Why do animals cooperate?

Daniel and Kelly talk about the evolution of cooperation, and why humans struggle so much with isolation. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 0:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Granger knows, if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Granger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need, when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for United Healthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters. There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  I'm Ben, and I work at United Healthcare. I am just one piece of a larger puzzle, but every piece matters. It's more than just work. We want to make the healthcare system better for everyone. I care because I want to make a difference. That's what committed to care means to me.

• 1:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Howdy, extraordinaries! Most of this episode is about social behavior and cooperation in animals, and in particular, human animals. But towards the end, we talk a little bit about cases where humans and non-human animals have not gotten the love that they deserve early on in life, and the implications of that for their behavior, which is a little bit hard to hear. So just a heads up, so you can decide if you want to listen to the last third of the episode or not. Thanks!

• 2:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Natural selection doesn't exactly sound like the kind of mechanism that would result in a lot of cooperation and snuggly social behavior. Let's imagine it. You take variation in some trait, say, differences in running speed, and link that trait to survival and reproduction. So imagine that running speed determines who escapes from predators and then goes on to survive and have babies. And if that trait is heritable, so if the babies of fast parents are fast themselves, then you have all the ingredients necessary for natural selection. Over time, you'd expect that fast individuals survive and become more common,

• 2:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  while the slow individuals, well, they get eaten. That sounds kind of cutthroat. Yet somehow, we've still ended up in a world where animals will call out to warn others of a nearby predator, even if calling out increases the risk that the predator goes after the caller in particular. And honeybees will sting us to protect their hive mates, even though stinging us will pull out their stinger and effectively disembowel the bee. They give their lives to protect their buddies living inside the hive. So how did this seemingly brutal mechanism give rise to so much cooperation and helpful behavior?

• 3:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's what we're going to talk about today. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's surprisingly cooperative universe.

• 4:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think people are the most interesting thing in the universe and also the most terrifying.

• 4:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, hello, I'm Kelly. I study parasites and space, and I completely agree with Daniel's assessment. And at the end of this episode, when I describe human behavior, I will try not to cry.

• 4:24Daniel Whiteson?

  So my question for you today, Kelly, is do you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert? And when did you know?

• 4:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, definitely an introvert. I think I hide it well, but I very much enjoy hanging out with people. But at the end of like a conference or something, I will crawl into my, my bed and like, just be absolutely exhausted. And I get very nervous when I go in a room and I have to like, pick a group to go hang out with because I assume that nobody really wants to talk to me. And so I love situations where people come up to talk to me because then I don't feel like I'm putting anyone out. So if you ever see me somewhere, feel free to come up and talk to me because that relieves the pressure on me and makes me feel so much better. And I don't know when I realized that. I think it was probably in undergrad

• 5:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  when I had to like, start meeting people. Yeah, I guess. I don't know. What about you?

• 5:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not sure how I would classify myself because on one hand, I feel the same way at the end of a lot of socializing, like at a conference, when everyone's like, hey, let's go out to dinner. And I'm like, no, thank you. But also, I find that people are my best source of energy. You know, if I go and teach in the classroom, I love that engagement and the response. I love getting emails from listeners. I love hanging out with friends. Like, moments laughing with your friends are more enjoyable than anything you could ever do by yourself. And so people are like the greatest mystery and source of joy and happiness in the universe. And also, they are completely exhausting. I'm not sure where that puts me on the spectrum.

• 6:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe we're exo-introverts, intro-exoverts? No, because I agree. Like, I also really look forward to going to conferences because I cannot wait to see the people at conferences and hear about how they were doing and laugh about stuff and find out if they purposefully infected themselves with any parasites in the last year. You know, all that stuff. But on the other hand, at the end of the day, I am also like, I need to sleep.

• 6:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, today, we are not just telling personal stories. We are talking about the Larger question of human behavior. Why do people act the way they do? Is it driven by evolution or something else even weirder? And today's episode is inspired by a question we got from an 11 year old, didn't we?

