Speaker 1: So individual varliability is everywhere, but in human society there
Speaker 1: is not a high level of tolerance for that. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today, we welcome doctor
Speaker 1: Franz d Wall to the podcast. Doctor de Wall is
Speaker 1: a Dutch American biologist and primatologist known for his work
Speaker 1: on the behavior and social intelligence of primates. He is
Speaker 1: a professor in Emory University's Psychology Department and the director
Speaker 1: of the Living Link Center at the Yerkes National Primate
Speaker 1: Research Center. Chipan Zee Politics, The Age of Empathy, The
Speaker 1: Bnobo and the Atheist, and Mama's Last Hug are among
Speaker 1: his most popular books that have been translated over twenty languages.
Speaker 1: His most recent book in the topic of our conversation
Speaker 1: today is called Different Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.
Speaker 1: In this episode, I talked to Franz d Wall about
Speaker 1: a very emotionally charged topic among humans, sex and gender.
Speaker 1: As a primatologist, he shares his youth unique perspective and
Speaker 1: research findings on the biological differences between male and female primates.
Speaker 1: Doctor Franz de Wal clears up what alpha male really
Speaker 1: means and debunks the natural order of male supremacy. We
Speaker 1: also touch on the topics of socialization, power, altruism, reproduction,
Speaker 1: and equality. Personally, I found this a really interesting and
Speaker 1: fascinating conversation with a really nuanced, thoughtful, reflective scientist. What
Speaker 1: I really like about his perspective is he doesn't take
Speaker 1: any of these extreme stances that you tend to see
Speaker 1: today on Twitter, for instance, and instead he really tries
Speaker 1: to think through what we can all learn from looking
Speaker 1: at other animals about how to treat humans or fell humans.
Speaker 1: I found it really interesting, for instance, that despite obvious
Speaker 1: distinctions between masculine and feminine behavior and great apes, they
Speaker 1: have no trouble accepting non gender conforming individuals. It's not
Speaker 1: the Great Ape that needs to change, but it's the
Speaker 1: other great apes that show tolerance to who the Great
Speaker 1: Ape already is. I wish we saw a lot more
Speaker 1: of that kind of acceptance among you humans, let me
Speaker 1: tell you, I also wish we saw a lot more
Speaker 1: of the kind of complexity of thinking that doctor do
Speaker 1: Wall shows. What I really like about him is that
Speaker 1: he really values the science and takes what the biological
Speaker 1: influence on behavior very seriously. But he also believes in
Speaker 1: equality and he argues that these things are not at
Speaker 1: odds with each other, and I could agree with him
Speaker 1: more so. Now I bring you doctor Franz do Wall.
Speaker 1: That remind me. Has your book officially come out yet? Yep,
Speaker 1: it's a congratulations. How are you feeling about the reception
Speaker 1: of it so far? Well, everyone who reads it, and
Speaker 1: it hasn't reached a ton of people yet, but everyone
Speaker 1: who reads it is positive. I just saw today if
Speaker 1: any positive review in the TLS, what is the Times
Speaker 1: Literary Supplement? So that was good. Good. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: it brings together lots and lots of ideas that you've
Speaker 1: had throughout your course of your career, and it really
Speaker 1: has a lot of pertinence to the cultural wars going
Speaker 1: on right now and lots of discussions that are the
Speaker 1: foremost front of the world. It must be interesting as
Speaker 1: a primatige is to watch all this going on and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, humans, yeah, there's a lot of bad
Speaker 1: stuff going on as well, you know, absolutely absolutely. Now
Speaker 1: let's start off by can you just just define to
Speaker 1: our audience what a primatologist is. A primatologist is a
Speaker 1: student of primate behavior and ecology and sometimes neuroscience and physiology.
Speaker 1: So it was a very broad definition related to non
Speaker 1: human primates. But most of us when we say I'm
Speaker 1: a primatologist, they mean behavior and cognition, that kind of
Speaker 1: a it's some more the psychology actually and the evolution
Speaker 1: of primates. But you're interested as well in comparisons to humans, right,
Speaker 1: I mean you must have really interesting conversations with like
Speaker 1: evolutionary biologists in your department, and right, yeah, I'm very
Speaker 1: interested in humans. I consider humans also primates of course,
Speaker 1: so I look at humans in that light, and I
Speaker 1: think that compareson I'm a biologist by training, and so
Speaker 1: I'm interested in all sorts of animals. But obviously there
Speaker 1: is the primates to comparison. It's much more easy to
Speaker 1: make I think, yeah, you see that. Promatologists don't worry
Speaker 1: about the desired ability of behavior, but rather try to
Speaker 1: describe it best we can. And then you say, I
Speaker 1: sincerely believe that the best way to achieve greater equality
Speaker 1: will be to learn more about our biology instead of
Speaker 1: trying to sweep it under the rug. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of attempts to sweep biology under the rug, and
Speaker 1: the science that's very well meaning attempts at equality. But
Speaker 1: you are in your book in various ways that they
Speaker 1: actually are misguided in some ways. Is that right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think you can get around human biology. If
Speaker 1: people try to do that, it always backfire us. I think.
Speaker 1: In the gender debate, of course, what we see is
Speaker 1: that people embrace biology when it comes to gender identity
Speaker 1: and homosexuality because they use biology as an argument and
Speaker 1: against those who say you have to change and your
Speaker 1: behavior is not acceptable, and they argue from biology saying
Speaker 1: that we are born that way. You know, this is
Speaker 1: a biological thing. But as soon as we get to
Speaker 1: gender of the large population, then gender has become a
Speaker 1: biology has become sort of bad word to use. Like
Speaker 1: if you see females are different from males in their behavior, naturally,
Speaker 1: that's really not very well accepted. And so biology is
Speaker 1: used in the ideological debate dependent on whether it's useful
Speaker 1: or not useful. And I as a biologist, feeling you
Speaker 1: need to use it in all domains and we need
Speaker 1: to have a science that tells us what the sexual
Speaker 1: differences are and go with that. And the interesting thing
Speaker 1: for me in writing this book was that there are
Speaker 1: some differences that are assumed that I think are nonsense.
Speaker 1: So there are some biological differences that people propose, like
Speaker 1: let's say men are more hierarchical than womens, things like that,
Speaker 1: which I don't believe in at all, that they propose
Speaker 1: these things, and then at other times they deny differences
Speaker 1: that are pretty obvious, like, for example, in the play
Speaker 1: behavior of the young primates, we see differences that are
Speaker 1: very similar to the play behavior that we see in
Speaker 1: boys and girls. And I don't see why would you
Speaker 1: deny that kind of differences that we see. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: making really excellent points. A lot of it does seem
Speaker 1: to be the arguments for made based on ideological lines,
Speaker 1: not the actual facts of the matter. You know, very
Speaker 1: very hot button topic is transgenderism, right, and you talk
Speaker 1: in your book about Well, let me ask you, you know,
Speaker 1: how can our findings about our understanding of biology and
Speaker 1: from a primatology perspective, how do you view transgenderism? Well,
Speaker 1: transgender persons usually this starts very early in life. That's
Speaker 1: why I don't think it's just sort of fashion because
Speaker 1: people sometimes resented low like that is that it's a
Speaker 1: sort of wim that arises during puberty or something. No,
Speaker 1: it often starts far before puberty in most cases, and
Speaker 1: it is irreversible, which already hints at a deeper cause
Speaker 1: than just cultural indoctrination or something like that. And then
Speaker 1: we have evidence from brain studies that the brain is
Speaker 1: involved and that a certain area in the brain which
Speaker 1: is different in trans women than in cis gender women.
