#515 - David & Douglas Kenrick - Evolved Psychology Vs The Modern World

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Modern Wisdom #515

Evolved Psychology Vs The Modern World

Host: Chris Williamson
Guests: Dr. Douglas Kenrick & Dr. David Kenrick
Date: August 20, 2022

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how evolved psychological mechanisms, forged in our ancestral environments, often conflict with and adapt to the modern world. Chris Williamson interviews Douglas and David Kenrick, co-authors of “Solving Modern Problems with a Stone Age Brain,” to discuss evolutionary mismatches, the nature of human motives, social status, relationships, well-being, and how understanding our instincts can lead to more fulfilling modern lives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Human Motives: Beyond Maslow’s Hierarchy

[03:02—09:18]

• The Kenricks criticize the common pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, noting Maslow himself never drew the famous pyramid.
• They propose a model more aligned with evolutionary psychology, emphasizing that core motives—like affiliation, social status, mating, and kin care—are inherently social and interconnected.
  • “At the end, the top of our pyramid is not self-actualization. It’s sort of what unfolds developmentally: first, after you’ve gotten some respect, you find a mate. After you find that mate, you need to keep the mate. And then if you have offspring, you need to care for your family—and even if you don’t have offspring, we’re probably motivated to care for our cousins and the other people in our group.” – A (Douglas) [05:15]
• Three kinds of well-being are recognized:
  • Hedonic (feeling good)
  • Eudaimonic (meaning in life)
  • Self-actualization (fulfilling potential)
• Satisfaction and meaning are often found in social contexts, especially in family and community care.

2. Affiliation, Status & Work

[00:40—02:06]

• People often derive more satisfaction from being productive and working with others than from leisure alone.
  • “I like having a bit of fun, but there’s only so much of it I can take. I feel better when I’m being productive.” – A (Douglas) [00:40]
  • “I like about work is the people I work with and getting to see them and that feeling of sort of purpose. I think we are sort of designed to want to contribute to those around us.” – C (David) [01:24]
• Both status and affiliation are strong motivators, rooted in our social nature.

3. Evolutionary Mismatches in the Modern World

[12:23—20:23, 22:06—24:00, 33:57—38:36]

• Modern technology hyper-stimulates ancient instincts: threats (news), status (social comparisons), mates (attractiveness), and social contacts (messages).
• Competition for status is now global, not just with neighbors: “Now we’re competing with what, 7 billion people as opposed to 10.” – C (David) [13:49]
• The abundance of food and safety means problems like existential crises and obesity emerge: “More people die from obesity than starvation now, according to the U.N.” – B (Chris) [22:06]
• Cultural changes outpace biological evolution, thus producing continued mismatch between instinct and environment.

4. Threat Perception & Negativity Bias

[32:32—38:36]

• Despite living in the safest era, humans remain hyper-vigilant to threats due to evolutionary benefits.
  • “Part of it is...it’s advantageous to feel unsafe. There’s an advantage to just looking for threats and to being hyper aware of threats.” – C (David) [32:42]
• Media amplifies this bias, leading to a persistent sense of danger: “Do I know anybody who was murdered? I do not know a single person.” – A (Douglas) [34:33]

5. Friendship, Affiliation, and Social Connection

[42:30—46:20]

• Friendships formed through shared effort or goals are deeper, particularly for men.
  • “It’s much easier to maintain friendships when you have common goals to accomplish.” – A (Douglas) [44:34]
  • Virtual connections don’t provide the same benefits as real-life interactions.
  • Female friendships often involve information exchange supporting mating and kin care.

6. Dominance, Prestige, and Social Status

[47:04—51:05]

• Two routes to status: dominance (power, aggression) and prestige (skill, teaching).
  • “Prestige, which is the idea that they can teach you skills and help guide you, is pretty key.” – C (David) [47:16]
  • Dominance matters for hierarchy and conflict; prestige is preferred in most modern contexts.

7. Mating, Attraction, and Sex Differences

[56:27—63:19]

• Women prefer confident, dominant (not domineering) men with status potential over mere looks.
  • “For women, it mattered. They would actually prefer to date the dorky looking guy in the Wall street clothes to the handsome guy who was working at Burger King. For men, they prefer the good looking woman who worked for Burger King to the less attractive woman who was dressed to the nines.” – A (Douglas) [00:00, repeated at 58:48]
• Women value “cool” jobs for men as status signals, not just income.
• Artistic achievement can be a marker of genetic quality; the “starving artist” may signal future potential, not just resources.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “You're raising an interesting question...those different kinds of well being, what gives me those, might vary as a function of, you know, who I am and maybe what my major goal in life is right now.” – A (Douglas) [11:12]
• “Our ancestors were not surrounded by strangers unless they were about to die.” – A (Douglas) [17:33]
• “If you have a murderous sibling who lives nearby, you reap the benefits...there may be some advantages to having an aggressive person.” – C (David) [77:17]
• “Selfishness itself is not a good thing in a whole human being...our genes may instruct us to be cooperative in order to promote their survival.” – A (Douglas) [81:41]
• “Being nice to other people is actually in some level being nice to yourself.” – Mark Schaller, as cited by Douglas [82:55]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–03:02: Status and mate selection, work vs leisure, social motives
• 03:02–09:18: Revising Maslow, hierarchy of motives, new pyramid
• 12:23–14:30: Modern comforts, existential problems, psychological mismatch
• 17:33–20:23: Ancestral environments vs. modern context; kin networks
• 22:06–24:00: Obesity, abundance, mismatch
• 32:32–38:36: Why we fear when safer than ever; negativity bias, media incentives
• 42:30–46:20: Evolved friendship patterns, male and female differences
• 47:04–51:05: Dominance, prestige, and leadership preferences
• 56:27–63:19: Evolution of mating preferences, occupation and status, “starving artist”
• 65:51–68:20: Menopause, kin support, evolutionary explanations
• 71:41–77:50: Kin vs. society dilemmas (Whitey Bulger, Unabomber)
• 80:01–84:14: Evolutionary justification for kindness and prosocial behavior

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Evolutionary Justification for Kindness

[80:01–84:14]

• “Being nice to other people is actually in some level being nice to yourself.” (Mark Schaller, via Douglas)
• Cooperative behavior helps individuals meet their needs in social groups, which is ultimately adaptive.
• The Kenricks advocate being “helpful,” rather than simply “nice”—goal-directed benevolence is most adaptive.

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Conclusion

The Kenricks weave together research, evolutionary theory, and practical examples to illuminate ways in which our Stone Age brains struggle in the modern world. They encourage listeners to recognize mismatches, seek affiliation through purposeful activity and relationships, pursue prestige over dominance, and anchor well-being in communal, not merely individual, satisfaction. Kindness and helpfulness, they argue, are adaptive—not just morally good, but fundamentally effective for thriving as humans.

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Further Reading:
Find their book, Solving Modern Problems with a Stone Age Brain, for a deeper dive into these themes.

Transcript

[A]

When people were asked, would you want to date this person? For women, it mattered. They would actually prefer to date the dorky looking guy in the Wall street clothes to the handsome guy who was working at Burger King. For men, they prefer the good looking woman who worked for Burger King to the less attractive woman who was dressed to the nines.

[B]

Doug, you just mentioned that you'd taken two months away from working and this is one of your first days back. Talk to me about what it feels like to take such a long break when you're used to doing so much work. Do you ever get the compulsion to go and do stuff? Do you get antsy about the fact that you're not working?

[A]

Yes, I like having a bit of fun, but there's only so much of it I can take. I actually feel better. I feel better when I'm being productive in some way. Although my work is, you know, writing books and being a college professor and talking to students, it's a pretty cushy job and, you know, it's in some ways more pleasant than actually being on vacation. Although being on vacation was fun.

[B]

What do you think that says adaptively about humans? The fact that you can take more pleasure from doing work than from leisure?

[A]

What do you think, Dave?

