Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: I'm really delighted to have doctor Steve Stuart Williams on
Speaker 1: the podcast. Doctor Stuart Williams is the New Zealander who
Speaker 1: moved to Canada, then to Wales and then to Malaysia,
Speaker 1: where he is now an Associate Professor of Psychology at
Speaker 1: the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. His first book, Darwin,
Speaker 1: God and the Meaning of Life, was published in twenty
Speaker 1: ten and his latest book is called The Ape That
Speaker 1: Understood the Universe, How the Mind and Culture Evolved. Steve,
Speaker 1: great to chat with you today. Hi, Scott, how are
Speaker 1: you doing. I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good. How are you, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm good. Thanks man. So I've been following your Twitter
Speaker 1: feed for a couple of years now. Oh great, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I've watched this sort of rise of doctor Steve
Speaker 1: Stewart Williams and the popularity. You've noticed that too, right,
Speaker 1: you've noticed that. You know, over the past couple of
Speaker 1: years you get a lot more likes than your posts. Yeah. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: it's sort of it's grown exponentially. Yeah, what do you
Speaker 1: attribute to, uh my good looks? So it's just that
Speaker 1: one picture you put up on Twitter yourself. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: that was the turning point. I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I read quite a bit, and I guess I just
Speaker 1: got mental habit of funding bits and paces that jump
Speaker 1: out of me and that spot my interest. It's greenshotting them,
Speaker 1: putting them up things like that. Well, that's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your work really is broad. I mean you cover you're
Speaker 1: very interested in all of human nature and not just
Speaker 1: the nice bits, but it includes the nice bits but
Speaker 1: also the naughty bits of human nature as well. Right,
Speaker 1: And you know what we are we evolved as a
Speaker 1: as a whole species, and what we have in common
Speaker 1: with other animals. You start out your book, your new book,
Speaker 1: with this aliens challenge. You know, what would happen if
Speaker 1: an alien dropped in on a how to view our species,
Speaker 1: particularly if the alien was from beetle guys three. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: as the planet that you talked about there. So I
Speaker 1: thought that was the craft of this whole you know,
Speaker 1: imaginative scenario. And you know, I was cracking up. It's
Speaker 1: funny to view human I mean, it's what comedians do
Speaker 1: every day, right, they view humans. Yeah, from a planet perspective.
Speaker 1: But you got a chance to play with that as
Speaker 1: a scientist, you know. So do you want to talk
Speaker 1: a little about what these aliens would think of what
Speaker 1: you refer to as us crazy meat robots. Yeah? Sure,
Speaker 1: So long story or short, I guess is that the
Speaker 1: aliens would they be quite puzzled by. So set it up. So,
Speaker 1: this is an alien that doesn't have male and female.
Speaker 1: It doesn't full love, it doesn't doesn't have families. It's
Speaker 1: cultural institutions that we do, such as religions and art
Speaker 1: and music things like that. So pretty much everything that
Speaker 1: we do and a lot of the stuff that's most
Speaker 1: central to our species and that we take most for granted,
Speaker 1: just unfamiliar to this hypothetical alien. So it's puzzled by
Speaker 1: all that. I also highlight some of the ways in
Speaker 1: which our species is different than other animals. We should
Speaker 1: be sort of an additional layer of puzzlement for the aliens.
Speaker 1: And then I pivot to so I focus on some
Speaker 1: of the areas that I get into later in the book.
Speaker 1: So sex differences. Now this is an asexual alien, doesn't
Speaker 1: have male female. So it's going to be puzzled initially
Speaker 1: by the fact that most humans are either male or female,
Speaker 1: and that the males and females differ in a number
Speaker 1: of ways. That differ physically, they also differ on average
Speaker 1: in a number of psychological ways. It's going to be
Speaker 1: puzzled by the fact that people fall in love. It's
Speaker 1: going to be puzzled by the fact that people who
Speaker 1: have fallen in love get upset if the person they're
Speaker 1: in love with becomes involved with somebody else. Another thing
Speaker 1: that might puzzle the alien sign is the fact that
Speaker 1: we tend to channel parental care toward our own the
Speaker 1: offspring rather than just sort of any old offspring. Where
Speaker 1: we're quite selective and how we are and how we
Speaker 1: distribute parental care. The alien might say, why shouldn't we
Speaker 1: just help everybody? It will be puzzled by how good
Speaker 1: we are to our relatives because the alien doesn't have family,
Speaker 1: but also how compared to most other animals, we're very
Speaker 1: good to non relatives as well. We often cooperate a
Speaker 1: lot with non relatives. That's some of the nice stuff.
Speaker 1: And then moving into the cultural sphere, it'd be puzzled
Speaker 1: by the fact that we have invisible beings that we
Speaker 1: pray to. It'd be puzzled by the fact that we
Speaker 1: synchronize our behavior to different tones and things like that,
Speaker 1: and how we spend hours staring at flat screens and
Speaker 1: admiring splotches of color on canvas and all these other
Speaker 1: kind of odd cultural things that we do as well.
Speaker 1: You know, as I see this thought experiment, it actually
Speaker 1: makes me appreciate being human more and maybe had the
Speaker 1: opposite effect. Oh no, maybe that was the But it's
Speaker 1: like there's an ironic effect there where I realized, like
Speaker 1: I start to feel empathy for the alien as being
Speaker 1: so lacking in fundamental humanity, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting because there are like humans that probably you know,
Speaker 1: you know, I always wonder like, what is it like
Speaker 1: if you were a bona fide psychopath, right, what would
Speaker 1: the world look like? And it must feel for a
Speaker 1: lot of them, like why do people hug each other?
Speaker 1: Why do people love each other? Like they must not compute? Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you see what I'm saying. So your thought experiment is
Speaker 1: real for some humans probably on this area. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think it's a really good point. And I think with
Speaker 1: psychopaths we often think about the bad effects they have
Speaker 1: on other people. But I guess something else is that
Speaker 1: they're messing out on a lot of stuff, right that
Speaker 1: the rest of us, you know, get to enjoy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've always been uh, just had compassion for like all variation, right,
Speaker 1: as long as they're not like killing me, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: or anyone else really. But anyway, So it was funny
Speaker 1: and it was really quite profound, you know that opening
Speaker 1: a good way to start a book, by the way,
Speaker 1: you know it really it kind of hooks you in.
Speaker 1: You said something, you said, humans are strange fish, I mean,
Speaker 1: then you know, and then you talk a lot about
Speaker 1: about how we're EPs? Are we are fish? Epe hybrid?
Speaker 1: What are we? Well? The way the aliens looking at it,
Speaker 1: so tetrapods, so mammals and reptiles and birds and amphibians
Speaker 1: were all the traditional way to say that we evolve
Speaker 1: from fish. But a lot of cladists would argue that actually,
Speaker 1: in a certain sense, it makes sense to say that
Speaker 1: we actually are fish. We belong to that clade. We're
Speaker 1: a sort of sub branch of this clade that we
Speaker 1: call fish. That's not the everyday way to use the language,
Speaker 1: but it is maybe how the alien would see it.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't draw the distinction that we naturally do between
Speaker 1: fish that are in the water and at the land
Speaker 1: fish as the alien says it. So to the alien
Speaker 1: and Neil Schubn the paleontologists actually the same way. He
Speaker 1: once said. I heard a talk where he said that
Speaker 1: when he looks at a picture of Einstein, so most
Speaker 1: people see they see a physicist, They see the guy
Speaker 1: that came up with equals mc squared, They see this genius.
Speaker 1: He said, what he sees is a crazy morphed out fish,
Speaker 1: because we're all from fish, and we're still in a
Speaker 1: certain sense a little reactionistic. Indeed. Indeed, yeah, so we
Speaker 1: are apes. We belong to that group, but apes belong
Speaker 1: to the fish group in this way of looking at it,
Speaker 1: and yeah, that's how the aliens sort. I think it
Speaker 1: captures something true, which is that we do belong to
Speaker 1: that group. We are fish like in a number of ways.
