the gut so the stomach is already full so basically gorillas are eating about the maximum rate already so how does a gorilla get a bigger brain it doesn't it's actually got a smaller brain relative to his body size than chimpanzee does and um and that's the basic problem for our ancestors then you come along and cook and all of a sudden you can get an increased amount of energy from your food you are spending much less energy on digesting your food you know there are 25 bodily processes or more that are involved in digesting your food making the acid that takes the proteins apart maintaining the brush border where the molecules are taken across the gut wall and so on that all costs it costs you to digest your food it costs less if you cook your food so you get a net gain in the amount of energy and you are reducing the amount of time from uh in our case of our ancestors probably around fifty percent of the day to chewing to nowadays one hour a day chewing so all of a sudden you've got hours a day in which to do other things and to use those those brains that you've now enabled to grow so with homo erectus you start the process of getting a bigger brain and famously you know throughout the whole period of the evolution of the genus homo you have a steadily increasing size of brain until right at the end when it actually gets smaller but that's a different story which end is this which are we talking about homo sapiens yeah in with homo sapiens you've got a smaller brain uh from um people haven't got it exactly down but at least 30 000 years ago it starts declining and so the fascinating thing about that is that all domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild ancestors and i the domestication is intricately connected to this brain size you think and do yeah exactly so i think what we're seeing in humans is uh is that same manifestation um and then the fascinating question is is why and the only point i would want to make about this is that there's no evidence that in the small brain domesticates they're losing say an average about 15 percent of brain size uh in those small brain domestics compared to their wild ancestors there's no indication of a loss of cognitive ability so i think what's going on is that uh it's a it's a younger brain it's a more pedomorphic brain in looking like the juveniles of the ancestor but just as our kids are very smart and can learn amazing things compared to adults you know all they lack is wisdom and maturity but they you know in terms of sheer cognitive ability they got it and i think that's the same with domesticated animals compared to their wild ancestors and probably therefore with um homo sapiens say 30 000 years ago compared to to their ancestors so we have smaller brains than neanderthals size richard isn't everything exactly what's the connection between fire cooking and the eating of meat do you which came first do you think uh humans starting to enjoy the eating of meat or the the the invention of fire and the use of fire for cooking i think that fire increased the using of meat but um but the fact that chimpanzees uh really like to hunt and kill meat as do bonobos certainly puts us in so they they those two species have a common ancestor with us going six seven million years ago and it was from that common ancestor that you get the australopithecine line it's very likely therefore astrologians were eating meat when they could get it which wouldn't be very often because they wouldn't be very good sprinters but nevertheless they would occasionally be able to get some meat and i bet they loved it all the time and basically all primates like meat if they can get it almost all of them but i think fire would have been very important um for a couple of reasons uh one is that once you eat fire once you eat your food cooked then you're saving yourself time by saving yourself time you can free up the opportunity to go and hunt more because hunting is a high risk high gain activity there's every risk that you will get nothing on one particular afternoon that you go off looking for opportunities to kill but it's high gain because when you do get something you bring down a kudu then you've got a serious amount of meat what did males and females do with the time they were saving from not having to chew their food i think that in the case of males it's very reasonable to think they spent a greatly increased amount of time hunting so chimpanzees they hunt maybe two or three times a month and the average hunt length is 20 minutes with humans they're hunting maybe uh 20 times a month and the average hunt length is six hours yeah so it's a huge difference yeah so and that's possible because the time was available because they were cooking less chewing more hunting you got it the other thing is that the meat is so much nicer yeah yeah so when a chimpanzee kills a monkey and i mean they are so excited about killing a monkey you know they are so excited about going into the hunt and uh when they make the kill then there's screams everywhere and uh some try to seize it and capture it and take it away from the others and eventually the strongest one has it and the others sit around begging and trying to get some and tear it off and so yeah they all love it there are others who he often goes to the top of a tree in order to be able to get away from all of these beggars and scavengers and while he's there drops of blood or little scraps will fall down to the bottom and the junior members of society you know the females and young and that sort of thing um they