[C]

Well, I mean, I think a lot of it is the affiliation factor, right. I know for me, one of the things I like about work is the people I work with and getting to see them and that feeling of sort of purpose, right, that it's like, I think we are sort of designed to want to contribute to those around us. And hopefully if someone is in a job that they like, then they'll feel like, oh, I'm working with a group of people to improve the world for people. So I think that's.

[A]

I like Dave's answer because I wouldn't have pointed to affiliation right away. I would have thought of status in terms of our hierarchy of motives. But I like what David's saying because it strikes me that in the ancestral environment, if you took two months off, the people in your group might have started to get a little annoyed at you. You know, what, are you going to start to catch some fish? And so I like the fact that Dave connects it to people, because it does. I especially like, I do like that as well. In fact, the first thing I did after having this, an interview this morning is I went to a meeting and our graduate students were there and my co author on a number of papers, Steve Newberg, was there and it did feel good. Felt good to be doing something with the group. And so I guess we're sort of wired up to connect those two things

[B]

you just mentioned about your new pyramid of human motives. Why do we need a new one? Or what's unique or interesting about this one?

[A]

So two things. One is that when Maslow made his hierarchy, he didn't make that pyramid.

[B]

It wasn't even a hierarchy, right?

[A]

Yeah, well, no, it was a hierarchy. He did actually say that there were a set of goals. He was arguing against behaviorists. The behaviorist thought that everything we do can boil down to satisfying thirst and hunger. Even our social motives, the behaviorists argued, were connected to secondary reinforcement. We come to like people because our mother nursed us. And Maslow was a student of Harry Harlow, who did those classic old studies with the baby monkeys that were separated from their moms and so forth. And Harlow was arguing against the behaviorist that no, we have. We at least primates have other social motives. And Maslow just made a more complicated model and argued that developmentally, first we have to just get fed and get warm, but then we get stranger anxiety, we have to protect ourselves, and then we want to make friends, and then we want to steam, which is what we would call status. So we agree with him up to that point. Where we disagree with Maslow was that he thought, then we move to non social things. We move above that. We want to go off and play the guitar by ourselves or writes poetry just for our own intrinsic satisfaction. And from an evolutionary perspective, it seems extremely unlikely that we would be designed that we got here because our ancestors, once they had managed to solve those lower motives, went off and, you know, beat on the beat on a log just for their own entertainment. If they beat on a log, it was probably to entertain the other members of their groups so that they could achieve, you know, acceptance and respect and find mates. And the other thing that Maslow skipped out on completely was the importance of mating. He was an evolutionary psychologist before the modern day, and he didn't think about the fact that in some sense, organisms are all designed to reproduce. And so at the end, the top of our pyramid is not self actualization. It's sort of what unfolds developmentally. First, after you've gotten some respect, you find a mate. After you find that mate, you need to keep the mate. And then if you have offspring, you need to care for your family. And even if you don't have offspring, we're probably motivated to care for our cousins and the other people in our group. And so we're not arguing in some Sense that it's ideal, that we all, in the same sense, it's self actualization. Painting, a beautiful painting is somehow intrinsically satisfying. What we're arguing is that that's the natural course of things is to move on to reproduction. Maslow had, the only time he talked about sex was as a lower physiological need. And so on that model, you could just masturbate and then be done with it, and then you can move on to playing the guit. But we, we disagree with that part of it.

[B]

Yeah, it seems, it seems to me that most people, when you ask them about the most meaningful stuff that they do in their lives, they talk about rearing children. And it seems as well, I don't know whether you guys would agree with this, but we are grandchildren. Optimizers is the nicest summary of what humans are kind of here to do that I've thought of. It's like you, you need to have some kids, then you need to make sure that those kids have some kids. And after that point, you kind of sweet. After that point, you can pretty much just let everything go.

[C]

But the great grandkids are on their own. Yeah, I mean, there is. So your lab did some research on that, right? Like actually asking people what gave them meaning. And it was, it was split right into there was parenting and then there was also just general taking care of family that included also like brothers and sisters and things like that. So I guess you also have to look out for like your nieces and nephews as well.

[A]

So it's actually even a little more complicated than that. We ask people three kinds. So there's three ways you can define well being. One of them is just hedonic well being. I feel good. There's more rewards in my life than punishments in my life. And then there's what they call eudaimonic well being, which is a fancy way of saying meaning in life. Okay. And then the third is self actualization, which is a way of saying fulfilling your highest potential. So what we did in our lab, some research with Jamie Krems, who's at Oklahoma State, and Becca Neal, who's at the University of Toronto. Now, we asked people about each of those things. What would you be doing right now if you were getting meaning in life? Okay. What would be the thing that would produce the most meaning in your life? And that's what the thing Dave was referring to. That's when they said I'd be caring for my family or I'd be hanging with my friends. For the most part, when we asked about self actualization. What would you be doing if you were achieving your highest potential? Then they talked about things like writing a book or, you know, managing a business. And they connected that with status and also with affiliation. And then the one of hedonic well being. What would I be doing if I wanted to just feel good? Their affiliation still, affiliation comes in across the board, you know. But then sex became more, you know, finding a mate rose up, especially for males. They would feel good, they'd feel hedonic satisfaction if they were in a romantic situation. But it's funny that those other kinds of well being are those. They're all connected to different motives.

[B]

Did you look at the mappiness study that had a ton of data done on it?

[A]

The what study?

[B]

Mappiness.

[A]

Mappiness. I don't know it.

[B]

Okay, so this was a study done by a bunch of researchers who were using mobile phones to pop up and ask people what they were doing at that point and their subjective rating of how happy they felt. And then Seth Stevens Davidowitz, who's a data scientist, has just released a new book called don't trust your gut. And in that he looks through a bunch of this stuff and then lays it out in this really easy table. And the number one thing plus 20, in terms of happiness, the most happy thing that people were doing is having sex. Now, I couldn't help thinking about the fact that the only way that that's been able to work is if someone's paused having sex to check the phone note down that they were doing it and then rate the subjective level of happiness. But yeah, I mean, this, this is an interesting distinction, I think, between Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman. Gilbert was talking about the fact that, you know, lying on a lilo for the rest of your life, drinking cocktails might be a way to spend a life well lived because each individual interval of time is something that's been pleasurable. Whereas Kahneman, I think retrospectively would say a good life is one that in retrospect, you're glad you lived. It had meaning, it had purpose, it made you feel retrospectively like something is worthwhile. And I've come to believe, my bro science is that that tends toward people that are more introspective and retrospective versus people that are a little bit more impulsive. That really the balance that you have between those two things, whether you lean more towards hedonic pleasure or sort of eudaimonic pleasure, is mostly because, okay, what do you think about when you think about the things that you value in Yourself. Do you value, you know, just time with friends, free flowing and being easy, or do you like hard things that you're contributing to over a longer period of time?

[A]

Yeah, no, I like. You're raising an interesting question, I think you know, about individual differences in those, in those. And we actually have a scale of that measures in. Becca Neal, who I mentioned before, developed a scale with us that looks at the extent to which I am someone who is currently concerned with each of those motives. We talked about finding mates or finding friends or, you know, protecting myself from the bad guys. But what you're suggesting is interesting that those different kinds of well being, you know, what gives me those might vary as a function of, you know, who I am and maybe what I'm, what my major goal in life is right now.

[C]

Yeah. It could also, I imagine have to do with sort of situational factors. If you have kids, you might be thinking more like, no, no, I need a meaningful life. Because that might tie into also providing for those kids and things like that. Whereas if you are younger or you don't have kids and you're like, no, the people around me are taken care of, then you might opt for just reading a book in the shade. So I could see how those could change throughout the life history as well.

[B]

Given the fact that the modern world is more comfortable for humans. Why do you think it is then that a lot of human problems seem even more difficult to solve today?

[A]

What's your take on that, Dave?

