Kind: captions
Language: en
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 in studying the behavior of
chimps and since then has done a lot of
seinal 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 Freedman podcast. To
support it, please check out our
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here's my conversation with Richard
Rangham.
You've said that we are much less
violent than our close living relatives,
the chimps. Can you elaborate on this
point of uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh
the uh the study which is particularly
striking is one of uh people living as
um hunter gatherers in a really um
upsetting kind of environment, namely um
people in Australia uh living in a place
where they got a lot of alcohol abuse.
Uh there's a lot of domestic violence.
It's all a sort of
a society that is um you know as bad
from the point of view of violence as an
ordinary society can get. Uh there's
excellent data on the frequency with
which people actually have physical
violence and hit each other. And we can
compare that to uh data from several
different sites comparing uh we're
looking at chimpanzeee and bonobo
violence.
And the uh 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, u physically engage is
sometime between 500 and a thousand
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 and much else besides
and uh that is all proactive violence.
You know, all of that is is gangs of
people
um making deliberate decisions to go off
and 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 armies try and work. And um and
there it turns out that humans and
chimpanzees are in a very similar kind
of state. That is to say, if you look at
the the rate of death from chimpanzees
conducting proactive coalitionary
violence, uh it's very similar in many
ways to what you see in humans. So we're
not downregulated 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. Uh so this was
discovered first in 1974. It was
observed first 1974
um which was about the time that um the
first uh major study of chimpanzees in
the wild by Jane Goodall uh had been
going for uh something like five years
uh during of
um the chimpanzees being observed
wherever they went. Mhm.
Until then, they'd been observed at a
feeding station where Jane was luring
them into um to be observed by seeing
bananas, which is great. She had learned
a lot, but she didn't learn what was
happening at the edges of their ranges.
Mhm.
So, five years later, um 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 um uh
chimps in this case uh shouting uh at a
bunch of other chimps 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 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. Um, 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 um so
damaged that they'll 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 Lorent
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.
Mhm.
Uh, 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 or 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. Um 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 uh she
famously began her studies not as a
qualified person um in terms of uh
education
uh but uh qualified only by enthusiasm
and considerable experience even in her
early 20s with nature.
So she's courageous in the sense of
being able to you know take on uh
challenges. The thing that is very
impressive about her is um her total
fidelity to the observations.
Uh very unwilling to extend
uh beyond the observations. Uh you know
waiting until they mount up and you've
really got a confident picture.
um 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 uh
of of GMI this particular community of
Kazaka about 60 individuals
uh so GMI was in Tanzania on uh Lake
Tangana. She was there initially with
her mother and then alone for uh two or
three years of really intense
observation. Um and then slowly joined
by other people. Um 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 the larger scientific world
initially her adviserss at at Cambridge
they said well you know we don't know
how to handle that because you've got to
treat all these animals as the same
basically because um
there there is no research tradition of
thinking about uh personalities. Well,
now whatever it is 60 years later,
the study of personalities is uh is a
very rich part of the study of animal
behavior. Um at any rate the 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 uh 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.
Mhm. So what is the process of
observation like this uh 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 uh
that it's very easy uh to to make those
projections as you say. The process
involves um making very clear
definitions of of what a behavior is. Um
you know aggression
can be defined in terms of um a forceful
hit, a bite and so on. um 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. U 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. Uh so the uh the sort
of formal system is that you build up a
pattern of the relationships based on a
a description of their different types
of interactions, their aggressive and
their 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 um
you know relatively friendly, relatively
uh uh aggressive, competitive based on
the frequency of these types of
interactions. And so one can talk in
terms of uh individuals having a
relationship which on the scores of
friendliness is two standard deviations
outside the mean.
I mean you know it's
in which direction? Sorry. Uh both
directions.
