When Human Evolution Collides With The Modern World | Prof. Adam Hart | Modern Wisdom Podcast 192

Adam Hart is a scientist, author & presenter. Our species has been around for far longer than the modern world. This is leading to some imbalances between our evolutionary heritage and the environment we now find ourselves in. Expect to learn how obesity might be an evolutionary adaptation gone awry, why fight or flight happens in the workplace, the misalignment of technology with our brains, the evolutionary basis for violence and much more... Sponsor: Shop Eleiko’s full range at https://www.shop.eleiko.com (enter code MW15 for 15% off everything) Extra Stuff: Buy Unfit For Purpose - https://amzn.to/2ZlMFa1 Follow Professor Hart on Twitter - https://twitter.com/AdamHartScience Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ #evolution #modernworld #biology - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Professor Adam Hart and we are talking about how unfit for purpose the human species is for the world that we find ourselves in now. You see, our species has been around for far longer than the modern world. And this leads to imbalances between our evolutionary heritage and the environment that we find ourselves in. So today, expect to learn how obesity might be an evolutionary adaptation gone awry, how the flight and fight happens in the workplace, the misalignment of technology with our brains, the evolutionary basis for violence and much more. Adam is a presenter for BBC as well, so his delivery today is just so cool.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  I'm really, really impressed by him and the book is really fun. So if you're into this evolutionary biology stuff, I would very much suggest that you go and pick it up. In other news, it's Patreon, Patreon coming this Monday. I'm so, so excited to get this live. If you love the show and you want to help support us make more of the content that you love, then please consider joining the Patreon. Dean has a shopping list for camera and lighting upgrades that is literally longer than his leg. So I think it might take quite a while for us to finish that off. But oh my God, once we finally complete all the upgrades that we want for this show, it is going to sound and look absolutely world-class.

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  The plan is to make Modern Wisdom the prettiest looking podcast, the most overtly obscenely cinematic visual experience that we can muster. So it's just gonna be, it's just gonna be awesome. I'm mega, mega excited, as you can hear. And the opportunity to release the new recap series and to involve you guys in voting for upcoming guests and topics and all this sort of stuff is hopefully going to repay you for your support and help to level this show up to where it needs to be. The guests that we get on, the volume, the consistency, consistency? Yeah, the consistency, like I was thinking about cake there. Yeah, the consistency of guests that we get, the volume, at the pace, you know, I really

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  do think this show can become one of the best in Europe. And as we continue to level up the quality, we're only going to grow faster and faster. So thank you to everyone who is going to become a part of that on Monday.

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• 3:49Chris Williamson?

  But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Adam Hart.

• 4:09Chris Williamson?

  Are you feeling fit for purpose this evening?

• 4:13Speaker 06

  To be honest, at the moment, I'm not sure I'm feeling fit for purpose at any given point, but I'll give it a go.

• 4:20Chris Williamson?

  That's fantastic. So today we're talking about human evolution and what happens when it collides with the modern world, the imbalance between sort of who we are and where we exist, right?

• 4:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. That's what the book is fundamentally about. Basically, we're an evolved animal and we're pretty decent, right? We're a pretty good evolved animal. We fit very well to the world and we've achieved global dominance as a consequence, but we have created now a modern world environment that seems to clash. And we've got lots of problems in the modern world that we can trace back to our evolutionary heritage to greater or lesser extent. Sometimes it's quite a playful thesis, sometimes it works quite nicely, but we can see those evolutionary echoes in the modern world. So that's the kind of overall idea.

• 5:03Chris Williamson?

  I get it. So how much of an imbalance is there between humans and the modern world? Because sometimes I think that I'm doing pretty all right, and then sometimes I feel a bit like an alien.

• 5:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think we have to understand that we have changed the world in such a massive and dramatic way. In some cases, over the last decade. I mean, if you think about it, we're having a conversation here over Skype. I've got my Twitter feed open. We can talk about things going viral and social media stress and FOFO and all that sort of stuff. This would have been meaningless even 10 years ago. And that's just in one small aspect of our life. If we look across the piece, I mean, COVID-19 has exposed, of course, how globally connected we all are. We've got used to the idea of going on flights and moving around. The world now is a very different place from what it was a generation before. And of course, if we look back over the last 100 years or so,

• 5:57Speaker 06

  it's a very different place. So we've always changed our environment. That's almost a feature of humanity. But the changes that we produce now and the environment that many of us now live in, and what we call the modern world, is a very, very different world from, well, even a century ago, but actually the world in which we evolved. If we look at our sort of post agricultural revolution ancestors 10,000 years ago, and we compare it to our lives now, it's a very, very different sort of setup, although of course, many aspects of it are also the same. So it is a different world that we live in. And I think we have to accept that.

• 6:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose the first thing to realise here is how slow evolution works and how quick and effective we are at changing our environment.

• 6:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, if you look back, so the biggest, probably the biggest thing that happened to us was that we worked out how to grow food. And obviously, that's a pretty decent thing to have worked out. Saves us a lot of time, allows us to to expand our technology and innovation, because we're no longer foraging for food, and we have a different sort of societal setup. But that came with problems. So actually, when we developed agriculture, there were quite a lot of health problems. Dentition, we suffered from dental careys for the first time extensively, for example, because of the way that our skulls were changing and our denticians were changing. So we did have evolutionary change, and that slowly but surely helped us to accommodate the changes that were happening. But we're talking over thousands of years. It wasn't as if it wasn't like the internet revolution,

• 7:22Speaker 06

  where within five years, everybody's online. And that's not how the agricultural revolution worked. It was over a long period of time. We also have an evolutionary change in order to, for example, digest milk. So those of us that have lactase persistence and are able to drink raw milk, that is an evolutionary adaptation to to dairying and to farming. So we see that happening quite slowly. And of course, that's, that's what environmental changes are often like, that are non-human induced. But recently, we've seen environmental changes that are just absolutely ridiculous. I mean, you look across the world at the moment at mega cities, for example, super cities. We have literally tens of millions of people living on top of each other in incredibly high density environments. The

• 8:07Speaker 06

  number of people on the planet is enormous compared to what it was, the technological shifts that have happened. These are all environmental changes. Now, they're changes to our environment that affect how we behave and affect how we live. And really, the change over the last, let's call it the last generation. You know, we can argue about whether it's 20 years, or 30 years, or 50 years. Actually, it doesn't really matter when we look at it in evolutionary terms, because it's too slow for us to to evolve to take account of it. We have to have social sort of accommodation for all these environmental changes. And it's incredibly rapid and dramatic.

• 8:39Chris Williamson?

  It really is. I was in Dubai a couple of years ago with my dad and I couldn't believe just how recent that city was.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that was that was desert not that long ago.

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  Bro, a desert.

• 8:50Speaker 06

  Small fishing village, I think, wasn't it originally?

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  Insane. So obviously, there's kind of two, two schools of thought, I suppose, broadly two schools that I see, one of them being the left-leaning person who might look at the modern world and look at inequities and inequalities and stuff like that and talk about it being bad. But then someone like Steven Pinker, who would look rationally at all of the ways with like, life expectancy and modern medicine and things like that that are effective. So there's kind of this balancing board in terms of how people see the world. But I guess evolution and humans and our ability to adapt, that's not going to change at all.