[C]

Oh, I mean, there's a bunch of things, I mean. Well, one is the sort of mismatch between our instincts in the modern world. And then a big one is we also have, with technology a lot of sort of things that will remind us. We have technology that's optimized to prime all of these motives at once. Right. You're going to sort of, you're going to see pictures of attractive people that your brain will think of as potential mates. You're going to see news about threats, you're going to see updates from your friends. And you can get all of these things in a matter of seconds or minutes, right. If you're on your phone. And so it's pretty overwhelming, right, to try to, try to. Like in the ancestral world, you can sort of focus on one thing at a time, right. If you're going out to get food, you might not even see any potential mates. You might have a few friends with you who are also there to get food. But these days I think we got to do everything at once and we've Got to compete in our minds with. If you want to compete with status, you're now competing with Elon Musk as opposed to just your actual next door neighbor. And same thing you see this with girls with Instagram is they have body image issues. They're competing with these with models all the time and they're just. That's intermixed with their friend feed. And so I think the hierarchies have gotten a lot higher. Like now we're competing with what, 7 billion people as opposed to 10. And so I think those all combine to make a pretty stressful, pretty stressful situation.

[B]

So is there a sense going back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but you could map it onto yours, I guess as well. Is there a sense that because so much of the bottom area of the pyramid, the immediate physiological needs, the safety, the security and stuff like that, that that's been filled is an existential crisis, a luxurious position to be in, basically. Is it only in a world that's got so many of those safety features already filled in that you have the opportunity to think, what am I doing with my life? What should I be doing with my life? How could I contribute better to my sense of well being? Am I really actualizing my potential here?

[C]

So that's interesting. I personally am not beyond worrying about those base motives. Living in Arizona, I'm always reading about our water levels and our drought and things like that. I don't know, I think a lot of people are still worried about these. They're. I know that we no longer have food insecurity the way our ancestors did, but health is still a major concern for a lot of people. So I'm not sure, I'm not sure we're at the point where we're sort of mindfully thinking about our higher motives. So I think we just have them stacked on there.

[A]

I wonder if an existential crisis is just. It's an attribution for something else. It means maybe I'm, you know, I'm not achieving the goal that I really want to achieve now. I'm not finding a satisfying relationship or I'm not, you know, doing a satisfactory job, taking care of my kids, or not getting respect on the job. And then I attribute that to something higher because I've got a college degree. And so I think, ah, well, I can't just be some SAP who's screwing up. What's really happening is I'm concerned with the whole meaning of existence.

[B]

I see. Okay, so it's loneliness masquerading as A philosophical treatise, maybe I could see it

[C]

being loneliness and then also sort of status frustration. You know, if you look at people online, I think that, I think these days in the modern era, I mean, there's all these sort of phenomenon of people who are like, they don't have friends, right? They're staying in their room, but they're eating, they're surviving. And so there's become this big jump where it's like, okay, I'm surviving, but to get to that next level, to actually contribute, to give my existence meaning to other people, seems too hard. And so that could be part of what is leading to existential crises, perhaps.

[B]

Talk to me about the relationship between ancient fears and desires with modern dangers and opportunities then.

[A]

So, I mean, you've mentioned the concept of mismatch, that in some sense we're designed to live in a small village. People debate about what was the ancestral environment actually like. And, well, there were lots of different ancestral environments, but they were different from the modern one in certain recurring ways. They did involve being around your kin. Even when I was a kid growing up in a little urban village in New York, I had my grandmother and my aunts, they all lived in nearby apartments. And now we spread out so widely that we can be surrounded by strangers. Our ancestors were not surrounded by strangers unless they're about to die. And that is, I think that's, that's one of the biggest mismatches. And that accounts for many of these problems. The other kinds of, well, there's mismatches of different sort at every level. So the, at the low level, the one about survival, we, you know, we certainly don't have to worry about getting food. Okay. I mean, during my travels, one of the things I was shocked at is that I could buy wood Fired pizza and find a fine restaurant with local tasty wines everywhere in the middle of nowhere. In places I would have considered the middle of nowhere, there's this fabulous food and every little convenience store has Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Everywhere you go. I could get some really delicious ice cream. I could get a six pack of India Pale Ale.

[C]

Can I just say one thing, though? But this is all contingent on having money. And this one of the other ways that the modern world is different. You had mentioned that you weren't likely to get, you weren't likely to be around strangers unless you were about to get killed. There's also this thing of you weren't likely to get killed unless you were around strangers. The people around you would help you out. But nowadays, when we're traveling all over the place. If you run out of money, which for somebody who is, has a good solid bank account may not be a risk, but for a lot of people, you're in the middle of nowhere and you run out of money, the risks are really high, right? If you try to steal food, you're going to go to jail. Somebody is not going to be as forgiving as if you borrow food from a relative.

[A]

That's interesting, Dave, because actually, despite having a reasonable bank account, I lived petrified of losing my wallet. Because if I was in Banff, Alberta, beautiful place, but I didn't have a wallet, I would have been screwed, okay? Because I kept thinking that what would I do? What would I do for food? What if somebody steals my wallet?

[B]

So one of my friends a couple of years ago, we went on a stag do to Barcelona. Actually, no, sorry, it was the wedding. The stag do was wild, but the wedding was even worse. So we went to a wedding in Barcelona. And I don't know whether you know, but Barcelona is the rock robbery capital of Europe.

[A]

Yes, I've been warned.

[B]

When I went to Barcelona, unbelievably pocket zipped, sophisticated. These kids that can do Lionel Messi style tricks with a football will come over and accidentally bump into you and before you know it, they've dribbled the ball between your legs. But they've also taken your car keys too. So we went to this thing. One of the guys came back anyway, he, one of the lads had a bit too much to drink. He doesn't usually drink. He fell asleep in Barcelona train station, woke up the next morning to find out that his phone, his wallet and his shoes had been stolen. His shoes had been stolen from him. And then he was trudging around. But he was a CrossFit coach. So the thing that he went back to, this is a point where you basically don't have any of the no trust required transactional proofs of status or legitimacy, which is what paper, paper money could be seen as. Right. None of that existed. But he's a CrossFit coach. So he walked into a CrossFit gym. He knew that there was a CrossFit gym somewhere in Barcelona. Walked into a CrossFit gym and said, hey guys, I know that I look like I've walked a hole in my socks. I'm dressed for a wedding. That was yesterday. No phone, no money, no shoes. However, if you go on Instagram, you'll see that I'm that guy. And I'm that guy that you've probably seen coaching some of your favorite athletes. So what he did was he gravitated toward the closest thing that he could find to kin.

[A]

That's interesting. Yeah, I like that. That's a great story.

[B]

I saw a stat from your book that said more people die from obesity than starvation. Now, according to the U.N. yeah, yeah, that was.

[A]

That was a fascinating thing to run across as we were preparing.

[B]

That is wild.

[A]

Yeah. And that's a good example of mismatch because even Dave, even despite the fact that we do worry about. Even if we're poor now, we have enough money that we can afford Twinkies and other unhealthy foods. And so I was amazed that as I got away from the less wealthy parts of Canada and into the sticks, I would see more obesity there. It's almost like now wealthy people I think are thinner. I don't know if that's statistically bears out, but I feel like it does. It does hold. When I would. The.

[B]

How would you say the threshold for having enough money in order to be able to make yourself fat is actually pretty low. You don't need. You don't need a lot of us. I think in order to be able

[A]

to make yourself fat, you need more money to buy organic vegetables and fruits. You know, like blueberries cost more money than a. You know, than a similar number of calories and a loaf of cheap bread and some Hostess Twinkies, which I don't know if you know what Hostess Twinkies are, but they're the classical fast food of my generation. They're empty calories, as they say.

[B]

Is it true that they're supposed to be able to survive a nuclear apocalypse and they basically never go off?

[C]

Apparently so we haven't tested it, but

[B]

yeah, I know that you guys looked at suicide here as well. Have you ever seen any data around how many people committed suicide? Ancestors, how common it was?

[A]

I actually thought of that. Have you come across that, Dave?