Speaker 1: So that argues for biology. That doesn't mean that culture
Speaker 1: cannot have an effect on it, or the expression of it,
Speaker 1: or the need to transition. All of that is probably
Speaker 1: culturally influenced, and culture has an influence on everything. But
Speaker 1: as in transgender persons, we should should respect them, just
Speaker 1: as we did with homosexuality. For a long time, we
Speaker 1: have argued, of course in society that homosexual behavior could
Speaker 1: be changed, and now we realize that that's not really
Speaker 1: a good possibility. Very interesting. Yeah, So for me, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm from the Netherlands and debate about homosexuality I've never
Speaker 1: understood because homosexual love was legal in the Netherlands for
Speaker 1: more than two centuries, and so when it came to
Speaker 1: the US and noticed that there are so many objections
Speaker 1: to it, I had trouble understanding that. But we went
Speaker 1: through the same debate there. I think that we're now
Speaker 1: going through with tomsender people. Well, there's something, you know, humans,
Speaker 1: there is something about our consciousness and our ability to
Speaker 1: even cognitively represent identity that is different from rangutangs. Right,
Speaker 1: So like I mean, when you look at other species,
Speaker 1: I feel like it is very cut and dry. What's
Speaker 1: a male, what's a female? I don't feel like there
Speaker 1: are debates within the ranguetang community of you know, I
Speaker 1: don't feel like, you know, rangu tanks are disagreeing in
Speaker 1: the nuance with each other about what which is the
Speaker 1: male and which is the female of the species. Right,
Speaker 1: But humans are very completed. But the apes do have
Speaker 1: exceptions to the rule. So that's quiet. So even though
Speaker 1: they may not be debating them and they may not
Speaker 1: be putting labels on them, which I think is something
Speaker 1: that humans are so strong at, you know, making labels.
Speaker 1: I describe in my book a female chimpanzee named Donna,
Speaker 1: who is born as a female, is clearly a female,
Speaker 1: but from a very young age she acted like a
Speaker 1: little male, and she liked to wrestle with males. She
Speaker 1: liked to invite the alpha male to wrestle with which,
Speaker 1: you know, the adult males don't usually play with young females.
Speaker 1: That's something they do with young males, but not so
Speaker 1: much with young females. And so she was from the
Speaker 1: very beginning different and then she grew when she reached
Speaker 1: the adolescence, you know, twelve thirteen years old, she grew
Speaker 1: into robust males. She had bigger shoulders, she had more hairs,
Speaker 1: she had a bigger head, bigger hands. She grew into
Speaker 1: a male like character, and she associated with males. He
Speaker 1: acted like the males, he associated with them, and from
Speaker 1: a distance, if you didn't know better, you would say
Speaker 1: she was a male. Of course, I cannot ask her
Speaker 1: her gender identity, and I don't think that's an issue
Speaker 1: that we can discuss about the primates. But she she
Speaker 1: was clearly an individual who didn't fit the binary so nicely.
Speaker 1: And so with for example, of his gender as opposed
Speaker 1: to sex, I usually like to make the division between
Speaker 1: masculine and feminine. For sex, I'm okay with a distinction
Speaker 1: male and female, and we do that in biology, of course,
Speaker 1: but for a gender, I prefer masculine feminine, and clearly
Speaker 1: that female Donna, she was more on the masculine end
Speaker 1: of things. Wow. Yeah, no, it's a great point, and
Speaker 1: her name is Donna. Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: I see his name was Donna. If we could actually
Speaker 1: ask him, he maybe would give us him pronoun. But
Speaker 1: this is so interesting because even taking the gender identity
Speaker 1: out of the equation, there seems to be sets of
Speaker 1: behaviors that seem to go in one direction or the
Speaker 1: other in terms of how they are perceived by others. Right,
Speaker 1: And so there's just deep implications for your research, and
Speaker 1: it's just so fascinating what we see when we see
Speaker 1: other species having similar behaviors but without the cognitive representation
Speaker 1: of identity that they obviously are missing. Yeah. So one
Speaker 1: of the things we humans do is we label. So
Speaker 1: we say you're a man, you're a woman, you're hit orsexual,
Speaker 1: you're homosexual, and you need to fit in these boxes,
Speaker 1: and if you don't fit in the boxes, you're sort
Speaker 1: of out of look. In our society, we're not very
Speaker 1: tolerant in that regard. And the difference with the other
Speaker 1: primates is that they don't do the labeling, they don't
Speaker 1: have the boxes, and they're not intolerant. They for example,
Speaker 1: Donna was extremely well integrated in my group, so no
Speaker 1: problem at all, even though she acted quite differently from
Speaker 1: other females. I've also known males who don't act like
Speaker 1: the typical male. For example, they may be big males,
Speaker 1: but they are not interested in the macho games of
Speaker 1: who's going to be dominant and stuff like that. They
Speaker 1: stay out of all of that. They're sort of sidelined
Speaker 1: in that regard by themselves, and they're also perfectly well accepted.
Speaker 1: So the intolerance in humans sometimes I wonder where that
Speaker 1: comes from. There's almost individual variability, and in biology we're
Speaker 1: very used to that, So you don't need a gender
Speaker 1: concept to talk about variability. Because you look at two
Speaker 1: trees in the forest of the same species and they're
Speaker 1: going to be different from each other. We are very
Speaker 1: used to that in biology. So individibal variability is everywhere,
Speaker 1: But in human society there is not a high level
Speaker 1: of tolerance for that. Yeah, excellent point. You break down
Speaker 1: a lot of misconceptions in your book, and I just
Speaker 1: want to go through them. One of them is that
Speaker 1: male supremacy is the natural order. Some humans might hold
Speaker 1: that belief. What would you say to someone who says that,
Speaker 1: you know, how would you set them straight? Yeah? So
Speaker 1: there are several ways of doing that. Since in my
Speaker 1: book I compare as with Bernova's and chimpanzees, which are
Speaker 1: our two closest relatives, and they're exactly equally close to
Speaker 1: us in DNA terms, I have it there's a very
Speaker 1: easy argument to Banovo is female dominated and the chimpanzee
Speaker 1: is male dominated. So already in our closest relatives, the
Speaker 1: picture is not that clear, you know. But even if
Speaker 1: I would go to chimpanzees alone, where the males are
Speaker 1: dominant physically dominant, I know many high ranking females who
Speaker 1: were very powerful. So my previous book, Mama's Last Heard
Speaker 1: was about a female champ named Mama who was for
Speaker 1: forty years. He was the alpha female in the colony
Speaker 1: of chimpanzees, so she was not physically dominant over the males.
Speaker 1: She could not beat up a male, so to speak,
Speaker 1: but she had more power than the males. So each
Speaker 1: male who wanted to be the other would have to
Speaker 1: court Mama because that female ran the female show. And
Speaker 1: if all the females put their weight behind a male,
Speaker 1: he could become alpha male. And so she was instrumental
Speaker 1: also in the male politics. So in a group where
Speaker 1: the males are physically dominant, I always make a distinction
Speaker 1: between dominance and power. You may have individuals who are
Speaker 1: physically dominant but don't have the power. Someone else has
Speaker 1: the power. And in humans, of course sometimes people are
Speaker 1: surprised by that. But in humans we're very used to that.
Speaker 1: You walk into a business in New York, and let's
Speaker 1: say you want to speak to the boss. You don't
Speaker 1: walk up to the biggest fellow in the store and
Speaker 1: saying that must be the boss. That's not your assumption.
Speaker 1: Your assumption is the boss could be someone else, could
Speaker 1: be an older man or a woman. All of that
Speaker 1: is possible. And in a chimpanzee society or banavo society,
Speaker 1: the same thing. You cannot tell from just from a distance,
Speaker 1: who's going to be the boss. It's not a physical
Speaker 1: feature necessarily, And and power is such the same power
Speaker 1: as the thing that is hard to measure. It's harder
Speaker 1: to measure than physical dominance. But there are lots of
Speaker 1: females who have a lot of power, and so all
Speaker 1: the primate and this also applies to monkey groups. You know,
Speaker 1: all the primate groups have an alpha female and as
Speaker 1: female politics too, and as female leadership to so interesting
Speaker 1: in the psychological literature. Jessica Tracy and her colleagues make
Speaker 1: make the distinctwe authentic and hebiristic pride and have argued
Speaker 1: that they evolved on different paths like and they also
Speaker 1: make there's researchers like chang it All who make the
Speaker 1: distinction between dominance and prestige as two roots to social status.