Speaker 1: Our limbs from our arms are modified fins, for instance,
Speaker 1: and our jaws are modified what's the word girls, Yeah,
Speaker 1: modified girls, modified girls. Yeah, So that's the sense in
Speaker 1: which we're modified sort of morphed out fish. We're other
Speaker 1: stuff too, though I always thought of as fish as
Speaker 1: modified humans. Okay, so look, there are so many different
Speaker 1: ways we can go here. I think that in order
Speaker 1: to really build up to the climax of your thesis,
Speaker 1: we should do this in steps. So let's start with
Speaker 1: a good grounding of the first meter of your book,
Speaker 1: which is evolutionary psychology, and then we'll get into why
Speaker 1: evolution is not enough. But let's start with evolutionary psychology.
Speaker 1: How does that singular perspective? How far does that take
Speaker 1: us in understanding human nature? It takes us quite a
Speaker 1: long way. So it's based on the sort of the
Speaker 1: genes I view of evolution. So the basic idea is
Speaker 1: that natural selection creates organisms that are designed to pass
Speaker 1: on their genes. And the rationale for that is that,
Speaker 1: so if you mentioned that you were a gene and
Speaker 1: you had in fact on the organism in which you're
Speaker 1: sitting that caused it not to have offspring it and
Speaker 1: not to pass itself on, or if it did so
Speaker 1: less confidently than your neighbor, then you are going to
Speaker 1: disappear from the gene pool. So the genes that stick
Speaker 1: around in the gene pool are the ones that have
Speaker 1: effects that mean that they will be passed on at
Speaker 1: a faster rate than competing versions of the same genes.
Speaker 1: And that applies to the body. That applies as well
Speaker 1: to the mind, certain sort of foundational aspects of the
Speaker 1: mind base. Yeah it doesn't stop it the neck, I'm afraid. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: sorry to break it to you. Ah. So basic emotions
Speaker 1: like like fair For instance, fear sort of motivates behavior.
Speaker 1: Motivates us to stare clear of danger, stare clear of
Speaker 1: the edge of the cliff, run away from the bear,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, and that leads us to survive, which
Speaker 1: gives us more opportunity to to have offspring and ultimately
Speaker 1: pass on our genes. Same sort of story for sexual
Speaker 1: desire that has has the same effect and obvious kind
Speaker 1: of way leads us to engage in behaviors that, in
Speaker 1: the absence of contraception as least result in offspring, parental love,
Speaker 1: same deal. We look after these little offspring once they're
Speaker 1: pair on the scene. That's the basic kind of idea
Speaker 1: of evolutionary psych. Those examples I think probably reasonably uncontroversial.
Speaker 1: I think evolutionary psych though it takes a little further,
Speaker 1: it takes it to explain other aspects of human behavior
Speaker 1: that do push it into some more controversial borders. Pure
Speaker 1: aquey when we're talking about the mind, indeed, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know, you go through a lot of pictions
Speaker 1: of evolution that are not as true and complex, don't
Speaker 1: fully capture the complexity of the matter, and you kind
Speaker 1: of work your way up. I thought that was really neat.
Speaker 1: So you talk about, you know, some people talk about,
Speaker 1: I think evolutions survival of the fittest, and that's not
Speaker 1: quite right, right, Yeah, I mean, it does tend to
Speaker 1: favor survival. You've got to survive in order to reproduce
Speaker 1: and to look out to ken. But if you were to,
Speaker 1: for instance, that survive for a thousand years but never
Speaker 1: have any offspring, then the moment that you did finally die, well,
Speaker 1: your gene is going to go out of existence just
Speaker 1: as surely as if you'd survive for twenty seconds. So
Speaker 1: survival alone is not enough. So if you rule that
Speaker 1: out for a start, at the very least, you need
Speaker 1: to reproduce and have offspring. Okay, So then some people
Speaker 1: might think like, oh, well, then we're really just baby
Speaker 1: making machines. You know, that's what the organisms are going for.
Speaker 1: Talk to me a little about that. Well, that's a
Speaker 1: step in the right direction, but it doesn't cover all adaptations.
Speaker 1: So one problem is, say you had a thousand babies.
Speaker 1: If none of those babies survive to adulthood, then again
Speaker 1: you're going to have as few genes go forward into
Speaker 1: the future as if you just had no offspring. So
Speaker 1: you need to have babies that survive to have babies themselves. Basically,
Speaker 1: the number of ways you can do this one is
Speaker 1: it's just like a numbers game. A lot of species
Speaker 1: and lots of insects, for instance, just pump out fish,
Speaker 1: just pump out tons and tons and tons of offspring,
Speaker 1: most of which we don't make it and just a
Speaker 1: tiny minority do. The approach that mammals and birds take though,
Speaker 1: is they had many fewer offspring, but they invest a
Speaker 1: lot more into each individual offspring. It's different parts of
Speaker 1: the same goal, but it's not just about producing offspring.
Speaker 1: It's about producing those offspring, bringing them those offspring to
Speaker 1: breeding age as well, and it's a further step in
Speaker 1: the right direction. Yeah, you know it just thought. Don't
Speaker 1: mean that, you know, I mean, I totally agree, Like
Speaker 1: humans are really strange in the animal kingdom and in
Speaker 1: so many ways. But one way is like we can
Speaker 1: be evolutionarily losers and be human success stories. Yep, Like
Speaker 1: isn't that fascinating to think about? Like, you know, because
Speaker 1: when we get into these kinds of discussions, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of misunderstanding. You'd be the
Speaker 1: first one to say there are a lot of misunderstandings
Speaker 1: about evolutionary psychology. But there's this misunderstand that like, you know,
Speaker 1: people get so emotional about it when we talk about
Speaker 1: it from the Genesi perspective when we really shouldn't get that.
Speaker 1: We're talking about like kind of like psychopath perspective that
Speaker 1: it exists, you know, you know, we want to understand it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't care about us. The organism, you know, the
Speaker 1: Genei perspective doesn't care. It just wants to propagate itself
Speaker 1: in the future and in fact, we have this peculiar
Speaker 1: ability as a whole organism to override that to a
Speaker 1: certain extent, you know, not a limited freedom, but we
Speaker 1: have this amazing ability to say, you know what, I'm
Speaker 1: going to define success differently than you, mister gen or
Speaker 1: missus Gens. You know, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: I totally message gens who cares what they want? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's our goals and ambitions seem to come quite detached
Speaker 1: from the evolutionary basis. That is fascinating, right, And so
Speaker 1: we might choose rather than having tons and tons of kids,
Speaker 1: we might decide instead that we want to devote ourselves
Speaker 1: to some other cause. Yeah, in a way that I
Speaker 1: think is quite unique to human beings. We do that,
Speaker 1: devote ourselves to creativity and then just jump in the gun.
Speaker 1: But you know, like producing works that live on through
Speaker 1: generations is also a form of cultural success. Right. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna get to that. We're gonna do that.
Speaker 1: Didn't mean to drop that just yet. Okay, So working
Speaker 1: our way up to the complexity of this, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: give you a statement and tell me if this will
Speaker 1: get you top marks. If I took a test in
Speaker 1: your class. Okay. Natural selection is all about inclusive fitness.
Speaker 1: Genes are selected if they enhance the inclusive fitness of
Speaker 1: their bearers. Adaptations are designed to maximize the organism's inclusive
Speaker 1: fitness and organisms taken as a whole, which I just
Speaker 1: like that phrase, whole organism are inclusive fitness? Machine? Does
Speaker 1: that capture the complexity is more very very close? Yees,
Speaker 1: So you get a really good mark for that statement.