• 6:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Actually, they're 13 years old now and they are the child of some friends of mine. And I was super excited to get their question. So let's go ahead and listen to it.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I love your podcast and I have a question. Why did humans evolve to be social? And why do we go crazy if we're isolated for too long? I also wonder what would happen if a human lived its whole life without having contact with other humans? And why could some animals like whales go for so long without having contact with other whales? But humans can't. Thanks.

• 7:21Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So on one hand, this is a really fun question, but also a really deep question about evolution. Because like the whole foundation of modern biology is evolution and natural selection. And things are the way they are because of this process. And that forces us to think about everything we see through that lens. But it can sometimes be hard to understand how something evolved to exist. You know, you have the examples of the eye and stuff, but human behavior is a great example. So tell us, Kelly, how do you interpret this question?

• 7:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I'll be honest, I kind of put this question off for a while because I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I'll look it up real quick and see like, you know, what are people saying these days? And generally the answer I found was, oh, well, humans are social because it benefited us in our evolutionary past. And I was like, okay, well, yeah, but how? And like, there's got to be a richer answer to that. But there was generally not a much richer answer. And I think at the end of the day, it's hard to know for a particular species, why a behavior arose in part because behaviors don't leave fossils. But at the end, I'm going to try to give a much better answer. But I thought that we could start by taking a look at why we think we see cooperation

• 8:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  and social behavior in general in animals at all. Because actually, that's a little bit of a Darwinian puzzle.

• 8:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I agree. It's really a fascinating question on one hand. And it seems like maybe it's simple because people learn to cooperate because that's more effective. But if everybody else is cooperating, then like the one jerk is like lazy and then just steals the results of the mammoth hunt is going to benefit. So it's not obvious why cooperation is always a successful strategy. That's how you have to think about it, right?

• 9:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. Exactly. So in order for natural selection to happen, you have to have variation in a trait. So for example, maybe you have variation in speediness. And then that variation needs to be important for survival and reproduction. So maybe the faster individuals are able to run away from the predator and then they survive to reproduce.

• 9:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 9:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that trait needs to be passed from parents to offspring. So the faster parents makes faster offspring. And over time, you end up with faster individuals in the population and the genes that produce faster individuals become more common in the population. And that doesn't necessarily sound like a mechanism that would result in more like hugs and cooperation. That seems like a bit of a cutthroat thing, you know, if you are faster and better able to get away from the predators or better able to secure the food, then you're the one who gets to reproduce and you're the one who, you know, gets to pass your genes to the next generation. But when we look out in nature, we see tons of cooperation. So, you know, for example, honeybees, if you walk up to a honeybee nest.

• 10:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 10:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you disturb the nest, do not recommend. A honeybee will come out and they'll sting you and they've got these barbed stingers that get stuck in your skin. And so the stinger will stay behind and the venom gland and like the insides of the honeybee will get pulled out of the bee. The bee will get disemboweled and will die to protect its hive mates. And so that bee is giving its life to protect the rest of the hive. And we see ants that are willing to, for example, like plug the hole of a nest overnight, even though the temperature is going to kill them overnight, they give their lives to like protect the temperature for the rest of their hive mates. And we see just loads of examples of animals dying for, you know, their buddies.

• 10:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you know, why does that happen?

• 10:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And so this is a great analogy, for example, to like soldiers dying in a war, right? They're not going to be around to experience the benefits of victory. And yet they give up their lives. But then it's always easier to understand these things in terms of like ants and bees. Cause you can actually do experiments on them ethically, right?

• 11:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 11:11Daniel Whiteson?

  So what do we know about why honeybees act altruistically? Is it because they have like more sophisticated genetic relationships among themselves and with their queens? Or what's the story?

• 11:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, absolutely. So that that is part of it. But first I want to dig down a little bit more and clarify what level we think evolution is happening at. Evolution at the end of the day is just changes in gene frequencies over time. So when we were talking about natural selection happening for fastness, like being able to run away from the predators. Evolution happening there, you'd end up with a higher frequency of the types of genes that are associated with moving quickly. So over time, the versions of the genes for slow individuals go away. And you get more of the versions of the genes for fast individuals. Does that make sense?