Speaker 1: Sounds like you see the same two roots to social
Speaker 1: status in other species as well. Is that what you're
Speaker 1: saying prestise is interesting because prestise is conferred by the outside. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. It's not like I can I can physically
Speaker 1: coerce you in to in my prestige, so to speak.
Speaker 1: That's not a possibility. The prestige comes from the outside
Speaker 1: who admires me for example. Admiration is part of that.
Speaker 1: The celebrities have prestige, for example. So we did one
Speaker 1: time an experiment with chimpanzees where we looked at would
Speaker 1: they imitate an individual based on their status. So we
Speaker 1: had a high ranking female who would show how to
Speaker 1: do a certain thing to get food and a low
Speaker 1: ranking female who would demonstrate how to get food, and
Speaker 1: they demonstrated equal amounts of times and equally visible to
Speaker 1: everybody and so on, and the mass of the colony
Speaker 1: followed the high ranking female. They ignored what the low
Speaker 1: ranking was doing, even though that was equally successful. They
Speaker 1: followed the high ranking female, and so prestige effects in
Speaker 1: the sense of following the example of which is often
Speaker 1: what that is can be found in the other pyramids.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's applications here for a lot of
Speaker 1: ways of thinking about meeting in among humans. Right, notion
Speaker 1: of the alpha male, Right, maybe we can talk about
Speaker 1: what is the alpha male and other species? Is it what?
Speaker 1: Because a lot of people think of it through the
Speaker 1: dominance angle, like only like big muscles, right, and aggression
Speaker 1: and brute force. But there's there's multiple paths ways to meeting, right,
Speaker 1: Please tell me, Please tell me there is. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: the word alpha male actually became popular after I wrote
Speaker 1: Chimpanzee Politics, and Chimpanzee Politics was introduced to Washington by
Speaker 1: Nude Genwich of all people. After that, the term alpha male,
Speaker 1: since I had used it repeatedly in the book, became
Speaker 1: more and more used, and then it ended the business literature.
Speaker 1: And in the business literature, alpha male means the guy
Speaker 1: who beats up everybody and lets them know every day
Speaker 1: who's bosson has the biggest office and the biggest parking spot,
Speaker 1: and that's macho macho, alpha male. And I think it's
Speaker 1: extremely unfortunate because for me, that's not necessarily the alpha male.
Speaker 1: Each group of primates has one alpha male and one
Speaker 1: alpha female. It's not a personality type, it's just the
Speaker 1: top position, and that position is associated with some responsibilities.
Speaker 1: We do have bullies sometimes also in chimpanzees, for example,
Speaker 1: we may have an alpha male bully who terrorizes everybody.
Speaker 1: That occurs, and those individuals don't always end well, I
Speaker 1: must say. Sometimes there's a revolt against their behavior. But
Speaker 1: most of the time, most of the alpha males that
Speaker 1: I have known are individuals who keep the peace, so
Speaker 1: they break up fights in the group. They protect the underdog.
Speaker 1: They protect a juvenile against an adult, or a female
Speaker 1: against the male. They protect the underdog. They show empathy
Speaker 1: for others, They reassure others who are distressed, and as
Speaker 1: a result, a good alpha male can become an extremely
Speaker 1: popular character, so he's groomed by everybody. Everybody loves that male,
Speaker 1: and if he's ever challenged by a younger male, the
Speaker 1: group will put their weight behind him because they want
Speaker 1: to keep a male like that. So I've known very
Speaker 1: popular alpha males, and so that idea that the alpha
Speaker 1: male must be feared rather than respected, you know, as
Speaker 1: Machiavelli would say, that is a wrong idea, and so
Speaker 1: it's a simplistic idea. And then with alpha females, alpha
Speaker 1: females like Mama, who also keep the peace in their way.
Speaker 1: They don't step in when a conflict is going on
Speaker 1: because that's a dangerous enterprise and that's better done by
Speaker 1: a male. But they step in afterwards. They come in afterwards.
Speaker 1: If individuals have had to fight and they're not reconciling,
Speaker 1: the alpha female may come in and pull out her
Speaker 1: arm and make them move to the other and bring
Speaker 1: them together and wait till they groom each other. And
Speaker 1: when they groom each other, she walks away. And so
Speaker 1: she sort of has a healing role in the group. Ah,
Speaker 1: and the male, the alpha male, can have a healing
Speaker 1: role in the group too, Yeah, both of them. If
Speaker 1: you have a group was a good alpha male and
Speaker 1: alpha female, they become a team very often. Well, then
Speaker 1: that's why all the power is at that moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've seen power couples among orangutangs. You're like, Wow, that's
Speaker 1: the power couple right there. Well, orangutangs are pretty solitary animals,
Speaker 1: so they are not as social as the Bnova's in
Speaker 1: the chimps, the chimps. Yeah, I don't know why all
Speaker 1: my examples keep coming around to orangu tanks. I think
Speaker 1: I just like the word of rangutang. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: nice word. It's a good word. You say, we cannot
Speaker 1: just go around the animal kingdom and pick and choose
Speaker 1: which species we like the best. I thought this was
Speaker 1: a good one too, because some people will be like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're more like bonobos than ship because we want we
Speaker 1: want to see ourselves in a positive light, you know,
Speaker 1: and we also can denegrate like chimps. And so I
Speaker 1: really liked that quote for that reason. Well, there is
Speaker 1: there is wishful thinking. And so if I described bonobos
Speaker 1: and say that our female dominated, the females are collectively
Speaker 1: dominant in the BOVA because I have a sisterhood and
Speaker 1: they support the female support itsel are very strongly, and
Speaker 1: I describe all the sexual behavior of the bonobos, then
Speaker 1: people say I'm more like a banobo or why aren't
Speaker 1: we more like bonobos? And there's many men, of course
Speaker 1: who don't like banovos for that reason, and they would
Speaker 1: rather be a chimpanzee, I think, And I've had reactions
Speaker 1: like that. One time I gave a lecture about bernobos
Speaker 1: for a German audience and then all the professor male
Speaker 1: professor stood up and said, what's wrong with those males?
Speaker 1: And so he clearly felt that the males were not
Speaker 1: doing their job in the pernobo society. So people associate
Speaker 1: like that. But for me, they're both fascinating animals and
Speaker 1: I like both of them very much, and I'm not
Speaker 1: making a choice between them. Yeah, I wonder if any bonobos,
Speaker 1: if they could talk, they would identify as chimps, you know,
Speaker 1: you know that the male female thing. It's just it's
Speaker 1: really there's so many complexities to the issue, because you
Speaker 1: are also arguing there is there are real biological differences
Speaker 1: between males and females. You know, you said, you say,
Speaker 1: I've never heard anyone say, you know, I followed male
Speaker 1: and female ranguetanks so the forest and find their behavior
Speaker 1: to be so strikingly similar. So you do clearly see
Speaker 1: differences if you just reduce sext of gentles, right like,
Speaker 1: you still see striking differences, is that right? Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: plenty of differences. One of the biggest ones is violence level.
Speaker 1: So the level of violence in all human societies. You
Speaker 1: look at the homicide statistics of any nation, it's more
Speaker 1: men than women physical violence, and in all primates it's
Speaker 1: more males than females. So it's very hard to argue
Speaker 1: in that case that that that's not a biological saying so,
Speaker 1: and the same is true for the play behavior. I
Speaker 1: describe the play behavior of young males and young females.