Speaker 1: So that's the next step beyond were before us plus
Speaker 1: or minus no I think as okay, maybe even an
Speaker 1: a maybe even okay. So it's not just about having offspring, right,
Speaker 1: that's what's called direct fitness. Inclusive fitness also includes what's
Speaker 1: called indirect fitness. So direct fitness is your personal reproductive success,
Speaker 1: the number of offspring that you have. Indirect fitness is
Speaker 1: your contribution to the reproductive success of genetic relatives. And
Speaker 1: you need to add that on as well, add a
Speaker 1: bit more complexity, and then you get to the inclusive
Speaker 1: fitness perspective, which I think is an excellent account of
Speaker 1: most adaptations. So it includes survival adaptations for survival, adaptations
Speaker 1: for reproductive success, and also adaptations that increase the survival
Speaker 1: and reproductive success are close relatives. Okay, so what would
Speaker 1: be the A plus the ALUs will the aplus have
Speaker 1: to go to a gene center perspective, You would have
Speaker 1: to go to a gene center perspective. So the inclusive
Speaker 1: fitness perspective basically talking about the organisms fitness in terms
Speaker 1: of you get selection for traits that maximize the organisms
Speaker 1: inclusive fitness, whereas the gene center view you get selection
Speaker 1: for genes maximize their own fitness. And most of the
Speaker 1: time those two things are the same, So it's just
Speaker 1: two different ways of saying the same thing. There are
Speaker 1: cases though, where you have a gene that will be
Speaker 1: selected which does not actually enhance the inclusive fitness of
Speaker 1: its owners. An example would be like segregation distorted genes.
Speaker 1: So these are genes that so most genes, right, they've
Speaker 1: got fifty to fifty chants making it into a sperm
Speaker 1: or into an egg. But segregation distorted genes are genes
Speaker 1: that have some kind of effect that means that they
Speaker 1: bias the coin flip, that they improve their chances they
Speaker 1: have a greater than fifty percent chance of getting into
Speaker 1: the gammy to the sperm or the egg now and
Speaker 1: doing that they either had no effect on the organism's
Speaker 1: inclusive fitness in some cases actually lower the organisms inclusive fitness,
Speaker 1: but they can nonetheless be selected just because they're good
Speaker 1: for themselves. So in other words, this is an example
Speaker 1: that where the gene is getting selected but can't be
Speaker 1: explained in terms of inclusive fitness. So I think that
Speaker 1: sort of a case where the genes I view goes
Speaker 1: beyond inclusive fittaesus and because it can explain that case
Speaker 1: provides a more accurate view I think of what's going
Speaker 1: on and the closest fitness. So you talk about how
Speaker 1: we're really rewriting our understanding of adaptations, what are some
Speaker 1: common misunderstandings of what an adaptation is and how are
Speaker 1: we writing that? Well, I think this kind of view
Speaker 1: changes the way we look at adaptations in a kind
Speaker 1: of interesting way. So, if you think of classic adaptations
Speaker 1: like the peacock's tail and effect, the peacock's tail is
Speaker 1: an adaptation designed to pass on the genes that give
Speaker 1: rise to the peacocks tail. If you think of sharp
Speaker 1: teeth that the lion has, likewise, that's an adaptation designed
Speaker 1: to pass on those sharp teeth. And an individual organism.
Speaker 1: These things lead the peacock or lead the lion to
Speaker 1: pass on all of their genes. But the genes that
Speaker 1: give rise to those traits that they're mixed and matched
Speaker 1: through the generations pretty much every other gene in the
Speaker 1: gene pool, and the only genes that they consistently benefit
Speaker 1: are the ones that actually give rise to those adaptations.
Speaker 1: So sort of ultimate effect is just to keep themselves
Speaker 1: in the gene point. So how does that rerate our
Speaker 1: understaning of adaptations? Well, what was the old view? Do
Speaker 1: you know what I mean? Yeah, so the old view
Speaker 1: was from a more organism center view, so it was
Speaker 1: to enhanced inclusive fitness or the fitness of the organism
Speaker 1: and question. So, yeah, the peacocks tail is for the
Speaker 1: benefit of the peacock, for passing oxy genes to future progeny.
Speaker 1: It's turning that around. So the peacocks tail is instead
Speaker 1: for the benefit of the peacock, that the genes giving
Speaker 1: rise to the peacocks tail. Okay, well that is interesting
Speaker 1: and it opens a windows what a group selection, right,
Speaker 1: and that is a very interesting form of selection that
Speaker 1: also takes us beyond this inclusive fitness only view. Right,
Speaker 1: So can you talk a little bit about group selection.
Speaker 1: I cande the group selection. It's kind of as a
Speaker 1: controversial idea in biology, and it has defenders and detractors.
Speaker 1: They're actually different versions of it. So one version it
Speaker 1: doesn't actually take us beyond inclusive fitness theory. It's actually
Speaker 1: just another way of construing inclusive fitness fair enough. But
Speaker 1: a common view, though, is that it does go beyond.
Speaker 1: Some people argue David Sloan Wilson, for instance, argue that
Speaker 1: that as well as selection among individuals, you get selection
Speaker 1: among different groups. So a group that does better, he argues,
Speaker 1: you can get selection for trades that actually make the
Speaker 1: individual that has those traits slightly worse off, if at
Speaker 1: the same time it makes the group in which that
Speaker 1: individual is operating perform better. So within groups, you have
Speaker 1: selection for traits that make the individual do better within
Speaker 1: that group, but then between groups you have selection for
Speaker 1: traits that make the group as a whole do better
Speaker 1: compared to other groups. So it's inclusive fitness versus group
Speaker 1: beneficial traits. And does that actually happen? Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: going to ask, That's exactly what I was going to ask. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Now I'm not one hundred percent sure I would if
Speaker 1: you force me to take a side, I would put
Speaker 1: my money probably that it doesn't particularly happen. It could happen.
Speaker 1: In principle, I think that group selection in the sense
Speaker 1: that it's something more than inclusive fitness, I think probably
Speaker 1: hasn't had any influence or much influence on our species
Speaker 1: or most others. I thinkably most of it's captured by
Speaker 1: inclosive fitness, you know. I mean this this gets us
Speaker 1: to altruism, doesn't it. And a real understanding of you
Speaker 1: know is everything you know the most diehard cynic you know,
Speaker 1: constance is like everything you do for others is really
Speaker 1: just the end of the day ultimately selfish. And I
Speaker 1: actually really liked your nuanced distinction between altruism and selfishness.
Speaker 1: It was one of the most precise definitions I've seen
Speaker 1: in the whole literature. I mean, I've been reading this
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology literature for more than a decade and I've
Speaker 1: never seen anyone pinpoint that. And it relates to some
Speaker 1: recent research I'm doing. So that's why I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk to you about it. Yeah, so you you make
Speaker 1: a very good point. You say, well, sort of would
Speaker 1: occurred to me that altruisms. Now you sound like an
Speaker 1: all I was trying to do with your accent. That's
Speaker 1: sound like a passport. I know. It did all of
Speaker 1: a sudden like a queen, you know, queen mother. Okay,
Speaker 1: I won't do that again, but you know it will
Speaker 1: occurred to me that altruism. You're helping someone, but you're
Speaker 1: getting intrinsic pleasure for it. And it made me think
Speaker 1: of like CONT's you know, kind of gourgical imperative, you know,
Speaker 1: like helping others as not as a means to an end,
Speaker 1: but as an end in itself. So I saw a
Speaker 1: great linkage there between what you said to const categorical imperative.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you thought about that, but it's
Speaker 1: in and then selfishness is well, you know, you're just
Speaker 1: helping someone as a means to solely benefit your own genome.