[C]

I mean, I know that there are, you know, you can think about like samurai sort of like there are traditional societies where suicides were part of a thing you would do if you brought shame to your tribe. So it's not unheard of. I don't know that we have. I mean, I certainly don't know of statistics the way we have modern statistics to compare. I mean, I think there were also. There were a lot more ways to risk your life rather than just kill yourself. Right. If things aren't going well, you can

[B]

beaten to the punch by. In the environment. Yes.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. You can go out. And this is. I think, one of the things we sort of talk about is this idea that suicide might actually. That desire or that lack of desire for self preservation might come from this place of you've got your sort of basic needs met, but you're not meeting those social needs, right? And so it might actually be your brain's way of saying, all right, go take some risks. It's time to go out there and maybe get yourself eaten by a lion or whatever, but maybe you'll find a really cool oasis, you know? And so that is one of the possibilities we've discussed is that really what people are. They're feeling like these other needs are not being met, and they're sort of overvaluing survival a little bit.

[A]

So, you know, what's cool about what you're saying, Dave, is that, like, I think there's no doubt that people acted what we call suicidal, you know, in the ancestor. They might not have actually gone out and, you know, conscious. They. Well, they couldn't have taken pills. They could have thrown themselves off a cliff, but they could certainly have gone out and screamed at a member of another tribe and gotten themselves killed or ended up looking good if they won the fight. You know, as we were driving through Montana, Dave was born in Montana. And as we were driving through, I got the audiotape of a book called the River Runs through it, which is a very beautiful book. It's a sort of poetic depiction of this relationship between a guy and his younger brother. And if you haven't ever read it, Chris, it's one of the most beautifully written English books in English literature. And it was recommended to me by the department chair of the University of Chicago, who said he had a colleague who never did anything his whole life, and they thought maybe we shouldn't have given him tenure. And then he wrote this book, and this guy said, this old professor said it should have won the Pulitzer Prize, except that it came out the Year of Roots. But it's a beautiful depiction, and I remember this beautiful depiction of the nature and of fly fishing. But a lot of it involves these are guys in the 1930s going out into bars, getting plastered, drunk out of their mind, and getting into fist fights and going out into the wilderness and doing crazy shit. And the brother who ends up dead in the end does have what we would call a suicidal tendency to. It isn't like he's thinking of ending his own life purposefully, but he's certainly putting himself in situations where he's either going to look really Good. Or he's going to die and it's a true story. In fact, in the end he gets murdered by some people who he probably pissed off.

[B]

Well, I mean the equivalent ancestrally wouldn't have been death by enemies or death by cop. It might have been death by lion or something. Death. Death by goring from some.

[A]

Exactly.

[C]

It could be death by, you know, fighting other tribes. It could also be death by challenging people in your tribe, you know, and so although that probably would have been less likely to end in actual death. Death, but. But yeah, the death by cop.

[A]

That's a nice association, Chris, when you say that. Because I actually think that that's a good. That's a nice way of capturing what I was just talking about. I think that a death by cop is probably some macho guy. There's probably a lot of women who die by cop, but it's probably a lot of young guys with a lot of testosterone that decide they're going to show people how tough they are.

[B]

That's the thing that you see as well, right? That over time testosterone decreases with a decrease in testosterone, less risk taking behavior. When men get into relationships, testosterone drops. When they get married, it drops. When they have kids, it drops again. Because the guy that continues to take tons of risks and gets death by lion is of little use to the three children that he's just brought into the world or the wife that's waiting back at the cave for him.

[A]

Right?

[C]

Yeah. The math changes. For what? So this, like going back to this sort of like pyramid of motives, like this is part of why I sort of always am like a little hesitant to even call it a pyramid because it's like you've got, you know, protection, friendship needs, mating, taking care of kin. That math is constantly changing, right? You have kids and then suddenly it makes less sense for you to run out and go do something super risky. When instead if there's a way for you to just sort of find a little bit of food here and a little bit of food there and keep your kids alive and our physiology changes to sort of accommodate that like these testosterone level drops. So how.

[B]

Go ahead.

[A]

I was just going to refer to. There's a study that you may know, Chris, by Martin Daly and Margot Wilson. They did a paper on the young male syndrome and it was about the tendency to die in homicidal conflicts. And what they found is that in fact it's very high for young guys of mating age. And in subsequent research they found it's especially guys in situations of desperation, like upper Middle class kids who went to college, they don't go out and do this kind of thing. But if you don't have any other way to prove that you're, you know, that you're, you've got something special about you, then you take these desperate acts. And so in fact it fits with all of what we've been talking about, that the, that it's young desperate men that are, in fact we talk about in the book. They're the people that you want to watch out for. And if you're one of them, you kind of want to watch out for yourself.

[B]

Just how violent are humans evolutionarily

[C]

compared to what? Like compared to how we are now?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Oh, I mean, I think now is the most peaceful time pretty much in human history. Right. And like we have statistics of the murder rates of. Do you know those off the top of your head, dad?

[A]

Well, so there's this big debate because some people, you know, like to argue, oh no, it was, you know, that it's exaggerated. But I talked to Kim Hill who's one of the world's prominent anthropologists who's done studies of like the Aceh. And what he found in one of his studies of a South American group is the homicide rate was like 40, 50%. And then people came in and said, oh no, that's only because they got killed by the Spanish agricultural people around. But I went and re looked at his data. When you took out the murders by the, by the non native groups, it was still a 25 or 30% homicide rate. And so that's a high end. But even amongst the Eskimos and the Bushmen. Steven Pinker talks about this in a couple of his books, but particularly the one, the Better Angels of Our Nature, where he compares all of the known data on violence in hunter gatherer groups and the least violent hunter gatherer groups, the Bushmen, and another group whose name I'm forgetting, their homicide rates were about similar to the city of New Orleans, which is the most violent city in the United States, which is the most violent developed country in the world. And so it was, yeah, it was dangerous.

[B]

Why is it then that we feel so unsafe day to day if the world is objectively safer than ever before?

[A]

I'll let you take that.

[C]

Well, part of it is, I mean it's advantageous to feel unsafe, right? There's an advantage to just looking for threats and to being hyper aware of threats. And there hasn't been enough time evolutionarily for that to go away because you don't want to miss a threat. And. And then beyond that, there are these sort of. Because we don't want to miss a threat. I think you can certainly see with news and things like that. There are things that command that attention for profit or for views or whatever. And so we still. We hear about probably more. Well, certainly more murders, because we hear about more murders than our ancestors would hear about people. Right. So we're constantly aware of things like the war in the Ukraine, which is a very serious thing. But it's also very far from me right now, but I'm paying attention to it because I want to know what's happening. So there's that interplay between our evolved mechanism and the technology that taps into that.

[A]

Let me just back to the concept of mismatch that, you know, we're designed to look for threats in a world where there aren't that many people. And even though there were homicides, they weren't every day. But the news media capital. We had that powerful motive that Dave was just referring to. I want to know if there's a threat. And so if I'm even the New York Times, you know, which is the sort of the liberal media, or if I'm Fox News, which is the more conservative media in the U.S. it's like they're both going to want to give us some bad news. They're going to want to talk about threats.

[C]

Why?

[A]

Because we want to know about it. We may say, oh, gee, why don't they put more good news? We don't click on the good news links. We click on the Ukraine. We click on there was a murder in Chicago. It's like, I know about murders in Africa. And it's like, we would have never known about murders in, you know, in distant places. So it seems like, holy crap, what a dangerous world we live in. But now I ask the question of, you know, well, it might be different from you, Chris, but, you know, I doubt it. Do I know anybody who was murdered? I do not know a single person. I grew up in New York City around lots of people, and I knew. I know more people than most of my ancestors ever knew. I don't know any. I did know people who went to war, okay, But I don't know anyone who was, like, murdered in a kind of violent urban or suburban. Do you know anybody who was murdered? Either one of you guys?

[B]

No, not me.