• 11:59Daniel Whiteson?

  It does make sense, but it sounds like you're choosing this set of words. Gene frequencies changing over time through natural selection. Very specifically, maybe in contrast to something you imagine is in the minds of the listeners or a general misunderstanding of evolution. What are you contrasting this with?

• 12:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so I'm eventually going to make the point that individuals are the ones who are carrying these genes around. And selection is going to be happening at the level of individuals and not the level of groups.

• 12:26Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. So it's not like evolution is this like mastermind guiding some species towards some predetermined goal or something. It's just a bunch of individuals changing over time.

• 12:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it's a frequency of genes that are found in a population and those genes are carried by individuals that some of which will die and some of which will not.

• 12:44Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 12:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Okay. So individuals are carrying around these genes. And then in the 1960s, there was this guy, Wyn Edwards, who was arguing that selection might be happening at the level of like groups, or maybe even at the level of species. And this idea kind of makes sense. So like, you know, you look around and there's, for example, maybe rodents having Two babies each. And you might say, oh, OK, two babies. That's not a lot of babies. Maybe what they're doing is they're trying to not eat all of the seeds. They're trying to make sure that they don't overexploit the seeds for the good of the species. They want to make sure that they're able to survive for many generations.

• 13:18Daniel Whiteson?

  What considerate and well-organized rodents.

• 13:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, yes. You know, maybe we should take some lessons from their behavior. But unfortunately, it turns out that we don't actually usually see group selection being a good explanation for what animals are doing in the wild. So imagine you did have like a population of individuals who were very responsible rodents and were limiting themselves to two babies each because they didn't want to overexploit the seeds. And then you had a mutation in a gene and a selfish gene popped up.

• 13:51Daniel Whiteson?

  OK.

• 13:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  And those parents-

• 13:54Daniel Whiteson?

  The jerk rats.

• 13:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  -had six babies. The jerk rats had six babies.

• 13:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 13:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  And there's all these extra seeds because everybody else is being responsible. And so all of their babies survive. And they also got the jerk gene. And so they have six babies, too.

• 14:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Dominion of the jerk rats, yeah.

• 14:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Dominion of the jerk rats, exactly. So over time, that selfish gene is going to pass through the population. You're going to end up with a lot more of this jerk gene.

• 14:18Daniel Whiteson?

  So does this argue against Winn Edwards' idea of evolution at the population level?

• 14:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, it does. And so just about whenever we look, when we go out into nature, we see that animals are trying to have as many babies as they can. Maybe not in a particular season, but across their entire lifetimes. We don't see much evidence of individuals sort of doing things for the good of the species. Most of the evidence we find is that they're doing it for the good of themselves. And we think that's because selfish strategies could easily invade populations where everyone's, you know, trying to do things for the good of the species. That's just a strategy that's very easy to invade by more selfish behaviors.

• 14:55Daniel Whiteson?

  This is a cool test because the cooperative strategy is actually more successful, right? If nobody's a jerk, everybody does better. It's sort of a prisoner's dilemma situation. But if everybody else is cooperating and you're the jerk, then you individually win out and then your babies dominate the future.

• 15:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 15:13Daniel Whiteson?

  And so if you were operating at a population level, you would definitely choose no jerks.

• 15:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. If selection was acting at the level of the group, then maybe that would be better for everybody. But but we don't see evidence of that happening. And additionally, like even if you could get a group of individuals to be like, super nice and everybody cooperates. Usually we see migration between groups because they don't usually exist completely in isolation. So if you had a jerk group, you know, little north of you, some jerks might move south and invade your population. And since you've left all these resources unexploited, they're going to come in and sort of mess everything up for everybody else.

• 15:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Those northern jerks every time, every time.

• 15:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. I'm looking at you, Canada. No, I'm just kidding. Canadians are way nicer. We should have done it in reverse.

• 16:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, now you're offending the Mexicans?

• 16:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no, no, no. I meant it's the Americans ruining things for the Canadians is what I was saying. No, no, no.