Speaker 1: So this is a really really cool distinction. It links
Speaker 1: to and it really plays out and lots of you know,
Speaker 1: links to lots of things like. It even links to
Speaker 1: like And I always had to bring up Abraham as
Speaker 1: at least one scenary podcast chat because he really had
Speaker 1: so much figured out, even before evolush psychology. You know,
Speaker 1: he really understood a lot about human nature, and he
Speaker 1: really made the distinction between what he called be love
Speaker 1: being love, which is love for all human kind, and
Speaker 1: getting intrinsic joy and pleasure in being loving. You know,
Speaker 1: that's what bee love is. It's being loving. You're not
Speaker 1: doing love, doing love so that you can X y
Speaker 1: Z right. Yeah, yeah, So the beg love is is
Speaker 1: that love for its own sake? Yes, that's what I
Speaker 1: was onto your altruism, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, as opposed
Speaker 1: to love and altruism as a means to some other end. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then he also and this is where it links
Speaker 1: to recent research I'm working on, which I haven't talked
Speaker 1: about with anyone, but I thought it'd be fun to
Speaker 1: just improvisee you know, just riff and get your thoughts,
Speaker 1: you know, is that he also had this construct that
Speaker 1: I'm trying to operationalize called healthy selfishness. So I have
Speaker 1: scales I just I'm working on this paper right now
Speaker 1: where I'm trying to empirically distinguish between unhealthy selfishness and
Speaker 1: healthy selfishness, and so even altruism aside, there's a form
Speaker 1: of selfishness where you're being selfish but it's not hurting
Speaker 1: anyone and it's benefiting you. And then there's sort of
Speaker 1: like psychopath type of selfishness, you know, like where it's
Speaker 1: antagonistic and manipulately. Yeah, so you could actually be selfish
Speaker 1: as an end in itself as well and it not
Speaker 1: hurt anyone. So anyway, these are some distinctions I want
Speaker 1: put forward. I wanted to get your thoughts on what
Speaker 1: I just said, and he talked a little bit about
Speaker 1: how this relates to and maybe an emerging understanding of culture,
Speaker 1: the evolution of culture. I should say, yeah, yeah. First
Speaker 1: of all, I think go a bit to the cynics arguments.
Speaker 1: With the cynics argue that we're not actually ever altruistic.
Speaker 1: It's never genuine altruism. It's always a means to some
Speaker 1: other end, whether that end is personal happiness or genetic propagation.
Speaker 1: I suppose I should say that. So I don't agree
Speaker 1: with the cynics on that. I do think that we
Speaker 1: are sometimes genuinely altruistic. H me too, by the way, Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, people do sometimes think or
Speaker 1: they feel as if an evolutionary explanation for altruism kind
Speaker 1: of sucks the wind out of the sales of altruism
Speaker 1: and just renders it not real. And they treat it
Speaker 1: as if it unmasks altruism as actually being not real
Speaker 1: and ultimately just selfishness. I don't think that's true. I
Speaker 1: think one distinction I draw is between there are two
Speaker 1: ways you can interpret it. Right, you could interpret it
Speaker 1: as at the approximate level, at that psychological level, we're
Speaker 1: actually selfish, and any altruistic act that we engage in,
Speaker 1: we actually full well know that we're actually doing it
Speaker 1: for ourselves. And I think that's not true. I think
Speaker 1: sometimes we do have a secret, hidden motivations, but sometimes
Speaker 1: we just do care about other individuals and we help
Speaker 1: them just simply because we do care, you know, the
Speaker 1: occasional psychopath notwithstanding, I think most of us do that.
Speaker 1: And I guess Emmanuel Kant would come up there. He
Speaker 1: would argue that any truly good action you do purely
Speaker 1: out of a sense of duty, and not because you
Speaker 1: want to do it, you desire to do it, And
Speaker 1: I disagree with that. Right, I think that the fact
Speaker 1: that that some people enjoy being altruistic doesn't imply that
Speaker 1: their altruism isn't real. I think the opfice is true. Really,
Speaker 1: I think that an altruistic person is somebody that does
Speaker 1: enjoy it being altruistic for its own sake, as opposed
Speaker 1: to to help achieve some other goal. You know. This
Speaker 1: relates to some other work I'm doing distinguishing pathological altruism
Speaker 1: from non pathological altruism empiricals. That seems like another distinction here.
Speaker 1: That seems important because pathological altruism you don't enjoy. It's
Speaker 1: actually comes compulsive and you're not enjoying the helping. It's
Speaker 1: not spontaneously enjoyable. It's like any addiction. Right. That's interesting
Speaker 1: because we see some things that appear like altruism among
Speaker 1: humans that is really just like a compulsive need for
Speaker 1: self validation. In that sense, it is not an end
Speaker 1: in itself. Do you know what I mean? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I tell you, And I guess it's probably worth distinguishing,
Speaker 1: right between whether altruism is adaptive in an evolutionary sense.
Speaker 1: That that's one question, and then a separate question would
Speaker 1: be whether it's adaptive in the everyday sense that we
Speaker 1: care about, right, and so, God, the sounds of a
Speaker 1: pathological altruism that's defined in terms of its effect on
Speaker 1: our wellbeing. Right, so, right, so who cares? Again? Who
Speaker 1: cares about mister and missus gene? It doesn't matter if
Speaker 1: it's adaptive a mes sense, but in terms of how
Speaker 1: it affects the person, their well being, the well being
Speaker 1: of others around them. Yeah, that's right. So can you
Speaker 1: talk a little about why the evolutionary approach itself is
Speaker 1: not enough to understand such a weird species as Homo sapiens.
Speaker 1: Why do we need culture? Well, I think it's because
Speaker 1: of culture that it's not enough. So somewhere along the
Speaker 1: line we sent to evolve that we evolved the capacity
Speaker 1: for culture, and I presume I think it's reasonable to
Speaker 1: say that that was because it was it was useful
Speaker 1: for us to have a bit of flexibility in our behavior,
Speaker 1: ability to acquire the behaviors that other people had figured
Speaker 1: out in the past, and to use tools and to
Speaker 1: prove the tools and so on and so on. So
Speaker 1: that was sort of selected somewhere along the line. Once
Speaker 1: we have that flexibility, though, turned us into a kind
Speaker 1: of open system to a degree that's not true of
Speaker 1: other species. And so having put it in place. It
Speaker 1: kind of escaped the genetic leiche to quite a large extent.
Speaker 1: So there's a whole bunch of stuff that we do
Speaker 1: that can't be directly trest back to natural selection. It
Speaker 1: could be indirectly trest back and that we have this
Speaker 1: capacity for flexible behavior and culture. But we have all
Speaker 1: these massive pedents of behavior and belief systems and institutions
Speaker 1: that evolve culturally rather than evolutionarily, And it came about
Speaker 1: through the evolution of means rather than the evolution of genes.
Speaker 1: So there's all sorts of weird stuff that we do
Speaker 1: which I don't think is explicable just from evolutionary psychology.
Speaker 1: I totally agree with that. And you know, like culture
Speaker 1: enabling us to evolve things like language to the degree
Speaker 1: that it's evolved in us leading to consciousness, has given
Speaker 1: us this quirk where we have such flexibility and goal
Speaker 1: invention that doesn't exist among any other animal. I mean,
Speaker 1: we can have like my friend, my colleague Coliny Young,
Speaker 1: loves to say, like, well, where did like the motivation
Speaker 1: to be ski ball champion, you know, of the world,
Speaker 1: Like setting that goal like cannot be directly explained. You know,
Speaker 1: one could say, well, it's tied to the self esteem
Speaker 1: a motive, Yes, but that misses the point that you've
Speaker 1: still created the content of a goal that cannot be
Speaker 1: directly linked to the natural selection process. Absolutely. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I agree with that, and I really and by the way,
Speaker 1: I like that you combine these two perspectives. It's not
Speaker 1: something you see all the time in discussions about evolutionary psychology,
Speaker 1: so or maybe even most of the you know, popular
Speaker 1: books on the topic. So I'm really appreciated you did
Speaker 1: that on the Psychology podcast. I trying to, you know,
Speaker 1: see linkages to things that interest me as well, and
Speaker 1: then we can kind of like come up with synthesis
Speaker 1: and integrations. I love. Is this exciting when that happens
Speaker 1: in real time? Right? Yeah? I wrote a paper about
Speaker 1: ten years ago on how the big bang of cultural
Speaker 1: explosion that happened. People don't agree exactly. Was it twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand years ago? Was it forty thousand years ago? Okay? Yeah?