Speaker 1: Young females very infant oriented. They love to put their
Speaker 1: hands on the infants of newborns or models, and later,
Speaker 1: if they are more skilled, they become the babysitters for
Speaker 1: those infants, you know. And if you give them dolls,
Speaker 1: they like to carry dolls and hold them and put
Speaker 1: them on their back and things like that. In the wild,
Speaker 1: they pick up wooden logs and rocks and carry them
Speaker 1: like dolls. So there's an enormous fascination with infants in
Speaker 1: the young females, which makes sense given that the rest
Speaker 1: of their life they will be caring for offspring and
Speaker 1: there's an enormous fascination with young males for mock fighting
Speaker 1: and rough housing and what we call rough and tumble play,
Speaker 1: and that has also been found all over the world
Speaker 1: to be done more by boys than by girls, and
Speaker 1: certainly in all the primates, the young males do more
Speaker 1: of it than the young females, and it explains also somewhat,
Speaker 1: I think the sex segregation that we see in play behavior.
Speaker 1: Mostly it's young males who play with males and young
Speaker 1: females who play with females. It's because the females don't
Speaker 1: like this rough play that the males are doing, so
Speaker 1: it's too rough for them, and some exceptional females like
Speaker 1: Donna who I described, who would like to be in
Speaker 1: that mix. But I think it explains to a large
Speaker 1: degree the sexual segregation that we see on the playgrounds
Speaker 1: in humans too. So interesting, So do you think that
Speaker 1: there's benefit in among humans if you are biologically male
Speaker 1: in terms of metal, medical sex, you know, and you
Speaker 1: feel psychologically you are the other gender, you think there's
Speaker 1: benefit in in Is there benefit in calling yourself the
Speaker 1: other gender as opposed to saying, well, I'm just male
Speaker 1: with female characteristics Mentally and psychologically, I think that's the
Speaker 1: crux of the debate, right, Yeah, I think the gender
Speaker 1: identity arises very early, long before puberty, and so it's
Speaker 1: not really hormonally driven. I think it results often in
Speaker 1: what I call self socialization. So the typical self socialization
Speaker 1: in children and in young crimates is that you look
Speaker 1: up at adults of your own sex. So young males
Speaker 1: look at adult young male chimpanzees look at the adult
Speaker 1: males around, and the mimic their behavior, and the young
Speaker 1: females usually mimic the behavior of their mom, which is
Speaker 1: the adult female around, and transgender children are set to
Speaker 1: identify more with individuals of the adults of the opposite sex,
Speaker 1: and they mimic their behavior, so they self socialized. I
Speaker 1: think self socialization is an underestimated feature of because we
Speaker 1: always think of socialization as a one way streat The
Speaker 1: adults socialize the young ones. But I think the young
Speaker 1: ones socialize themselves by mimicking the behavior, mimicking the example,
Speaker 1: and modeling themselves on adults mostly of the same sex,
Speaker 1: but sometimes like in the Tom's gender, children of opposite
Speaker 1: sex and in the primates. We have evidence for that
Speaker 1: as well. So you want a orangutank, example, like they
Speaker 1: do and orangutanks. Recently, a study demonstrated that the young
Speaker 1: females they eat exactly what their mother eats. You know,
Speaker 1: in the forest of orangutanks, there are thousands of plants,
Speaker 1: some of which you should not eat, some of which
Speaker 1: are the best to eat, and fruits, and the young
Speaker 1: females they copy exactly the diet that their mom has.
Speaker 1: Young males have a different diet, and that's because they
Speaker 1: watch adult males who come through. They don't live with them,
Speaker 1: but they come through on occasion and they watch very closely.
Speaker 1: But these guys are eating and so and we have
Speaker 1: other evidence, we have evidence of tool use in the primates,
Speaker 1: where young females copy what their mom is doing and
Speaker 1: the young males don't. And so I think self socialization
Speaker 1: is a powerful concept and it applies equally to the
Speaker 1: primates as to us. And to a large degree, I
Speaker 1: think primates and that's why I use the wordgenda for
Speaker 1: them as well, they learned their sexuals also from watching adults.
Speaker 1: So it's not just that they are born with certain behavior,
Speaker 1: as people often assume that the other primates must be,
Speaker 1: you know, they have innate behaviors. I think there's a
Speaker 1: very strange assumption. A chimpanzee is adult when he's sixteen,
Speaker 1: so of course he has an enormous learning period, and
Speaker 1: he is just as much influenced by the environment, I
Speaker 1: would say, as a human child. And so the gender
Speaker 1: concept can be applied there as well. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: could see a case in which do you think if
Speaker 1: Donna could speak and could self identify, do you think
Speaker 1: her wife would be made easier and her well being
Speaker 1: would be improved if she could say I am a
Speaker 1: male and my pronouns are him, you know, like I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that's just the crux the question among humans,
Speaker 1: and I'm wondering a primatology perspective on that, you know,
Speaker 1: because there's different pasathways one can take when they're have
Speaker 1: such a great mismatch between mind and body. One pathway
Speaker 1: is to just say I'm female, but I really am
Speaker 1: very masculine in lots of ways. Another way is to
Speaker 1: do complete gender surgery right reconstruction. There are different pathways.
Speaker 1: Can we glean any insights at all from looking at
Speaker 1: other animals? I find that very difficult. The point to
Speaker 1: make about Donna is that she was extremely well integrated already. Yes,
Speaker 1: in human society, maybe because of the awkwardness or intolerance
Speaker 1: that occurs, you know, but she had no problems at
Speaker 1: all in her life with that issue. I think, and
Speaker 1: I think, if you ask me which kind of individuals
Speaker 1: would primates ostracize or exclude, I would say probably only
Speaker 1: trouble makers, individuals who cause trouble and upset everybody with
Speaker 1: aggressive behavior, for example, where I could see an exclusion,
Speaker 1: but for other reasons I find it hard to imagine.
Speaker 1: So I also use the example in my book of
Speaker 1: racial intolerance. So in humans, because we label everybody black, white,
Speaker 1: whatever we do, I think that doesn't help in our case.
Speaker 1: But there is a species of spider monkey, which is
Speaker 1: called a variegated spider monkey, where you have individuals from
Speaker 1: almost white to almost black. You have all the color
Speaker 1: variations in between, and in captivity. I know that these
Speaker 1: individuals get along fine. They do perfectly fine if you
Speaker 1: mix them together. But I asked recently a field worker
Speaker 1: who works with them in Columbia in the field, and
Speaker 1: he says, in the wild too, these color variations are
Speaker 1: all over the place, and they're all mixed together, and
Speaker 1: he's never noticed that it makes any difference to them.
Speaker 1: And so the level of tolerance in private societies is
Speaker 1: actually a bit higher, I would say, than in human
Speaker 1: societ and that's we are conformists and we insist on
Speaker 1: rules and we label and I think some of some
Speaker 1: of that is related to our linguistic capacities, which are
Speaker 1: of course wonderful and give us a lot of benefits,
Speaker 1: but they also under minus a few things in society,
Speaker 1: I would say, Yeah, like our psychological categorization ability is evolved. Yeah. Wow,
Speaker 1: that is really really mind blowing. It's almost like humans
Speaker 1: are even the opposite, Like we extall the troublemakers and
Speaker 1: they're the ones that trend on Twitter, you know, they're
Speaker 1: the ones that get the attention, whereas in tall you know,
Speaker 1: the intolerant people you know, can even be elected into
Speaker 1: political offices for instance. So wow, this is so so
Speaker 1: so interesting. I really appreciate your answer, by the way.