[C]

My neighbor's brother was murdered. I didn't know him personally, but that's the closest I could think of thinking

[B]

about the fact that we've got this evolutionary mismatch and how would you say, vestigial negativity bias, perhaps that carries over from our ancestral past. I'm sure that you guys must have thought about what happens in future if humans continue. If we were able to keep around about 2022ish as the level of environment that we're going to be in for the next hundred thousand years, what sort of changes do you think we would see to the human psyche? Have you got any idea about what would be adaptive? Obviously the problem that we have, and the reason I need to keep us at 2022 is that technology is going to move more quickly than our evolution can catch up with it. But if we were to hold ourselves where we're at now, would that, would the negativity bias come down? Would there be other changes that you might expect to see?

[C]

I would think you probably would. There probably would be because I imagine it takes resources to, I mean, it definitely takes resources to be on alert. Right. And so being less nervous would have, I think it would have enough of a evolutionary benefit. This is not really a thing that we've ever, I think, discussed before. But just thinking about it right now, I mean, we would, yeah, we would, we would redirect that part of our brain to figuring out how to get it more likes and how to, how to program better.

[A]

Probably it is possible we'll use the technology. I actually don't think there's going to be enough of a selection pressure against it because technology changes so quickly. But I do think we could use the technology. I mean, Dave, you and I have talked about this, developing apps, for example, that are much, much more effective at preventing us from spending too much screen time. And I know that I personally will turn off my New York Times. They used to give me, they would give me daily reminders of the news and political parties asking for my money will give me daily reminders of all the dangerous stuff that the other side is doing out there. And what I do is I close those apps, I disconnect from them. But I think in the future that maybe we'll be able to get some executive control Ia working where I can say how much of this shit do I want to hear? And I don't want to hear about it more than once a week. Maybe you guys are younger and you may have a different opinion, but do you think there might be a market for that kind of technology?

[B]

In my opinion, I think we're going to look back, hoping, I hope this is the case, that people in about 50 to 100 years are going to look back on what we do with technology now, or more accurately what technology does to us in the same way as when we can generate our own meat in a lab. People are going to look at factory farms. I think they're going to see it as a complete aberration. What on earth were they doing? Look at all of this wasted time and focus and attention. Look what they did to young girls and their body image. Look at the levels of anxiety and self harm and all of these perverse incentives that we had. I wonder as well, because one of the constraints that you had around psychopathy and Machiavellianism was the fact that your group was so small that you could only get away with a small number of those people per group. I also found out that psychopathy is actually adaptive on a group level, but not necessarily on an individual level. Because if you're a Viking tribe, it's pretty useful for you to have a few psychopaths that you can send over to Lindisfarne to get, go and sack it, kill everybody and come back with a ton of gold. But you don't want too many so that it actually makes the group unstable. My thinking being that because we're no longer as at the mercy or as visible and people can bounce around, you know, the snake oil salesman can go from town to town now that you may have more incentives, more adaptive pressures that allow people to take advantage of Machiavellian or psychopathic traits.

[C]

So the world is certainly set up. We talk about this in the book. Even the automobile does allow for it makes Machiavellian strategies more effective. Actually, just to tie this real quickly back to what you were just asking about, how we would evolve, I could see countermeasures to those sorts of things, countermeasures to cheater detection becoming more, more salient. And also we've been talking about this sort of, I think from the perspective of guys being worried about other guys. I think for women there's still a lot of the same sort of threats that they faced. Threats of sort of pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy and things like this. Those might be getting worse because of some of this technology. And so those sorts of things, I feel like those countermeasures are going to, we're going to become more and more aware of. Wait, is this person, is this person going to rip me off? You know, like not necessarily they're going to beat me up, but they're going to convince me to engage in a, in a pyramid scheme or something like this, or you know, Is this person who is approaching me as a potential mate, are they really trustworthy? So I think those sorts of risks are possibly even higher than they've ever been.

[A]

I think that's more like cultural evolution than biological evolution in some sense. I know growing up in New York City, I learned not to trust strangers in a way that my mother in law, who grew up in a little town in Delaware, you know, when she moved out to Arizona, she would leave her doors unlocked, she would leave her keys in her car, you know, and you know, one of my cars got stolen from her parking lot, you know. But for me, it was very easy for me to be suspicious because I'd grown up around strangers. And so some of it might simply be that we, we pick it up, we basically use those old mechanisms and just set them to a lower threshold than we would have and that may continue.

[B]

What did you learn about how friendships work

[A]

in the book? Okay, yes.

[C]

So I'm going to just jump in here because I think one of the things sort of thinking about how friendships work in the ancestral world is they're very goal oriented. Right. This sort of affiliation motive is. It can be designed, it can be based on sort of not quite altruism, but like kin care and care of people around you, like sharing food. But it can also be based on teaming up to either take down a mammoth is sort of the classic idea. And so that is the thing that in modern days we have a lot of competitive activities and some of those are sort of team based sports. Right. If you're playing sports, you are still with your team against the other team. But one of the things we sort of discuss a lot is this idea that working together. Working together is a good way of matching that. That's what our ancestors used to do, right. It's like instead of getting together to play board games, you get together to build a hut or to fish. Yeah, exactly.

[A]

And so that I think is something that we, you know, it's kind of fun writing this book because it's like you think a lot of this stuff would come automatically, right? But I don't think it did because our ancestors didn't need to think about it. Okay. They would wake up in the morning and their cousins would say, we're going fishing today and you're coming. And that doesn't happen. So in the modern world, I think sometimes when we think about making friends, we think, oh, all I have to do is just go talk to people and then I'll. But in reality, I think we do have to do something significant with them. It's much easier to maintain friendships when you have common goals to accomplish.

[C]

And we're skipping the biggest difference in recent modern times, which is these days, friendships are often virtual. Right. Which was obviously never the case. And there's data showing that spending more time online actually makes people less happy versus spending time in person. So one of the most simple things is just, you need to be hanging out with real people in real life.

[B]

I certainly think that for men, bonding through shared effort seems to deepen friendships in a pretty profound way. I had a guy called Max Dickens who's just written a book called Billy no Mates about why men have a difficulty with friendships at the moment. And he seemed to come across the same conclusion, which is that women are really good at maintaining friendships. Over time, men's friendships peak around about 18, the maximum amount of time that they spend socially. And then that just gets frittered away and frittered away. And one of the reasons is that men need to see other men making effort, not only for them, but with them. You know, they need to be contributing. And that kind of makes sense. Like, think about what the friendships would be ancestrally. The men would go out, they would hunt, they would do something hard together. They would bond over the fact that they were doing that hard thing together. But they wouldn't get quite as attached as a woman would to her friends, because that guy that you're out hunting with might get killed. You're out on a hunt. It's pretty likely that they're gonna. It's certainly more likely that they're gonna die than one of the other mothers that's back in the cave. So I think it's called alloparenting, where you kind of do shared. Shared care of children, stuff like that.

[C]

Yeah. I think even on top of the guys dying, there are other aspects of female friendship. There's sort of like an information economy in female friendships where knowing somebody, they can help you. They can help you assess potential mates. Right. They can help you raise kids, as you were saying. And so I think it could also be partly for guys, the skill set, to get somebody to come and help you. If you see a guy who can throw a spear and you're like, hey, you can throw a spear, I can throw a rock. Let's go hunt a thing. Whereas if you want somebody to say, hey, can I trust you to tell me who else I can trust around here? Knowing them for a long time really adds value to that.

[B]

What about dominance? You looked at the difference between dominance and prestige, when it refers to being effective at getting ahead and becoming status full in life. What did you learn there?

[C]

Well, so people like prestigious leaders. Dominant leaders are appealing if you're thinking about going to war, but if you're thinking about just working together as a group, people prefer prestigious leaders. People also often, when they conceptualize their ideal boss, will prefer a female leader. And so it really depends on the situation at hand. But often if you're talking about getting along or a thing where resources are going to be shared, a workplace environment, things like that, prestige, which is the idea that they can teach you skills and help guide you, is pretty key.