Speaker 1: The general trended says we go further back in time, yeah, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then Stephen Thinkers like made a good case for
Speaker 1: why it probably is even farther back. And yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know, really looking at the linkage between that cultural
Speaker 1: explosion and creativity and human creativity. There was like zilt
Speaker 1: human creativity before that. Jeffrey Miller would say, well, our
Speaker 1: height of our creativity worth esthetic hand axes used to
Speaker 1: attract meats, which you do talk about in your book.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean. But I mean, like, let's
Speaker 1: compare like aesthetic hand axes for like two million years,
Speaker 1: you know, versus like what happened in this really short
Speaker 1: period of time where culture, you know, evolved and then
Speaker 1: the capacities for creativity that came as a result. So
Speaker 1: I was wondering i'd be talking about culture. Have you
Speaker 1: thought about its linkages to understanding like how human creativity
Speaker 1: evolved has maybe separate from sexual selection? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I do think creativity does. I don't have a strong
Speaker 1: view on how creativity evolved, but I don't think that
Speaker 1: as one hundred percent down to sexual selection. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Creativity is so open ended, right, it can have effects
Speaker 1: that so many different domains, and it's useful for achieving
Speaker 1: any goal you care to name, from attracting a mate
Speaker 1: to being a skateboard champ or whatever it is, right activity,
Speaker 1: you can use that for any of those different goals.
Speaker 1: So I imagine that it was useful for all of them,
Speaker 1: and that selection what a favorite, a tendency to be
Speaker 1: able to creatively come up with good creative solutions to
Speaker 1: achieve whatever goals wanted to happen to have. Many of
Speaker 1: wish to have office sort of evolutionary precedents. Right, So
Speaker 1: the desire to attract, to make, the desire to rise
Speaker 1: and status, that desire to just survived, look after your kids,
Speaker 1: all these kind of selection pressures. I think we're have
Speaker 1: favored it. Yeah, I like that, and it doesn't limit
Speaker 1: us to you know, well, where did creativity come from?
Speaker 1: It's either natural or sexual. We got nothing else, you know,
Speaker 1: we have no other options. Well, you know, bringing in
Speaker 1: the cultural perspective does open us up to the idea
Speaker 1: that maybe certain plead on certain systems that we share
Speaker 1: with other animals, such as the general drive for exploration,
Speaker 1: for instance. I've been really interested in the drive for
Speaker 1: exploration is something that's not reductionistic to the meeting motive,
Speaker 1: because you know, seven year olds are explortive before pre puberty.
Speaker 1: There's great playfulness and create activity. I don't think Jeffrey's
Speaker 1: model is quite complete there. When we're trying to understand
Speaker 1: a complete understanding. I think it partly explains it, and
Speaker 1: he's quite brilliant in his book, But if we really
Speaker 1: want to understand this phenomenon of human creativity and flexibility,
Speaker 1: which is exactly what you nailed, you know, there's kind
Speaker 1: of a more general drive as I see it, that
Speaker 1: we evolved that perhaps culture has really drawn out more
Speaker 1: than it's done in like turtles. You know, there are
Speaker 1: very exportive turtles, but they haven't evolved the cultures kind
Speaker 1: of utilized it completely. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. So
Speaker 1: that's interesting, right, So what do you think what sort
Speaker 1: of selection pressures do you think favored the general exploratory,
Speaker 1: playful kind of creativity that we have. I guess, like
Speaker 1: if Jeffrey was sitting here, I like to take other
Speaker 1: people's perspectives as well as my own, right, If he
Speaker 1: was sitting here, he'd like, well, come on, obviously, those
Speaker 1: who like were exportive to like take risks to get
Speaker 1: attract meats. To him, everything comes down to meats, you know,
Speaker 1: like everything, So he would probably say, like, well, the
Speaker 1: exportive drive originally evolved to attract meats, you know, but
Speaker 1: we now use it for other things. But we could
Speaker 1: think of many, many reasons why exploration would have been
Speaker 1: important for fitness in lots of different things, you know,
Speaker 1: like even inclusive fitness. You know, even in altruism, there's
Speaker 1: lots of we don't have exist, yes, sorry, go on,
Speaker 1: looking after your kids, yeah, looking after your other relatives, Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: And you know, just the fact that we conquered that
Speaker 1: was that drive that got us to travel to other continents,
Speaker 1: you know, to get out of Africa in the first place, right,
Speaker 1: you know, like we must have been impacting the course
Speaker 1: of human evolution even back then when we were you know,
Speaker 1: still when we weren't a single species, you know, when
Speaker 1: we were side by side with the Neanderthals, for instance,
Speaker 1: we probably outcompeted them and in part probably to our
Speaker 1: sport of capacities, maybe also to our aggressive tendencies as
Speaker 1: well as we may have killed them. Unfortunately, we may
Speaker 1: have killed them, or we may have slept with all
Speaker 1: of their women. This is one of the theories, right,
Speaker 1: and then gene drift occurred. So anyway, look, I just
Speaker 1: love riffing you know, with you about this and really
Speaker 1: think about all these different things, and it is precisely
Speaker 1: the fact that you were bold enough to combine these
Speaker 1: two perspectives, that is what allowing me to riff on
Speaker 1: this right now. So thank you. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: you open us up to a different kind of evolution,
Speaker 1: that is something that is it's fighting words to ever
Speaker 1: say uniquely human. Have you ever say that phrase among
Speaker 1: an evolutionary psychologist? It they're fighting words. But I like
Speaker 1: to use the phrase uniquely developed because it doesn't get
Speaker 1: me in as much trouble if I say uniquely developed
Speaker 1: and we can agree that this kind of process you're
Speaker 1: talking about, like mimemic evolution, it's pretty uniquely developed among humans, right,
Speaker 1: isn't that a fair thing to say? I would say, yeah,
Speaker 1: there might be a touch of it, a little bit
Speaker 1: of it here and there in other spaces, but just
Speaker 1: take it at a whole new level. I don't think
Speaker 1: there's any question about that, really. Yeah, So can you
Speaker 1: talk a little about mimemic evolution? How does it operate?
Speaker 1: You don't only rely on Dawkins, which was nice, and
Speaker 1: you make that clearer that you draw on a lot
Speaker 1: of different people who have studied this. But he was
Speaker 1: pretty you know, Richard Dawkins was pretty foundational. On talking
Speaker 1: about americavil should pep we talk about it a little bit. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1: So the basic idea, basic meme theory idea is that
Speaker 1: so just in the same way that the genes that
Speaker 1: come to dominate in the gene pool are genes that
Speaker 1: have effects that cause them to stick around in the
Speaker 1: gene pool, So genes that are like selfish genes, genes
Speaker 1: that are good for themselves stick in the gene pool. Basically,
Speaker 1: Dawkins transplant that idea into the realm of culture. He said,
Speaker 1: you have cultural units, and he called those memes. He said,
Speaker 1: which memes stick around? So the memes that are most
Speaker 1: likely to stick around are not necessarily the ones that
Speaker 1: are good for us, or often they are good for us,
Speaker 1: not necessarily the ones that are good for the groups
Speaker 1: in which those memes are found, although again often they are.