they are racing through to find a particular leaf that's got a drop of blood on it so they can lick it i mean they love it but yes it takes them a lot of time to chew it i mean it's the same thing as for cooked food in general so um they are getting meats very slowly into their bodies and there sometimes comes a time when they just say i've had enough of this i need real food and they'll drop the meat and go off and and eat fruit again because they can get fruit into their bodies so much faster than they can get meat um so once they're cooking that problem is solved and they can eat the meat so this is much more readily so i think that meat eating would become important for two reasons with cooking so the key uh not to oversimplify but the key moments in human history are with the homo erectus the discovery of fire and the use of fire for cooking and then with uh homo sapiens the the beta males killing off the alpha males so that the cooperation can exist and cooperation leads to communication and language and ideas the sharing of ideas that kind of thing well yes the only thing i would modify on that is that you have to ask how is it that the beta males were able to kill the alpha male right and we now know that although chimpanzees do kill males within their own group sometimes it's not a process of killing the alpha male it's taking advantage of opportunity when some male gets into a bad position but it's not a systematic ability to kill the alpha male and you can see see why you know because they don't have language and without language it's very difficult to know how confident you can be of the support of others against a particular individual within your own group yes when you're attacking someone from another group that problem is solved you know we all hate the yes you know those guys but the alpha male has got alliances within his group some of those allies might be willing to to turn against him some of them might be harboring deep feelings of resentment but how does anyone else know that so in other words i think that you have to have some kind of language that is pretty good to solve the problems of gaining confidence that five of you say you know or some some number um can trust each other in this final attack and you know even nowadays it's it's difficult uh you know when you mention stalin it's like why was everybody terrified any dictator that takes control why is all of us as individuals terrified when you know there's millions of us that's right and so like that we lack the language because our basic psychology of fear overtakes us like who can we talk to who can we talk to and not get killed ourselves exactly that's right but you're yeah do you have this intuition that some kind of language was developing along with this process of beta males taking over yes yes i mean once you have sufficient language to be able to have the beta males conspiring to kill the alpha male then you have selection uh in favor of cooperation and tolerance as we spoke about and at that point there will be uh increased ability to communicate and the language will get richer and better and better so yes absolutely positive feedback loop once you get the situation started can you maybe comment on um the full complexity and richness of the human mind through this process we've been casually saying cooking [Music] fire and uh beta males leading to cooperation but how does the the beauty of the human mind emerge from all of this is there other further steps we need to understand or is it as simple as this language emerging from taking over the alpha male and the cooperation or am i also over romanticizing how amazing the human mind is is it just like one small step in a long journey of evolution well if the beauty of the human mind is the ability of us all to be creative to explore i that's one kind of beauty another kind of beauty is the empathy that we can show and we think of that as beautiful because it is a kind of rare and uh and special ability compared to uh the sort of ordinary selfishness that can commonly predominate um i suppose we have to think of you know different sources for those those two types i suppose you know a general answer is that there has been selection in favor of bigger brains which probably in general has been associated with increasing cognitive ability and as that has happened i the complexity of life has increased because people have more and more complex highly differentiated strategies in response to each other's more complex highly differentiated strategies and we get to a point where there is deception and self-deception there is some a manipulation of ideas through stories that we invent and stories that we pass on um you know i guess all i'm wanting to say is that there is a world of the mind that evolves in response to these platforms that are put there you know the platform of increasing brain size and therefore cognitive ability made possible by uh increased energy supply the platform of uh cooperation and tolerance in a world in which there remains a lot of conflict and therefore a need to respond to the conflict and manipulate your allies appropriately you know i don't see beauty as coming uh either kind of beauty is coming so totally independently of these things um you know i don't think there's a selection for staring into the sunset and creating poetry yes you know but um i guess sexual selection you know males wanting to impress females in different ways will lead to um them wanting to very poetry well yes you know show off yeah in all the different ways