Speaker 1: It really it really opened up my mind to the
Speaker 1: way the humans are and the way the humans don't
Speaker 1: really have to be. So thank you, thank you. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'd like to talk about your disagreement with Richard Dawkins
Speaker 1: his notion of selfish genes in that we really aren't communal,
Speaker 1: cooperative species. You say, we are an ultrasocial animal with
Speaker 1: solid communal values. So can you kind of explain to
Speaker 1: me this difference in perspective between the selfish gene view
Speaker 1: and your view. It's a bit odd because Richard Darkins
Speaker 1: is a student of NiCoT Nicotimber is a Dutch etologist,
Speaker 1: and I'm an indirect descendant too, so we are from
Speaker 1: the same school, and I understand his arguments very well,
Speaker 1: his arguments in the selfish gene and as far as
Speaker 1: the biology is concerned, I have no trouble at all
Speaker 1: as his argument of evolutionary argument about gene evolution. But
Speaker 1: when you call genes selfish, you're using a metaphor, and
Speaker 1: he says that on occasion in his book. It's a metaphor.
Speaker 1: So they're metaphorically selfish. They cannot be really selfish because
Speaker 1: selfie is a psychological characteristic and genes are just chunks
Speaker 1: of DNA, so they cannot have that. But he uses
Speaker 1: that metaphor and then sometimes he gets carried away by
Speaker 1: his own metaphor, and this happens to his followers also,
Speaker 1: so they go from our genes are selfiesh to we
Speaker 1: our selfies, our psychology is selfish. And that's why in
Speaker 1: his book at some point he says you shouldn't expect
Speaker 1: any kindness or altoism from the human species naturally, because
Speaker 1: that's our biology is not made that way. I don't
Speaker 1: know what the exact quote is, but that's how he
Speaker 1: says it. And this he has said repeatedly is that
Speaker 1: you shouldn't get your hopes up about human altoism because
Speaker 1: we are born selfish. And so that's where he all
Speaker 1: of a sudden falls into the trap of his own metaphor.
Speaker 1: And I had a discussion with him when he came
Speaker 1: on time to Atlanta. I had a discussion with him
Speaker 1: about that, and saying that he should have spoken of
Speaker 1: the self promoting gene. That would have been more correct
Speaker 1: than the selfish gene, because people confuse it with human
Speaker 1: psychology basically. And what he then he answered in that
Speaker 1: interview that we did that maybe the jeans are misfiring
Speaker 1: when you see altruistic behavior, because I described to him
Speaker 1: a few scenes among the chimpanzees where where sometimes you know,
Speaker 1: the chimpanzee sometimes help individuals who can never help them back. So,
Speaker 1: for example, we had an old female in the chimpanzee
Speaker 1: colony who could barely walk anymore and was nearly blind,
Speaker 1: and so each time she would try to go to
Speaker 1: the water faucet to drink, younger females would run ahead
Speaker 1: of her because he were much they were much faster,
Speaker 1: run ahead of her, suck up water then returned to
Speaker 1: her and spitter than her mouth. Or if she would
Speaker 1: try to join a group of chimps grooming, they would
Speaker 1: push her up. They would push her up into the
Speaker 1: climbing frame where these individuals were sitting because he could
Speaker 1: not get there anymore, and she was so old, and see,
Speaker 1: of course he died a couple of months later. She
Speaker 1: was so old that there was really no way she
Speaker 1: could pay them back. But that's what they were doing
Speaker 1: for her. And I described that to Richard Dawkins, and
Speaker 1: he was speaking of misfiring geness firing, which to me
Speaker 1: is I don't even know what that ore, misfiring genius.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so that was my disagreement with him. I
Speaker 1: think his book opened the eyes of many people to
Speaker 1: evolutionary processes, but it was also misleading on the human
Speaker 1: psychology part. Thank you, I appreciate that. Stephen J. Gould
Speaker 1: called the female couturus a quote glorious accident. Is that true? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a discussion of maybe fifteen years ago, maybe more,
Speaker 1: where it was proposed by Elizabeth Lloyd. I believe philosopher
Speaker 1: was proposed that the clitoris was a byproduct. It's like
Speaker 1: the human male nipple has no function. You know, all
Speaker 1: the primate males have nipples, so goilla male has nonipples too,
Speaker 1: and these nipples have no function, and the glitterus was
Speaker 1: a bit like that. The glitterus was there because males
Speaker 1: needed a penis, and that's why females got the glitteris.
Speaker 1: But it serves no purpose, so that's why gold Clock
Speaker 1: called it the glorious accident. But now we know we
Speaker 1: have actually much more knowledge of the glitters from anatomical studies.
Speaker 1: We know that the glitterus has as many nerve endings
Speaker 1: as the penis and is served by big nerves which
Speaker 1: carry that information to the brain. And so the glitterus
Speaker 1: is not just it's not like the male nipple. The
Speaker 1: glitterus is a functional part of the female body. And
Speaker 1: for example, Bunova females have a very large glitterus. Dolphin
Speaker 1: females have the largest glitters in the animal world, all mammals,
Speaker 1: the mouse and the elephant, All mammals have a glitterus,
Speaker 1: and so the clitterus is functional, and it relates a bit,
Speaker 1: and that's the discussion in my book. It relates to
Speaker 1: female sexuality. Female sexuality has been traditionally downplayed by the biologists,
Speaker 1: by everyone, actually not just a biologist. But this is
Speaker 1: sort of the Victorian view of female sexuality is that
Speaker 1: the males are sexually interested and have a sex drive,
Speaker 1: the females are sort of the passive recipients of sexuality,
Speaker 1: and that view is so incorrect. It's also incorrect for birds,
Speaker 1: it's incorrect for lots of animals. But in the primates,
Speaker 1: for example, females are sexually quite active. Now I'm not
Speaker 1: just talking about bernobos, where the females are sexually assertive,
Speaker 1: I would even say, but in many primates the females
Speaker 1: are very enterprising sexually. So the clitoriss plays a role
Speaker 1: in that, I'm sure, in that it makes sex more pleasurable.
Speaker 1: Female primates also masturbate, which they wouldn't do I'm sure
Speaker 1: if there wasn't some sort of associated feeling, was it?
Speaker 1: And so yeah, the clits was as glorious accident. That
Speaker 1: was a discussion from long ago. But as I think
Speaker 1: we have different ideas now about female sexuality. Yeah, within
Speaker 1: the demean of the meeting game, you argue that Smith
Speaker 1: that the females are always demure, right, And I love
Speaker 1: how you brought in Abraham Maslow there, because that's one
Speaker 1: of my intellectual heroes. And I actually, oh okay, actually
Speaker 1: revised his hiercu needs in my most recent book. And
Speaker 1: I really like, you know, how you brought his idea
Speaker 1: of talking about monkey self confidence, you know, and how
Speaker 1: it's related as human self esteem. I worked at the facility,
Speaker 1: you know, he was, I believe a student of Hey Harlow.
Speaker 1: He was, Yeah, Helow was his mentor. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: worked at the Wisconsin Primy Center for ten years and
Speaker 1: I worked at the facility at the Wilence Park Zoo
Speaker 1: where he also watched monkeys. And so that's how I
Speaker 1: got into the history of Maslow. And and if you
Speaker 1: read his early articles, he started out with being impressed
Speaker 1: by the dominance of monkeys and the self confidence of
Speaker 1: the alpha male monkey, and then later he developed his
Speaker 1: ideas about self esteem, and I think there's a sort
Speaker 1: of continuity between these ideas. So the self confidence of
Speaker 1: the male monkey sort of became internalized, and that that
Speaker 1: then leads to self esteem. So I find it so interesting.
Speaker 1: And I worked on the same monkeys, and I worked
Speaker 1: on Reese's monkeys, and I described in my book the
Speaker 1: fascinating observations there that we had an old male who
Speaker 1: was the alpha male of the of the troop, a
Speaker 1: big troop, like a hundred monkeys, but he could not
Speaker 1: handle the younger males, and the younger males were faster
Speaker 1: and stronger. Probably he didn't know what to do with them.