Well, I mean, you know, there would 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, uh, and by the
way finding that those things are
correlated with each other. Mhm. So it's
possible to define uh a friendship with
a capital F in a very systematic way and
and to compare that uh between uh
individuals but also between um
communities of chimpanzees u 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? Cuz you're tracking these
individuals that are full of life and
intelligence for for long periods of
time. Plus, as a human, especially in
those days for for Jane, she's alone
observing it. It 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
she regrets to some extent how close she
became. Um and the the problem is not
just from the humans. The problem is
from the chimpanzees as well because uh
they do things that are um extremely
affectionate if you like. You know um at
one point Jane offered a a ripe fruit
Mhm.
to a chimpanzeee 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.
Um
no thank you.
Right. Um
Oh is almost like thank you and uh
returning the affection by giving the
fruit if if they did so.
You know it was a gentle squeeze. I mean
chimpes could squeeze you very hard as
occasionally has happened.
Um some chimps are aggressive to people
um and others are friendly. Uh 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 Jo in
GMI 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 just to be informed about it. So
uh all of this is a temptation to be
very firmly resisted and uh 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.
Uh, 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 GMI. So after Jane had done
the um you know very obvious thing when
you're first engaged in this um 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 one person. He killed a baby uh
that he he he took from a mother uh a
human baby that he took off her hip when
he met her on the path.
So, you know, it's a reminder that we're
dealing with um a species that are
rather humanlike in the range of
emotions they have, in the capacities
they have, and even uh in the strength
they have, they are uh you in many ways
stronger than humans. So, it's uh uh you
you've got to be careful.
So, 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 uh they will kill they will
kill not just strangers um they can kill
uh 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 the this is a
longived individual. Obviously these
killings can't happen 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. Um they are very strong to
support each other. They very much
depend on their um their close
friendships
which they express through uh physical
contact and particularly through through
grooming.
So grooming occurs when one individual
approaches another uh 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. Uh 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 a
you know a major expression of interest
in somebody else.
When did your interest in this one
particular aspects of chimp 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 GMI with Jane Good and was
studying feeding behavior. Mhm.
But during that time we were seeing and
I say 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 uh the start of my interest
because it was such chilling evidence of
uh 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 would be of interest to us.
Mhm. 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 has seen that the societies
were dominated politically by males,
coalitions of males. All of these things
of course resonate so closely with
humans.
Mhm.
And then it turns out that in contrast
to conventional wisdom at the time, uh
the chimpanzees were capable of hunting
and killing members of neighboring
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 the
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 uh 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 um uh sin and and God and 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 as occurred in
chimpanzees
and in both species. uh it has evolved
because of its uh evolutionary
significance. In other words, because
it's been uh helpful to the individuals
who have practiced it and uh now we know
that uh as I mentioned other species do
this as well. In fact, you know, wolves
um which this is this is a really kind
of ironical observation.
Conrad Lurren who I mentioned had been
the person who thought that human
aggression in the form of killing
members of your 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 uh
spats uh 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 uh and the other uh might put their
jaws on the neck but will not bite.
Mhm.
Okay. So now it turns out that if you
study 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.
that 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 chimpanzeee communities are
much more violent than others because of
things like the frequency with which a
large party of males is likely to meet a
a lone victim and that's going to depend
on the local ecology.
But you know, so the overall um answer
to the question of what do 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 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
common place.
Mhm.
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
um chimps together that increase the
chance of violence or is is violence
still fundamentally part of the
individual? like would the would an
individual be as violent as they might
be as part of a group?
If we're talking about uh killing
killing
then um violence in the sense of killing
is very much associated with uh a group
and the reason is that individuals uh
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 uh rises
sufficiently for them to be motivated to
do it.
uh the
the average number of chimpanzeee males
that attack a single male in uh
something like 50 observations that have
accumulated in the last 50 years uh from
various different study sites is eight 8
to one
now sometimes it can go as low as uh 3
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
on another foot, another male on an arm,
another male on another arm. Now you
have an immobilized victim with, uh,
four individuals capable of just doing
the damage.
Mhm.
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. Mhm.
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 prefer 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
the 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 you have to understand that uh
these things are happening at high speed
um in thick vegetation.