so all of these are natural consequences of uh just coming up with strategies of how to cooperate and how to achieve certain ends so that's just like a natural i mean we haven't spoken about sexual selection but but that is a really important part of it you know they trying to out-compete each other in um normally without any physical conflict uh just in order to be able to be chosen by mates of the opposite sex and and that that is certainly a major source of creativity so you've studied chimps you also all the other relatives gorillas what do you find beautiful and fascinating about chimps about gorillas about humans maybe you can paint the the whole picture of that evolutionary that little local pocket of the evolutionary tree how are we related what is the common ancestor what are the interesting differences i know i'm asking a million questions but um can you paint a map of what are chimps gorillas and humans like how we're related and what you find fascinating about each in africa straddling the equator there is a strip of rainforest that relies on the combination of high temperatures and rainfall that you get around the equator that rainforest goes into about 22 countries and throughout those countries uh you have chimpanzees although they've gone extinct in two of them i in uh just a fraction of them but i was at sorry five countries uh you've got gorillas where there are mountains and in one country on the left bank of the great congo river you have bonobos so in the african forest you've got these three african apes the only african apes all of which are very similar in much of their way of life they walk on their knuckles through the forest looking for fruit trees and eating herbs when they can't find fruits gorillas represent the oldest chain so about 10 million years ago maybe as recently as 8 million years ago the ancestral gorillas broke off from the ancestor leading to chimps and bonobos and humans so they probably remained very similar now to what very similar to what they were then they were probably um the largest apes uh living in mountain areas and uh spending more time uh eating just uh herbs stems not so vitally dependent on fruit and living in um if there was like the present uh groups up to about 50 stable groups with one alpha male who was in charge gorillas are wonderfully slow and inquisitive compared to chimps and bonobos yeah and i had the privilege of um spending uh a week or two with gorillas um at diane fossey's camp when before she was murdered and i i i went out with two women kelly and bob to a particular group and there was a young female in the group called simba and simba approached us and stared at the two women and then she came towards me and she very deliberately reached out her knuckles and touched me on the forehead she was watched in doing this by a young male who was quite keen on her and he was called digit and about five minutes later digit stood in front of us on the path and kelly was in front of me uh and then there was bob and then there was me and he came charging down the path and he sidestepped around kelly and he sidestepped around barb and me he just knocked with his arm and sent me flying about five yards into the bushes and i loved the way that that was a very deliberate response and i loved the way that simba had been so interested in me and and held my eye chimps and bonobos never hold your eye but gorillas really look as though they're trying to figure out what are you thinking about that was a species that has goes back for something like 10 million years in that situation was there a game being played um well i mean i i felt that digit was telling me i don't want you messing with with simba or was simba using you oh i see well that's a fun idea uh i don't see why she should be using me but you mean testing how strongly the affection preferred to intervene too yeah exactly oh that's that's that's comes straight out of a sort of adolescent to high school playbook all right well that's that's no no there's nothing wrong with it brother for that um yeah i don't know i never thought of that and you never know so so yeah so okay so this is an ancient branch of the evolutionary tree uh this gorilla that led to gorillas gorillas um so then the next thing that happened on the evolutionary tree was uh six or seven million years ago when uh you have uh the line uh between chimps and bonobos on the one hand and humans on the other splitting and basically what happened is that at that point a chimp-like ancestor uh leaves the forest gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts and that becomes the astrological scenes and meanwhile the chimpanzees and bonobo ancestor continues in the forest and later what happens is that one branch of that crosses the congo river and becomes the bonobos that was only about two million years ago maybe one million years ago now the chimps that remained in the forest throughout this time and occupied all the countries across uh from east west to east africa now um again we assume that they're pretty similar to the ones that live nowadays whether some variation from from west to east and these are animals that live in social communities of between say 20 and 200. they have a lot of them in one group but they never come together in a single unit these are they share an area a community territory and that area is defended by males and within it females wander and bring up their young independently and the females are very scared about the possibility that males will be mean to their infants and in