• 16:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Don't get me wrong. Okay, so there are some arguments still that there could be some situations where it makes sense to think about selection from a group or a species level. But I think in general, we think that most of the time, selection is happening at the level of the individual and that you can, you know, get away with not thinking about group selection most of the time.

• 16:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is true for behavior and also for more like mechanical traits like cheetahs running fast and stuff.

• 16:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 16:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 16:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. And actually, I bought a recent animal behavior textbook because that's what I learned in like the early 2000s. And I was like, I just want to be 100% sure that this is what everybody still says. And it is.

• 16:45Daniel Whiteson?

  So then you're telling me that you can't choose behavior based at the population level, like, hey, everybody be nice. Or everybody like to have go to parties or whatever. And so in that case, how do we get things like altruism or social behavior? If natural selection acts only on the individuals, that's the puzzle, right?

• 17:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that is the puzzle. Okay, so we're going to talk about three or four different ways that we think you can get it by individual level selection.

• 17:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, okay.

• 17:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the first way is what we call kin selection. This is an idea by William Hamilton. It was proposed in the 60s. And the idea is that you've got genes for particular traits. And you can get those genes passed from one generation to another by having your own babies directly.

• 17:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you can also increase the frequency of those genes by doing things like helping out your brother. And so that indirectly increases your fitness because you probably share about 50% of your genes by descent because you come from the same parents. And, you know, for example, if you're a diploid organism, so humans are diploid organisms, that means we have two chromosomes. We got 50% of our genes from our mom, 50% of our genes from our dad. And just by random chance, you and a sibling probably share about 50% of the versions of the genes that you have in your body. Does that make sense?

• 18:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, so basically, I have a big nose. My brother has a big nose. If I help my brother's kids, then I'm increasing the big nose fraction of future generations. So I'm not really being altruistic by helping people who are not my direct offspring.

• 18:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  As long as they're related to you.

• 18:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right, right. Yeah, as long as they're related.

• 18:29Daniel Whiteson?

  That's why it's called kin selection, I guess.

• 18:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly. Right. And so there's some predictions that come from this. You should care about how closely related people are to you. And so, for example, you should be more likely to help a brother or a sister. And you should be, you know, sort of willing to help like a half sibling or a cousin.

• 18:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Depends how big their nose is, actually.

• 18:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's, maybe that's right. Depends on the gene. But, you know, for example, if you imagine that there is a gene out there for altruism, and that gene does make you more likely to help out other members of your family, then you can imagine that that gene would pass through a population if family members are helping each other. And so there's this famous quote by a scientist named J.B.S. Haldane, and he was asked, would you save a drowning brother if it risked your own life? And he said, no, but I would save two brothers or eight cousins.

• 19:28Daniel Whiteson?

  And mathematically, that checks out.

• 19:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. And so whether or not you should engage in a behavior that helps out your family members, to some extent, depends on how closely related they are to you, how much the cost would be to yourself, and how much they would benefit. And so you should expect to see altruistic behaviors arising among closely related individuals if it's going to result in, for example, your siblings having more kids that are going to carry some of the genes that you would find in yourself. And so maybe you're not having as many kids personally, but if your siblings are having loads of additional kids, then your genes are still getting out there. And so indirectly, your fitness is doing great. And so maybe we see altruism happening, because selfishly, that still helps your genes pass through the environment.

• 20:13Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So just to make sure I understand, we started out wondering, why would anybody die for other members of the population? And this seems like to me a partial answer, because it doesn't suggest you would die for any member of the population, but it tells you that you might sacrifice yourself for people you're related to who are not directly your offspring.

• 20:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly.

• 20:33Daniel Whiteson?

  And that, to me, describes a sort of like limited, local altruism that like falls off with the size of the nose of people in your family. But then you added this twist about a gene for altruism itself, right? Because this doesn't require a gene for altruism. You just support people who have enough genes that overlap with you.

• 20:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. But you could imagine that a gene for altruism would be how you get this trait to pass from family member to family member to family member.

• 21:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see.

• 21:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 21:01Daniel Whiteson?

  The gene for altruism helps you recognize that this is beneficial?