Speaker 1: But each time a younger male would challenge him, the
Speaker 1: alpha female of the troop would walk up to him
Speaker 1: and stand right next to him, and that would stop
Speaker 1: the younger males. The younger males would not there to proceed.
Speaker 1: Is the alpha female standing there because she had a
Speaker 1: whole army behind her, so to speak. And so that's
Speaker 1: another indication I'd we talked about that before, of a
Speaker 1: female who has a lot of power, you know, and
Speaker 1: so I'm very used to that. Also in the monkeys, well,
Speaker 1: I did a quite deep analysis of Maso's own psyche,
Speaker 1: and he was quite obsessed with dominant females. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: his mother was a very dominant female. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: he wrote papers about that about he said that was
Speaker 1: a very under research topic of investigation where dominant females,
Speaker 1: and yeah, this is something that he was very, very
Speaker 1: interested in that idea. So, what is the evidence that
Speaker 1: the sex drive of women may match that of men,
Speaker 1: Because there is this idea that men have a much,
Speaker 1: much greater sex drive and then a lot of reviews
Speaker 1: of the field of evolutionary psychology show in lots of
Speaker 1: different ways that that is the case. But you're you're saying,
Speaker 1: we may need to rethink that a bit. I think.
Speaker 1: So I've seen that literature on the male sex drive
Speaker 1: being stronger, and one of the arguments comes from data
Speaker 1: on masturbation, which is a way of measuring sex drive,
Speaker 1: because masturbation is not constrained by the risk of getting
Speaker 1: pregnant or by finding a partner, and men do clearly
Speaker 1: more of that than women, and I think male primates
Speaker 1: do more of that than female primates, So that argument
Speaker 1: I can follow. But we also know that people lie
Speaker 1: about their sex lives, and so I don't know why
Speaker 1: psychology keeps trusting questionnaire message. As you may have noticed,
Speaker 1: I'm not a big fan of it. So because, for example,
Speaker 1: if you ask men and women on campus, usually as students,
Speaker 1: usually you ask them how many sex partners do you
Speaker 1: have or did you have in the last couple of years,
Speaker 1: the men have many more than the women, which is
Speaker 1: really impossible. It's an impossibility in an environment like that,
Speaker 1: is that the men have many more sex partners than
Speaker 1: the women in heterosexual interactions. But if you hook up
Speaker 1: you must know that study. If you hook up to
Speaker 1: women to a fake light detectile machine, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: they have equal numbers of sex partners than the man.
Speaker 1: I don't recommend doing that at home. No, it's a
Speaker 1: fake machine. It's a fake light detect machine, okay. And
Speaker 1: so what that means is that people are not honest.
Speaker 1: Women especially are not honest about how many sex partners
Speaker 1: they have because there's a stigma attached in our society
Speaker 1: to women having too many sex partners. And so I
Speaker 1: don't trust questionnaire methods. I'm so glad I work with
Speaker 1: animals who don't fill out questionnaires, and I don't ask
Speaker 1: them how much sex they have. I just measure how
Speaker 1: much sex they have and with whom and so on.
Speaker 1: So with the sex drive, I think sexual adventurism as
Speaker 1: I call it or sexual proactivity is very highly developed
Speaker 1: in the females. That whether you call that the sex
Speaker 1: drive or not, you know, that's a different thing. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the sex drive exactly is, but by
Speaker 1: some measures, I sinking men have a greater one, and
Speaker 1: by other measures, I think it's pretty equal between the two.
Speaker 1: Even among humans, you find that women tend to be
Speaker 1: more exportive sexually and have a more varied interests in
Speaker 1: terms of different sexual things to try. There is some
Speaker 1: research on that. Yeah. So for example, in chimpanzees, it
Speaker 1: has been calculated that a female chimpanzee in the forest
Speaker 1: will have about six thousand copulations in her lifetime. She
Speaker 1: produces about five or six children in her lifetime because
Speaker 1: because there's a long interverse interval and they have one
Speaker 1: kid at the time. So doesn't that look out of proportion?
Speaker 1: Six thousand copulations for five to six children. I think
Speaker 1: that's totally out of proportion, And so they don't have
Speaker 1: sex necessarily to make a baby, because if that was
Speaker 1: the case, they only needed to have sex like twenty times,
Speaker 1: forty times or whatever. It is so clearly there's something
Speaker 1: else going on with female sexuality, and and there are
Speaker 1: theories about it. It would go too far maybe to
Speaker 1: go over all of them, but there are theories why
Speaker 1: females have more sex than it's necessary for their immediate reproduction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: was this a bonobo that you're referencing? There was a
Speaker 1: female chimpo? That's for ycause I would have far more
Speaker 1: than that, yeare, And of course a Banovo would also
Speaker 1: have a ton of sex with other females, not just
Speaker 1: with males but also with atom Yeah, anything goes for
Speaker 1: bnobo's they're freaky. Wow, I'm not sure that that's freaky
Speaker 1: they For them, sex is part of their social life.
Speaker 1: It's very hard to draw a line social and sexual
Speaker 1: for the Banobo, and we should not. People often imagine,
Speaker 1: and I'm partly responsible because I've popularized the sex life
Speaker 1: of the bonobo. People often imagine that they have sex
Speaker 1: the whole day. But you know, their sexual contacts are
Speaker 1: ten seconds, fifteen seconds the beef. You better look at
Speaker 1: them as sort of handshakes or patting someone on the
Speaker 1: back or something that's so interesting. Well, Yeah, for the record,
Speaker 1: freaky wasn't a negative connotation for me, So I just
Speaker 1: want to be cool with that was no slight against
Speaker 1: the banobos. Okay. Have you read doctor Susan Black's book
Speaker 1: The Banobo Way? I know about it. I know about it.
Speaker 1: She loves that. She loves the bonobos and humans, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, peace on Earth that she thinks. Okay, so
Speaker 1: why have we underestimated the role of female choice? And
Speaker 1: you had a couple reasons I thought were very interesting.
Speaker 1: You said, chip and see females typically vocalize at the
Speaker 1: quimax of intercourse, but never during a secret rendezvuew. And
Speaker 1: you also say cultural reasons females are expected to be
Speaker 1: passive in KOI, of course, yeah, I can kind of
Speaker 1: just elaborate on some of these reasons we underestimate the
Speaker 1: role of female choice. Well, I think cultural reasons, you know,
Speaker 1: the Victorian attitude that females ought to be passive. I
Speaker 1: think that's at the roots of everything. And then also
Speaker 1: we didn't have the evidence. You know, now we have
Speaker 1: paternity testing, we can do DNA testing. So one of
Speaker 1: the first findings was with birds, you know, monogamous birds
Speaker 1: male female, they have a nest with eggs. We always
Speaker 1: assumed that all these eggs are fertilized by the male
Speaker 1: of the nest, but now we know it is paternity testing,
Speaker 1: that very often these eggs are fertilized by multiple males.
Speaker 1: When people found that for the first time, they said, well,
Speaker 1: maybe these females get raped by somebody who comes through,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's all they could think of at
Speaker 1: that moment. Now we know that female birds very often
Speaker 1: outside is called extra pair copulation. Outside of the pair,
Speaker 1: they have sex with other males, So we know now
Speaker 1: by paternity testing, we know a lot about that. So
Speaker 1: for example, in the primates, the same monkey group that
Speaker 1: I worked with in Wisconsin was one of the first
Speaker 1: to have paternity testing, not even based on DNA, it
Speaker 1: was just bloods groups at the time, and they found
Speaker 1: you know, if you look at at a group of
Speaker 1: Riecorus monkeys, you think the alpha male does most of
Speaker 1: the copulations, so most of the kids that you see,
Speaker 1: most of the young monkeys, they are his. That's what
Speaker 1: we always assumed, and that study showed that he had
Speaker 1: more offspring than other males, but only slightly more, meaning
Speaker 1: that the female males were arranging copulations with low ranking
Speaker 1: males behind his back, and that at night things were
Speaker 1: happening that we scientists didn't know about. And so paternity
Speaker 1: testing has opened up a new world for us, you know,
Speaker 1: and we know a lot more about female sexuality as
Speaker 1: a result, and it's much more enterprising than people have assumed.