order to avoid them doing that they do their best to mate with every single male in the group multiple times as if to give a memory in that mail of yeah yeah i remembered you so i'm not going to be mean to your baby so what's wonderful about gyms well you know as we've spoken about them yeah they are creative and um uh and so amazingly human-like but i love the the sort of you know the quiet moments and and here's one um i've got uh uh two chimps who are uh grooming each other on a day when they are utterly exhausted they've walked um 11 kilometers the day before up and down hills and on this particular day all they do is they get to one tree and they eat from that tree and other than that they only walk about 100 yards and they go back to sleep in the nest in which they woke up so they're utterly exhausted um and they're just eating non-stop because they're trying to recover uh their energy and this is uh hugh and charlie and we think they were probably brothers so we never actually got the genetic evidence to prove it well um i never remember now who it is but let's say that they both come down from the tree and um they're both carrying branches of the food they're eating actually seeds from these branches they're both engaged even in the midday sun when they want to come down and unshade themselves for a bit on the ground um they're still eating but then charlie finishes his branch and he starts grooming hugh and hugh continues eating from his branch charlie eventually gets bored of this after a few minutes and he reaches out and he lifts the branch from which hugh is still taking seeds and puts it over his head and puts it behind his back as far as possible away from you hugh doesn't do anything he just finishes his mouthful and then he turns to charlie and grooms him so this very polite way of saying will you groom me please has worked then hugh grooms around charlie's back and around our to the right side and then down his arm to what point where he can reach the branch again and then he picks up the branch and continues nonchalantly right yeah so in other words you know a very sort of simple little strategy yeah but it just shows the the courtesy with which they can treat each other and you know the days i love with gym so when you see that sort of thing or when you see mothers just lying in a sunlit patch in the forest with babies bouncing on top of them um just having a a wonderful peaceful time and that's you know that's what most of their lives are like so chimpanzees are the species that kind of unites the rest of the apes because a gorilla is in many ways a just a big version of a chimpanzee if you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee in your mind to be bigger it basically turns into a gorilla and then bonobos on the left bank of the congo river are a like a domesticated form of of chimpanzee but obviously humans didn't domesticate them so they're self-domesticated they are less aggressive and they show all the marks of domestication that domesticated animals do in compared to wild animals in their bones so they have reduced differences between males and females in which the males are more like females they have smaller brains they have shorter faces smaller teeth and smaller bodies all the things that domesticate animals show and and bonobos live in this environment in a strikingly peaceful way compared to the chimpanzees there's no indication that they will have these aggressive kills and enough data now to show that there's a statistical difference in the frequency of which it would happen and um and bonobos are famously uh erotic the females have enlarged sexual parts which swell to a particularly large size compared to the female chimpanzees and the females have a lot of interactions with each other in which they excitedly rub their clitorises together and um and appear to have orgasms and wow these occur in the context of um some kind of social tension and they sometimes happen before this sounds happen after the social tension and they seem to be devices uh these interactions for um ensuring that everyone's friends and uh reducing the chances that they're actually going to get into a fight this is a kind of uh conflict resolution through uh through through sex or some kind of pleasurable sexual experience well it's often characterized as make love not war that's right make love not war okay uh you uh mentioned to me offline that you you have a deep love for nature if we look at the world today how can we ensure that the beautiful parts of nature remain a big part of our lives as human beings and in the way we think about it in the way we also keep it around preserve it you know we keep it part of our minds and part of our world it's a very difficult question because every time there is a conflict between conservation of a natural habitat and allowing people to get a little bit of extra food for their babies then naturally the tendency is for the humans to win so we have this steady erosion in the face of tremendous efforts to conserve nature we have a continuing steady erosion of habitats and all the species and the numbers are always in the wrong direction occasionally you get sort of wonderful little examples of something being saved but the overall trend is clear and it's very difficult to see how one can ever escape that because it's not human i know that we are essentially a single tribe to want to save an elephant if it means killing 20 humans so i think the only way in which we can really conserve is if we uh put tremendous effort into conserving