[A]

Yeah, let me just expand on what you just said, Dave. Let's define those terms. A prestige leader is someone who, as Dave just said, there was a paper by Joe Henrick and Francisco Gill White that made this distinction and said that as far as they could tell, at least among chimpanzees and most other mammals, the top of the status hierarchy is occupied by an aggressive, competitive individual who you won't mess with. You don't want to go near them because they'll bite your, you know, they'll bite your head off, you know, and we do have that. We have that kind of, you know, the tough schoolyard bully type of thing in human beings as well. And that individual, if they want to take something from you, you know, they're in a better position to do it if they're the big tough bully. And a lot of times, for a long time, people would read evolutionary literature like chimpanzee politics. There was the head of the Newt Gingrich used to give it to incoming Republican representatives and say, this is the way it is, man. It's all about blood, you know, and, you know, take what you can. Don't give, though. Don't give in. Bond together to kick ass on anybody who gets in your way. And that's one view of things. It may be why the American Congress doesn't do so well in getting anything done. But another thing that's unique to humans is that we share information with one another. And so a prestigious leader is someone who is given status because we want them to be in the decision making. We want them to be driving the car because they've got the skills and you get prestige if you deliver goods and if you can train other people. And so that's just to kind of clarify that distinction. And so, as Dave was saying, the research evidence suggests that we do like the bullies as leaders. If we're about to go to war and that's Mark von Vucht, did a lot of that research. He's at the V Free University in Amsterdam. But we've done a lot of research here, and a number of people who, like Henrik's colleagues and John Maynard, have done research suggesting that we really do like prestigious leaders. If I'm going to work for you, if you're going to be my boss, I don't want you to be the big bully. I want you to be somebody I can get close to, who can take me and show me the ropes and how to get things accomplished and can lead me in a. You know, lead me in a direction I'll trust.

[B]

So our preference for leaders responds to the local demands of whatever situation or ecology or environment we're in.

[A]

Yeah. And most of the time in the modern world, we're not at war. And if you're running a corporation, I think it's probably better not to think of yourself as, you know, a dominant alpha male chimp, but to think of yourself as a prestigious human being.

[B]

Who was that guy that ended up in a ton of different marriages? Giovanni.

[C]

Giovanni. Yes, yes, yes. So, and this was before dating apps. Right. But he just would do this. He had a car, and so he would go from town to town and he met women at things like antique shows and would sort of get them to fall in love with him and also get them to lend or give him their assets, their car, their bank accounts, and went around and did this to over 100 women, was married to them, I think, and was like stealing their stuff. Right. This was the ultimate sort of like Machiavellian dating strategy. Right.

[A]

Which could not have happened in the ancestral environment because you would have had some brothers come hunting you down and killing you. But he was able to drive to another state and start again.

[B]

How much evolutionary evidence do you think there is for humans feeling love and thinking about love in the way that we conceive it now in the modern world?

[A]

So the myth in my field of psychology used to be. Well, in the social sciences used to be that love was something that was invented in the Middle Ages. And, you know, it's like, about romantic love and chivalry and so forth and those. And before that, love didn't exist. That turns out to be bs. There's an anthropologist, Jankowiak and Fisher, they did a study where they actually did a meta analysis sort of a thing where they got a whole. They looked at all the societies they could find, and they were. Anthropologists, looked at the anthropological reports and looked at. Are there ever powerful bonds between romantic partners in this society. And what they found is that I'm going to make this number up, but in the, say, 120 that they could look at, they found that the answer was definitely yes in 110 of them and we don't really know in the other 10. And so they guessed that powerful bonds are something that happened even in hunter gatherers. And so I would argue that they are part of human nature. The bond between lovers.

[B]

What's the difference between strong pair bonding and love?

[C]

I mean, is it just a semantic difference?

[B]

That's what I mean.

[A]

Yeah, that's what I would say. Yeah, I agree. That's just the words we're using.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, I think love is a sort of common term that we use that is primarily used for sort of pair bonding and then also sort of parental familial love.

[A]

But there is that distinction. No, I'm actually just agreeing with you, Dave, that there's actually studies that have been done where they ask people to think of someone you're in love with. And they do think of people in two categories. They think of romantic partners, and for that kind of love, they talk about feeling passion and arousal and longing. And then they talk about familial love or, you know, affiliative love. And then there they just talk about bonding and being close. So there are two. Those are two different ways we use the word love. But I think what you were referring to, Chris, was romantic love. It's that passionate.

[C]

It also sometimes I think is used to refer to that sort of initial feeling of euphoria at a sort of early stage of a relationship. And so which, whereas pair bonding includes that, but also includes the sort of longer term.

[B]

I remember hearing Jonathan Haidt talk about passionate love and companionate love as being two, like a life cycle that you go through.

[A]

Well, yes, romantic relationships do shift to those companionate relationships. So we have the companionate love with our family members where we never felt any passion for them. Okay, but romantic, as Dave just pointed out, romance tends to peak at the beginning of a relationship. And you really wouldn't want to go on for years with this pounding of heart and sweating palms and anticipation every time you see, you know, your wife, okay, because you die of a heart attack, you know, and so turns out that in fact it does go away and gets replaced with that more kind of familial, you know, what you might call brotherly love. You know, just, this is a person who's my mate in the sense that you used the term before as a friend.

[B]

Doug, did you do some work on the relationship between dominance and attraction at some point?

[A]

Yes, many, many years ago. It was one of the first studies that was published in our major journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psych. From an evolutionary perspective. It took us 10 years to get it published because people didn't like the idea of comparing us to other animals. With Ed Sadala did some research where we actually just. We had been, you know, Ed had been reading Sociobiology and I'd been reading a book by Jane Lancaster called Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture. We thought, well, let's start to apply this to humans. And so we did some, what would now seem very simple studies where we showed people, potential partners, who were either dominant in the sense of they'd go into an office, they'd sit up, right? They'd lean in towards the person in the desk, or they'd sit meekly over in the corner. And we did a number of ways. We had, sometimes we had a psychologist described you as dominant. And what we found in all of those studies is that for women judging men, they judged the guy as sexier when he was dominant. Not when he was domineering, incidentally, not when he was pushy and aggressive and nasty kind of dominant, but when he was confident and, you know, that kind of dominant, you know, men didn't care one way or the other. They asked the question of, was she attractive? I don't know if you know, the study by John Marshall Townsend, I think his name is. He did a study where he brought people into the lab and showed them potential. I think maybe it was like a simulated dating study. And I'm not exactly sure the context, but you would look at a photograph of. If you're a man, you would look at a picture of a woman who either looked gorgeous or who looked average. And she was either wearing a Burger King server's outfit, okay. Or she was wearing a dress to the nines. Wall street fancy suit and Rolex. Watch the female guy or the guy, same thing. You'd see a guy and he either looked like a movie star or he looked like a dorky guy, but he'd be dressed for Wall street or for the Burger King server. And it turns out that when people were asked, would you want to date this person or have amorous relationships with this person, for women, it mattered. They would actually prefer to date the dorky looking guy in the Wall street clothes to the handsome guy who was working at Burger King for men, they didn't care what if she was good looking? They prefer the good looking woman who worked for Burger King to the less attractive woman who was dressed to the nines.

[B]

Something else that I learned in Seth's book was about the difference in mate value, in perceived mate value of men by women based on the amount of money that they earned related to the job and the type of job that they had. And what A lot of the time men say that because women are hypergamous and they're resource seeking creatures, that it's hard because I need to climb up the corporate ladder and I need to get myself to a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year before anyone who's going to look at me. And the data doesn't seem to suggest that. What it suggests is that you can actually pivot from one career into another career and that women value a cooler job a lot more than they value a high paying job. In fact, they found that a man who works in hospitality and was being paid $200,000 a year would be equally attractive as a fireman who was getting paid $50,000 a year.

[C]

Wow. So that's it. Well, the fireman, still, that's a protective sort of job, right? That's a. That. And whereas I guess hospitality, it's still there's a way in which it's like you're helping other people.

[B]

So for one reason or another it's just not seen as status full. Yeah, I always remember this example. I think it's in Robert Wright's the Moral Animal, which is what, like 30 years old now or something? Nearly.

[A]

Yes, it is.