Speaker 1: But the bottom line is that to stick around, the
Speaker 1: memes that are going to be selected and that are
Speaker 1: going to come to the foreign of culture are going
Speaker 1: to be those that are good for themselves. So selfish
Speaker 1: memes memes that have effects that keep them around in
Speaker 1: the culture. An example might be a meme that is
Speaker 1: good at grabbing your attention you notice it sticks in
Speaker 1: your mind, sticks in your memory. That's the first step.
Speaker 1: The second step would be you have selection for memes
Speaker 1: that motivate people to pass them on in some way
Speaker 1: sort of an interesting idea that you want to tell
Speaker 1: your friend or that you want to impose on people,
Speaker 1: or some other kind of way that makes you not
Speaker 1: only notice and remember the idea but also then pass
Speaker 1: it on as well. Might be good for you, might
Speaker 1: be good for the group, but ultimately it just has
Speaker 1: to be good for the meme itself. Do you ever
Speaker 1: like scratch your head when you see what some of
Speaker 1: these YouTube videos that go viral, like, do you as
Speaker 1: an evolutionary cultural appeal? Yeah? Do you really? Like? You're like,
Speaker 1: you know, have five billion views, and you're like, why
Speaker 1: did this evolve? This meme? Yeah? Why do you? And
Speaker 1: the funny thing is, exactly why did this one when
Speaker 1: when some other one? And why do people like watching this?
Speaker 1: And I sometimes even have that effect when I'm enjoying
Speaker 1: watching it and I'm not even sure why, so why
Speaker 1: are you enjoying it? On Facebook? I often I must
Speaker 1: have been lingering quite often on cute kitten videos and
Speaker 1: cute puppy video and things like that, because I think
Speaker 1: if you get more and more of those these days,
Speaker 1: and why they're so appealing, that they are very, very
Speaker 1: epigling and contagious and despite you know, there's a bit
Speaker 1: of a waste of time. You know, you just pointed
Speaker 1: something out that's actually really a good point. Is the
Speaker 1: algorithms we're creating allow us to custom tailor memes. They're like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: if you like this, we're gonna like throw one Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan video or whatever. And then I get five hundred
Speaker 1: thousand Jordan Peterson videos in my inbox every day in
Speaker 1: my life. It's like, wow, Like culture is imposing that. No, no,
Speaker 1: it's not imposing. The right word would be amplifying. Perhaps,
Speaker 1: you know, this interplay between our nature and what we
Speaker 1: find attractive and then culture has this amazing ability. Culture
Speaker 1: is not innocent. You know some evolutionary psychologists or misconceptions
Speaker 1: of every psychology, right is that it's like we're talking
Speaker 1: about these context independent modules and that's the farthest thing
Speaker 1: from the truth. Right, Like culture can really play a
Speaker 1: huge role in bring out the worst or the best
Speaker 1: in humans. Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely absolutely, and we
Speaker 1: behave so differently, right, from culture to culture, even though
Speaker 1: we've got the same basic human nature. So common criticism
Speaker 1: of evolutionary site, I think, not a great one, not
Speaker 1: a fair one, is that it implies that stuff is
Speaker 1: just unchangeable. It says human nature is this and that's that. So,
Speaker 1: for example, if aggression is innate, humans are going to
Speaker 1: be aggressive and there's nothing we can do about it.
Speaker 1: But different cultural contexts can bring that out to a
Speaker 1: greater or lesser degree. And we have seen like a
Speaker 1: massive decline and violence with the course of the decades
Speaker 1: and centuries and millennia. And that's a cultural difference, right,
Speaker 1: It's not a genetic difference. It's a cultural difference, but
Speaker 1: it's culture interacting with the same human nature, the same
Speaker 1: propensity for aggression. But it's just it's not inevitable that
Speaker 1: we behave aggressively or peacefully. And do you have this
Speaker 1: beautiful section in your book. The feature is unwridden, I mean,
Speaker 1: technically it is written. I talked to check Carrol the
Speaker 1: physicist about this, like we all none of us know
Speaker 1: what it is, but those physical laws are wridden. But
Speaker 1: your point is I'm just being cheeky, but your point
Speaker 1: is very well taken. And you know, you say, as
Speaker 1: mimemic evolution picked up steam, humans were transformed. No longer
Speaker 1: were we devices designed solely to pass on our genes.
Speaker 1: Suddenly believe became hybrid creatures, hybrid machines, maybe from an
Speaker 1: alien perspective, torn in between passing on our genes and
Speaker 1: passing on our memes. This vision of our species helps
Speaker 1: to explain much of what most puzzled the alien scientists,
Speaker 1: our moral systems, our religions, our art and music and science.
Speaker 1: Cultural evolution is the key to unraveling the deepest mysteries
Speaker 1: of the human animal. You know, I got chills when
Speaker 1: I read that, and it really made me think of
Speaker 1: you know, you don't use this word in your book,
Speaker 1: but it seems like it's really ripe for integration with
Speaker 1: some research I do in positive psychologroon and just purpose.
Speaker 1: The need for human purpose, right, like, our ability to
Speaker 1: transcend ourselves in the sense that we can pass on
Speaker 1: ideas and help future generations and really impact future generations
Speaker 1: is something that makes us quite strange as well as
Speaker 1: quite human. Just human yep, yeah, strange human in a
Speaker 1: really good way, potentially, right, yeah, absolutely, Okay, So I'm
Speaker 1: going to end here this podcast. Ask you some Twitter questions.
Speaker 1: Do you see my time? I said, ask Steve questions. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to ask you the question you know
Speaker 1: some of those questions, but I will ask you the
Speaker 1: most thoughtful ones. Okay, you know which one I'm talking
Speaker 1: about that I'm not going to ask. I do you Okay?
Speaker 1: Now our audience is so curious. What do you say?
Speaker 1: What do you say? No? The answer is no, okay,
Speaker 1: not even for twenty dollars. Okay, lot more than that, Okay, Okay.
Speaker 1: So Max Spialb, I hope I pronounce his name right.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, he said. Since you wrote the ape
Speaker 1: that Understood the Universe, there's been a series of publications
Speaker 1: casting doubt on the good genes hypothesis. What do you
Speaker 1: make of these developments and do they fundamentally change or
Speaker 1: understanding of sexual selection? Yeah? So Max is a really
Speaker 1: thoughtful crime and I definitely take those papers seriously. I
Speaker 1: can tell you that I'm a lot less confident in
Speaker 1: the good genes view of the evolution that made preferences
Speaker 1: than I used to be then it was a year
Speaker 1: ago or two or three years ago, a lot less confident. So,
Speaker 1: just to be clear, for the listeners. So the theory
Speaker 1: in question, it's so there are a number of Maine
Speaker 1: preferences that we have that seem to be products of evolution.
Speaker 1: They seem to reliably develop across different cultures, and the
Speaker 1: question is why now. The good genes theory is the
Speaker 1: idea that the traits that we find attractive indicators are
Speaker 1: good genes. So that means like they're indicators that the
Speaker 1: person has a relatively low mutation load and indicators that
Speaker 1: the complement of genes that they have is resistant to
Speaker 1: the local pathogens. That's a good theory, it seems, though
Speaker 1: the recent evidence suggests that as good and logical theory
Speaker 1: as it might not be true for us, might not
Speaker 1: be true for all traits. I guess I'm not quite
Speaker 1: on the fence yet, so I think I'm still this
Speaker 1: side of the fence through I think, if I had
Speaker 1: to bet, I think there's probably there probably is merit
Speaker 1: still to the good genes approach. I, like I said,
Speaker 1: I'm a lot less confident in it, and the evidence
Speaker 1: is now very mixed. So I don't think we're in
Speaker 1: the position we're throwing it away yet. But because it's
Speaker 1: so max we should have been confident that it's correct them. Sure,
Speaker 1: a lot of people use that in terms of attraction
Speaker 1: understanding attraction and you know, what are the traits that
Speaker 1: males select for females in short term verus long term
Speaker 1: meeting and females males. But you know, again, there are
Speaker 1: all these like quirks where we depart from that, where
Speaker 1: we are deeply attracted to someone that might not actually
Speaker 1: be attractive, you know, universally. You know when I say that,
Speaker 1: like at that, I'm saying, it's a fascinating thing that like,
Speaker 1: you know, we can also be unattracted to people who
Speaker 1: are attractive, you know, objective dye. And you know, I
Speaker 1: don't think that orangutangs have such nuance. You know, they
Speaker 1: may be less nuanced, maybe they are more just like
Speaker 1: you know, their genes are lighting up, you know that,
Speaker 1: like that person has good genes. But we have this again,
Speaker 1: we're flexible, right and that's that's uh yeah, we yeah,
Speaker 1: with Facebook, and we're right. And I think you're right.