• 21:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  It helps make sure that the trait passes in families and is maintained.

• 21:09Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. All right.

• 21:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we have some examples of this. So for example, there are these squirrels that you find in California, buildings ground squirrels. And the females tend to stay in the areas where they were born, whereas the males tend to go away. And so if you're a female, your sisters are likely to be nearby, your aunts are likely to be nearby. And what they find is that the females are more likely to call when there's a predator around. And so when a predator's around, they call, and then their sisters and their aunts. Maybe their mom and even their kids go and hide in their burrows. But when you call, you also increase the probability that the coyote goes after you because you've drawn its attention. So it's a risky behavior that has a cost.

• 21:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  But they've also found that females will call even if none of their own kids are around. So it's not just a direct fitness thing. They will call to help their aunts get out of the way or some or their sisters get out of the way. So it looks like they're also willing to take a cost to get an indirect fitness benefit. So to help their sisters and stuff.

• 22:09Daniel Whiteson?

  So females without any kids of their own still raise the alarm, putting themselves at risk even though they have no offspring.

• 22:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:17Daniel Whiteson?

  That's fascinating. Are squirrels smart enough to do this calculation? Are they little JBS Haldanes adding up like, you know, fractions and cousins and stuff?

• 22:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's a great question. So I, I think they really just need to know, like, okay, I was raised with, uh, so, you know, for example, they were raised in a nest with their sisters. And so they don't necessarily have to be like, all right, I've got three sisters out here. I'm 50% related to all of them. So that's point five plus point five plus point five. That's 1.5. So that's more than just me. So, you know, they don't necessarily have to do those calculations. They just have to like, you know, have some affiliative feeling for the individuals that they were raised in a nest with and be willing to call. And so maybe the genes that are being passed aren't necessarily like altruism genes. They're just genes for, you know, having like a nice feeling about the people that you were raised in a nest or, you know, the squirrels you were raised in a nest with

• 23:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  and being willing to call if you think that they're in danger.

• 23:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Or does it work even if it's more instinctive? Like if every female squirrel responds to a predator with a call, then in general that increases the fitness of the whole population, including their own. And then that gene tends to survive. Is that a reasonable argument?

• 23:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  There is evidence that females are less likely to call if they are surrounded by females they are not related to.

• 23:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  So they will withhold calling when they're not around family members.

• 23:40Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's really context dependent. They are doing fractions in their head when deciding whether to save your life.

• 23:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  They are at least deciding, uh, are there people who were at the last family reunion or not?

• 23:51Daniel Whiteson?

  What did they bring to the potluck?

• 23:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. And if you didn't bring enough, I'm not, I'm not gonna call. That coyote can have you for dinner.

• 23:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I know that acorn casserole didn't pass muster and so I'm sorry.

• 24:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, let's, let's take a break. And when we get back, we're going to return to the honeybees and the insects that Daniel asked about like 15 minutes ago. And I was like, I'll get right back to it. And then I didn't.

• 24:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans, up to $400,000, help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 24:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. What still makes you just sit down at the piano?

• 25:20Speaker 03

  If you sat down at 9:00 AM and then at noon, you had a full song that you recorded and put in your voice recorder or you recorded at your studio. You just created something brand new that didn't exist when you woke up. What a beautiful feeling it is. I'm always excited to write something new. I've been writing for Broadway, which has been a new challenge with new collaborators and amazing performers who are triple threads, who can sing and dance and act and do all these amazing things. And I want to keep feeling that. And so that means not resting on my laurels, going out there and continuing to create something new.

• 25:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:15Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we're back and we're answering a question from a listener about how behaviors can evolve and a broader question about altruism in evolution. So tell me about insects. Why do bees give up their lives for their fellow bees?

• 26:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so in particular, we're talking about hymenopteran insects and hymenopterans are like the bees and the ants and stuff like that and the wasps. And these have some of the most amazing examples of organisms.

• 26:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Why are they called hymenopterans?

• 26:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, you'd ask that.

• 26:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it just, it has an interesting prefix.

• 26:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  So hymen is Greek for membrane and turin is wing, and so they have wing membranes.