the very best representative areas of nature often this will be the national parks that already exist and what we have to do is to make them so valuable that actually it is worth it in terms of human survival to be able to keep those sorts of places and you know that's the attitude that uh my colleagues and i have taken in uganda where we want to keep the kibani national park alive which has got the largest population chimpanzees in uganda and it's got elephants and wonderful birds and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on and um and visitors and lots and lots of visitors it may be that we're going to have to have huge increases in the amount of charges that you pay for eco-tourism and you need to make sure the ecotourism is done right in other places you will keep nature there because it's useful for um maintaining the climate uh you're bringing rain uh maybe uh you can in some places uh convince people of the sheer sort of aesthetics of keeping nature that even over the long term presidents whose job it is to look for the future of the country will be persuaded that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons but overall what is required is for people in the rich countries to do much more investment than they have so far in maintaining both the natural places in their own countries and in the tropics and if you look at africa you know i mean the population trends are that nigeria may become the most populous country in the world i think within a century future of african habitats you know it's clear what's going to happen in general there's going to be a huge conversion towards agricultural land uh i heard ed wilson speak years ago about the prospect of the entire globe being turned into a single human feedlot it's going to take a lot to avoid that he is out there calling for half the earth to be devoted to nature it's incredibly ambitious and incredibly optimistic but unless you have really exciting goals probably nothing will be achieved yeah i mean there's something to me like when i visit new york and i see central park and somehow constructed a situation where you preserve this park in the middle probably some of the most expensive land in the world the fact that that's possible gives me hope that you can do this kind of preservation at a global scale perhaps for just the aesthetic reasons of just valuing the beauty and um just respecting our origins of having come from the earth we are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees bonobos and gorillas as our um close relatives still living on the earth you know we're unlucky that we don't have astrology and other species of homo but we're still lucky to have those because they are incredibly closely related to us compared to what most animals have you know there are many animals that don't have any close relatives to them on the earth but not only are they they're relatively close but they teach us so much about ourselves you know they the similarities between them and ourselves raise questions that we can then test about the extent to which our own behavioral propensities are derived from the same evolutionary stock as in those great apes well how much is that worth you know i mean we could spend billions going to the mars to find evidence of bacteria there and that's fascinating too but we should be spending billions on this earth in order to make sure that we have i don't know how to say it you know substantial representative populations are these close relatives yeah that we can meet there's something um like space tourism when you go out into space and you look back down on earth that's to a lot of people including myself is worth a lot but why is that worth a lot is because you uh it's humbling and beautiful in the same way that meeting our close evolutionary relatives is humble and and beautiful just to know that this this is what we come from this is who we are not just for the understanding or the science of it but just like something about just the beauty of witnessing this um and it's again it's both humbling and empowering that this place is fragile and we're damn lucky to be here yes unfortunately the problems are incredibly difficult to solve and there is no one solver you know it has to happen from a network of potentially cooperating people but but i mean you're so right about it being daunting to to think about what it looks like from space and i love the view that herman muller expressed of uh being able to go out from space and he said the whole of life uh would look like a kind of rust on the planet yeah so the aliens were to visit i'm not sure they would notice the life they would probably notice the trees or ocean it's it's a kind of rust but let me ask the big ridiculous philosophical question of what is the meaning of this rust what do you think is the meaning of life on earth what is the meaning of our human intelligent life well i think it's very clear that um we have an evolutionary story uh that uh is only getting challenged around the edges you know we we have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life and the meaning is you know we are here as a consequence of materialistic processes that began uh in our sense uh you know with the establishment of the earth the four and a half billion years ago whatever it was and then water and oxygen and and so on um and you know we are the astonishing uh uh consequence of um the evolution of of cells and and multicellular organisms uh the word random is the wrong word to use unless you understand what it means you