Speaker 1: I think peacocks as well. I think the peacock with
Speaker 1: the best tail. All the females seem to like that.
Speaker 1: It's not the case that they have these quirky, idiosyncratic
Speaker 1: tastes where some of them like this one, but then
Speaker 1: some of them like the one with a little lots
Speaker 1: of colorful tale exactly right, right, so weird? I don't know, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, you never see one of the p hens
Speaker 1: saying like oh, I just think it's so like cute
Speaker 1: and charming, the how small that tale? You know? But
Speaker 1: among humans it's like we do. We're like we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, like what's your fete? Like some of these
Speaker 1: people have like a fetish like red hair. Some people
Speaker 1: have vetual they're like a small nose, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Okay, let's move on. Trey Rose said, what's
Speaker 1: his opinion his being you? This is you. What's your
Speaker 1: opinion on the evolutionary explanations for moral disgust? And do
Speaker 1: you think it's a separate phenomenon or a linguistic variant
Speaker 1: of aggression? That's an interesting question, isn't it? It is interesting.
Speaker 1: I think probably that is not a separate thing. I
Speaker 1: think we've evolved discussed in certain kinds of contexts, such
Speaker 1: as for pathogen you know that's gone off and things
Speaker 1: like that that could toxins evolve discust in certain sexual
Speaker 1: contexts for close relatives, people that we grew up with.
Speaker 1: I think probably my guess is that moral disgust isn't
Speaker 1: something that separately evolved. I tend to favor the idea
Speaker 1: that morality is primarily a product of culture and that
Speaker 1: it's just a bunch of stuff that we talk about,
Speaker 1: like we're trying to work out what's right and what's
Speaker 1: wrong and anything we're we're doing that we call that morality,
Speaker 1: But it's not a cohesive, evolutionary phenomenon. I think disgust
Speaker 1: feeds into that. It's one of the emotions that feeds
Speaker 1: into that kind of shapes our morality. But you know,
Speaker 1: you have a lot of people these days who argue
Speaker 1: that we should extract discussed from the moral equation. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, when you're trying to evaluate the moral rightness
Speaker 1: or wrongness of gay marriage, for instance, some people influenced
Speaker 1: by their disgust toward same sex sex that feeds into
Speaker 1: their moral views on that topic. But a lot of
Speaker 1: people argue that it shouldn't. It's still morality though, right,
Speaker 1: So morality isn't necessarily closely tied to our instincts. Often
Speaker 1: it's not right. So we're naturally nepotistic, but we say
Speaker 1: we shouldn't be. We naturally want to lash out of
Speaker 1: people who harm us in some way. Often we say
Speaker 1: that we shouldn't do that. So Mara does seem to
Speaker 1: have come disconnected from a lot of our instincts. I think,
Speaker 1: including disgust, really interesting. Thanks for the answer. We are
Speaker 1: in power. Ask the questions very near and dear to
Speaker 1: my heart, possible evolutionary explanations for autism other mental health conditions,
Speaker 1: modern responses to these. I see near and dear in
Speaker 1: my heart because I'm really interested in how why things
Speaker 1: like ADHD evolved, autism, dyslexia. You know, what are some
Speaker 1: of the evolutionary basis for worrying difficulties and things? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what do you think? I tend to think that
Speaker 1: they're probably not adaptations these things. I think an evolutionary
Speaker 1: side perspective is really good at explaining stuff that we
Speaker 1: have in common with one another, whereas things like ADHD
Speaker 1: and autism and the like are relatively rare, and so
Speaker 1: I suspect that they're not adaptations. I don't think that
Speaker 1: they were craft by natural selection or favored by selection.
Speaker 1: I think probably that's an example of a mistake that
Speaker 1: it's very easy to make with evolutionary thinking, which is
Speaker 1: just kind of overextending adaptation is reason and seat of
Speaker 1: applying it too broad lys, so it's really attempting a right.
Speaker 1: It's a very seductive kind of way to explain things.
Speaker 1: So it's very very easy to say this is an adaptation,
Speaker 1: that and this and the other thing, they're all adaptations.
Speaker 1: I think probably it's not. I think one reason for
Speaker 1: that is I don't think that well, they're rare, for start,
Speaker 1: but also they tend to be associated with relatively low fertility,
Speaker 1: which seems unlikely as an adaptation. I think also that
Speaker 1: a stronger case has been made for other ways to
Speaker 1: explain them. So in the case of autism, for instance,
Speaker 1: I think that it's like a big part of his
Speaker 1: genetic and a lot of the genes that contribute to
Speaker 1: autism are seen to be what are called denovo mutations,
Speaker 1: so relatively new mutations more product of mutation selection balance.
Speaker 1: So you have sort of new mutations coming into the
Speaker 1: gene pool, but selection is unable to take them out fasten,
Speaker 1: so you basically have a sort of low level of
Speaker 1: these these genes that increase the likelihood of autism developing
Speaker 1: just a lower level kind of remains. Selection doesn't get
Speaker 1: rid of them as fast as they come into the
Speaker 1: gene pool. Perhaps some of schizophrenia. Yeah, I was just
Speaker 1: going to say. Jeffrey Moller wrote a really interesting article
Speaker 1: playing that logic to schizophrenia and arguing why these things
Speaker 1: might be fitness indicators of attractiveness, and arguing why extreme
Speaker 1: schizophrenia it might not be as attractive among humans, you know,
Speaker 1: from a meeting perspective. But whether or not you grew
Speaker 1: with that argument, I think that it's an interesting extension
Speaker 1: of that to think about a way of framework for
Speaker 1: thinking about the evolution of lots of disorders. But there's
Speaker 1: a related idea about schizophrenia that I think is unproven
Speaker 1: but certainly possible, and that's that the genes that predispose
Speaker 1: people that are schizophrenia, those genes are found in people
Speaker 1: that don't develop schizophrenia. It might be associated with creativity.
Speaker 1: Creativity exactly, Yeah, and the benefits of the creativity may
Speaker 1: outweigh the costs of occasional schizophrenia. Yeah. Keep them at
Speaker 1: the gene pool. Yeah, Yeah, Like schizotippy is very strongly
Speaker 1: correlated with the creativity just you know, full bull mental illness.