• 26:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, got it. Okay.

• 26:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so membrane, that's a great answer.

• 27:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, thanks. Okay, so they have a really interesting sort of system for determining whether or not they end up being males or females. And we talked about this a little bit in the listener questions episode, but briefly, males are haploid, which means they only get one set of genetic information. So they develop from unfertilized eggs. So females will not mate with males. They'll just lay an egg. It will have one set of chromosomes instead of two, whereas females will get two sets of chromosomes. And so when a daughter is born, she gets 100% of the info from dad because he only had one set of chromosomes to give. So all of the sisters, they're going to get the same chromosome

• 27:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  from dad. So that chromosome's 100% the same. The chromosome they get from mom, they're going to have a like 50% chance of having the same information if you're comparing between two sisters. So if you look at two sisters, 75% of their genetic information is going to be the same.

• 28:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Whereas between me and my brothers in humans, it's only 50%.

• 28:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 28:05Daniel Whiteson?

  I see.

• 28:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if you compare the mom to her daughters, they're only 50% similar. And so the daughters are like super, hyper similar to each other.

• 28:15Daniel Whiteson?

  They're more like clones than our sisters.

• 28:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, they're much closer. And so you find that they're willing to help their mom produce a bunch of additional sisters because they're producing more individuals that are very similar to each other. And they are quite willing to give up their lives to protect each other because they are very genetically similar. And so we think that that's why you tend to see these amazing examples of animals being willing to give up their lives to protect each other. Because in these systems, at least the sisters tend to be very genetically similar. So kin selection seems to be, you know, able to particularly work well in these systems.

• 28:51Daniel Whiteson?

  It's fascinating that behavior seems to follow these relationships. You know, that people who are more closely aligned tend to act in a way that benefits people who are more related to them. And isn't it because selection at the level of individuals, when individuals have these complex overlaps, tends to benefit behaviors that leads to the selection of those genes that led to those behaviors? Is that right?

• 29:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you are closely related to individuals, you might be more likely to see a benefit to any genes associated with behaviors for cooperation.

• 29:35Daniel Whiteson?

  But do you have to see the benefit? I guess that's my question, you know, because like we were talking earlier about like the squirrels knowing whether their people are related. But in the case of like a bee, like a bee isn't aware that they're related in some way. Isn't it just that their behavior benefits people who are more closely related to them without them being aware of their like sisterly relationship? I mean, are bees feeling a sisterly bond with their clone sisters?

• 30:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, I see. Okay. So I think ants are able to tell the difference between nestmates and not nestmates based on their chemical smell. I wouldn't be surprised if bees could do something similar. There are social trematodes, we talked about this in a prior episode, living in the gonads of snails, that are able to tell the difference between members of the same species that are a different genotype, that are trying to invade and take over the snail. And so I think even for Species that we think of as like, you know, quite quote unquote lower, they are able to tell even within the same species, you know, are you my family or not? Which is kind of amazing, but I think there are a lot of techniques for telling,

• 30:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  even in a hive, are you in my family or are you not in my family?

• 30:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I see. And that makes sense because if you can do that, then you can act differently based on that information. And that also will help propagate your genes. If you help people who have your genes more than you help people who don't have your genes.

• 31:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 31:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 31:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I think, I think being able to recognize family is a big part of how, how this stuff works.

• 31:09Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, cool. So in the future, when the aliens come and they create like, an army of 10,000 Daniel clones, I will just like naturally help those guys out more than like all the Kelly clones, because I'll know that I'm more closely related to the Dan clones. And it's just nature, Kelly, don't be offended. Okay?

• 31:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but let's move on to mechanism two, which is mutualism, which is there are some instances where there is mutual benefit to working together and you both get higher fitness by cooperating. And so, for example, although I was gonna say, you know, we both have this great fitness together, but I don't think it's gonna help either of our reproduction. So, um, so maybe that's not gonna work. You help the Daniel clones, I understand. So, all right, so here's an example. In paper wasps, you may have seen like these giant wasp nests that kind of look like they're made of paper, like, you know, they're literally

• 32:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 32:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  using their mouth parts to sort of scrape parts off of trees or parts off of your furniture. And then they make these giant nests. They're made by several females and some of those females, up to 35%, are actually not related. And so why would they be helping to make these giant nests if they're not related? Because only one of the females in that nest is laying the eggs and everybody else is subordinating themselves and choosing to not lay eggs.