Speaker 1: These other animals they are sneaky. Well, you know, at
Speaker 1: timpleties they have very often a rendezvous. So the alpha
Speaker 1: male of course doesn't tolerate other males to copulate these
Speaker 1: females in his view. So what females will do is
Speaker 1: they sneak up to a younger male who is not
Speaker 1: alpha male, and they hang around him, and then at
Speaker 1: some point they split. The male walks up in this
Speaker 1: direction and a few minutes later the females walk off
Speaker 1: in that direction, so no one notices that they are
Speaker 1: getting together at a far away point where they have
Speaker 1: a very quick copulation. I mean, this is incredible. It's
Speaker 1: all pre arranged stuff that they do. Since gyms are
Speaker 1: good at planning and good at deception, they get away
Speaker 1: with that kind of stuff. But what is their consciousness
Speaker 1: that they're not This is still instinct, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's there's still a genetic sort of program there. I
Speaker 1: just it's so fascinating to me how they can communicate
Speaker 1: with each other and have all this stuff without without language,
Speaker 1: without all the things we have. Maybe I'm overplaying the
Speaker 1: capacities of humans here. Yeah, I'm not sure why you're
Speaker 1: saying it's still instinct, because the term instinct we barely
Speaker 1: use anymore with animals because there's always learning and intelligence
Speaker 1: involved and every point good point. And so these chimps,
Speaker 1: the male and the female both know what they want
Speaker 1: and they both know how to get it, and they
Speaker 1: know that they should not draw attention to themselves, which
Speaker 1: which they have learned the hard way. So simple associative
Speaker 1: learning right there. So it's a combination of things. But yeah, planning,
Speaker 1: we have good evidence for planning in animals nowadays, in
Speaker 1: birds and in primates, and that's what they do. They
Speaker 1: plot their escape. It's just amazing how they can do
Speaker 1: all this without talking each other. I'm saying, like, it's
Speaker 1: like they don't say, like, hey, Mary, meet me behind,
Speaker 1: you know, underneath the bleachers at four pm and they
Speaker 1: but they somehow communicate to each other that that's where
Speaker 1: they're going to meet and when they're going to meet.
Speaker 1: It's just fast. The humans can do the same thing
Speaker 1: with a few meaningful glances, you know, and and a
Speaker 1: little shake of the head. We we can do similar things,
Speaker 1: you know. We don't need to talk for that. That's
Speaker 1: that's a good point. That's a very good point. Another
Speaker 1: misconception that you that you clear up is the idea
Speaker 1: that female female competition doesn't exist. You say, in all primates,
Speaker 1: males compete overwhelming with males and females with females. This
Speaker 1: applies equally to us. Psychologists down play this among women.
Speaker 1: I'm a psychologist, so I'm sorry on behalf of my
Speaker 1: species of psychology. Why do we downplay female female competition?
Speaker 1: And how can how do we end up with this
Speaker 1: bogus gendered dichotomy? Yeah, that's so surprising to me. Is
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a biologist who has lived for almost
Speaker 1: thirty years. Among psychologists, I'm a psychology professor, And so
Speaker 1: in psychology there is a very positive opinion of women
Speaker 1: and a negative one of men. For example, male friendships
Speaker 1: are not taken seriously because only women have real deep
Speaker 1: friendships and the male hierarchy is emphasized. But that females
Speaker 1: have a higherarchy no one talks about. You know, the
Speaker 1: word pecking order comes from hence not from roosters. All
Speaker 1: female animals have hierarchies and are competitive, and of course
Speaker 1: in humans, women are competitive with each other. So they
Speaker 1: have friendships, which is wonderful, but they're also competitive with
Speaker 1: each other. So so yeah, in psychology, and for me,
Speaker 1: the fascinating the saying is that in anthropology we have
Speaker 1: exactly the opposite bias. In anthropology always emphasizes male bonding
Speaker 1: and male rituals and the men's houses and hunting together
Speaker 1: and warfare together. So the male bonding is emphasized in
Speaker 1: the anthropology departments and the female bonding in the psychology departments.
Speaker 1: But you know, all primate females are competitive with each other,
Speaker 1: more with each other than with males, and males are
Speaker 1: more competitive with each other than the females. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that needs to be recognized, and of course people now
Speaker 1: recognize it. For example, bullying at schools and bullying on
Speaker 1: the internet at Facebook, we now know clearly that's not
Speaker 1: limited to males. You know, that's not limited to males
Speaker 1: at all. Yeah. Yeah, in terms of competition for meeting rivals,
Speaker 1: Derogation of rivals is a big one among humans. Males
Speaker 1: will often compete with each other in ways that the
Speaker 1: women don't even care so much about it, like you know,
Speaker 1: making fun of each other's penis size, or like or
Speaker 1: punching each other and like you know, who's the more
Speaker 1: muscular when you know, it's just like what men think
Speaker 1: what women want are the things that men are competing
Speaker 1: with each other for, when that's often not exactly what
Speaker 1: women really want. And I find it interesting. Do you
Speaker 1: see that in other animals as well, that kind of
Speaker 1: meeting derogation of potential rivals? They don't have the language
Speaker 1: to do that. But of course the competition among males
Speaker 1: is more physical than among females, and also males develop
Speaker 1: different strategies. So, for example, chimpanzee males they have a
Speaker 1: lot of conflict, but they also reconcile quite easily. They
Speaker 1: reconcile afterwards, they kiss and embrace, then they groom. They
Speaker 1: get over it quite easily. I think for the female chimpanzee.
Speaker 1: The data indicate the females have a lot more trouble
Speaker 1: this reconciliation, and for that reason, the female strategy is
Speaker 1: largely to avoid conflict. So if it's hard to get
Speaker 1: over them, then the best trilogy is to try to
Speaker 1: suppress them and stay away from your rivals. For example,
Speaker 1: males don't stay away from their rivals. They don't mind
Speaker 1: the conflict and they get over it. The females they
Speaker 1: try to. I call it the females have keep peace
Speaker 1: keeping strategy and males have a peace making strategy, and
Speaker 1: we know more about it in the primates than in humans. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: for conflict resolution, which is one of my favorite topics,
Speaker 1: we have a bigger knowledge for the primates than for humans.
Speaker 1: I don't know why. In humans that's not really studied
Speaker 1: so much, but I do know that in the business literature,
Speaker 1: I noticed that they talk about how women are more
Speaker 1: affected by conflict in the corporation, so they ruminate more,
Speaker 1: they think about it more, they are more deeply affected
Speaker 1: by conflict and competition. So that may correspond a little
Speaker 1: bit with what I saw among chimpanzees. Gosh, that's so fascina.