• 9:34Speaker 06

  No, we're not going to sort of evolve our way out of some of the problems that we that we face right now. I mean, I was thinking about this actually today, because social media was was being discussed on the radio. So I was driving and, and, you know, I talk about social media in the book. But the way that we have, we have evolved in amazing capacity for for social behaviour. And that's almost the definitional part of our species. And the ability for us to communicate in language enhances that sociality. And you sort of get this runaway selection where one enhances the other, which increases the benefits of the other. Our intelligence, you know, we see this across the animal kingdom or social animals tend to have larger brains, you know, all of these things are intermixed and interlinked. But and we're incredibly good at it, right? We're incredibly good

• 10:18Speaker 06

  at living together, cooperating, working together, achieving incredible things face to face. And we know the rules and most of us are able to, you know, read the room and work out sort of emotional engagements with people. And we have an emotional intelligence that lets us navigate that environment. But now we go online, and we sort of try to use those same rules. But it's a completely different environment that we have to operate in. And people can say, oh, well, that's kind of a trivial example. But but but people commit suicide as a consequence of interactions online. That is the ultimate, you know, lack of fitness, right? You to take your own life as a consequence of something. You know, that is really a very serious thing. It affects people's lives. It affects how people interact

• 11:00Speaker 06

  with it with each other and their mental health. And it's because we don't know the rules. Now, we've had Thousands, tens of thousands of years of evolution to help us build up the cognitive processes that enable us to navigate our social world in the real world. We've had about 10 years to work out the rules. And of course, and here's the thing, right? As soon as we work out the rules, the social environment changes because suddenly they're the new form. So, you know, people, I think, I sort of got the impression people were starting to get a handle on how to use Facebook. But then Twitter came up on the sort of back back ropes and suddenly everyone was getting quite involved with that. And that is a very different vibe to it. You know, people say things to me on Twitter they would never say to my face. You know, you would never get up in someone's face like that and say

• 11:43Speaker 06

  the sorts of things that people will say on there. You know, you just wouldn't do that. We've had tens of thousands of years of social evolution that stop you from doing that because you're likely to get punched in the face. But that doesn't happen online. So I think we start to learn the rules and then something new comes along. We get Instagram coming in when suddenly we get this highly filtered version of, you know, Instagram's kind of an interesting one, isn't it? It's quite a, it has a high potential for mental health damage, I think, because of our tendency to sort of compare and contrast with other people's lives. That is something that we are just coming to terms with. As soon as we do that, of course, well, TikTok's around now. So that's the new big thing, isn't it? And we'll get used to that. And then the goalposts will move again. So even when

• 12:24Speaker 06

  we're able to get a handle on this new environment, we shift the environment and it's just happening all the time. And I think that is really the key point. We are, we are changing what we do and the way that we interact and the environment that we're in, in all kinds of axes, in ways that really are, don't just outstrip evolution. I mean, outstrip evolution because they're happening subgenerationally, but, but they outstrip even our ability to sit down and think about it. Even our ability to just get a basic handle on it. And I think, I think we have to sit back sometimes and realize just how remarkable we are and that we can do these things. And, you know, you and I are having a conversation over the internet. This would have been a ridiculous thing to consider a generation ago. But at

• 13:06Speaker 06

  the same time, we, we aren't always up with the rules of engagement. And I think that's, that's something that we really need to, to sort out.

• 13:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. There's an arms race going on at the moment. And there's a number of different levels that it's operating on. So. Technology and new modes of being will always lead. Then probably a little bit after that, individuals might start to adapt. Then some social norms might arise around how groups should adapt within that. Then lagging up behind that, the policymakers finally get their act together and catch on to the fact that we need GDPR online compliance, or we need to police what YouTube's policy is able to do, or what Twitter's policy is able to do, whatever it might be.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  And then bringing up the rear, a couple of hundred generations after that, evolution is like the old, slow, decrepit dog that's like at the end of the leash, like 50 yards behind you, just slowly creeping up behind. And we've got all of these, and you're totally right, like the arms race that's going on between the pace that we're able to move at as a society, as a world, and everything else, you know, those layers and layers there, several different sort of filtering points at which we're not able to keep up. So, I mean, is evolution right now, is human evolution kind of a little bit pointless?

• 14:38Chris Williamson?

  Because by the time that you evolve, the environment that you've evolved to adapt to will have changed.

• 14:44Speaker 06

  Yes, and of course, many of the things we're talking about, you know, evolution can only happen if there's a genetic basis for the traits that you're referring to. And if that genetic basis affects survival and ultimately reproduction, right, that's your fundamental aspects of it. And, and, yeah, many of the features that plague us in modern life might have some echoes in evolution, but they're not necessarily affecting, they're not necessarily affecting our reproduction, if you like. So, our inability to handle social media may well have an evolutionary sort of echo in terms of the types of social groups that we've evolved to handle. And the size of those social groups and those sorts of interactions, right? That that may well be the mismatch that we see in the modern world.

• 15:27Speaker 06

  But our inability to handle that doesn't necessarily affect our our ability to reproduce. It doesn't become a dominant feature. It's not, if you like, open to to natural selection in the modern world. So so evolution isn't going to get us out of that problem, even though there may actually be some genetic component to to it, right? Our ability to handle larger groups could well be a genetic component. If we accept that there is some evolutionary echo to the way that we think about these things, then there's going to be some variation in population. And some people, of course, can handle things better than others. And actually, you know, like I talk about in the book, for for for some people, social media isn't a problem at all. And for other people, it's a very big problem. And there's no reason to assume that there may not be some underlying genetic variance there. It's going to be very complex and it's going to be far from straightforward.

• 16:13Speaker 06

  But there could be something there. But is that ever going to translate into a sort of meaningful selection environment? So that people that have people that that do well on Twitter suddenly have more children. Actually, that's and they pass on that ability to do well on Twitter. You know, that that that that sort of evolutionary scenario seems a little unlikely. But the the biggest problem with it is that is that by even even if that were the case, of course, by the time that's able to act in a generation or so, you know, the problems, the problem's gone away because we've come up with a new way of interacting. I've just I've just been joined by by a almost two year old who should be down. Hello, darling, who should be downstairs. So if I can, if I can just pause very quickly, I'll have him I'll have him removed. Hang on a minute.

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely fine, yeah. We can send the child catches in. That's it. The child catches are coming. Two year olds being.

• 17:04Speaker 06

  No, I've I've I've sent for the child catch. It's all right.

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  That's totally fine. Two year old has arrived.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  All right, fella. Yeah.

• 17:15Chris Williamson?

  See you later on. Just you do as your co host for a brief for a brief while there.

• 17:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, and and he illustrates. Oh, could you close the door? Sorry.

• 17:25Speaker 06

  Yes, sorry about that. So yeah, that's the big problem with all of these things is even if there was enough variation, enough of it was genetic in the background and it made some meaningful sense and people that did well in certain things left more offspring than others. By the time that happens, the environment's changed, we've changed the environment. Of course, there may be more subtle effects with that. I mean, we talked earlier about social media causing problems. One of those problems is things like stress and we can see some genetic basis and differences in the way that people handle stress. But equally, that's a balance because some people handle it in different ways. This warrior-worrier kind of idea which maybe have strengths and weaknesses at different points. So all of it becomes quite difficult to see a way to evolve our way out of trouble. But certainly

• 18:10Speaker 06

  evolution has provided some of the background that sort of got us into trouble in the first place.

• 18:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's so weird the way that our evolutionary heritage rears its head when these new things happen, right? So you bring in a new technology and you're like, well, I wonder how the human makeup is going to respond to this surplus of food. I wonder how this human makeup is going to respond to this, that hyper-normal stimuli coming from your mobile phone and dopamine hits throughout the day and all this sort of things. And it's crazy, man. It's so fascinating. This is why I've been loving reading your book and some of Robert Wright's work and Rob Henderson, we recently had him on talking about evolution and dating. And it's really, really cool. So you mentioned there about group size, actually. I wanted to ask, how does Dunbar's number relate to social media?

• 19:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, this is a really interesting one because it's the odd thing I found when researching this idea was that you can find quite a lot of people who'll say, oh, Dunbar's number is very controversial. And you'll kind of read around and people will come up with different numbers. So the idea of the Dunbar number is it's the number of people that are in your social group that you can feel comfortable with. And Robin Dunbar, I think, defined it as this idea of who you could go up to in a bar and join for a drink without feeling embarrassed about it. And the idea is that that number maxes out at around 150, but that there are layers within that. So there tends to be smaller numbers, sort of around five or so, that are your very intimate, close friends, and then a slightly wider circle and then expands out. And the idea is that when you go beyond the Dunbar number, that you struggle with those social groups and that social groups tend

• 19:45Speaker 06

  to form naturally in human, both in human history. Actually, if we look back and in modern sort of human relationships into these kind of groups of that number and and I saw lots of people go, well, that's not true. And you'll find this other number and they say, well, no, it's three hundred and fifty. And then someone else that that came up with research is, well, that's twelve hundred. And and you've got all these sort of people arguing the details. But what I noticed never really came out was the the idea that there was a limit. And in fact, the upper limit seems to be down to our ability to remember faces. We at some point our head, you know, we can't cope with anymore. And so when you follow all this through, this idea of the Dunbar number, however, which way you dice it, you end up with people deciding that, yeah, well, there is a limit. Actually, we're just not totally sure, you know, maybe the number's this, maybe the number's that.

• 20:28Speaker 06

  But there is a limit and that limit seems to always be in the order of hundreds or, you know, perhaps up to a thousand. Well, when you look at people's online social networks, they are much larger in many cases. And in many cases, those online social networks can be quite active as well. So it's not just a case of you've got, say, ten thousand Twitter followers, but you only interact with two or three of them. Actually, you may have interactions with a large number of them in different shifting patterns. So you can end up actually with very large networks. And then when you intercept that, I mean, this is the other thing, right? That's our virtual world in one platform. But of course, people have lots of different platforms with different interactions on. And on top of all of that, and this is something that I wasn't able to really find that much

• 21:10Speaker 06

  research on, we have our real world networks as well. So we we might be maxing out or getting close to the Dunbar number or whatever number we decide in the real world. And then we lump on a whole load of different social media platforms with all of these things as well. And and it seems that that that people, particularly people who are quite ruminative and perhaps prone to overthinking things maybe, have a real issue when when the social network of the online world, you know, mixes with their with their real world and and it can cause real problems. But equally, for for some people, it can be a real big benefit. And there is this slightly odd idea that, you know, we know friendships are good and healthy and we know that friendship networks and strong friendships are good for mental health.

• 21:54Speaker 06

  But having very, very large networks online for some people can be very bad. And, you know, I mean, my my advice for that. I didn't write a self-help book, but if I was to, my advice for these online social networks is is learn how to mute and ignore and block and learn how to manage them to get what you want out of them. And I think that's that's something I've learned, but I think it's also something that we don't tend to think of when we join a social network online and we expand beyond our Dunbar number range, if you like. We often don't think, well, why, why am I doing this? Right? What, what, what is the point? You know, I see people on Twitter and Facebook going, I'm taking a break from this now. It's all too much. And you think, well, what, what, what were you doing? You know, what, what was your

• 22:36Speaker 06

  reason for joining that network and what are you trying to get out of it? Um, we're not used to doing that because we don't think of friendship groups in that way in the real world, right? We don't, we don't always look at someone and go, right, what am I going to get out of you? You know, what's my, what's my, what's my angle here in becoming, you know, a friend of yours, right? That's not really what we do.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  Not that costly, you know, like, yeah. And also there's not a, if you stop, if you just stop speaking to someone that happen, you don't, you don't remove yourself entirely from the social environment. You don't go, right, that's it. I just fancy a little bit of time in monk mode for the next four months, all of you. My entire social circle, all of you are assholes and I can't take you anymore. Yeah, that, that doesn't happen. It is interesting. I mean, there's a, I've got a bunch of doorways open in my mind. One of them being play stupid games, win stupid prizes, which is a quote from Naval Ravikant, where he asks, what is the prize for winning the game that you are playing at, at the moment? And one of those for a lot of people will be checking their phone every 30 minutes.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  Like, what is the prize for winning that? And this is something I, I am the epitome of someone who's spent too much time on the, on their phones. I'm a club promoter by trade. I've sent and received millions of messages on WhatsApp, millions. So I am very, very accustomed to what it feels like to have a tech addiction. And I've had to set myself such hard and fast rules in a desperate attempt to try and wrangle a technology which is far, far, far outgunning me. This race to the bottom of the brain stem is I am just a pawn and there is billions of dollars and the smartest designers on the planet behind every button press, you know, anyone that's spent a bit of time looking at Tristan Harris's

• 24:21Chris Williamson?

  stuff from the Centre for Humane Research and he's, we've spoken a lot on this show about tech addiction. We're a big fan, big advocate of phone reduction on this show. But yeah, having a separate device for social media has been a big help for me, not allowing my phone into certain rooms of the house. So if I want to use my phone, I've got to go into the kitchen, not sleeping with my son. My phone beside my bed has been a huge difference, having a hard digital sunset on a night. And it's like, even this, like, think about what I'm saying. I'm having to construct this bizarre world within the world with weird little fences and rules and stuff in a desperate attempt to stop using a device that I had to pay a grand and a half for.

• 25:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, and this, this, none of that would have made sense to anyone 10 years ago, you know, none of what you've said. And yet, every single thing that you've just said, I thought, yep, now that's actually a good idea. Hmm. Yep, not a bad plan. You're right. And the devices that we hold in our hands now, they're like, people that design fruit machines know this. And one of the problems of gambling addiction or troubled problem gambling, as it's sort of more broadly known, is that particularly with slot machine gambling, it's the unexpected win associated with bright lights and noises that form this sort of perfect storm to reward those pathways in our brain that make us associate this with a good thing, right? This is excellent. We must carry on. Yeah. And that, of course, is at the root of addiction, of addictive behaviours, when we think

• 25:45Speaker 06

  of drugs and things more broadly. And having a device that is attractive to hold, it's a pleasing, it's an aesthetically pleasing thing that makes us feel good. It rewards our reward pathways because we're getting messages and we're getting likes, right? We're getting confirmation of what we, what we want affirmation of what we are. It reinforces that. And all of those things that we're talking about, there are psychological structures in our brain that have evolved to keep us alive and to breed essentially, you know, the reward pathways, basically there to eat and have sex. You know, that's, that's effectively what is there to reward. And now we, I talk about the hijack hypothesis in the book, when it, when it comes to substances and drugs. But of course, we can see the same sort of thing with, with devices. And you're right, we're having to come up with this whole.

• 26:28Speaker 06

  Sphere and this whole realm of engagement and management options in order to manage this technology that our huge brains have led us devise and innovate, which is incredible when you think about it. But of course, in there, we also have these evolved mechanisms that are perfect for for making us addicted to it. And it's, it is, it's something that we we need to want. And I look at my kids, you know, they're they're they love technology and, you know, you have to, you have to come up with rules. And I see lots of parents with rules for their kids, right? No screens, none of that, blah, blah. They don't have those rules for themselves, you know, and and I'm just as bad, I'm just as bad as anyone here, you know, as anyone listening, I I need, I I had to put the um, the kind of Twitter launch icon, I've hidden

• 27:12Speaker 06

  it on sort of screens about five kind of sweeps away from my home screen and stuff. I don't keep it loaded up. So I actually have to go on to it and make a physical move. Because if it's in the background tweaking away at notifications, I know that I know I won't be able to help myself.

• 27:26Chris Williamson?

  Got it, got it, got it. Add that effortful friction in, man. Dopamine is a hell of a drug and variable schedule rewards are a hell of a delivery system.

• 27:35Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 27:36Chris Williamson?

  You know, we are, we're outgunned in that department. So can you tell us about the hygiene problem? I love this.

• 27:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I did, I mean, I guess, one of the, one of the issues of the modern world, and we can certainly see it in lots of aspects of the modern world, is inflammatory diseases. And actually, inflammation in general is now implicated in a whole load of different things. And this is when our immune system sort of overreacts to what's going on. It's actually one of the sort of cytokine storms that people are talking about causing deaths in COVID-19, is it is in effect, it's an immune over response, right? And we can see it in much less dramatic things, but nonetheless, very life changing and life reducing kind of things like asthma, for example, allergies.

• 28:21Speaker 06

  You know, not just sort of peanut allergies and sort of potentially serious or fatal allergies, but but but sort of lesser allergies as well. And we can find all of these things. And and one of the very seductive ideas about this is the it was became known as the hygiene hypothesis, which is effectively saying we are all living such clean lifestyles now. And we use so many domestic cleaning products and everything that that our immune systems never get chance to learn friend from foe, right? We never get the chance to build up the idea in our bodies that, well, these bacteria are good, these bacteria are bad, and we end up with this immune system that, if you like, hasn't been to school properly and has kind of not learnt to respond properly. And and that's a really interesting idea because it's very seductive. You see it absolutely everywhere. It's repeated in the popular media particularly,

• 29:06Speaker 06

  you know, jump on the hygiene hypothesis. But when you actually look back through the history of it as a scientific idea and the publishing of it, it was never about home hygiene in that sense. It was actually the original idea was looking at looking at the incidence of things like asthma, for example, and it looked at household effects. And the biggest household effect was actually the size of the family that you're in. Because it gave you more, it gives you, well, it gives you more interactions. So if you have more children, basically those children have more interactions with children, more very close interactions, more opportunities basically to ingest bacteria and so on.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  Because you're dirty and they're dirty.

• 29:42Speaker 06

  And you've got.

• 29:42Chris Williamson?

  And together, everybody dirty.

• 29:45Speaker 06

  And and of course, if you look at our modern lifestyle, we tend to have much less exposure to to outside. We live more inside lives than than we certainly than we evolved to live. And so taken together, those ideas actually have some merit. And and they went on to form what's become known as the old friends hypothesis, which is the idea that we co-evolved really with a whole suite of of harmless organisms, you know, microorganisms, bacteria, nematode worms and all sorts of other things. And that by being exposed to these very young in in life, you know, our adaptive immune system is able to go, OK, cool, your friend, your friend, ah, you know, shit, we better sort you out, you know, you're different, right? So that's the idea of the sort of. The the old friends hypothesis, the hygiene hypothesis, of course, then you've

• 30:29Speaker 06

  developed greatly because of this idea that we all clean our houses more than we do. And actually, I mean, looking back at certainly at my grandmothers, I and looking around my house right now, I can honestly say that there's absolutely no way that my house is cleaner than theirs. You know, and and in fact, people did lots of studies of this and they looked at these cleaning products and all this sort of stuff. And and it really transpires that it's not it's not this fact that we're all so damn clean these days. And, you know, back in the day, we all ate mud and and, you know, miles past where the size of house bricks. It's not it's not this sort of uh uh kind of great, great change. It's actually down to the way we live and and the the modern, you know, if you like, the modern Western lifestyle, the idea that we

• 31:10Speaker 06

  are inside much more as children, we tend to have less interaction with other children. You know, we're a crushing species, almost, you know, lots of children in in sort of ancestral society. Certainly, children would have played together much more than they do now. You would have had family groups mixing together much more than they often do. Family size would have tended to be larger. There would have been potentially more contact with with animals and livestock than we have now. And so all of these changes to our lifestyle can have an influence on on the way our immune systems learn. And we can see similar sorts of effects in in lots of different places around the world. I mean, there was a really nice natural experiment where a group of an ethnic group in in northern Finland, I say a nice natural experiment, nice in inverted

• 31:55Speaker 06

  commas, from a scientific perspective, an ethnic group got divided by border effectively between Finland and Russia. And very, very rapidly, the the Russian group were living a sort of more traditional lifestyle for them and a more rustic lifestyle, I guess you would call it, with association with animals and so on. And the group in Finland lived were living a what we would describe as a modern Western lifestyle. And and very, very quickly, they were able to see the differences in those two. Effectively genetically identical populations, they hadn't had time to diverge, but they were, the only difference between them now was the environment they were in. And they were able to follow through the, the sort of, the fact that the, the group that was in this modern western sort of setting had more lifestyle related kind of allergies and so on.

• 32:39Speaker 06

  So it's a, it's a really interesting idea. It, it is a tricky one and it's, it's the sort of thing that's very difficult to do the type of controlled experiments, you know, sort of the, the, the gold standard kind of medical trial that you would like to do because of the ethical implications of it. But, but certainly the correlative evidence is, is strongly points towards this lifestyle effect changing and resulting in these allergies.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  The question that we need to know, do I clean my house or not?

• 33:04Speaker 06

  Well, absolutely. And yes, you should, because this is the other thing that developed, of course. I mean, I've heard people say, well, you know, I'm going to take little Toby out or whatever and force feed him, you know, mud.

• 33:13Chris Williamson?

  If you push a toddler into the ground, it's good for their health, right?

• 33:19Speaker 06

  It's good for their, this was the idea. I'd be, well, I won't clean my house. Well, well, of course, actually, you know, we, we should. Hygiene, and as we're seeing right now, hand hygiene particularly, is an incredibly important thing. The fact is that we, yeah, being clean is good, right? We, we needn't longer suffer from many of the infectious diseases that we would. We can clean wounds. We, all of these things are wonderful. And if you handle things like chicken, for example, you know, with campylobacter back to being quite rife in some of these things, yeah, God's sake, wash your hands, right? Wash your children's hands.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  Adam, I had.

• 33:51Speaker 06

  Don't get into the idea that, that all these things are good.

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  I, I had salmonella 18 months ago.

• 33:56Speaker 06

  Oh, right.

• 33:57Chris Williamson?

  Wouldn't advise it.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  No. And, and actually, it's something, I mean, I, I wrote a book about five years ago, um, which looked at us, the complex relationship with bacteria. And one of the great surprises with that was to, and I don't remember the figures offhand, but was to see how many people in this country die from food poisoning, from salmonella, listeriosis and so on. It was quite shocking. And in fact, there was a, um, there was a food poisoning outbreak, if I remember rightly, up around the north eastern, you know, uh, five or 10 years ago that I mentioned in that book, you know, these things happen and that you're right, they're, they are not fun, right? So definitely, definitely have some basic hygiene.

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  Awful, awful way to spend half the month of October and most of the month of November. It doesn't stop, man. It was, it was, it was savage. Anyway, I won't, I won't go into too much graphic detail. And so you looked at stress too. What did you find out there?

• 34:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, well, stress is brilliant. Stress is actually what started the book. So I was, I was looking for, for another book to write and, and one of the things that came out from the book on bacteria, which was talking about sort of allergies and so on. I got looking at inflammation and then started reading around and ended up finding that the stress in the modern world is this big long, you know, chronic stress is this long-term killer. And that we don't, you know, we still don't understand that much about it. So I started thinking about stress as a topic and then realised that it could expand more. So, you know, the base, the basic story behind stress is that stress is an absolute lifesaver. Stress is fundamentally this fight or flight response, right? Something terrible happens, we need to fix it right now. We, we can't wait for a sort of

• 35:29Speaker 06

  homeostasis to take care of it. It's, it's not, you know, the right now, we need to do something. We need to jack ourselves up and get ready for it. And so we get this fabulous hormonal sort of ballet through our body that releases all these hormones that, that elevate our heartbeat, you know, all of that feeling that we're all familiar with. Elevate the heartbeat, elevate blood pressure, divert blood away from where it's needed to, or where it's not needed to where it's needed. All of these responses that we associate with that. And, and that's a lifesaver. It's, and it's certainly saved. I'm, I'm guessing that nobody hasn't been saved at some point from serious injury and potentially actually death as a consequence of that response.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Walking out in the traffic, accidentally dropping something on your hand that's hot, you know?

• 36:11Speaker 06

  All of those things, right? That is, that is a lifesaver. And every one of our ancestors would have enjoyed that, you know, this sort of stress thankful chain all the way back. And in fact, the biochemistry underlying this, this isn't a human thing. You can go back through the primates, through the mammals, reptiles, even some invertebrates have, have this sort of system in place. So this is a really deeply evolved thing. And it saves our lives. The problem is that if you release all of these hormones all the time, they, they have a harmful effect. It's called an allostatic load. They have, they have this harmful effect on our body system, right? It's a great thing because you need it right now, but you can't be living with this all the time. And what we find in the modern world for some people and potentially actually, I think for, I think for many of us.

• 36:56Speaker 06

  You know, some people deal with it better than others, but many of us are, are subject to an almost. Constant drip feed of stress. Instead of having these major stressful events that save your life because a bear's just jumped out from behind a bush, you know, we have a groaning email inbox, three phone calls to take care of. Um, we mentioned it earlier, you know, social media alerts and notifications and, you know, thirty five different WhatsApp threads, half of which you're unsure why you're even on anymore. All of these things go on, you miss buses, and then of course we've got financial woes. We're able to read the news and, and take on the woes of everyone else. Uh, you know, some earthquake at two thousand miles away, a place you've never heard of is suddenly becomes something to do with you, you know? And, and, and all of these things build up.

• 37:38Speaker 06

  And the, the really sort of bad thing about it is we get this sort of drip, drip of stress, but then that has immediate effects. Um, it can cause headaches and pain, which of course can cause you more worry and concern. Um, it can cause sleeplessness, which is a major source of additional stress because, because then suddenly you're an insomniac. And we end up with this almost maelstrom of very, what, what we would think of, I think, is a very modern day, whoa, a very modern day problem. And it's coming at us from all sides. And, and of course, we haven't lived this life for long enough for us to really have a very solid handle on what it might, and how that might affect us. Um, seventy and eighty year olds right now did not grow up in the same world that teenagers are growing up in with the same stresses.

• 38:21Speaker 06

  They had their own stresses and different things as well, um, some of which would have been greater individually, but did they have such a large stress landscape as, as we live now? That, that, that is something which we are discovering all the time. But, but what we do know is that, that more and more evidence is gathering up that this constant chronic stress, micro stress that we're under i- is having an effect on our, on our health and wellbeing. And it's something that evolution isn't going to help us with. Evolution has given us this wonderful tool and it's allowed some people to deal with it in different ways and it's allowed some people to, to. To have a variation in how they do it, but it's given us this wonderful mechanism for keeping us alive.

• 39:01Speaker 06

  But but it's up to us, I think, to to regulate our lives in the modern environment and perhaps change our environment so that we change that stress landscape because, you know, we can't live like this. And what's interesting is if you look at, you know, you look at, well, actually NHS advice and and things, it sounds more kind of Glastonbury than Harley Street half the time now. Most of the advice, I have to say, is quite unhelpful. It's things, effectively, it sort of says, pull yourself together, calm down and, you know, go for a walk or something. And actually, that, you know, that might be very good advice, but it's not necessarily the advice that someone that's deeply stressed needs to hear. So we still need to work out the best language for that. But what's interesting is you look at kind of retreats, for example, or spas,

• 39:42Speaker 06

  and it almost feels like the more they strip out of the modern world, the more you pay, the more Spartan your existence is, the more it's going to, the more it's going to cost you, right? And I stayed in a hotel in Africa, actually, a while ago that had this spa and had a big sign, you know, leave your mobile phone here, they had a locker for it and everything. It was very much stripping away aspects of our modern life, which we would consider to be luxurious and they are, and safe, and they are. We live a very safe, luxurious life, really. But stripping those aspects away and giving us some refuge from them is how we're now trying to de-stress our lives. And that's, I guess, over the last couple of months, you know, with with sort of lockdown,

• 40:26Speaker 06

  one of the narratives that I've seen coming out, and this is probably down to the sort of echo chamber that I'm in in social media, but but I've seen people very much say how important the natural world has been to them, how important it is for them to now go out for a walk every day, for them to go and sit in their garden and just watch the bees or, you know, get their binoculars out and have a bird list and to, and they're saying that that is how they're dealing with it. And in effect, well, they're de-stressing by removing the modern world, slowing down, taking it easy. And I think that is something that we definitely need to do because the lives that we're living now are luxurious, safe, privileged, and yet.

• 41:07Speaker 06

  Causes us all kinds of stressful woes and it feels like something that we I think we can get on top of that, you know, I think we just need to identify what those stresses are, understand that we've got this evolutionary background that isn't helping us and work out how to get those things to operate together. And I think that's something that possibly actually the last few months might have helped some people to come to terms with. I know it's helped me actually because the whole work-life balance is put into stark relief when you're, you know, working at home constantly and you've got kids around you, you have to manage those things. And, and, you know, now I find myself going, I mentioned earlier, I find myself going outside a lot more, you know, I'm a, I'm a biologist

• 41:48Speaker 06

  by profession, I'm a, I'm a keen naturalist, I'm a, and I'm a natural historian by sort of persuasion, but I don't get that much chance to do that. This year is the first year that I've seen skylarks flying for years, that I've been out here in kikis because normally, you know, I would be at work and then at home and then sort of, you know, probably on social media.

• 42:07Chris Williamson?

  Being around and stuff like that.

• 42:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. So being forced to balance those things has actually helped me immensely. But of course, for some people, it's also been, you know, another stress.

• 42:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, I, I, I understand and I appreciate the people that have had stresses and stuff during lockdown, but the reduction of stimulation, the reduction of novelty, the reduction of opportunity for experience, as far as I'm concerned, has re-centered many people, including myself's, attention onto simpler pleasures. So I was mentioning this on a podcast the other week, that over the last two and a half months, three months or whatever it's been since I've been in lockdown, I have been able to do my morning walk and watch the trees go from bare branches to getting ready to leaf to buds to flowers. And I know the, I know which trees went first. I have like the shape of them, like some of them

• 42:59Chris Williamson?

  I've given like weird pet names to. And obviously this is just all part of the odd psychosis that's going on inside of my mind. But like, I, I, I took notice of my flower, the clematis I've got in my garden. I'm not, I've never, I've lived in this house for five years. Like I've never taken notice of stuff like that. So I do agree that. Hopefully we've been able to reset, dial back that hyper normal stimuli, dial back the the constant, it's Joanne's barbecue this weekend and we've got to hurry off because we've got to go to our parents down in Surrey on Saturday and blah, blah, blah. I really do hope that that is something that people take away, the fact that they can have more simple, more easy and enjoyable experiences and hopefully

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  kind of reconnect themselves with that grander vastness that nature does because it makes you feel small, right? It reminds you that your problems aren't that big. So the two key takeaways we've got so far that I've I've got from this, or three key takeaways. Number one, sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. Number two, if you've got a child you worry about getting ill, shove its face in some mud. Number three, if you want to really enjoy your life, then loincloth, mud hut, out in the middle of somewhere completely barren and stark, and just live, live out there for like a week and you'll come back and you're just going to be fully actualized and full of zen. So those, those are the three takeaways I've got so far. Up next, are we evolved to be violent?

• 44:28Speaker 06

  Yes, now this was, this was a chapter which I found particularly interesting to, to come out from, from a zoological perspective, because I think you can find lots of people that will suggest that, that humans are the only people, they're the only species that will, that kills its own kind. And as a biologist, I know that that's, I mean, that's twaddle, right? It's absolutely incorrect. I've studied leaf cutting ants and honeybees, for example, in some depth and both of those highly social species, right, that we look at in terms of harmony. I mean, but bees are virtually, honeybees are virtually synonymous with harmonious living. Well, actually, you know, the queen, when she emerges, will kill her sister queens. They, they will eat each other's eggs.

• 45:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, I used to study these ants called deinoponora quadriceps. Huge things. They're actually the biggest ants in the world. They live in Brazil, they live in relatively small colonies. About ten or fifteen percent of the ants in a colony are involved in all these antagonist interactions between each other. They're sisters. But it doesn't make any difference to them because they might get the chance to sort of become the breeder in a colony. And they're they're trying to kill each other. And in fact, what what someone did fairly recently was to do what's got a phylogenetic analysis. So they looked across the broad sweep of mammals. And they looked at their relationships between the different groups, the evolutionary relationships between the different groups. And the incidence of inter-individual death, but but basically members of the same species, conspecifics, killing each other. Fatal conflict, if you like.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  And what they found was that forty percent of mammal species had solid evidence of that happening, forty percent of them. And their suggestion was that actually they would have found it in more, except, you know, we haven't studied most of these things. Basically, the rule seems to be that if they've been studied for any length of time, it turns out that they probably are killing each other at one point or another.

• 46:15Chris Williamson?

  Shades of shit out of each other at one point, yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 06

  And here's the brilliant thing. You look at it, they they illustrated this beautiful sort of circle of all the species going around so you can sort of see them all in one place. And there's a really massive kind of lump of violent interactions. And you look at it, it's the primates. The groups that we come from are unusually violent for mammals, even though you can find this violence throughout. And then you sort of look further in and, you know, the apes are kind of a bit more violent still. And and so we have come from a a violent lineage.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  We've got a perfect heritage, yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 06

  We we we do have that heritage for it. And you can come up with all sorts of quite plausible evolutionary scenarios as to why, you know, violence can be at times a great problem solver. You know, if if particularly, for example, if you're a group living animal and you come into conflict with other groups, for example, which would have been at some point an issue. But also to resolve conflicts within groups. So, you know, violence can definitely be an advantage at times, and it can be a lifesaver. Particularly in sort of in sort of conflict times. So, you know, I think we can overdo our sort of violent history. But over the course of our of our evolution, there are times when violence would have been a definite advantage. And then if you you look at us as a physical unit, we're we're pretty handy, right? We're we're a decent size.

• 47:30Speaker 06

  We're quite strong. We've we've got long limbs which provide perfect kind of. Levers and perfect sort of gives you very good reach. You can swing a fist very, very fast. We've got feet, knees, elbows. We've got heads and skulls, particularly the front of our skull is quite tough. We're, yeah, we've got some pretty, pretty decent sort of bits about us physically that allow us to inflict harm on to others.

• 47:54Chris Williamson?

  A couple of inbuilt weapons here and there.

• 47:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, sure, you know, we don't have teeth and claws that are particularly effective, but nonetheless, we're not, we're not badly put together. There was, I came across this fabulous sort of argument by, by a biologist who, who sort of tried to put forward the argument that the fist and the way that the fist is, is made and butt wrist and sort of the, the architecture of the human hand and everything was, was to do with, with a fist and that we were sort of pre-adapted. You know, the fist, well, not pre-adapted, the fist was actually adaptation for fighting. And he'd also put forward the idea that the, the human male face and differences in bone structure between males and females. It was basically a sort of punchproof face. That was his kind of overall view.

• 48:34Chris Williamson?

  The way that the impact comes in and a thicker neck that will be able to withstand.

• 48:39Speaker 06

  Exactly that. So, so those ideas, it must be said, were, were met with some fairly robust criticism in, in the literature. But nonetheless, actually, some people also said, well, yeah, maybe there's something in it. So there's, there's sort of an idea that, that we might have, that there might be adaptations. I'm not really sure I'd buy into that. But certainly as a, as a physical specimen, we, we, you know, we have, we have some fairly useful attributes for violence. Of course, we then also got a pretty decent brain that's both innovative. So we're pretty good at using weapons and tools and, and can plan ahead. So we can really start to, start to bring all these things together. So it doesn't seem necessarily surprising that we are, are violent. I guess one of the surprises is that we're not more violent. And of course, then we see evolution coming

• 49:21Speaker 06

  in as well. And there's lots of evidence and ideas about sort of how we have evolved mental mechanisms and neural mechanisms for, for reining ourselves back. Emotions, for example, things like shame. And some of the emotional sort of side of things are hypothesized by some to be to be ways to reduce our violent tendencies. So it was quite interesting in and out for me, this sort of thing. And what's really interesting as well is that you can find perfectly good, well put forward theses by people that say we are more violent now than we were. Very, very learned theses that say, no, we're actually much less violent than we were. Learned theses that say, no, we're no more violent than we were before. It's almost as though we have not really got a firm grip on it.

• 50:04Speaker 06

  But what I did find was that there is evidence for genetic components to violence. And when people have looked at violence and tried to, it's always very tricky, of course, to separate nature from nurturing human studies. But it does seem that violence, in the broader sense of the term and what we might, you know, subsume within that, that there may be some genetic component to it as well. And what that suggests is that it, of course, has been under the influence of evolution. So evolution has certainly had a role to play, of course, in the modern world and in our modern way of thinking, you know, we have a very different view on that. And just because evolution, you know, just because we've come from an unusually violent sort of phylogenetic origin, and just because we have all this ability to be able to do this,

• 50:47Speaker 06

  and just because at some point in the past, there may have been selection for it, you know, that is not an excuse for violence, because equally, we've had selection and mechanisms that prevent us from acting through on that. And of course, our secret is, you know, our secret, I guess, our ultimate goal is to work out why it is and what triggers there are in some people that make some people much more violent than others. And that's really a hope, I think, of lots of people looking at the evolutionary history of this sort of thing is to try and get some sort of handle on how we might, if you like, cure or treat violence.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  There's an argument there. There'll be a number of people that would hear you say or hear researchers say that we're looking at ways to cure violence. And they would think, they're trying to neuter the population. They're trying to make us helpless and weak and unindependent. And they want this sort of utopia. And again, what we're talking about, the misalignment between human.

• 51:49Chris Williamson?

  Makeup and current environment, the fact that the fact that we have this flinch response now where the vast, vast, vast majority of things don't require a flip. We don't need to be scared of a cold shower. And yet, every morning, when I go and have a cold shower, I shit myself just before I go in because I know what it's going to be like. And I know that I'm fine. Or for instance, when I'm doing breath work, let's say that I'm doing some quite challenging holotropic breath work and I'm scared that I'm choking and I can feel the gasp response coming. It's like, I know I'm not choking, I'm in complete control. It's me that's holding my breath. And yet, we have all of these misaligned concerns and warning signs that go off around us.

• 52:31Chris Williamson?

  And there's going to have to be a line where we begin to align the way that we are, the way that we operate to the environment more effectively. But there must be an overton window to that where you actually push it so far that you essentially no longer become human.

• 52:50Speaker 06

  Yes, and, and I think, yeah, we need to be, we need to be careful when we develop these sorts of theses too far. Because actually, of course, things are always a bit more complicated. We're not going to find a gene, for example, there's not a gene for violence, right? And there's not going to be a simplistic way of curing it. But I think we can get some insights into what are clear problems in the world today. And, and violence can be in the broad is, is clearly a problem. Domestic violence is a huge issue and a huge problem. Violence towards children is clearly a problem. Violence towards, towards everyone, you know, unjustified violence.

• 53:33Speaker 06

  And let's put that inverted commas and sort of, and sort of park it, but just, just let's assume that in some cases, violent responses are justified or desirable. To defend yourself, for example, most, most of the violence in the world is not defensive. It is not in that sense. And we see the escalation of violence across the world, you know, resulting in

• 53:55Speaker 06

  Manifest atrocities up to the level of genocide. Clearly, there is a problem.

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  I mean, even

• 54:03Speaker 06

  Understanding it's gonna help us in some way.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  A much more personal level, because people, when we get to these big abstractions and we start to actually talk about the genocides and everyone can go, well, I'm not a part of a genocide. It's like, okay, everyone's been on a night out. I've stood on the front door of over a thousand nightclubs, right? And I have seen hundreds and hundreds of fights.

• 54:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  So many guys that are posturing, that are looking to not lose face in a group of drunk people who don't even know who they are and won't remember what happened the next day. And you think this is, I'm watching it thinking this is an evolutionary adaptation to not wanting to drop down the pecking order within your tribe gone so haywire that it is unbelievable.

• 54:56Speaker 06

  It's a pure evolutionary, if we were, if we were sort of alien biologists dropping onto earth and we saw that classic drunken nightclub brawl.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh, come on then, mate, come on then.

• 55:09Speaker 06

  Well, first of all, it's posturing, right? So you get display. So in our case, it's often vocal display. So people will start adopting a way of speaking which they wouldn't normally adopt. They're shouting, they're swearing at each other and they're name calling, right? That is no different from red deer bellowing at each other, right? It's trying to work out who's the biggest and people might back down at that point. And if they don't, they start displaying and you see it in deer, right? They'll start walking parallel to each other. They're sizing each other up basically to work out if it's worth it. You see that in men, right? They'll start putting their arms out. Come on in, come on in. They're trying to make themselves look bigger. It is pure, pure animal behaviour at that point. And that is, that is, has an evolutionary origin. It's display. First of all, the threat displays. Then we get physical displays. And then if it escalates, of course, it goes into, into a fight. And you're right, it's to do with status. It's to do with.

• 55:52Speaker 06

  Um. Access to females, it's to do with access to resources. Of course, in the modern world, those things are slightly subverted and become somewhat bent and twisted, but the basic essence of it is the same. And then, of course, people will start fighting. And what they're generally doing, I mean, if you watch, if you watch people having, you know, as you've done much more than I have, I'm sure, um, the sort of fighting they're doing is either a fairly weird imitation of the type of fighting that they see on television and films, which we are immersed in constantly, which of course doesn't, doesn't really work because it's there to look good, or it is, it is brutal, you know, all the fancy kicks in the world aren't going to be as good as stomping on someone's head. And that's what you actually see in the real world. And that, that is where, that, you

• 56:34Speaker 06

  know, that is where people get killed in these ridiculous threat displays. We have a problem when that's happening, right?

• 56:40Chris Williamson?

  For the most part, what I see, and that's a really interesting insight I've never thought of before. For the most part, I see fights which are grander and less effective than they need to be. I've never, in all the fights I've watched, seen someone bite another person. And yet, if you were trying to pull a murderer off your child,

• 57:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  You would be, it would be, you'd be in the eyes, you'd be in the throat, but it's not. That sort of fighting is this almost like, uh,

• 57:12Speaker 06

  It's slightly ritualized.

• 57:14Chris Williamson?

  Style. Yeah, this kind of weird dramatized, like, uh, kayfabe WWE bullshit. Um, so, look, I've got a couple more questions, but I want to do a quick fire round for you now. Adam, I'm going to quick fire round. Quick fire round is going to be, try and give us a brief evolutionary explanation for different emotions.

• 57:34Speaker 06

  I'll try.

• 57:35Chris Williamson?

  See what you can do. Okay, so first up, pride.

• 57:38Speaker 06

  Pride. Well, that's an interesting one, isn't it? Pride. Um, I suppose, I mean, this is pure, this is the worst type of armchair adaptionism, but I guess, um, pride is almost a sort of self-rewarding thing, isn't it? It's sort of an affirmatory kind of self-rewarding. I wouldn't be at all surprised if feelings of pride, if you were to MRI someone that's done something that's prideful, um, that it, that it doesn't affect that reward pathway in some way. Because if you've done something that makes you feel proud, you maybe, you might want to end up doing it again, or, or seek that emotional out again. I wonder if that's, I don't know.

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  Next, next one, envy.

• 58:16Speaker 06

  Well, I suppose envy basically comes down to resource management and territory and so on, isn't it? You're envious of things which will give you more status and more reproductive power ultimately. I can imagine, I've got two blackbirds that live, the males are constantly barracking each other. One is on the street opposite and one's on my roof and they've both got pretty decent territories, but you can see each of them eyeing up the other one. I'm guessing that envy in humans is probably a more sophisticated and more intellectualized version of that. We see something we want that will give us some status, some resource that we need. And envy ekes away at people, it motivates. It's probably linked in some way to those motivational pathways that gets us to,

• 59:00Speaker 06

  get something that we perceive to be of value to us.

• 59:02Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 59:03Speaker 06

  That's my armchair adaptionism for that.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  I like it, two more, so loneliness.

• 59:08Speaker 06

  Well, loneliness is an interesting one, isn't it? That's something that ironically perhaps in the modern world of interconnectedness, we find ourselves less connected and we see loneliness. Loneliness is an extremely unpleasant thing to experience. Whether that's a pathological reaction to the situation. So if you like, outside of the realm of, it's not an evolved response, it's simply a symptom, a disease response, or whether there is some evolved response to it because it's such an unpleasant way of feeling it, stimulates us, I don't know. But I guess one of the things that we see with people that are chronically lonely is, it doesn't necessarily drive people towards seeking out humans.

• 59:50Speaker 06

  In fact, if anything, it tends to lead to further isolation and further loneliness. So I wonder whether loneliness might actually be a sort of a symptom, almost a disease if you like, a symptom of something rather than a... An evolved emotional response.

• 1:00:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 06

  But, but, but yeah, I, I'm, I'm guessing there'll be, there'll be people listening to this that know a lot more about the evolution of emotion than me going shouting at the screen.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, Adam, you can comment in the comments below and correct us throughout this whole thing. I've told, I've, I've said like five times about shoving a child's face in the mud, it's fine. Um, final one, right? I've asked this question to a number of different people and this is the, this is the most difficult one. Have you seen Interstellar, the film?

• 1:00:32Speaker 06

  I haven't yet, no.

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so in Interstellar, there's this short period, a short sequence where the, they're talking about the evolution of human emotions and they're trying to justify or work out why we still love people that have died.

• 1:00:51Speaker 06

  So grief.

• 1:00:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 06

  I suppose. Well, it's, it's different from grief, isn't it? Grief is, is almost that separation, uh, sort of thing. Um, the pursuit or the continuation of love of people that have died.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  How is that fitness enhancing, you know?

• 1:01:06Speaker 06

  I guess, I guess in a sense, uh, maybe we want, we want that to be us some sense. Perhaps that's one of those things that's gone beyond simple fitness enhancement and is a product of, this is, this is such a squirrely and, and, and a weasely response, but perhaps that's one of the products of the complexity of our brain that simply emerged from the, the background of all those neurological connections.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Speaker 06

  Maybe, maybe, maybe that's just a, um, a spandrel, if you like, an evolutionary kind of, loads of other things have evolved for different reasons and as a consequence of them, we get these interconnections that lead to something that we can't explain. That, that is, that is a.

• 1:01:46Chris Williamson?

  No, I like that. I like, I like the fact that you've got this kind of like haywire, um, add-on, the, the kind of like a bug in the system. Uh, so you could think, again, this is, I've thought about that question loads and this is the first time. You're eliciting a lot of new thoughts here, which is great. What you could have is your brain is unable to work out the fact that your feelings for someone, the love that you had for someone, that they're no longer there, then it's actually a denial of death, almost, somewhere back, back inside of you. I don't know why that would be evolutionary fitness.

• 1:02:26Speaker 06

  Well, I guess, I guess a denial of death is probably a very good thing, right? If, if, if you refuse to believe that death is there and you, well, no, actually, accepting that death is there is much better, isn't it? Because you know how bad death would be for your fitness, so you ruthlessly tried to avoid it. So actually kind of ignoring death, I'm not sure, I'm gonna, I'm gonna weed that out.

• 1:02:45Chris Williamson?

  Hey, let yourself ponder, have a little ponder on that.

• 1:02:47Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, it's an interesting one.

• 1:02:49Chris Williamson?

  When you watch Interstellar, you'll know the exact bit that I was talking about. So my final question, what's, what, what happens next? We said at the very beginning of this conversation that human evolution is kind of a bit moot now, or at least for the time being, for as, as long as the environment changes fast as hell, evolution is kind of just spinning its wheels. What's that mean as we go forward?

• 1:03:14Speaker 06

  I, I think, I think what it means is that we, it's kind of like, we, we need to sort of grow up a little bit, don't we? We've, we've reached this point now in, in, in our civilization, and particularly over the last few, few decades and last generation or two, we've, we've really reached a very critical point and, and perhaps even a tipping point in the way that we, that we view the world and, and see the world. And I think, I think we need to embrace the fact that we are incredible creatures, right? We are amazing. We can control our environment to a ridiculous degree. We can explore space. We can smash atoms. We can do all of those things. And too often, I think, we, we sit back and say, oh, but you know, we're, we're rubbish and we blah, blah, blah, and like, aren't we awful? And

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  we, we can't run as fast as a cheetah or whatever. No, we're, we're incredible. We're the fastest, strongest. Most intelligent creature on this planet, we should embrace that and we should use that in a much more effective fashion. I think to do that, we're going to have to accept the fact that we are animals, that we have these kind of evolutionary echoes that influence things both consciously, subconsciously, and also within our bodies and the way we respond to things. We almost have to embrace all of that and, and much understand ourselves in a much better way, I think, if we're going to move forward. Because you're right, evolution is not going to get us out of this. We're going to get us out of this. But for us to

• 1:04:37Speaker 06

  do that, we have to really deeply tank on what we are. And we are flesh and blood animals that have been subject to evolution, but we're also something incredible because we've got in our heads the most complex structure that we know of in the universe that's capable of innovation that, that we can't yet imagine, and imagination that we, we can't quite fathom. So I think we just need to bring all these components together. But underpinning all that, and this was really the big surprise to me, is, is the fact that we're not very good at thinking about the future. Evolution hasn't equipped us for that. Evolution doesn't care what's going to happen in three generations' time. It cares what happens now, right? We have evolved and our heuristics and our brain have evolved, this kind of here and now things. And we devalue us, actually. We think of ourselves as different people in the future.

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  Future us is, is sort of treated as the same as everyone else, but we can stop that. We can actually do experiments that show that if you just tweak people a little bit and prepare them and say, listen, you're going to need to make a decision for future you, but future you's going to be you, yeah? It's going to have the same hopes and fears and emotions and everything. If you prime people in that way, they treat future them better than they treat a future them without that priming. And I think we need to learn those little lessons that, that let us take our evolutionary heritage and sort of turn it on its head and make it into a strength, you know, the sort of judo approach of, of understanding our enemy. And I think that's Flip it against itself. And I think that's, that's where we're going to need to go. I think we're going to need to be much more understanding about what we are.

• 1:06:05Speaker 06

  Both in a sort of philosophical sense, but also in a biological and sort of very real flesh and blood sense and understand that heritage, but also understand what it means for us right now. And perhaps then we have some hope because we are in every axis, really, it's very hard to find anyone arguing against a point that we seem to be right now in history at quite an important point in terms of human population, the way we're treating the planet, our environmental issues, the social issues you mentioned earlier, ideas of social inequality and everything. It very much feels like we're at that, we're at that important point. And I think we're going to need to understand our past and

• 1:06:49Speaker 06

  our present in order to move on into that future, which of course, we need to get a better understanding of as well. So it's tricky times, but it's exciting times as well. You know, there's, there's hope, I think.

• 1:06:59Chris Williamson?

  There is so much complexity to hold in that, you know, and I genuinely do hope that the more abstract, more long-term rational side of us that allows us to transcend the terrible social norms and the awful evolutionary heritage and all of the fears and the worries and the crap that we've managed to, the baggage that has been given to us by our ancestors in an environment that we're no longer fit to be in. But it requires a lot of social change. Like if, if evolution isn't going to do it, then it has to be a combination

• 1:07:42Chris Williamson?

  of wisdom acquisition by the individual, social cohesion by small and local groups, by bureaucratic and political change, by people in power who actually understand every layer below that. And then a global movement toward understanding that we are one species, one planet, one shot at this. You know, we didn't even start talking about existential risk and stuff like that. But that's a whole new rabbit hole for us to go down. But you know.

• 1:08:12Chris Williamson?

  Fermi paradox actually seems to start making more and more sense.

• 1:08:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, we need to, I think, we've tended to think of globalization, a lot of the times, that's why it means I can get cheap trainers from Indonesia and fly to Australia. You're absolutely right. We need to realise that actually we are, we are globalised now. We can see ourselves in the round, literally, if, you know, from space we can see ourselves. We need to embrace that. We need to embrace what we are as a species much more, I think, and realise our problems. And you're right, it's going to happen at all levels, but it needs to happen at all levels. It needs to be individual, it needs to be local, it needs to be national, but it needs to be global as well. And we can start to see movements moving in that direction. But one thing, one thing that we can be sure of, right,

• 1:08:59Speaker 06

  in human endeavour, we usually end up going further than we thought we would, but it usually takes a bit more time. You know, you look back to the 50s and people were predicting we were living on the moon and whatever by the 1970s. But, but in fact, they didn't predict half of the things that we've managed to do. They just got the timing wrong, you know. So we really, I think it's going to take us a bit longer. This is, this is not going to be a shift that's going to happen overnight. But hopefully, we're going to be heading in the right direction.

• 1:09:26Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Adam, unfit for purpose, when human evolution collides with the modern world, will be linked in the show notes below. Have you got any other websites, any other stuff you want to plug?

• 1:09:36Speaker 06

  No, just that one for now. There is a Radio 4 programme coming out. There's not linked to this actually, but it's quite interesting and sort of arose out some of the ideas where we look at humans as prey. So we're looking at that, at how, how we are eaten around the world, actually by various animals and how serious that can be in certain areas. But also, we look back to our evolutionary history and look at the influence of not man the hunter, which is the sort of glamorous way that we used to think of it, but man the hunted, and the importance of that environment on our evolution. So some links there as well.

• 1:10:09Chris Williamson?

  What's that called?

• 1:10:10Speaker 06

  That programme's going to be called On The Menu, and it's out at the end of June, and that's on BBC Radio 4.

• 1:10:16Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. That sounds awesome. I've never seen...

• 1:10:20Chris Williamson?

  Any ancestral historical analysis of what happened, of how we would have acted as prey, the ways that we would have hidden from animals. You're totally right. We get this sort of hyper romantic view of the berry picking while the wife's at home and then the killing the saber tooth tiger and all this sort of stuff. You don't get the how did we cower in caves narrative very much. So that that sounds absolutely fascinating. On the menu, BBC Radio 4, I'm excited, man. But look, thank you so much. Unfit for purposes. Sick. It's an awesome book. Everyone that has been listening, if you've enjoyed this, if you've got an interest in evolutionary theory and and all of the stuff that we've gone through today, then head to the show notes below and grab it. Feel free. I'll also link Professor

• 1:11:03Chris Williamson?

  Hart's Twitter below. So feel free to hassle him on there and tell him what you think he got wrong, what you think he got right. Adam, thank you so much for your time, man.

• 1:11:12Speaker 06

  Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  On October 2.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

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• 1:11:42Speaker 03

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• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  I'm not the first.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.