• 32:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 32:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so why would they do that? Well, it turns out that at some point, the dominant female will die. And one of the subordinate females will get the chance to take over that giant nest when she dies. And the giant nests have a much better chance of surviving like a predator attack than teeny tiny nests that are made by solitary females. So there are nests like that are made by solitary females who try to go it alone. And so there are some females who will say, all right, you know what? I'm not related to you, but I am going to help you out in the hope that maybe one day I'm going to get to take over this, this giant kingdom and my turn will come. Uh, and so I'm going to cooperate now in the hope that later I'm going to get to take this over. And so it's like delayed benefits. It's with it.

• 33:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is called postponed coordination. And actually this idea of like territorial inheritance, where if I help you now, I might get to take over this amazing territory later is a pretty common thing that we see in like birds and insects and lots of other, lots of other species.

• 33:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. So then my question here is it makes sense to cooperate. Everybody benefits. But what about the prisoner's dilemma example we talked about earlier? Why aren't there jerk wasps who come and wait for you to build your nice nest? And then say, oh, wouldn't it be a tragedy if something were to happen to your paper wasp nest? And, you know, kill everybody and take it over.

• 33:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, yeah. So usually the individuals who are helping are weaker and couldn't be the dominant individual for whatever reason. And so, for example, if you are one of the 35% of individuals who are not genetically related to the dominant individual who's making the nest, you probably couldn't try to oust the dominant individual who's laying the eggs. You'd probably get slaughtered if you tried to do that. And so I think in a lot of cases you would be outnumbered and you are kind of like waiting to get older. And in the meantime, you're probably also like learning how things are done. It's also like an apprenticeship. Uh, and so I, I think that if you could go it alone, maybe you would, but you're just sort of waiting for your chance.

• 34:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, I see. All right, cool. So that makes sense.

• 34:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. And then, uh, option three is manipulation. So maybe it looks like cooperation, but you are just straight up being coerced. And you should go to our episode on interspecific brood parasitism, where we talk about birds who take care of eggs that are not theirs because they were tricked into doing so.

• 34:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So definitely not altruism, right?

• 34:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Definitely not.

• 34:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Just being duped.

• 34:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  You have straight up been duped.

• 35:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so last, let's talk about reciprocity. This used to be called reciprocal altruism, but we stopped calling it that because altruism in my mind is when you do something nice with no anticipation that you'll get paid back. But this is really like you're doing something nice because you expect to get paid back eventually.

• 35:18Daniel Whiteson?

  This is like a gift exchange.

• 35:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, that doesn't really feel like altruism. So we call it reciprocity. And my favorite example of reciprocity is vampire bats in Costa Rica. So the idea here is that you are doing something nice because you expect that you're going to interact with this individual over and over and over again. So you mentioned the prisoner's dilemma. And so the prisoner's dilemma is a game that is often used to think about these reciprocal interactions. And it doesn't work if you're only going to interact with somebody once. If you interact with someone once, you should probably dupe them to try to get, you know, the best outcome from the interaction for that one iteration. But if you're going to interact with someone over and over and over and over again, maybe it makes sense to cooperate and try to make it so that both of you are getting the best outcome

• 36:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  from interacting over and over and over again.

• 36:06Daniel Whiteson?

  And I remember they did this experiment and they showed that like the best strategy for the prisoner's dilemma is called like tit for tat. Basically, people are being nice to you, you're nice to them. People are not nice to you, you're not nice back, right?

• 36:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Axelrod is the one who set up, I think, the games and people could submit different strategies and tit for tat one.

• 36:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, okay. Classic game theory. Cool stuff.