[B]

Yeah, it's still spectacular. And he was talking about why do women fall in love with the starving artist? You know, the guitar singer that plays acoustic sets on the night but sleeps on his friend's couch. And his justification for that was that it's basically buying a penny stock, that it's a future projection of potential mate value over time. And I think that, you know, if you were to look at the firemen and the value not in terms of monetary outcome but in terms of status over time, you would think, right, that guy is probably going to accumulate a ton of goodwill. Everyone's going to be really altruistic toward him. You know, if he saves a cat from a burning building, that's the people are going to owe him. Whereas the hospitality industry, that being said, lawyer was the highest rated in terms of category. And I don't think that many people see lawyers as being super altruistic creatures

[C]

either, but dominant, right. They will fight. So that could be part of it. And so there's that, because both of those have the. This person has the ability to protect me, which I think is an attractive.

[B]

Legally and from a fire. Those are the two ways that women primarily need.

[A]

Why the rock star? Why the local rock star? Because, you know, Jeffrey Miller would argue. He wrote a beautiful book called the Mating Mind.

[B]

I was with Jeffrey and Diana last night.

[A]

Oh, were you? Okay, great. So you know about the mating mind then. And what he would argue there is that in some sense, if I can show off my, you know, my brilliant mind, it indicates that I have good genes. So even if I don't currently have resources, if you mate with me, your kids will be peacocks, too. Your kids will be the human. The human version of a peacock is someone who can speak eloquently or who can play the guitar. And, you know, he'll be able to charm women even though he doesn't have money in the next generation.

[C]

I'd be curious. Have they ever looked to see how much more or less attractive a guy is with a guitar versus being in a band? Does the actual ability to sort of put together a band and work as a group seems like it would add an extra level?

[B]

Maybe, but maybe it dilutes down where the success is coming from. Perhaps it's less to do with you, and perhaps it's more. More to do with, I don't know, sort of Machiavellian, I don't know, coordination and stuff like that. Because by that virtue, maybe the guy that's the agent of the band or the manager of the band should be the one that's the most important. Because he's the guy that puts them all together and yet he's not. So, yeah, I would be, but you

[C]

don't see him doing that, right? Like, when you see the band. I'd be really curious to see whether a single guy, like a guy up there with a guitar by himself, how he does compared to a guy with a band. And I would bet on the guy with the band.

[A]

Actually, it's an empirical question, Dave. You could probably talk a couple of the graduate students here into running that study.

[B]

Easy one. I had a question, actually. Why is it that human females go through menopause? Because I don't think that many other animals, or most other animals do.

[A]

Hardly any. Hardly any. I heard of 11 cetacean. In other words, some sort of a dolphin goes through menopause. That's the only other species I've ever heard of. The theory is that at some point a woman reaches an age that humans over time began to become more and more long lived. And at a certain age it's more if a woman, if we live in social groups, we take care of the members of our group. And if the mother is taking care of her children and then her grandchildren, her bearing another child, there's the danger she'll die in childbirth or that she'll die when that child is young. And so it actually, it's an economic sense that our genes making an economic like, you know, like Dawkins talked about in the selfish gene. It isn't like that our genes actually make things decisions, but we can think of them as saying, click. Now let's switch to this strategy where it's better off me being a grandmother than dying in childbirth or dying while I have a very young child. And so better to just invest.

[C]

That's I think the reason that it's sort of unique to humans comes from because of our brains. Pregnancy is particularly dangerous for moms. Right? Labor. Labor is dangerous. And also we just need a lot of like or we benefit a lot from long term social support, more so than most other animals.

[A]

So back we've talked about this, I think Dave. But Kim Hill also did some data where they actually, you know, Kim Hill and Hillary, Hillary Kaplan. A number of people have analyzed things like the calories, the, that are brought in by people over their lifespan in these kind of horticultural groups living sort of close to the ancestral circumstances, living in the jungles of South America. One of the things that they tell me is that first of all, the average couple doesn't really bring in enough calories to care for themselves and their children. They're so busy taking care of the kid, they can't bring enough calories. And so they need their relatives to help them out and their neighbors to help them out. And the average male doesn't bring in enough calories until he's like 20 years old to really to be a guaranteed source of protein. And so because we're so incredibly dependent in ways that most other animals were so incredibly dependent on that risk pool group that, you know, that's what makes us the special species in which it pays for the female to stop reproducing because she's still in this group, she's still caring for. She's still sharing calories and time and resources on her second generation offspring, but

[B]

she's no longer continuing to produce more mouths that need feeding.

[A]

Right, exactly right.

[C]

And she's. Yeah, and she's no longer, she's not Taking the risk. Because if a woman has a kid three years before menopause, right. And she would have died three years later, that, that young three year old is going to be essentially helpless. Right. So.

[A]

Right.

[C]

So those younger kids, especially the more recent the kid was born compared to menopause, if there was a risk of death, the better.

[B]

Does this mean that menopause would have only emerged after a time when human females were growing up to be on Average older than 40 years old or 45 years old or something like that?

[A]

Would have to. There would have to have been selection pressure operating at that age for it to. Because it's a universal feature of humans. So there would have had to been some selection pressure. I guess one other theory is there could have been a weird bottleneck where there was only a small number of human beings and there was a genetic switch and one of the females, the only one that survived, that'd be the other possible theory. And it was an accident.

[B]

Oh, that is cool. I guess that could potentially explain a whole bunch of phenomenon that we can't really come up with an explanation or that there's adaptive explanations that are sometimes contested. Wasn't there was a period that we got to where there was less than 10,000 Homo sapiens on the planet? Right. And everybody was in Indonesia or something?

[A]

I don't know that, but that's interesting. If that were true, it would have led to a lot of bottlenecking and some, we might have some unique characteristics that we don't really have to have.

[C]

I mean, it's also possible, I don't know the, like anthropological literature on this, but it's possible that say it was a mutation that worked in a small group and then it just sort of lived among humans until we got to the point where by and large women tend to live past 40. Then it suddenly becomes incredibly advantageous and then that's when it spreads, right?

[A]

Yeah, that's.

[C]

That's when it sort of becomes.

[A]

That's a good point, Dave. That's the way it works. If it had a cost, you know, then it would have been selected out at some point. But if it actually had an advantage, you know, that advantage could have, could have been magnified.

[B]

It's like a latent benefit almost that sort of sat idling away and then becomes significantly more beneficial at some point. And it's the, the fortunate timing of both of those things coming together that you have the genetic mutation perhaps at a time when there's an explosion of that genetic mutation being advantageous. But I suppose that's what all mutations are at.

[A]

That's the name of the game. Random variation and selective retention. That is evolution.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean, it also. But it's kind of wild to think that that still happens. You know what I mean? Like, that these sorts of things. I think even as we've been discussing this book of our evolved brains, I think it's easy to imagine, oh, back in the day, everyone had our current brains, and those current brains were perfectly matched. And it turns out, well, that wasn't true because there were other people whose brains were not matched to then, and they died off. And then even now, there's so many different variations on sort of human genes out there, you know, that there are different things that could, in a relatively short number of generations, become very advantageous.

[B]

What was that story about the guys who had brothers that were on the FBI's most wanted list?

[A]

Yeah. So.

[C]

Sure, sure. Whitey Bulger. Right. And his brother, and then the Unabomber. So we talk about this. These sort of two stories of brothers with a very similar choice, and. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it, dad?

[A]

Sure. So Whitey Bulger was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list, but his brother was the. He was the president of the University of Massachusetts, and he was also the president of. He was a lawyer, law professor. So he was the president of the Massachusetts State Senate for some period of time, or the state House of Representatives, I forget which. But very prestigious, very successful guy. And his brother was a very successful mobster in Boston, killing people. And the question came when the FBI, they went to Whitey and said, do you know where your brother is? And he did, but he refused to speak to them. He lost his job because of it. And it took 20 years for them to find his brother. And the other one is David Kaczynski, who was a guy who studied English and was a. You know, I don't know if he ever. What he did for a living. He was a teacher or something. But he. He had a brother who was just brilliant. Okay. Ted Kaczynski. Ted Kaczynski was a professor at Berkeley, which is, you know, in the US One of the most prestigious universities probably in the world. One of the most prestigious universities. Universities. But he kind of cracked up, and he went to live in Montana. I just drove through by there the other day. It's really beautiful where he was. Where he chose to live in Lincoln, Montana. But he. He became. He started sending bombs to people who he thought were destroying nature, you know, and his brother Turned them in.