know it didn't happen by chance but a lot of random events had to happen to make this possible and those random events of course are the production of uh appropriate mutations but the um you know the meaning of life is there is no meaning it's the you know the really big mystery of life is why is there a universe and that same y propagates itself through the whole of it through the whole process of it for the emergence of planets the virgins first of all galaxies of star systems of planets of the proteins required to construct the single cell organisms and the single cell organism becoming complex organisms and uh some of the clever fish crawling out onto the land and and the whole of it and then there's fire some some clever uh clever guy or lady invented fire and then now here we are uh it just does seem speaking as a human kind of special they were able to reflect on the whole thing where the whole wonderful story is so much more interesting than the stories produced by religion yeah it is it is beautiful but it just seems special that us humans are able to write religions and construct stories yeah and and also do science that seems uh that seems kind of amazing it seems like the universe is such that it it um it creates beings like us that are able to investigate it and that and that that's why there's this longing for why it's just uh such a beautiful little pocket of complexity created by the universe it seems like um it seems like there should be a y but maybe there's just an infinite number of universes and this is the one that uh led to this particular set of humans even without an infinite number of universes i bet there's an infinite number of intelligent beings throughout this universe yeah now that we know how many planets are have the right sort of conditions you know which is what i can't remember a lot you know it's some significant percentage of all planets um then then there are apparently billions of planets and there's every i mean things happen so quickly on earth you know once you've got water then uh you've got life and um it did not take long for for life to evolve in in the big scheme of things and if you think you look out there say there's a nearly infinite number of intelligent civilizations one dimension you could look at is the proclivity to violence they have it's interesting to think what level of violence is useful for extending the life of a civilization so we have a particular set of violence in our history maybe being too peaceful is a problem in the early days uh maybe being too violent quite obviously is as a problem so you look at viruses what kind of viruses on earth propagate and succeed if you're too deadly that's a big problem uh if you're not deadly enough that's also a problem so so that is a fascinating exploration of i don't see any evidence i don't see where you're coming from when you say that being too peaceful is a problem well because so i'll say it this way death is a way to get rid of suboptimal solutions so violence but there's lots of ways to die without violence right to me death in itself is violence and you you can i mean a lot of people that talk about for example longevity and and disease and all that kind of stuff they see death is uh this is the way they they talk about it and it's interesting to philosophically think of it that way death is it's like mass murder that's happening it's like people that try to from a biological perspective help extend life they see that you're you're helping the most the biggest atrocity in the history of human civilization from their perspective is not allocating all our resources to solving death right because death is a kind of violence it is the kind of murder that we're allowing to be committed on us by nature and so so the flip side of that is death makes way for new life for new ideas and so that's but but that's got nothing to do with with peace versus war you know i mean you you have animals that are very very peaceful but but they evolved just in the same way as as other animals do they they just don't do it with with death caused by violence and violent death is premature death surely i mean you know i don't mind about people dying um you know what what i mind about is people dying uh in the in in their youth prematurely but some people would say all death is premature it certainly feels that way it's uh died too soon anyone who's ever died died too soon yeah well i mean if we can become like sequoias you know and and live for hundreds of years and thousands of years that would be great do you ponder your own mortality are you afraid of death i don't think i'm afraid of it um you know i'm reconciled to the fact it's going to happen um i i just feel frustrated because i enjoy life you know and i don't want to to leave the party yeah it's kind of a fun party i don't want to leave the party either so however we got here we made one heck of an awesome party and you're right uh having a party with a little bit less violence in it is an even more fun party richard i'm deeply honored that you spent time with me today your work is amazing it's includes some of the deepest thinking about our human history and the nature of human civilization so again thank you so much for talking today it's an honor oh thanks for your great questions it's a really fun conversation thanks for listening to this conversation with richard wrangham to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from jane goodall the greatest danger to our future is apathy thank you for listening and hope to see you next time