Yes. mostly so that they they have not
been filmed carefully. You know, we we
have a few little glimpses of them from
one or two people like David Watts who'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 you know, it is possible. And 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 uh than in in GMI National
Park in Tanzania. It's conceivable
that's just chance. We don't have real
numbers now, but what is this? Um I
can't remember the exact numbers, but
you know 10 versus 15 or something. Um
so 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
uh 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 of what they know about that. Um I
think that uh the way to think about the
motivation
is uh rather like uh the motivation in
sex.
So when males are interested in having
sex with a female, whether it's in
chimpanzees or in humans,
uh 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 end away. Uh and um I
think that that's it's a similar kind of
process with the chimps. You know what
they are thinking about is I I want to
kill this
yes this individual and it's hard to
imagine that uh 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 there's
reasons to think it should not be an
important part of it because it might
inhibit them and they they don't want to
be inhibited. You 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 um produce the
sort of rather haunting thought that
there has been selection in favor of
enthusiasm about killing.
And in our
relatively gentle and uh you know
deliberately moral society that we have
today, it's very difficult for us to
face the thought that uh in all of us
there might have been u a residue and
and a more than that sort of actively an
active potential for that thought of you
really enjoying killing someone
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 uh 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 4hour episode that I recommend to
others. It's quite haunting but he takes
us through an entire history uh it's
called painful tamement 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 um
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 the murder of somebody or even the
torture of somebody that uh a very large
fraction of the population on earth
would not be able to look away. They'd
be drawn to that somehow. That's a very
dark thought that we are 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 that word you
produced at the end is critical, I
think, you know, because u 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 we're
interested in violence for violence's
sake that much.
Um 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 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 um that tribalism fades away. That
our dehumanization, the natural desire
to dehumanize or 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 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 Erent 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, quite a beautiful
particular little branch on the
evolutionary tree. Um what part of that
was played by um 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 sort of concept
of what what homo sapiens is by uh
thinking about features that are very
obviously different from all of the
other species of Homer
uh and uh our our large brain, our uh
very rounded cranium, our relatively
small face. uh these are characteristics
which are developed in a relatively
modern way by about
70,000 years ago say you know that's one
of the earliest skulls in 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 homos
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.
Uh 315 literally is the is 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 uh they are only
beginning the trend of sapionization and
that trend consists basically of
grassinization
of making uh our ancestors less robust
um shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller
brow ridge, narrower face, um a thinner
uh cranium, all these things that are um
associated with reduced violence.
Okay. So that's that's saying what
that's homo sapiens beginning. So it
began sometime three 3 to 400,000 years
ago because by 315,000 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 3 to 400,000 years ago. And
and if you look 170 it's got even more
like us. And then if you if you look at
at 100, 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 3 and 400,000 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 uh 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 um has been um
portrayed most most uh richly by
Christopher Bowen and whose work I've
elaborated on uh is that uh 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 chimpanzeee or
an alpha bon 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.
Mhm.
And that coalition
Yes. That'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. 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 beta male thinks he's getting
strong and and uh you maturing in in
wisdom and so on and he refuses to uh
cowtow 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.
Mhm. And that make enables this
possibility 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 Dimmitri Bellf
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
um shorter face, smaller teeth,
reduced maleness. Uh the males become
increasingly femaleike.
Um 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 earlier 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. Mhm.
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.
Mhm.
and incidentally
uh 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.
Mhm.
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 is two kind of
values. There's one kind of value is
things that are good for the group like
thou shalt not murder.
Mhm.
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 Neanderthalss 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 got murdered out. Nowadays when when
homo sapiens meets homo sapiens and we
don't know each other initially then
conflict breaks out and the uh 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 that you see
nowadays in in contemporary anthropology
is very reluctant to point to uh success
in warfare uh as the reason why sapiens
wiped out Neanderals within about 3,000
years of the sapiens coming into Europe
43,000 years ago.
Mhm. And people are much more inclined
to say, well, the Neanderals were at low
population density, so they just
couldn't survive the demographic um sort
of sweep. Uh or that 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 uh sapiens were just um were
powerful. Uh they had everyone agrees
they had larger groups. Uh they had
better weapons. Uh they they had
projectile weapons, bows and arrows to
judge from the um little microlith uh
you know bits of flake
um which theals didn't.