Speaker 1: I could talk to you all day about this. It's
Speaker 1: so interesting. Why is the term the maternal instinct misleading? Ah,
Speaker 1: the maternal instinct is used all the time. I think
Speaker 1: there's an instinctual part, which is the attraction to infants,
Speaker 1: which you see in young females and in all the
Speaker 1: attraction to infants is maybe inborn or I mean attraction
Speaker 1: to care for infants, yeah, or hold them or yeah,
Speaker 1: see them, smell them, hold them. But the care for
Speaker 1: infants is not. No one is born miss the skills. So,
Speaker 1: for example, if you have a gorilla group at the
Speaker 1: zoo where there's a female pregnant and they have never
Speaker 1: had babies there, they know they're in trouble because that
Speaker 1: female will not do the right thing. She may even
Speaker 1: sit on the baby, who knows what she's gonna do,
Speaker 1: but she's not gonna take care of the baby. And
Speaker 1: what a zoo will do under these circumstances is bring
Speaker 1: in a human mother who has a newborn and let
Speaker 1: her nurse in front of the gorillas, and she will
Speaker 1: do it every day and the gorillas will watch f
Speaker 1: carefully and that may help them, it's not sure, but
Speaker 1: it may help them raise their own infant. So infant
Speaker 1: care needs to be learned. It's one of the most
Speaker 1: complex skills. That is how to carry them, how to
Speaker 1: feed them, how to punish them, how to all sorts
Speaker 1: of clean them. All sorts of things need to be learned,
Speaker 1: and the primates learned that usually when they're young by
Speaker 1: watching models around them. But if they don't have that example,
Speaker 1: they are in trouble and they're not very good at childcare.
Speaker 1: Just generalizing above to like I guess as a callback
Speaker 1: to the Dawkins disagreement, we are wired for cooperation in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. Are we wired at all the
Speaker 1: care for those who are in our outgroup? I think
Speaker 1: that's kind of the biggest thing in the world right now,
Speaker 1: is that when it comes to that instinct, it's usually
Speaker 1: associated with oxytocin, associated with sort of that drive to
Speaker 1: help those in our in group. We're suffering from a
Speaker 1: lot nowadays is how much if we perceive someone in
Speaker 1: our ourt group, how much we kind of don't treat
Speaker 1: them as human anymore. We won't even agree with that,
Speaker 1: we won't even to have discussions with them, And Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just want to kind of understand how can we
Speaker 1: is there instinct at all for that for because the
Speaker 1: maternal instinct seems like something different. That's like the we
Speaker 1: call that the in group of instinct, you know, So
Speaker 1: the maternal instinct, there's a lot of learning involved. But
Speaker 1: the in group outgroup distinction is very you know, it's
Speaker 1: very profound in all sorts of animals, not just in
Speaker 1: our species, and so to overcome that is going to
Speaker 1: be very difficult. So, for example, I've done quite a
Speaker 1: bit of research on empathy in animals, how they respond
Speaker 1: to the emotions of others and adopt the emotions of others,
Speaker 1: and there's a very big in group outgroup distinction right there.
Speaker 1: Empathy is much more easily triggered between individuals who know
Speaker 1: each other the individuals who don't know each other. And
Speaker 1: in the primes, in group out group is defined by
Speaker 1: who you know. So it's not like your label of
Speaker 1: I am French and you are Germans. We don't have
Speaker 1: that kind of labels. In the primates, it's who do
Speaker 1: you know and who is it that you don't know?
Speaker 1: And there's only one species that I know in our
Speaker 1: immediate relatives who is not senophobic, and that's the bonobo.
Speaker 1: The banobo females, since they have taken over and are
Speaker 1: maybe less territorial than the males, they mingle the neighboring groups.
Speaker 1: So when groups meet in the forest, they mingle, and
Speaker 1: the groom and they have sex, and they hang out together,
Speaker 1: and we now have data that they sometimes share food
Speaker 1: with each other, that females may even adopt an orphan
Speaker 1: from a neighboring group and stuff like that. So female
Speaker 1: Banovos are not senophobic, but chimpanzees are extremely senophobic. They
Speaker 1: hate the other group and they will kill them and
Speaker 1: they do that, they do that in the wild. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: So we need to harness more our more of our
Speaker 1: innerban obo if we want to have world peace. Yeah. Maybe, okay,
Speaker 1: So let's let's just stand on this idea of how
Speaker 1: we need to move away from mind by dualism. I
Speaker 1: think that that you see that as a big problem, right,
Speaker 1: as a thread range through lots of these misconceptions. So yeah,
Speaker 1: can you kind of tell tell me your argument a
Speaker 1: little bit along those lines. Yeah. So, the the mind
Speaker 1: body dualism is an old trope by male thinkers. Men
Speaker 1: think that their mind is independent of their body. And
Speaker 1: that's why you have men, for example, who tried to
Speaker 1: freeze their brain and preserve it because they hope that
Speaker 1: one day their brain will be revived, at least the
Speaker 1: content will be revived, so they can imagine a life
Speaker 1: without their body, and and and and it has been
Speaker 1: used of course against women in the sense that these
Speaker 1: all these thinkers, they believe that the human mind, the
Speaker 1: male mind, is far superior to anything in the world,
Speaker 1: including women, including animals, including everybody else. And so at
Speaker 1: some point that dualism of mind mind being dominant over
Speaker 1: the body, so to speak, that dualism was adopted by
Speaker 1: the feminist movement. And I think it's a second wave
Speaker 1: feminism and sometimes confused the different waves, but I think
Speaker 1: it's second wave feminism that emphasized how women should be
Speaker 1: become more intellectual equals to men, and the bodies were
Speaker 1: not terribly different. Only between the legs was something different.
Speaker 1: But for the rest, the bodies were not relevant to
Speaker 1: the discussion, and so they focused on the mind. And
Speaker 1: I think that is very misleading. The mind is never
Speaker 1: independent of the body, and that men can think this
Speaker 1: is very logical because men don't have the hormonal cycles
Speaker 1: to deal with that women have, of course, and so
Speaker 1: then it's easier to think that your mind is sort
Speaker 1: of independent. But the mind is always part of the body,
Speaker 1: because the mind is in the brain and the brain
Speaker 1: is the body. And this whole idea that you can
Speaker 1: sort of isolate your interest and your being and your
Speaker 1: identity from what your body is is for me a
Speaker 1: very strange idea, because your body is involved in everything
Speaker 1: you do and what you think, and even being hungry
Speaker 1: will enormously change your perspective on the world. And so
Speaker 1: your body is involved in everything. And we know that,
Speaker 1: for example, in psychology, embodied cognition is a big area now,
Speaker 1: and the body is involved in everything in your psychology
Speaker 1: and your thinking, and so running away from your body
Speaker 1: is I don't think the solution to the gender debates,
Speaker 1: and we need to recognize that the human genders, they
Speaker 1: are different, and their bodies are different, their minds are different.
Speaker 1: And what I argue in the book is of course
Speaker 1: that the difference doesn't mean that we need to accept inequality.
Speaker 1: For me, if you take the two words gender inequality,
Speaker 1: the problem is not with gender. The problem is with inequality.
Speaker 1: That injustice and the inequality. That's where the problem is.
Speaker 1: And we can be perfectly equal even though we recognize
Speaker 1: that there are certain biological differences. Yeah, yeah, we The
Speaker 1: problem is with us. The problem is the way we
Speaker 1: treat each other. Yeah, it's becoming so clear to me
Speaker 1: after talking today about that. I'm going to end with
Speaker 1: some culture from you. You say, I would never want
Speaker 1: to live in a generalist or sexless world. It would
Speaker 1: be an incredibly boring place. It all comes down to
Speaker 1: mutual love and respect and appreciation of the fact that
Speaker 1: humans don't need to be the same to be equal.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on my podcast, but
Speaker 1: even more big thank you to being a legend in
Speaker 1: the field of primatology and influencing us psychologists in the
Speaker 1: way that we think about this as well. It's a
Speaker 1: huge debt to you and also the field of primatology.
Speaker 1: It was a huge debt to you. So just thank
Speaker 1: you so much for your existence in this world and
Speaker 1: the work you've done. You're welcome, Thank you great, Thank you,
Speaker 1: have a great day. Thanks for listening to this episode
Speaker 1: of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in
Speaker 1: some way to something you heard, I encourage you to
Speaker 1: join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com or
Speaker 1: on our YouTube page thus Psychology Podcast. We also put
Speaker 1: up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page
Speaker 1: as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks
Speaker 1: for being such a great supporter of the show and
Speaker 1: Tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity.