What Use Is The Female Orgasm? - David Puts

David Puts is a Professor of Anthropology at Penn State whose research focuses on the evolution and development of human sexuality and sex differences. Apparently women orgasm. Why they do it however, has been a mystery for a long time. They don't need to in order to get pregnant. And sometimes they don't do it at all, for ages. So what use is the female orgasm, and what predicts the sort of partner who'll make it happen? Expect to learn if the female orgasm is just a gatekeeper for oxytocin, whether more dominant male faces predicted earlier orgasm, why men competed for women through contests rather than sexual selection, how male-male aggression, not female selection drove the evolved differences between men and women, whether you can tell a person's personality from their voice pitch and much more... Sponsors: Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out David's website - https://beel.la.psu.edu/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #women #evolutionarypsychology #mating - 00:00 Intro 00:46 Why Does the Female Orgasm Exist? 07:26 The Purpose of Released Hormones after Sex 16:53 Is Too Much Dominance Bad? 22:19 How Sexual Selection Occurs in Humans 28:36 Unique Traits of Male Development 37:55 Are Male Traits Only Developed for Survival? 43:28 How Does Male-Male Aggression Attract Females? 54:47 Is there a Difference Between Male & Female Mental Capabilities? 1:04:26 Telling Someone’s Personality From Their Voice 1:18:06 Where to Find David - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Why is it necessary to have an orgasm? Why would selection have favored having an orgasm sometimes and not others? Why does it happen so infrequently? Measured several variables related to the masculinity and dominance of their partner, including taking photos of the guys and measuring objectively how male typical the face was, how masculine it was, or how feminine it was. Having those faces rated by unfamiliar people. We found that those things correlated pretty well and that women whose partners were more masculine, that those women took less time to have an orgasm during sex and more likely to have an orgasm.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  David, I want to talk about the female orgasm. I feel like that's what everybody's come to hear us talk about. Female orgasm, a massive mystery. You've done some really, really interesting work on it.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  Why does the female orgasm exist? What's the function of it?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  That's a great question. And I would say it's about 10% of the research that we do in my lab, but about 90% of the interviews that I do are about on that topic. And, you know, I guess I should start by saying we don't know.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  But if I had to sort of put my money on a hypothesis, it would be that it functions in mate choice. And, you know, whether, that could be in a couple of ways. I mean, it could be that it functions to choose mates of high genetic quality that will make females' offspring healthier and more fit themselves. Or it could be that it functions to choose long-term investing partners. Or it could be some of both. I mean, there's some evidence that orgasm increases the probability of conception. And so, you know, it makes sense then that, I mean, it could be for either function.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  You know, if orgasm functions to choose males of high genetic quality, then it would make a special sense, especially since that it would be more likely

• 1:57Speaker 00

  to increase the probability of fertilization. But, you know, there's also lots of evidence that when women feel closer to their partners and have an emotional connection, that orgasm is more likely as well. So I could talk about some of the evidence that, you know, sort of bears on this, but...

• 2:18Speaker 00

  I guess, well, maybe I, maybe I'll stop there, or maybe I, I could, I could actually, maybe I'll, I'll say how I got into this, um, which was, I always sort of, you know, appreciated it as an interesting intellectual question, and I understood that, um, some evolutionary biologists, uh, you know, thought that it was likely an adaptation, and it makes sense that, you know, it might be, it's something that, uh, is so intimately connected to reproductive behaviors, that it seems unlikely to be selectively neutral, you know, to have been, um, irrelevant to our ancestors' reproductive success. Um, but then, you know, it's something that males are much more likely to have an orgasm

• 3:02Speaker 00

  when they have sex, and some women have never had an orgasm, and there's not some kind of smoking gun evidence for its function, that there are plenty of other evolutionary biologists who say, no, it's, it's not an adaptation, it's just a sort of a happy coincidence, and that it's really a byproduct of selection favoring orgasm in males, that in the same way that males have nipples because of selection on females, female mammals, some female mammals to have nipples, that selection on males to have orgasms has produced a similar trait, so, and, and, uh, and females. And so, you know, I appreciated that question, and then, uh, I guess about fifteen years ago or so, I was asked to review a book on the topic.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Um, and I thought, for, for a journal, for Archives of Sexual Behavior. And I thought, okay, uh, great chance for me to get into the literature a little bit, read a, read a, a book that reviews the literature, and, uh, and also have a publication, I was a postdoc at the time, and I, you know, the more publications, the better, I thought at the time. And, um, I, the book sort of took a strong, uh, ostensibly, it was, um, sort of more neutral, but I came away, you, you, it's, anyone reading the book comes away thinking that the author really supports the byproduct hypothesis, that orgasm is not functional in human females. And I came away from the book feeling that the author was more likely to be wrong, um, than when I started the book, you know, that it just seemed to me that...

• 4:30Speaker 00

  You know, you could pick away at any bit of evidence and say, well, it's an imperfect study. This doesn't show for sure. But every bit seems to support the hypothesis that that women's orgasm functions in choosing mates and that it's unlikely to be simply a byproduct, that, you know, it should be reduced, for example, but byproducts like men are bigger, but their nipples are smaller. Because when when selection doesn't favor a trait, and it favors it in one sex and not in the other, then it tends to be vestigial or rudimentary in the sex where it's not an adaptation. And if you think about the sort of phenomenology of female orgasm, if anything, it's bigger than it is in males,

• 5:13Speaker 00

  less frequent. But that could be, it makes complete sense if it's functions in choosiness.

• 5:19Chris Williamson?

  I had Carol Hooven on the show a little while ago, and she was explaining about what happens when people take testosterone and transition from female to male, and then some people detransition and go back. And she spoke about sexual desire and sex thrive and stuff like that. But she also spoke about spoke about subjective orgasm quality.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 5:36Chris Williamson?

  And spoke about the difference between natal women, as she calls them, and the sort of full body, much longer lasting, sort of warm feeling, then taking testosterone, transitioning to being a male, or a man, at least, not transitioning to being a male, transitioning to being a man, and then having a more sort of localized, higher peak, less duration, and then detransitioning back and going, oh, my God, I've seen both sides of the fence here.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  That is fascinating, and I would love to talk to those people. I've, you know, I've sort of also have some anecdotal evidence from just, you know, sort of, yeah, talking to people. And one account was that this was also a, this is secondhand, I got this, that, so friend of a friend, transitioned, you know, female to male, and started taking testosterone, and said,

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Before I started taking testosterone, I could masturbate. After I started taking it, I had to. It was just like a necessity. So, anyway, yeah, that's interesting, um, thinking about this sort of, you know, physiology underlying some, some sex differences. Um, and I'm sure that some of, some of it is sort of, some of the differences in sexual desire, response and so on, are sort of direct effects of sex hormones acting on, on the brain, including patterns of gene expression in the brain. And then some of it, of course, is also, uh, the effects of those sex hormones on anatomy, right? I mean, uh, you know, penises and clitorises are, are aroused in different ways and, you know. So, yeah.

• 7:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so previously, I think the, when I first started getting into evolutionary psychology, the first explanation I had, beyond it just being a byproduct or some vestige of it being a, the orgasm being a byproduct of the man, was for bonding, was the fact that there's this flood of hormones that gets released after that. Uh, how, how much contribution do you think there is with regards to the oxytocin and the feel-good and the closeness and stuff that females have after sex?

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, go ahead.

• 7:48Chris Williamson?

  After orgasm, after sex.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Right, right. Yeah, so that is an interesting, I mean, we really don't know a whole lot about, um, this hormone that's released, uh, in the brain from sexual arousal and also especially after orgasm. But oxytocin does, in, in experimental, you know, laboratory mammals, it does have an effect on sort of bonding, pair bonding behaviors and, um, and socially monogamous rodents. And, and there's some evidence in people too, although it's just harder to do a, a well-designed experiment in people. But, um, but I, I think that it, it must have some kind of an effect like that to make, uh, women feel more emotionally close to their partner. And also, there have been a couple of studies that have,

• 8:36Speaker 00

  treated women with oxytocin and looked at, um, what happens to a, a sperm-like fluid, a semen-like fluid. It was the same viscosity as semen and radio-labeled. And, um, so some women were happy to participate in a study like this, but it was treating women with oxytocin and looking at what happens to this, um, This semen-like fluid after oxytocin treatment. And the answer was that it's always brought into the uterus. But the question is, does it go up into a fallopian tube? Because that's where fertilization takes place, right? When the egg is released from one side, from one ovary,

• 9:19Speaker 00

  then there are generally sperm waiting there. If fertilization is going to happen, then there'll be sperm waiting there, sort of embedded with their little heads embedded in the epithelium there. And then they can, you know, one of them can fertilize the egg. So you have to get sperm there. And sperm swim, but a little bit, you know? It's just like they have a little, they're tiny and they can't get very far on their own. The way that they're, they move up toward the egg is through peristaltic muscular contractions of the female reproductive tract. It's the female tract that's moving them upward. And these, this fluid was moved toward the, into an oviduct.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  And the closer that the women in the study got to ovulation, the bigger their follicle was, so closer to bursting and releasing an egg, the more transport you had just into the oviduct where an egg was going to be released. And this was just after oxytocin treatment. So that's kind of, to me, that's kind of strong evidence that if you, if you do an experiment and you treat some women with the hormone that's released especially after orgasm, and its effect is to move sperm or a sperm-like fluid toward and up the oviduct where an egg is going to be released. And the closer you are to ovulation, the more fertile, the more of that transport just goes up into that oviduct.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  I mean, that suggests that orgasm also has that function because why else would oxytocin play this role? You know, this hormone that's released during sexual arousal, but especially after orgasm.

• 10:55Chris Williamson?

  Dude, the price that people pay for science, those women

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:00Chris Williamson?

  That were happy to have a semen-like substance put inside of them, then be treated with oxytocin.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:08Chris Williamson?

  Then have it tracked to see whether the cilia waving it along and getting it into the right fallopian tube. Dear God. But how do we not know? If that's the case, how do we not know that female orgasm is not just a mediator between the act of sex and the release of oxytocin?

• 11:31Speaker 00

  How do we know it's not a mediator?

• 11:32Chris Williamson?

  It's that that's not just the only function for it. All it is is just like a gatekeeper that says oxytocin is what's to go. It's got nothing really to do with anything else. All it is is just we're releasing oxytocin. That's going to improve fertility.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Oh, it could be, but then the question is, um, I mean, at a sort of, I think that's the hypothesis is that it plays that role. But then the question is, um, why, why do, why is it necessary?

• 12:03Speaker 00

  To have an orgasm and why does it happen sometime? You know, like in other words, why would selection have favored having an orgasm sometimes and not others? Why, why does it happen so infrequently?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  You know, if, if selection just said, look, the natural selection that has said, look, um, it's, you know, what's favored by selection is having more offspring than you would expect.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Have an orgasm every time with sex because that increases your chances of, of fertilization. That increases the number of offspring. But if it was more like, well, but having, being pregnant all the time is not a good, good idea. If the mates are of differing quality, then, you know, select ones that are more investing, more caring, more loving, more have better genes for your offspring, whatever. Then it makes sense to have this mechanism that increases the odds of fertilization. Be dependent upon those characteristics, you know, be dependent upon the, uh, the quality of a male. And we know for sure that it's not necessary, like women, plenty of women have, you know, have kids and have never had an orgasm in their life. Um, so I think if anything, it's just, um, increases the odds.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  And given that it's something that doesn't happen all the time, and there's also some, some evidence that measures of male mate quality increase, you know, affect the probability of women having an orgasm. It seems like, it seems like it has that function to me, but, um, I want more evidence, you know? I, I can imagine a, a study where. So I gave you circumstantial evidence that orgasm increases the odds of conception. But what would be really great is to do a study. We have some idea of the fertile window because people have participated in studies where they recorded when they had sex with their partner and then later found out when they got pregnant.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  And then you can sort of model that and say, okay, so these are the days that are fertile. The day of ovulation and it looks like the five days before. If women had sex during those days, they had a non-zero chance of conception. So you can sort of say, these are the probabilities of conceptions on different days in the cycle. You could do a study like that, but also have participants record whether they had an orgasm with their partner and then see how that influences the sort of daily conception risk. And that would be strong evidence that orgasm increases the odds of conception. But that kind of research, I would love to do it someday. I've just got so many, you know, whatever irons in the fire. I haven't sort of taken steps.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  So what I do is whenever I talk to somebody about this, I say, this would be a good study. Somebody should do it. I don't know if I'm going to do it, but.

• 14:45Chris Williamson?

  So what you would be able to do there is split test sex from orgasm and non-orgasm to see just how much of a fertility tool.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Boost or something.

• 14:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is to do that. Okay, so talk to me about the relationship between dominant men and orgasm success.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Well, so we published one study about 10 years ago where we had women in their, heterosexual women and their male partners participated as couples. And they, but they answered all the questions separately about, you know, sexual response and that sort of thing. Then we made sure that, you know, they were, they understood when they were going in that they were not going to find out the answers that their partner provided. And we found that women whose partners who rated their partner, we sort of measured several variables related to the masculinity and dominance of their partner, including taking facial photos of the guys and measuring objectively how male typical the face was,

• 15:45Speaker 00

  how masculine it was, or how feminine it was, having those faces rated by unfamiliar people, having women rate their partners on sort of, you know, dominance and masculinity. And we found that those things correlated pretty well and that women whose partners were more masculine, that those women.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  I had an earlier orgasm, where more, you sort of, it took less time to, to have an orgasm during sex and, and more likely to have an orgasm. And so we suggest, you know, we thought, well, there's a lot of literature that suggests that traits that require high levels of sex hormones to produce, that those are indicators of underlying genetic quality. And so our prediction is, well, if female orgasm functions in part to recruit good genes for your offspring, then women should more easily orgasm and, and have earlier, you know, earlier timed orgasms with, with putative good genes, males in this case sort of more masculine and dominant. And that's what we found. You know, I'm, I'm happy with

• 16:47Speaker 00

  the study, but it's, I, I'd like more data. You know, one, one study doesn't prove anything.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  Would it not be possible for men to overshoot dominance? I've been, I've had a bunch of conversations about ancestral leadership and stuff like that. And it seems like the, the tyrant dominant male actually ends up being killed pretty quickly because people don't like that in a, a small tribe of 150 people. So did you find dominance topping out at all? Is there a way to overshoot on dominance?

• 17:16Speaker 00

  That is a great question. And I think, I don't recall looking at it, although our sample size, you know, the, so when you're starting to look at both linear and curvilinear effects, then you'd like, sort of the more effects you look at, the bigger sample you'd like. And I, and I, I just, now I'm wondering if we still have those data. I don't think we looked at that, but that's a great possibility. And I think you're absolutely right about that. And in fact, I think that that's something that characterizes other primates too, but might be especially true in, in humans, that we've sort of, so.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  In our ancestors, our males probably competed via contest competition by, you know, threats of aggression and actual physical aggression and won mating opportunities that way. But we engage in a lot less, a lot less frequent fighting than, say, our closest living relatives chimpanzees. I mean, human males are more likely, whether they're boys or men, more likely to fight and get, you know, get engaged in some kind of physical altercations than females, but it's about 1% as frequent as it is in chimpanzees. And I think a lot of that has to do with exactly what you said, that maybe around 2 million years ago, 1 and 1/2 million years ago, and around Homo erectus, that we got

• 18:39Speaker 00

  really good at killing, including each other and predators. We became sort of hyper predators around that time, probably. There's evidence of sort of increased carnivory, increased brain size, changes in shoulder structure that would suggest throwing. And that, once we became very deadly, then it became important not to get out of hand with your...

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  Uh, because you can easily escalate a small disagreement to one that becomes lethal.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, despots can be, can be killed by anybody. And so it's more important, you know, and then, of course, there's also coalitional aggression in humans and in chimpanzees, but it, you know, warfare is something that it seems to have happened throughout human evolution, and that requires some sort of, you know, group cooperation and competition against other groups as well. So, anyway, I'm sure that you're right about that, that, you know, there's a lot of emphasis in human groups on prestige, which is freely conferred social status, that you get social status by conferring benefits to the group. And, you know, you have to be careful with the dominance, with coerced status, because...

• 20:03Speaker 00

  We're deadly.

• 20:04Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I tell you what would be an awesome study to be able to do. To look at the local ecology of the situation that the particular tribe is in. If the tribe was in a time of more stress, i.e. potentially there are external tribes that are going to war with them, there is more male aggression between tribes. That is a time, it seems like anthropologically, where it is useful for a more dominant leader rather than a prestigious leader. People want the person that's going to just get shit done, the more psychopathic traits may be a little bit better. I wonder if that would be reflected in female orgasm rate and mate choice.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Great idea.

• 20:47Chris Williamson?

  Completely simple, superbly simple study to do, obviously.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could imagine doing it. A big, it would be huge, right? Big cross-cultural study, hopefully getting some data from sort of non-Western societies as well.

• 21:02Chris Williamson?

  How cool would that be to work out whether female mate choice wanes, sort of swings between prestige and dominance preference based on what's going on situationally?

• 21:14Speaker 00

  I think you could do a study like that, both with sort of stated preferences. You know, you could ask people what they're after, but also,

• 21:23Speaker 00

  yeah, looking at orgasm as a potential mate choice mechanism as well. I think that would be, yeah, that'd be a pretty cool study. I've, you know, we're, in my lab, we've recently done some cross-cultural work and it is, if you want to get a good representative, you know, set of societies, it's a ton of work, but I think it's well worth it. I, I think mostly what people are interested in human evolution want to know is sort of about humans broadly, not American undergraduates or British undergraduates or something. And so it's nice to sort of look at how. Some of these mating, mate choice, mate competition patterns are similar across societies, how some sex differences are similar, how they change as well.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  What are some of the socio-ecological variables that predict those differences? And can you predict those things based on evolutionary theory like you're doing now? So, yeah, I love it.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you mentioned there about contest competition, and this was the first time that I ever got introduced to the idea of it was reading your work. And when we think about sexual selection, a lot of the time, we consider the ornaments of sexual selection, right? Sort of the peacock's tail type thing. But when it comes to humans, there are a bunch of, and also other animals as well, but when it comes to humans, it seems like there are a huge number of other types of competition that are going on. So what do you think have been the primary mechanisms of sexual selection when it comes to humans?

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Okay, so, right, so when people who study sexual selection, which is the kind of natural selection that favors traits that win mates, when they think about that, they sort of tend to categorize into different modes or mechanisms, right? Ways that you could win mates. So there's contest competition, which favors, you know, size, strength, aggression, weapons, it's the use of force or threat of force to win mating opportunities. There's mate choice, which favors ornaments and sexual displays. But there's sperm competition, sometimes two males mate with the same fertile female, and then the male who produces more sperm, or more viable sperm, or more motile sperm is more likely to fertilize.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  And sexual coercion is another one, that happens across many animal species, that males can use force not just against each other, but also against potential mates to win mating opportunities. And if I had to sort of rank mechanisms of sexual selection operating on human males over recent evolutionary history, let's say in the past couple hundred thousand years, I'd say probably contest competition, then mate choice, and then, I'm not sure, between coercion and sperm competition. But between those first two, contest competition and mate choice, when I started studying this stuff in grad school, the literature...

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Everything I was reading pretty much talked about how male traits, like if we, if we talked about, say beards or deep voices or facial mask and anything like that, it would have sort of talked about that trait as if it were a sexual ornament for attracting females. And I started doing research on the voice. Um, I can remember sitting on a bus in Pittsburgh, thinking about, what am I gonna do for my, for my dissertation? I wanted to have one of at least two characteristics. Either it has some obvious sort of utility in helping humanity, like it has some medical relevance or something like that. Or, and/or it opens up sort of a new area of research that hasn't kind of been done yet.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  And it just, I think I was, I remembered sort of having that debate with myself about, you know, what, what should my dissertation be and, and what characteristics should it have? And I thought back to, um, doing some holiday shopping at a mall in Pittsburgh and hearing two guys behind me who seemed to be competing to talk in a, in a lower voice pitch with one another. Um, you know, like this, and it's like, what is going on? And I turned around, I noticed, oh, there was a cute young woman near, near them and they were probably, you know, trying to show off, like, ah, yeah. And so then I'm sitting on the bus thinking about this and I thought, you know, voice has to be a sexually selected trait, right? I mean, it's like the deep voices of human males, um, were, uh,

• 25:43Speaker 00

  you know, a little bit bigger than females, but our voice, our voices are way lower than you'd predict. Like, human males are about seven or eight percent taller. So their vocal folds then should be about seven or eight percent longer, but they're sixty percent longer. They're like ten times as, as long as you'd predict, um, based on the size difference. And voice pitch, you know, it's, it's half the fundamental frequency, it's like an octave lower in males. It drops at puberty when, when sexually selected traits tend to appear. They don't sort of, you know, antlers don't grow in a deer until they can do some, they have some function. They're not competing for mates when they're, when they're juveniles. But when they achieve sexual maturity, then they start competing. And then the, those costly traits can sort of pay, pay for themselves in terms of winning mating opportunities.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  And so, anyway, I just thought, thought about voice and I thought, yeah, that's gotta be sexually selected. And I kind of went into that thinking. Based on the literature that I'd been reading, it must be about female choice. Like, it's got to be a sexual ornament to attract females. And once I started doing research on it, I discovered that, sure, women prefer

• 26:48Speaker 00

  deep voices, a little bit lower than average, but the effect of the same pitch manipulation, when I manipulated sort of the masculinity of a voice, the effect of the same manipulation on other men's perceptions of a guy's fighting ability was 15 times as big as the biggest effect that it had on women's preferences. That women kind of cared a bit, but it was just had this huge effect on perceptions of dominance. And I thought, you know, form follows function. Like, we can sort of infer ancestral selection pressures by looking at the traits those selection pressures design. And men's voices look like they're much better designed for intimidating other guys than they do at attracting women. And then I started thinking about other traits in the literature on them.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  And I, you know, every study, sometimes it's kind of swept under the rug in the paper, but it's studies that look at, say, manipulating the same trait, like facial hair, on women's preferences and appearance of dominance. It always has a much bigger positive effect on perception of dominance than attraction to women. And so that got me thinking about sort of the design of men's phenotypes, the male phenotypes. And I just kept finding out sort of more studies and more evidence that men's phenotypes really look like they were designed primarily to either win fights or intimidate their same-sex competitors more than to attract females.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  We don't look like sort of peacocks with sexual ornaments as much as we look like a typical mammal and really a typical ape. I mean, if you look at all of our closest relatives, you know, males fight each other for mates and they don't really have any clear sexual ornaments, but they have large bodies and aggression and, you know, long canine teeth.

• 28:34Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the other differences? What are some of the other ways that males have developed in a unique pattern that gets explained by this contest competition?

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, let me think here. Well, there are many traits, and I mean, if we go back...

• 28:52Speaker 00

  To say traits that we should, that have probably been around for a couple of tens of millions of years that we share with, you know, all of the other great apes. Large body size, um, you know, males, human males have about, say, thirty-five percent more fat-free mass, um, and about sixty percent more muscle mass. And their skeletons indicate of a primate that's about maybe, um, forty-five to fifty percent larger than, than females. Um, and, uh, aggression, you know, I, I mentioned that there's less frequent, um, aggression in human males than there is among, say, chimpanzees or closest relatives, but it's equally lethal.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  And so that means that, you know, if human males fight each other, uh, one percent of the time, then it's a hundred times as lethal, um, uh, among humans. Weapons, so the, the typical weapon in, in primates is long canine teeth. And, um, and you see that even in socially monogamous like gibbons and siamangs, they have long canines because it's useful to have a weapon to use against conspecific, same-sex competitors, uh, but predators as well. And then, um, we lost our long canine teeth. And that, you see that in the first hominins, um, so the first bipedal apes about seven million years ago, that there's a reduction in canine size, um, with the evolution of

• 30:17Speaker 00

  bipedalism and adaptations of the hand that look like it's good for gripping something. So, um, there's a ton of sort of speculation and theorizing about this among anthropologists, but to me Darwin was probably right, that we, you know, evolved, uh, bipedalism to, to use tools and, um, and that once we did that, we, our primary weapons became not canine teeth, but, you know, rocks and wood or whatever for. Millions of years until we developed more sophisticated weaponry.

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, why try to bite someone? Why have to get your head so close if you can just put a rock in your hand and smash them over the face with it?

• 30:56Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, like we don't have the typical primate weapons, but we have way, way better ones.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Have you read Bill von Hippel's work on this?

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Uh, oh, I, I'm sure that I have.

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  It came out about three or four years ago. It's really, really great. He just, he says the same thing. He suggests that it seems like a really, really cool insight I got from that was that if you give toddlers a playground and on the playground, there's a couple of appropriately sized rocks. There is something in them that drives them to go over and just pick it up and practice throwing. I was like, that's so fucking interesting.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is. So there's another, right? Um, now there are big differences in throwing. And, um, so there's about a one and a half standard deviation male advantage in targeting. Um, that seems to exist even if you control for differences in practice.

• 31:47Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. There is a one and a half standard deviation in accuracy.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, targeting accuracy.

• 31:55Chris Williamson?

  Of throwing, even if you have the same level of training between men and women.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  So the, the research that's been done on it has tried to control for, for practice. And actually, um, Melissa Hines. It seems to be driven in part by androgen, by exposure to androgen like testosterone.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Melissa Hines showed that, uh, women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is a condition where the adrenal glands produce elevated androgens before they're born. Um, that they had sort of targeting accuracy that was intermediate between unaffected females and, and males. Now, who knows exactly whether that's effects of sex hormones acting directly on the developing brain? And the regions that are involved in targeting, or whether it's more involved in like what you like to do and spend your time on? And whether you like to engage, whether you want to go and pick up a rock and throw it?

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the first place that I'm going to here is that proponents for the WNBA are probably slightly unhappy to find out that there is no way that you can level the playing field between the two groups. It would be very difficult to level the playing field because there are certain things that men have a predisposition to be better at than women do, and it seems like throwing is one of those. I've never watched women's baseball, but if they use the same size, whatever it's called, area, the area that the throw is actually permitted in.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Right, strike zone.

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  Strike zone. I would guess that the number of balls that are thrown in the women's MLB will be greater than the number that are thrown in the men's MLB.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so that I don't know if there's, there's softball. I mean, women tend to play softball, which is a little bit different. It's underhand pitching.

• 33:40Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I've watched that. It's fucking vicious. It is so, and they're closer as well. Apparently the pitches, the actual time that you have on the pitches is way shorter because they throw pretty much not far off as quick, and it's super short from the mound to the batter. Yeah, it's so, it's so vicious.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I don't know too as much about that, but I, but for sure, you know, if if somebody has gone through male puberty, then that gives them certain physical advantages in, in physical competition that are difficult to erase. And the, and the evidence suggests that

• 34:15Speaker 00

  that you can't completely, you know, that even like, say, removing testosterone, you know, there, there's some changes that have already happened that are but I want to say about throwing that the, the, there's also an even larger sex difference in throwing velocity. And that is present very early on. So I mentioned the one and a half standard deviation sex difference. There's a one and a half standard deviation in throwing velocity by age three. And by age 12, it's three and a half standard deviations. Which is one of the biggest, you know, when you think about The sex difference in height is about two standard deviations. And it's easy to see that males on average are taller. Of course, there's overlap. And if you look at the WNBA, you can see there are lots of tall women.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  But but there's a, you know, a pretty big sex difference in height, but it's nowhere near the the size of the sex difference in throwing velocity.

• 35:04Chris Williamson?

  Here's the thing that no one's speaking about when it comes to the discussion about men and women in each of the sports and the trans leagues and stuff like that. No one is talking about, almost everybody is using velocity. Right? Everyone is talking about the the ability to generate power. Nobody is talking about the predisposition to be more accurate or more precise with particular types of movements. That's really interesting.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  It is. And yeah, I mean, given that some studies have tried to control for both report, like participants' own reported practice with throwing activities. But also, in one study I'm thinking of, tried to select an activity, throwing, targeting behaviors that nobody had much experience with, like underhand throwing of a of a ping pong ball or something. I don't remember what it was exactly, but it was something that like, if you're playing typical throwing sports, you wouldn't have practiced this anyway, to to try to control for differences in experience.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  So that suggests that some of the sex difference isn't due to just, you know, what you like to spend your time doing. But either way, those sex differences also are ones that are consistent with an evolutionary history of sort of males targeting each other. But it's also the case, like I mentioned, that, you know, somewhere, it seems like for the first, say, four million years or so of hominin evolution, we were typical ape omnivores, where we ate a lot of plants and had some meat in our diet. Chimps hunt, you know, red colobus monkeys sometimes they eat meat too. They're just not, not as much. They're mostly frugivores, they eat fruit, you know. And our early hominin bipedal, small-brained, like chimp-sized-brained ancestors,

• 36:52Speaker 00

  for the first several million years, probably, were not eating a ton of meat. And then maybe. Became better scavengers, uh, three and a half million years ago by, but by the evolution of our own genus Homo, around two million years to one and a half million years ago, we got really good at hunting and we know that. And so it's not clear how much of the sex difference in throwing velocity and, and targeting has to do with male male competition and targeting each other versus targeting prey. Um, because we also know when you look at modern hunter gatherers that there's a big sex difference in subsistence strategy that males hunt more and females forage more and that it like if one's, if only one sex hunts in this group, it's males. If one sex hunts bigger game, it's males. I mean, it

• 37:36Speaker 00

  just, I'm just describing something. I'm not saying how it should be.

• 37:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but it makes sense.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  There's a big difference that probably was ancestral as well.

• 37:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. It makes complete sense about why the men would have this, uh, overpowered throwing ability if it was mostly them that were having to go out and throw stuff at other animals. So, uh, I mean, this is the interesting thing about the, the male male aggression and how much that's driven sexual dimorphism and the, the traits that we see in men and how they're different in women. How do you separate out the traits that men have that have been developed to be effective at whatever dominance and aggression toward other men, rather than just straight up survival or, uh, ornaments or like wilderness, uh, yeah, wilderness survival?

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, you know, you can't in many cases and the, the reality is that for any trait of any organism, there are often many selection pressures operating on it simultaneously. And sometimes those pressures work in opposition, like, um, for stature, for height in human males, um, probably there's sexual selection favoring a taller height than, than is the average. And there's ecological selection or survival selection favoring a shorter height, you know, because it's costlier to produce this. Uh, you have to have more resources to produce and maintain that kind of phenotype. And so those are, you know, sort of body size is one of those traits that, that probably.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Sort of ordinary natural selection or ecological selection and sexual selection are working in opposition. But any trait has, you know, sort of multiple selection pressures operating at the same time. And so that's true of sort of typical masculine characteristics in human males. There's almost certainly been female mate choice, male contests and ecological selection at a minimum operating on it. And so it can be really hard to say how much of trait X is because of male contest. But if you, you know, do careful experiments and you look across societies and see similar patterns and say, wow, you know, this trait looks like it functions much more efficiently

• 39:43Speaker 00

  at function X than it does Y or Z, then that that suggests that, you know, that's been a stronger selection pressure. And when you look at human male traits, it's just that they look like they function better. And the experiments that have been done and also sort of correlations with, in sort of more naturalistic type studies, correlations with outcomes as well. It just looks like male traits function better for contest competition. And, you know, many of these things existed way before there was, say, specialized hunting in humans. Like, you know, are all of our closest living relatives have male male competition and fighting and stuff. So large body size, muscularity, aggression, those things have existed probably for tens

• 40:28Speaker 00

  of millions of years in our lineage, way before there was anything like, you know, specialized hunting. So, yeah.

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  I heard that the brow ridge, the increased brow ridge that men have would maybe be one of these particular traits that as soon as you have hands, especially amongst men, bigger hands that can be balled up into fists that you can punch each other in the face with, it is adaptive for you to have basically an extra little bit of armor that runs, that runs, that runs across here. Is that something you've come across?

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. And. I I know that I suggested it in a paper in two thousand ten and I don't remember if I was plagiarizing somebody, I hope not. And I know that a guy Dave Carrier um has has published more on it and sort of talked about the evolution of of hominid skulls in that in that light. Um, we so human males have a more prominent um supra occipital torus is the name for this. Um, uh supra orbital torus, is that it? Yeah, supra orbital torus, occipital, what am I talking? Um, and and and more robust mandible.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  And um, it makes sense that those would provide some protection against fractures of the of the face and the and the mandible. Um, they're fairly grassile, they're much less robust than they than were in our ancestors, you know. Um, a million, two million years ago. Um, but but still the sex difference, yeah, I mean, it makes sense to me that a a slightly larger brow ridge could protect eyes from punches or hits from other things too, you know, a rock or a club or something like that. Um, and same thing with the jaw, I mean, that's like, you know, young males get way more jaw fractures than anybody else and it's you it's the most commonly reported, other than car accidents, which are evolutionarily novel.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  Um, across studies, the most common cause is, um, you know, uh, hit with a blunt fist or blunt object, you know. So that's how they get the despite having a thicker mandible, so it makes sense that in our ancestors, if you broke your jaw, you couldn't have your jaw wired shut and feed through a tube, that would just possibly be catastrophic, right? I mean, life life ending. Um, and so it makes sense that selection would favor a bit more robust um skulls. That said, uh, there has been a sort of reduction in overall skull robusticity in the over the past few million years. And I wonder how much of that has to do with um changes in our weaponry going more toward um cutting and puncturing.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, a big, thick brow makes very little difference if your opponent's got a knife.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  It would have made a lot of sense to, yeah, to hominids, you know.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Five, six million years ago, when they were only bashing.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  And there was huge sexual dimorphism in the shape of the skull as well back then, so.

• 43:27Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to talking about this male male aggression that we're discussing here, how does that help men get mates? Surely there's still the female that is an element of this. I understand how it helps you win a fight, but it's not necessarily apparent how it would make you better at getting a mate.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's something that I've wondered about a lot because, you know, for one thing, we're not a species like elephant seals where males fight for a piece of real estate on a breeding beach. They exclude all of their males and then the beach master, the dominant male, has exclusive sexual access to all the females in the spot of real estate that he's been able to defend. We're not like that. We live in multi male, multi female groups and there's almost certainly been lots of scope for mate choice. And so, you know, how does dominance competition translate into mating opportunities? And there are a

• 44:27Speaker 00

  few ways. One of them is coalitional aggression, which is something, so I mentioned that, like in small scale societies, you probably, you know, people who study this would still call it warfare. This happens in our closest living relative chimpanzees as well, that groups of males will attack other groups or especially single individuals from other groups and take females from those groups. And that's something that seems to, you know, in the historical records and there's even archaeological evidence that that's something that has happened in human groups over time, that sort of males attacking other groups, killing some enemies and abducting females. So that's one way that male male aggression could result in mating opportunities. There's within groups.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Fights over, you know, when two males are after the same female. Um, you know, Frank Marlowe was an anthropologist who studied the Hadza. They're one of the last hunter gatherer groups in, in the world. Um, and, um, only about a thousand of them left. And he talked about, um, how in the Hadza it's free mate choice. Unless two guys are interested in the same woman and then one might kill the other one with an arrow, which kind of constrains the scope for, for mate choice. Um, but that's something that happens and, you know, male aggression often occurs when two, when male aggression happens, it often occurs when two guys are interested in the same female. Um, and also defensive mates, um, is another way. Um, and Napoleon Shagnon was an anthropologist who studied the, the Yanomamo,

• 46:00Speaker 00

  who are horticulturists from, um, South America. And he talked about how when one male suspects another one of trysting with his wife, then he can sort of challenge him to a fight. Um, and that sometimes results in death as well. But they're sort of, you know, a way of fighting translating into retaining a mate. But then really, I think the threat of all these things, you know, that like, like I mentioned, that human males are not unabatedly at one another's throats, fighting all the time, but there's the sort of potential for it. And that the, the threats of those things, um, can deter rivals from trying to win the same mate that a male is gonna try to get or to, uh, to, you know, cheat with another guy's wife or, or mate or something like that.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  So, um, but then also it's the case that, um, across species, when males compete through contest competition, females often evolve preferences for dominant males or males of high status and the traits that win status. Because when you think about it, it's for females, if they just let males duke it out, males are imposing strong selection on one another to see who's the fittest or whatever. And so females can sort of then just sit back and say, oh, well, that guy must be successful. So, um, that happens in, in many species and it, it could be the case too that,

• 47:23Speaker 00

  you know, uh, social status is highly attractive and you could sort of let males decide who's, who's. High status among themselves and then pick that, you know, the winners.

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  I had a conversation with Rob Henderson last week and he taught me about this study that had been done where men and women reported, based on the faces of the people that they saw, the relative attractiveness and dominance. So the men judged the dominance and the women judged the attractiveness. And they found that over the next year, all of the men whose photos they used then self-reported the number of sexual partners that they'd had. And the men that were judging the dominance were more accurate at rank ordering the faces based on how many sexual partners they would have. Dominance was a better predictor of sexual partners than attractiveness from women. So it seems like the men were better able to predict

• 48:16Chris Williamson?

  the number of sexual partners that the men would have than the women were, despite the fact that women are the market for what these men were going for.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  That is an awesome study. And at first I wanted, I wanted to know, is this a study that he did? Because it also, it sounds like one that, okay, I think it's one that I did.

• 48:34Chris Williamson?

  It very well might be your study.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  I think, I think you're describing a paper that we published in Evolution and Human Behavior a few years ago where we had, um, we wanted to study this phenomenon and to try to understand, um, whether, um, success in male male competition was a better predictor of mating success than success under female choice. And so we said, look, um, what this would have looked like over most of human evolution was probably not a whole bunch of strangers reading strangers faces and voices and whatever. It'd be like people mostly knowing each other. And, um, so why don't we get a bunch of guys who know each other to assess the prestige and dominance and so on of guys that they know? And then have women who know the guys.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Based on everything, their sense of humor, their intelligence, how nice they are, but also whatever, that you know, how good looking, how dominant, whatever. Uh, how attractive they are. And then um. Use. That information to predict guys. Number of sexual partners. And what we found was that um. Oh, and what, what do we, how do we do this? Um, we recruited um two of the largest um social fraternities um. At, at Penn State and then the, there's socially affiliated sororities. Um, to participate in this study. And, and we found that um guys. Were able to, that their, their sort of average rankings of guys dominance, um predicted guys number of sex partners. Um, and when we put those in a statistical model with.

• 50:08Speaker 00

  How attractive the women who knew the guys said the guys were, that, that though attractiveness ratings didn't explain any additional variation in number of sex partners.

• 50:16Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding me.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Beyond dominance. And you know, it's funny, I just lectured on that, um, and I took it out of my lecture. Um, this year because I'm behind on things and I thought, oh, it's, you know, it's one study in the, in American undergrads and. Uh, you know. Uh, I can cut it out. Um, but I often, you know, when I do in past semesters, when I talk about that particular study. I sort of presented to the classes like, uh. How does this happen? Because doesn't it feel like what's really determining? Uh. A guy's sort of mating success is whether women find him attractive. I mean, doesn't that really have, don't, don't get that strong feeling in this society that's the pri- primary determinant. And I'm not sure exactly, but it, it could be things like, you know. In um. Uh, bars and.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Parties and wherever the sort of mating relationships are formed. That dominant males um. Are not challenged, if they're trying to attract a female. Subordinate males are got, you know, guys who are clearly wimpier would never. Inter- impose themselves and, and, and inject themselves into that conversation and say, oh, no, no, talk to me. Um, whereas a dominant male would have no compunction about, you know. Um, getting in the middle of the, this wimpy guy is talking to this really good looking woman and have no problem just. You know, yeah, uh, out of the way. And, and so I, I don't know, that's one possibility, but. Um, I'd love to study sort of. The.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  The actual causal connection there, yeah.

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  I would also be very interested to find out how online dating in the modern world is changing this.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:51Chris Williamson?

  You know, how easy is it to show dominance or prestige really over a Tinder profile or an Instagram account? You know, what, what cues is a high follower account and a blue tick? What did they give off? Does that show prestige? Does it show dominance? Is there a way that you could construct a bunch of fake Instagram accounts? And the kind of photos that were being taken and the kind of language that was being used and the follower account? Is there a way that you would be able to work that out? Because, you know, the environment now of whatever you're talking about here, like almost mate guarding in a way, or a potential mate guarding when you're chatting somebody up in a party? That, that doesn't work anymore. Anybody can message anybody on Tinder.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. And, and my, my guess is if you did a study like that, I mean, just based on the, the sort of research that's already been done. I just don't think that very dominant appearing guys are going to be attractive. I mean, I, I just think that, you know, women tend to prefer sort of somewhere close to the male average for traits. You know, like a little taller than average, but not too tall, a little more muscular than average, but not too muscular. The faces that manipulate facial masculinity. Some find that, that on average, women preferred a little bit to the feminine side of male average. Some, a little bit more masculine, but it's around the average. Same with voice pitch. It's like too low. It was kind of weird sounding, but, but so a little lower than average probably.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  But I, I really think that, yeah, if you made a guy seem very dominant, he would seem, I don't know, scary, antisocial, something. And, you know, yeah.

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  Think about it this way. Think about the fact that your study was able to look at what women said that they wanted. That was what, that was the stated preference, right? Of this person is the most.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  We had them rate on sort of how attractive a guy would be for a long-term committed relationship. And also for just sex and.

• 53:45Chris Williamson?

  But if, if the men, if the dominance element is. Somehow influenced by the presence of other men and then you take those men out of the equation in online dating.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:57Chris Williamson?

  What are you left with? Well, I wonder whether the subjective ratings of attractiveness from women are now less encumbered somehow, whether or not they're able to take less heed of other men's cues of this guy is dominant or not dominant.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  I think you're right. I think that's, I think that's what you would see. And so my suspicion is that these, that the sort of dominant traits and dominant behavior is functional in a setting where there are male competitors and that, you know, and for sure, when women have been asked to rate behavior, like videos of males, they're, they might like dominant behavior directed toward other males, but they certainly don't like dominant behavior directed toward females. So, um, yeah.

• 54:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So what about the difference in male and female mental capabilities? We've spoken just there about the ability to throw. I know that on average IQs-

• 54:55Speaker 00

  How much trouble are you trying to get me into?

• 54:56Chris Williamson?

  I know. Maybe. We've already talked about trans sports. But I read something about men are better at spatial rotation and women are better at remembering directions or something. What is it? What are some of the different capabilities?

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, um, there are, I mean, if you measure overall cognitive function with like an IQ test, there's no difference. Male, males and females have the same average. Now, that's by design because IQ tests have similar or composed of similar numbers of the types of questions that women tend to do better at, or females tend to do better at, and some, and, and other ones that males tend to do better at. Um, most cognitive traits don't show a very big sex difference. The biggest ones are in spatial cognition and they're, they're not huge, but about one standard deviation sex difference are the biggest ones. And, um, on average males do better at mental rotation. So if you're

• 55:54Speaker 00

  shown the sort of most, sort of gold standard test or the most common test is to take, to be shown a two dimensional picture of a three dimensional block figure. It just looks kind of like, you know, something like that, like one of those.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Three by three by three cubes that you have, you take apart and have to put together again, like, looks exactly like one of those pieces. Um, and then you're asked which of these, which two of these fourth other images are ju- is just that thing rotated in space? And, um, and if you have a bunch of males and females do this, um, then you get about a point six to one point zero standard deviation, um, male advantage. You get a bigger male advantage when you make the test harder. Um, so if you give them less time to do it, for example, if you give, if you give people all the time that they need, then eventually most people can, can do it. Um, and then there's a female advantage at object location memory.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Um, and one, one test that's been, that's been, uh, published is the memory game, you know, with the cards you flip over, you have a bunch of cards face down and then you flip them over in pairs. And I can remember doing that before I knew about a sex difference like that. I remember doing that with my, with my girlfriend in college and, um, she was like sweating bullets as she was destroying me and I was trying so hard to, to concentrate and she would seem to do it effortlessly. And then later, you know, I found out that there's a pretty good sized sex difference in, um, a female advantage. And I was like, ah, okay, maybe that's.

• 57:22Chris Williamson?

  You should have, you should have told her to come to the pub and play darts so that you could have even did it.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Um, but anyway, um, so those are the biggest sex differences in spatial cognition and, um, also if you, there's a test that is, that rodents are put into called a Morris water maze. It's a, a pool of water filled with some opaque, um, substance like, um, powdered milk so that you can't see. And there's a, underneath the surface and there's a little platform just underneath the surface. So if you put rats in this thing, um, just put them in the maze, it's a, you know, I don't know how big, a 10 feet across or something like that. And you put them in. Um, then they would like to not be swimming. They'd like to find the platform and climb up on it and stand on it.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  And so what you can do is measure and put them in different places in the maze each time. And you can see like how how quickly they learn the location of that platform under the water that they can't see or smell.

• 58:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh, they get create a a abstract map of what it actually is like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  And um, and so, you know, there's a sex difference in that um, that males tend to learn it faster. They they tend to find that platform. And so the latency between when you put them in the pool and when they get onto the platform. It it isn't to do with swimming ability or motivation or something, you know, that those things have been tested.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  But if you mess with the cues, like the landmarks within the maze, right inside of, you know, sort of marks on the on the border of the maze itself, that messes up females more. And if you mess up, if you if you manipulate extra maze cues, like things that are better for gauging distance and direction, that's that messes up males more. So it suggests that they're using sort of different information to navigate. And it's testosterone dependent. If you treat females with early in life with androgen, they solve the maze like a male. And if you castrate males, they solve it like a female. And this difference seems to characterize species where males have a bigger home range, that they have to travel over a larger area to locate females.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Because, you know, both sexes are about the same size and they have a range that they they range over the same geographic area just to get food. But then if males are also polygynous and trying to mate with multiple females, then they range over a bigger area. Then they need sort of different spatial cognitive abilities, including ones that rely less on local landmarks and more on direction and distance. And so, anyway, the se- the sex differences that we see probably existed like, you know. Ancestrally in mammals a long time ago, but then were subsequently shaped by other things like possibly male, you know, targeting different foraging strategies, more male hunting,

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  ranging over a broader distance to to track prey and and hunt versus foraging, which is closer to home.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  What does the

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  And also targeting.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  What does the ability to remember cards like ancestrally, what is that related to?

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, the idea is that it's related to remembering where food resources that are stationary in the environment are located, and that's kind of a stretch. But there was a cool study by Steve Gollan was the senior author at UC Santa Barbara that had recruited participants in a farm farmer's market and and had participants at the end, after they'd spent time in the market, come back and say, OK, point me in the direction of the honey, point me in the direction of the lettuce or whatever. And what they found was a female advantage and that the higher the caloric returns, the bigger the sex difference, I think it was.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  So, you know, it's like the the attempt there was to be more ecological to say to show a sex difference in object location memory that was more like foraging, you know, remembering the location of food in the environment. Pretty cool study. So that's that's the reasoning, but it could also just be that if you're ranging over a smaller area, you don't have to travel over such as a large area to get animals or to find mates, then you a different sort of navigational strategy makes more sense using landmarks.

• 1:01:48Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to say something incredibly sexist here. I wonder whether this plays into the Women are able to be more organized and tidy when it comes to a smaller area like a house and men are better when it comes to longer, greater distance organization like driving. Like, I know it's a total meme, right, to talk about how men, yeah, how men are better at being able to remember locations and to be able to get directions and stuff like that. But I do wonder whether this would map across, and I have tons of male friends that are absolutely useless behind the wheel. So I'm an N of one here, right?

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  I ask for directions all the time.

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, precisely. But I do wonder if you would be able to look at, it would suggest to me that women would be better able to organize stuff within a smaller location. That's what we're talking about, right? Does this mean that men more often lose their keys than women do? Does this mean that women more often take the wrong route to someplace without using satellite navigation than men do? Like, that would be interesting.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  I don't know about organizing a, like, a domicile. But I have often in my life attributed that sort of supernatural ability to remember where the keys are. I mean, I've got, you know, a wife, two daughters and a son. And actually, my son's pretty good at remembering this stuff. But generally, the females know where things are. You know, it might be related to this. And, you know, there's another study that show, that has participants look at an array of common objects, you know, a teddy bear, a telephone, a barbell, you know, whatever, just some common things that you might see. And then they're shown

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  that same array of, you know, array of objects again, and asked which of these things have been moved or removed. And again, there's a big sex difference favoring females. It seems to be a bigger sex difference. Maybe it only occurs when participants are given a distractor task. In other words, you're told to be doing something else and thinking about something else other than memorizing where all these things are. And then you, and then you, you test them on their, on their memory and find that women were remembering where those things were better, even when they were focusing on doing something totally different. And I mean, it, it accords with my experience, but yeah, I would never want to use my sort of anecdotes as, as-

• 1:04:20Chris Williamson?

  End of one, that's a new step, bro-science, David. We don't need to do real science, we've got bro-science. Okay, so you, you've done all of this work as well about vocal pitch and, and what, what, what voice pitch can do. Did you do a study that looked at, you can tell someone's personality from their voice?

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was a, a co-author. I, I can't claim credit for that. I provided some data and helped with the writing a bit, but it was really a study out of Lars Penke's lab. He's at University of Gottingen in Germany. And, and one of the results that stuck out to me was that there was a relationship between the sort of dominance characteristic of personality and, and voice. But yeah, I can't really claim, claim credit for that study, but it's cool and it looks like it's been, it's being, you know, cited pretty highly too. So that's kind of a nice thing. We've definitely looked at this idea in, in

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  our lab. This has been one of those sort of interesting questions driving our recent research is why we would pay attention to voice pitch and other characteristics of the voice, like vocal timber, which also shows a, a big sex difference. Males have a, our, our larynx descends a full vertebra lower at puberty in the vocal tract, so that our vocal tract sounds longer than it is. I mentioned that males are about seven to eight percent taller, so their vocal tract should be about seven or eight percent longer, but it's, it's 15% longer, so twice that, because of this descent of the larynx at puberty. So really, we have these exaggerations of size, like males' voices look like they've evolved to make males seem big and scary. And so then we've asked, yeah, but if that's

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  the case, then why do we pay attention? If it's just kind of a- You know, a deceptive signal to say, look at how big I am. Why do we, why, why is selection favored continued attentiveness to this? Why do we continue to defer resources, mates, whatever to males?

• 1:06:23Chris Williamson?

  Ah, because we should, we should have discounted for the fact that it's already small. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, if it doesn't advertise anything. So that's been something we've looked at with personality, but also things like, um, you know, body size, well, there's a weak relationship, but it's not, not, not a strong one, but you know, larger males have lower pitch and timber. Testosterone seems to be a bit stronger relationship there. And especially if you look at cortisol, which is a stress hormone. So guys who have both, um, low cortisol, low stress hormone and high testosterone have especially deep voices and that's a kind of a stronger relationship. It's not super strong, but it's, you know, it's, it's there and it's one of the stronger ones. Um, we've looked at like fighting ability. So we looked at MMA fighters to see if their voice pitch predicted their, you know, success

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  in, in fighting and that sort of thing. A little bit of evidence that basically bigger MMA fighters and ones who have more fighting experience have lower pitch voices. And, um, but that's been a really interesting question about sort of, um, why do we continue to defer to this trait? You know, does it actually advertise? Is there a kernel of truth? Does it advertise something relevant about the sort of competitiveness of, of another male?

• 1:07:36Chris Williamson?

  That's really, really interesting. I wonder how much of the low advice is because they've been punched and choked out a lot. I wonder whether you can, uh, just if you get, if you get someone in a rear naked choke enough that I don't know, it hypertrophies the, the vocal cords somehow.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Well, then you, you'd have a relationship in the opposite direction that, um, yeah, uh, low, low voice, lower voice, less success then.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  If you've been choked out too many times, yeah, that's a good.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  Confounding, like we have two effects that, yeah. Um, so, and you know, it's not, it's not really.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  When we first started doing this, I thought, the guy who proposed the study, I thought, that is the coolest study because, you know, we're never going to get data like this in the lab. You can't get a bunch of guys to come in and fight each other and then you measure their voice and see whether, you know, voice pitch predicts fighting success. And so I thought that is a really cool way of sort of looking at natural variation and fighting ability. But the reality is that MMA fighters are not typical, right? They're like the best fighters. And MMA is that, I don't know, I don't remember all the details about, you know, you can do this kind of fighting, but then the ones that we measure

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  like the professional fighters who, so they're like, you know, the top fraction of a percent or something like that. So there's some issue there with like, there's really low variation in fighting ability, basically.

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, also, I imagine that there are a lot of different ways to win a fight, especially when it comes to MMA. It's not simply the most dominant man that goes in there. It can be selected for all sorts of things, conscientiousness, industriousness, like openness to be able to try new things. There's like a huge number of different ways that you could be, and you see this in fighting, right? Everybody knows, oh, that's the tactician, the person that sits back a little bit more, or that's the guy that's the brawler, he's the sort of all out testosterone guy. And what you've actually seen, if you were to track something like UFC over the last 30 years since it started, you've moved more away from the Chuck Liddell, Anthony Rumble Johnson style of just a straight up brawler to now someone who

• 1:09:45Chris Williamson?

  is much more of a hitman, somebody that's incredibly technical with their skill. Okay, well, what is that? What's that selecting for? I mean, there'll be some dominance in there, there'll be a good bit of testosterone in there, but it's, it's less about the all out war and it's more about this sort of very precise selection of routes to success.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  That's really interesting. Yeah, when we were pushing, we're just, you know, sort of coming from the question of

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  If you do rating studies, if you say manipulate voice pitch to make make male voices, the same male voices seem lower or higher, then the perceptual effect you get is that if you make a voice lower, the guy sounds like a better fighter. And so then we and if you look at sort of correlational, just don't manipulate anything and just have people rate guys' voices, you find that voice pitch predicts lower voices are rated as as better fighters. So we sort of approach it from that perspective of regardless of how they become a good fighter, whether it's from punching or wrestling or choking out or whatever, but just if they have a lower voice pitch, are they a better fighter? In other words, is it, you know, useful to pay attention to this trait of voice pitch and and sort of assessing the formidable of the competitor?

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  And, yeah, I mean, we found some evidence in MMA fighters, professional MMA fighters. My suspicion is that there'd be a stronger relationship if you just took a random sample of guys, especially because there's probably a bigger variation in everything that you're interested in, including fighting ability, but size and things like that, too. So, yeah.

• 1:11:21Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned the story about when you were in the shopping center and the two guys were competing for who could have the lower voice pitch. Have you actually done any studies on whether or not men and women modulate their voice pitch based on areas of high mating competition that they're in?

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  Yes. One, only one that I can think of right now, and it was actually part of the dissertation research where I had guys come into the lab, they were told that they were gonna be in a sort of a dating game thing and they could win a lunch date with a with a woman. She was a friend who I did a video, she it turned out to be a good actress, and she was the potential date and she was on a webcam, you know, but it was actually recorded, so everybody saw the same female. She was supposedly in the next room and there was another guy in a third room, a competitor. And before any of this, I had the guys come in and I recorded, I think it was a hundred, uh, how many guys was it? A hundred? Something, one hundred and eleven, maybe, one hundred and eleven guys.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  One at a time, they came into the lab and I recorded their voice before they knew anything about those circumstances. And then I recorded their voice when they were talking to their competitor. And you might think that as soon as they start talking to their competitor, they, you know, try to sound all deep and masculine. But the reality was that some guys lowered their pitch when talking to the competitor and other guys raised their pitch when they were talking to their competitor. And we could predict whether a guy lowered or raised his pitch based on whether he rated himself, the participant rated himself, the speaker rated himself, as a better fighter than he rated his competitor, which was the same guy that everybody heard was also a friend of mine who was recorded. And so it was the same across all participants. But if guys perceive themselves as less good fighters than their competitor,

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  they tended to raise their pitch from baseline when they spoke to him. And if they perceive themselves as better fighters, then they lowered their pitch. Which makes sense, because you'd expect that, you know, if a voice pitch doesn't just sort of influence dominance relationships, but the dominance relationships will also influence how we modulate our voices across contexts. And so, and we, you know, we did another study a few years after that showing that the same people, when they were asked to speak on a topic that they were an expert on, tended to speak in a lower pitch than if they were not an expert on the topic. So, you know, lowering pitch seems like it's a sort of, you're signaling status, authority,

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  dominance, if that's relevant, and probably in male undergraduates, it was very relevant, you know, much more than, you know, older people.

• 1:13:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay, it's a cue of confidence as well, that I know what I'm doing here. I feel comfortable in this situation. And the reverse is that it's subservience. It's, I am no threat. You don't need to worry about me. Listen to me in my higher pitched voice. I'm absolutely no concern to you. Please don't punch me in the face.

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  That, yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, all, all species where that have this sort of, you know, fighting for whatever, resources or mates or whatever, it, it pays to evolve, um, signals of deference as well because, um, you know, it, it would not benefit everybody to advertise their maximum dominance to every competitor because that just invites, you know, uh, an escalation of, of competition. And, um, if, if you're pretty confident that you're not going to win, then you, you would like to back out and say, no, I'm not signaling, um, you know, aggression here. I'm, I'm signaling that, you know, you win and let's not fight, you know, so it makes sense. I mean, it would not, it would not have paid our ancestors to,

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  um, evolve signaling threat potential all the time.

• 1:15:01Chris Williamson?

  Well, especially given what we spoke about at the start, which was, men specifically are trying to do everything that they can to signal dominance and aggression without having to actually get into the act of being aggressive.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, and in certain contexts and not, not others, you know, not, um, I mean, plenty of the people do, people modulate their voice across context all the time, right? I mean, if I'm, you know, back when you couldn't tell who was calling you, you're talking and then my wife or, you know, calls in, oh, hi, honey, you know, his voice goes up. Or to kids, you know, you talk to kids in a, in a non-threatening voice, like, uh, you know, so, um, yeah, anyway, um, I think voice has probably been a really, I, I went into studying it, um, with no special interest in voice, but just thinking this will be a really useful model trait for trying to understand human mating competition. And it's, it's, you know,

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  it's really paid off, um, as a trait, like, imminently quantifiable, you know, it's what, it's unlike face, faces, which are hard to measure, you know, it's really easy to, to measure it. There's a huge sex difference of about five standard deviations or more, um, in voice pitch that occurs at puberty, when, when mating competition becomes more intense and, um, and, uh, you know, it seems to be related to mate preferences and, and.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  Dominance competition, including how we modulate it. So, um, yeah, anyway.

• 1:16:31Chris Williamson?

  All right, David, let's bring this one home. What are you working on next? What's, is there anything cool that you've got that you're doing right now?

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, we're, well, we're working on some studies that we didn't really get too much into those topics, but, um, looking at sort of how sex hormones, um, influence our, our psychology and behavior. So we have one study where we're looking at, um, people who have a condition where, um, they had low sex hormones, males and females both have this condition, um, called IHH, where they had low sex hormone levels from the second trimester of gestation all the way to puberty when they get on hormone replacement therapy. And so we can look at how, um, having low sex hormones, low estrogens and progestogens, if you're female, or low androgens like testosterone, if you're male, how that influences psychology and behavior. Um, we're doing another study looking at, um,

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  women's phenotypes, their psychology behavior and other, and voice over the ovulatory cycle with changes in sex hormones. Um, and then we've got a couple of papers looking at, uh, voice, a cross-cultural voice study, looking at, um, how voice pitch influences perceptions of attractiveness and dominance across societies and what sociocultural variables modulate those influences. And another study that's a cross-species, um, comparison, looking at, um, when you see the evolution of big sex differences in voice pitch across primates and how it seems to be related to, um, male male competition, group size, things like that. A bunch of other things, but those are some of the, I think, most exciting ones that we're doing right now.

• 1:18:04Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. What, where should people go if they want to keep up to date with those studies and the stuff that you're working on?

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  Um, well, if, if it's published studies, Google Scholar is always a great place to go. Um, you can just search for, you know, an author's, um, Google Scholar account and you'll see everything that's published recently. Um, some studies we might talk about on my lab, um, website at Penn State, uh, but most of the time we, we don't really say much about a study until we're, we've published it. So, yeah.

• 1:18:30Chris Williamson?

  All right, David. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks Chris, good talking to you.

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