Speaker 1: It's hard to be creative when you're full blown. But yeah,
Speaker 1: these mild or forms, the relatives of people with full
Speaker 1: blow mental illness tend to be more creative than the
Speaker 1: general population. Bipologist. That's right, that's right. I mean I've
Speaker 1: written papers yeah on that exactly. Are making that argument
Speaker 1: that these exist in our gene pool because of the
Speaker 1: benefits they confer to the relatives. That's been the argument. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what are your thoughts on ADHD? Well, that one I
Speaker 1: would link to the exploration drive you know we were
Speaker 1: talking about earlier. You look at the d r D
Speaker 1: four you know, you look at the genes that were
Speaker 1: selected particularly associated with what we call I mean, EHD
Speaker 1: is just a label that in the school system we
Speaker 1: put on these poor kids who want to conquer new countries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they well, you know, it's like, can you do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, It's like, can you imagine like
Speaker 1: we would probably put Christopher Columbus or well, maybe's not
Speaker 1: the best example, because that's not controversial, right he's yeah,
Speaker 1: but can you imagine putting that label on some of
Speaker 1: the earliest explorers of if they were in a school system,
Speaker 1: we probably would have said they have ADHD, you know,
Speaker 1: because they don't want to sit still and possibly passively
Speaker 1: consume information. And so I think that is actually kind
Speaker 1: of a no brainer in a sense. You know, that
Speaker 1: label we put in there is that phenomena, and we're
Speaker 1: talking about the d r D four, you know, talking
Speaker 1: about the genes that code for proteins that lead, you know,
Speaker 1: to a phenotype of I want to move around and
Speaker 1: you know, see what's new, you know, and stimulation and
Speaker 1: in a more natural environment that would have been just
Speaker 1: fine and dandy, right, Yeah, that would be problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a They would make it a product
Speaker 1: of evolutionary mismatch. We're sticking these little little kids, these
Speaker 1: little primates into a completely unnatural setting. It's fine for
Speaker 1: some of them, or ok for some of them, but
Speaker 1: it's not suitable at all. Yeah, that's precisely. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's what's going on there. So should we go
Speaker 1: in to Toby Wawson's question, do you know all these people?
Speaker 1: By the way, are these all you like your friends? No?
Speaker 1: I know, Max, but okay, I think I know the rest. Okay, cool.
Speaker 1: Toby Lawson has ever psych become hand weavy catch all
Speaker 1: explanation for human treats. There should to be no explanation
Speaker 1: of underlying mechanism of how treats developed. That's b K commentary.
Speaker 1: I disagree with that. But anyway, just but okay, back
Speaker 1: to what he's saying, just x post fitting into sex selection.
Speaker 1: I guess that's quite close for common criticism of evo
Speaker 1: psych which is that it's just a bunch of just
Speaker 1: so stories, right, and that we just sort of we
Speaker 1: have these handwave the explanations of here's a trade, let's
Speaker 1: try to explain it. Maybe it evolved for this purpose.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not just sexual selection, as there are
Speaker 1: various other tools we had to explain it. I think
Speaker 1: that to be as fair as possible to the criticism,
Speaker 1: I do think that there are cases where we perhaps
Speaker 1: do accept adaptation of explanations on relatively flimsy evidence, and
Speaker 1: we should be hard on adaptation of explanations. But I
Speaker 1: think as a critique of the whole field, I think
Speaker 1: that it's not a good critique. Actually, a ton of
Speaker 1: evidence and evolutionary psychology by now decades and decades, there
Speaker 1: are literally thousands of publications on all sorts of different explanations.
Speaker 1: Adaptation is explanations, but also eye product explanations mismatch explanations
Speaker 1: as well. So the evolutionary SSY like explanation for obesity
Speaker 1: isn't an adaptationist explanation. It's a mismatch one that we're
Speaker 1: in novel environment where they have way too much food
Speaker 1: is too good and we just eat tons of them
Speaker 1: and so that creates obesity. It's it's not an adaptation.
Speaker 1: That's one of the best known evolutionary explanations. There's a
Speaker 1: ton of evidence. I think that evolutionary psyches have martials,
Speaker 1: So it's not just handwaving. Even if it's some of
Speaker 1: the explanations are not correct, but I really think it's
Speaker 1: fair to say it's just handwaving. So I was trying
Speaker 1: to understand this person's question in particular because it seems
Speaker 1: like they wanted they're asking about human treats. So one
Speaker 1: way I interpret that question is like, how does evolution
Speaker 1: explain the existence of human variation in personality treats? Perhaps
Speaker 1: or psychologically. Now, maybe I'm erry more in this person's
Speaker 1: question that this person really meant, But I was thinking
Speaker 1: that's interesting because I've seen some really interesting stories that
Speaker 1: I think are quite plausible that Daniel Nettle, you know,
Speaker 1: has come up with about the evolution of traits. And
Speaker 1: I don't see them as just just so stories because
Speaker 1: there isn't at least empirical evidence suggesting that they're trade
Speaker 1: offs on all parts of the continuum of each of
Speaker 1: the Big five personality traits. For instance, like there's both
Speaker 1: benefits and disadvantages of being agreeable, you know, conscient disagreeable exactly,
Speaker 1: or extroverted or introverted exactly. It's a good idea. I
Speaker 1: think it's not just handy thing's made a good case.
Speaker 1: I think that because there are benefits and costs at
Speaker 1: both ends of the spectrum, the selection just naturally maintains
Speaker 1: a range of genes that create a range of individual
Speaker 1: differences and personality expression. Yeah, so we may may or
Speaker 1: mayor may not answer this person's original intent of the questions. Okay,
Speaker 1: so last two which I've saved the grandiose ones, you know,
Speaker 1: is it Michael Shermer. Everybody knows Michael Shermer. Yeah, legend,
Speaker 1: legend this guy. Okay, so he says, who will eventually
Speaker 1: win in an epic battle between our better angels and
Speaker 1: our inner demons, time frames twenty twenty election, twenty fifty,
Speaker 1: climate change deadline for carbon emissions, twenty one hundred, population,
Speaker 1: twenty two hundred, factory farming, anytime, nuclear war. So there's
Speaker 1: a great question, and I'm not sure I have a
Speaker 1: great answer for it. I find it very hard to
Speaker 1: figure out where we're going to go. And I've kind
Speaker 1: of bounced around in terms of whether I'm feeling optimistic
Speaker 1: or pessimistic, depending on if I've just been reading Michael
Speaker 1: Shermer or Pink or Ridley or you know, these rational optimists.
Speaker 1: I tend toward optimism, Dann what I hear? I think
Speaker 1: this morning. I heard that Trump has just announced he
Speaker 1: wants to boost the nuclear arsenal, and then I'm feeling
Speaker 1: not quite so, I know, not quite so optimistic at all.
Speaker 1: But I should put my neck out and make some
Speaker 1: predictions rather than just sitting on the fence. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to say that I think got better angels are
Speaker 1: going to win. I think twenty twenty elections are going
Speaker 1: to be kind of ugly. I don't think that the
Speaker 1: better angels are going to win then, but I think
Speaker 1: and I hope that we could solve the climate change problem.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's a completely impossible task, as daunting
Speaker 1: as it looks. What else was on the list SWEE
Speaker 1: climate carbon emissions. Well, that's similar to climate change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: population population was one of the factory farming population. I'm
Speaker 1: going to put my vote for optimism factory farming. I'm
Speaker 1: going to put my vote for optimism as well. Definitely,
Speaker 1: I really hope that we managed to produce meat without
Speaker 1: nervous system what's called not factory meat but lab grown meat.
Speaker 1: That would be wonderful. It would be great, right, it
Speaker 1: would be be able to create meat without the suffering
Speaker 1: of a sentient being. Right. You know, humans seem to
Speaker 1: think like human suffering is only kind of suffering that matters.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it drives me nuts. You know that we
Speaker 1: can't think beyond that. The fact that we are starting
Speaker 1: to think about other animals suffering. That kind of thing,
Speaker 1: I think is one of the great products of culture.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not instinctive, it's not natural, It's come
Speaker 1: from talking and thinking and it's a cultural phenomenon. Good.
Speaker 1: I love that. And you know, our capacity for perspective taking,
Speaker 1: I love that. Okay, last question, Christine Snyder Christine M.
Speaker 1: Snyder says, is everything going to be okay? Yes, it's
Speaker 1: gonna be okay. Steve, thank you so much for the
Speaker 1: great work you do in public science communication as well
Speaker 1: as your research, and for being on the podcast today.
Speaker 1: Thanks very much, Scott, It's been a real pleasure for
Speaker 1: me too. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react
Speaker 1: in some way to something you heard, I encourage you
Speaker 1: to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com.
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