[C]

Right. And so this was, I think this, I really like this dilemma and these two stories of these, because these are two. If you think about each of these guys brothers, they're in a similar situation of you're sort of trying to live a law abiding life and you. Assuming they both knew. I mean, I know with Ted Kaczynski, there was a point where David's wife was like, I feel like these letters are written like they were written by your brother. Right. And he's like trying to figure it out.

[A]

No, no, he first wanted to deny it. No, no, that's not my brother. And he. She said, yeah, you know, and then she found some exact passage. And so then he went and showed it to the FBI.

[C]

Yeah, but it's a really interesting question of trade offs, right? This trade off between sort of getting along with society and kin care. Right. Of sort of protecting your family.

[A]

And the question is, Dave, what would you do if you found out that I was a modern Unabombered, which route would you go?

[C]

Well, the answer, I think I'd sort of. I mean, I hate to be like, yeah, I would go the Whitey Bulger route, you know, like, but there is, there is a sort of feeling of like, oh, do you work it out internally? Right. Do you keep, Is it, is it as a family, do you keep your family in check rather than turning to the outside world? Yeah.

[A]

You have a debt to society. It's another interesting, interesting case of where our genetic interests are one thing, and then there's our obligations to society, which isn't completely independent of our genetic interest. Because if we, you know, if our brother was discovered to be a murderer, it would hurt our social standing too. So it isn't like they're completely. Isn't like genes versus culture. But, you know, in both cases, there's a decision to be made. What's the best. What's in your best interest and what's in the best interest of the rest of society. And I think it's a fun question of why did the Unabomber's brother turn him in, but why Whitey Bulger's brother didn't turn him in. What do you guess on that, Dave?

[C]

Well, part of it might be they didn't live in the same place. Right. Like Ted and David Kaczynski, when people move away, those sort of, that feeling of being part of the same tribe gets harder to maintain, which is one of the things we actually discuss, not just so that your family doesn't turn you in for crimes. But we do sort of talk about there's a lot of benefits to staying geographically close to your family. And I think that a lot of that comes down to you guys help each other out right when they're nearby.

[B]

I wonder as well whether the fact that in the modern world status is probably held in high regard, but any of the actual physical fallout and consequences of your brother being the Unabomber or whatever are less so. Previously you said that there's this sort of cohesion between genetic interest and environmental interest or community interest. But let's say that your brother was a dangerous murdering psychopath. He if you're in a group of 150 people, he may threaten one of your children, he may threaten your, your wife or one of your brothers in law or something like that. That is no longer, that sort of fallout is no longer a concern. But the status for side of things is potentially even more of a concern because that is one of the commodities that we're playing about with now.

[C]

Yeah. Although I think a lot of times people who are aggressive in nature are still less likely to be aggressive or at least murderous to biological relatives. So it actually may be that if you have a murderous sibling you who lives nearby, you reap the benefits sort of. As we're going back to this idea of sort of having a dominant person on your team, there may be some advantages to having an aggressive person.

[B]

Is there not a potential risk here that most murders of partners are committed by the first place that they look is the spouse? I wonder whether you would be safe. But your immediate non biological to them, but biological to you. Genetic relatives maybe.

[A]

Yeah. No. Again, back to Martin Daly and Margo Wilson who I mentioned before. They wrote a book called Homicide and one of the counter people always used to say oh well if genes are the thing, why is it that people always kill their relatives? And what it turns out is that they don't kill their relatives, they kill their spouses and they kill people who they live with who are not related to them. But they hard even though their relatives pissed them off more than anybody else. You know, we're doing some research now which which indicates that people are more likely to get hit and even hurt by their brothers and sisters as they're growing up. But they don't kill one another. They almost never. Despite the opportunities and despite the annoyances, killings between siblings are so rare as to be, you know, an anomaly when they do.

[C]

And what about, what about like in laws are. Because I know killings between step parents and kids are less rare. Right. But I've never actually heard this question of do people kill their brother in law or not?

[A]

Yeah, I don't know. That's a good. I bet you Martin Daley knows the answer. My prediction is yes. That's a dangerous position to be in

[B]

if you're in a house. If a child's in a house with a parent that is non biological is a hundred times risk that that child is going to be, is going to be killed. And I think that that shows just how hard it is to raise a kid. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of the reason that you put up with raising them is because they're yours.

[A]

Exactly. Right.

[B]

So rounding all of this out, you guys come up with an evolutionary justification for being kind, which given some of the areas that we've gone into today, might seem averse to part of our nature. Give me the evolutionary justification for being kind.

[C]

Well, I think the justification is that it will help you solve your, it will help you meet your evolved needs in the modern world. Right. And one of the ways that I think that we're immediately mismatched is often our selfish desires ring really loudly right in our heads. And we don't really necessarily need people out there saying, oh, you should really look out for yourself. Right. Like we'll generally do that. But there are a lot of ways that by helping other people meet these needs, you really benefit. And this is a thing that was true in the ancestral kingdom. You know, we've talked about this with status. One of the things I think people see all the time these days is status is how big your boat and your house are. But really those are signs of status that generally in a system that works, those will come from your contributions to the group. And that is what, even when you think about animal kingdoms, when we've talked about a dominant ape or something, they still can contribute, they still can protect the other members of the group. They can still, you know, and so by thinking about how you can help the other members of your group and the people around you achieve their fundamental motives, that turns out to be a really good way to achieve yours. Right.

[A]

I mean, we're not saying to be totally unselfish. That's an important. In fact, I was just re listening to the book the Selfish Gene and one of the things and Dawkins had a 25th anniversary edition in which he defended himself and said, you know, I didn't say that selfish genes produce selfish people. Selfishness itself is not a good thing in a whole human being. It's but it's, it's there in our genes. But our genes may instruct us to be cooperative in order to promote their survival. Okay. And in fact, if you're living in a social group, the, you know, there's reasons to be nice to other people and it's sometimes it is hard. Part of the reason we put that in there is that about when Dave's younger brother was 10 years old, I asked a bunch of my colleagues, some of whom are, you know, famous biologists and positive psychologists, and I asked them, if you had one piece of advice for a 10 year old kid, what would it be? And none of them said, even though they're biologists, they know the theory of evolution. They didn't say, go out and, you know, conquer, you know, and do the best for your genes. Find them, feel them and forget them. And I'll skip the third F in there, you know, and none of them said that. All of these people who were very successful, they said most commonly, be nice to other people. Yeah. And my colleague Mark Schaller said it best. He said, look, being nice to other people is actually in some level being nice to yourself. Because if you're nice to other people, they'll trust you, they'll be your friends, they'll give you things. And so in some sense it's the best way to be nice to yourself.

[C]

I do want to just sort of qualify one last thing, because we keep using the word nice and I think throughout the book, because there's ways that you can be nice that allow you to be taken advantage of. And I actually think the word that I would use instead of nice is helpful if you find ways to be. So it's not always like you don't want to agree with every bad idea somebody suggests to you because that's a way you could be nice. That's not necessarily going to help you or help them, but consciously thinking about how to be useful to your friends, useful to your co workers, useful to your partners, useful to your family. That I think is the key.

[B]

Doug and Dave, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the work that you do and keep up to date with stuff, where should they go?

[C]

That's it. Check out the book, read the book.

[A]

I would say, based upon what Dave just said, buy a copy of the book for your sons or your fathers or your brothers or your mothers.

[C]

Yeah, I think that's, that would be great and we would appreciate people buying. It's solving problems with the Stone Age brain. Solving modern problems with the Stone Age brain.

[B]

Gentlemen, I appreciate you. Thank you for the day.

[A]

Good talking to you.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.