You know nowadays there's evidence of of
interbreeding quite extensive
interbreeding between sapiens and
neanderals uh as well as with some other
groups and sometimes people say well you
know so they loved each other they they
made love not war
I think they made love and war and uh
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 you can imagine that
Neanderal females would essentially be
captured.
Mhm.
And taken into Zapian's groups.
Maybe you can comment on this uh
cautiously
and eloquently. What's the role of
sexual violence in human evolution? Cuz
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.
Um and um you know I think we're the
world has been slowly waking up over the
last several decades to the fact that
sexual violence is uh routine in uh war.
And that to me says that um it's just
another example of power corrupts
because uh you know when
uh frustrated
uh scared uh elated soldiers uh come
upon females in a group uh that there's
been essential dehumanization of uh then
uh they get carried away by opportunity.
It is not always possible to argue that
this is adaptive
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 of uh
terrible cases of 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
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 gathers would typically have felt
which would have been that if we attack
we have an excellent chance of getting
away with it. M
nowadays uh you know you're sent in
across the s 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 um you know but nowadays
of course I think people recognize
increasingly that the principal form of
um sexual intimidation uh and rape
occurs within relationships.
Mhm.
It's not stranger rape that is really
you know statistically uh important is
much more um what happens um behind the
walls uh of uh a bedroom where people
have been you know 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 uh
should think it you know a good idea as
it were to uh impose themselves sexually
on someone with whom they have a
relationship.
But what they're doing is uh
intimidating someone uh 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
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 all the way. Right. 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 or
somewhat parallel kinds of uh sexual
intimidation where males will target
particular females. even in a a group in
which the norm is for females to mate
with multiple males. But each male will
target a particular female and um 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.
Mhm.
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 interexual 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
be it wives or or whoever
um because it's a reminder that it's
basically a patriarchal world that we
have come from. Mhm.
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 3 to 400,000 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 evenhanded nowadays
between males and females but obviously
we are patriarchal de facto
because society still in many ways uh
you know supports um men better than it
supports women in these sorts of
conflicts.
So beta male patriarchal.
if we're looking at the evolutionary
history. Okay. Is there u 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 in violence and the
way the society has been constructed?
Oh, I 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.
Mhm.
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 that it it remains the
case uh that um that women suffer in in
various kinds of ways. You know, I mean,
a a woman who is
uh has lots of sexual partners is
treated much more rudely than a male who
has lots of sexual partners. Uh there
there are all sorts of informal ways in
which uh is it's 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 the origins of our human
nature that still operates no matter
what the law says.
Yeah.
which 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 um them to go away you know but
it remains the fact that um men uh are
um hugely concerned to try and uh have
sex with um
at least one woman and you know often
lots of women 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 it just it just goes on because
of human nature so maybe looking at
particular humans in history uh let's
talk about Jenghis Khan so is is uh this
particular human who was one of the most
famous examples of
largecale 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 Tenis Khan.
Uh it's possible that he had a
particular streak of psychopathy.
Um
you know it's it's striking that uh by
the time you become
immensely powerful
then uh your willingness to do terrible
things uh for the interest of yourself
and your group
um becomes uh very high.
You know Stalin, Metung,
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 uh 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 uh could fall into this position
I don't know but you know Lord Actton's
uh famous dictim was power corrupts and
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 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 it bred
you construct the world view in which
the violence is justified, the cruelty
is justified. So there um 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 don't know if you have a com
I suppose so. I mean but but uh seems to
me what really motivated Stalin was not
so much uh communism uh as the retention
of power.
So once he became leader uh and in the
process of becoming leader uh 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 glimmering of uh
willingness to challenge him. So you
know when he um apparently had uh Kiraov
uh murdered uh Kiraov was a great
communist. Uh Trosky was a great
communist. Uh you know all all the all
his rivals and I mean when he went into
the towns and and and murdered people by
the t