• 36:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so with these vampire bats that live in Costa Rica, they go out for a blood meal at night. If they unfortunately don't get a blood meal, they can make it for one night, but if they don't get a blood meal for three nights in a row, they're probably going to die. But if they get a blood meal and they could find an animal, they probably get more than enough blood and they could afford to share some. So helping out a roost mate, so they live in roosts, isn't a big cost to you, but could be a big benefit to an individual who didn't get any food that night.

• 36:59Daniel Whiteson?

  How do they help them out? They like spit up some blood?

• 37:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, they puke. In their mouth. Yeah, super gross. Puke up blood in their mouth.

• 37:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you very much.

• 37:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, you know.

• 37:09Daniel Whiteson?

  This is a little better than starving.

• 37:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, you wanted to do a podcast with an animal behavior person. This is what you get. So. Anyway, okay, so, uh, so they looked and they, they saw that bats that didn't manage to get a meal for the night. They were very likely to get fed by family members. So that's totally consistent with our kin selection discussion.

• 37:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 37:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  But they were also really likely to get fed by roost mates. So there was a guy who went out and they collected a bunch of bats from the wild, brought them into the lab. And then held on to some of the bats and made it so that they couldn't get food. And then they released them back into a room that had some individuals from the same roost. And some individuals that were completely new to the bat. So they essentially had like friends and non friends. And the friends were much more likely to feed the bats, uh, when it went in asking for food and essentially was like, I'm hungry. And individuals that knew the bat were like, okay, I'll feed you. And so it does seem like having some familiarity with an individual and essentially like some anticipation that you'll see this individual again. So they might be able to pay you back.

• 38:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Made you more likely to feed them. And individuals who were fed were then more likely to feed individuals later on in the experiment. And so it does look like other individuals expect you to ante up later if it's known that you were helped out. And if you see someone pretty often, then you feel like you can ask them for help. And so it does look like these bats have this reciprocal altruism system going on where if you've got these iterated interactions where you know, you're going to see them pretty often. You can ask them for help and expect to get help in return.

• 38:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. All right. So that's like another reason why what seems like altruistic behavior might benefit the individual. And that seems to be the common thread is that you're arguing that all of this behavior, which seems like it might've been selected at the group level. Can sometimes be explained by evolution on the individual because in the end, all of this behavior really does come back to benefit the individual. And that's why it would be selected.

• 39:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Exactly. Yep. Yep. That's the perfect way to bottom line it. Uh, whenever we've seen examples of cooperation, we've been able to find explanations that can be explained by individual level selection. Uh, don't require group selection and can be completely understood through the lens of natural selection.

• 39:28Daniel Whiteson?

  So everybody out there is selfish, you're saying?

• 39:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, we do see a lot of selfish behavior in nature. We also, this is kind of interesting, we don't see a lot of examples of spite, which is where someone is willing, which is where someone is willing to accept a negative impact on themselves just to see something bad happen to someone else. But we do see humans do that. That's a unique thing.

• 39:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Now, this sounds like a Mary Roach book.

• 39:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Spite.

• 39:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Spite. Examples of people hurting themselves just to get back at somebody else.

• 40:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  We know of at least one case. So like, there's been studies on monkeys in the lab, capuchin monkeys, I think, where if a capuchin monkey was observed getting too many of the most delicious snack, another monkey would take a less delicious snack as long as it meant the other monkey would get punished in some way. Like, no, no, you've been getting too many good snacks. This is not cool. You're getting punished and I'm getting punished. I don't care. It's not cool. So other animals are capable of spite.

• 40:30Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm willing to have a less delicious snack as long as I get to see you suffer.

• 40:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 40:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, that is cold. Cold monkeys.

• 40:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so we don't see it as often as we see humans doing it. But we also see amazing examples of cooperation and social behavior in humans, which gets to Karen's question, which we will get to after the break.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel. My small experience with the discrepancy in the business of music made me angry in the best way, and I wanted to, I wanted to finish. So I started really like leaning into my therapy, trying to get down to like, what matters now? Somewhere Miguelito felt like he didn't have a place to say how he felt. And music was the place that I went to, to say how I felt. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 42:28Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we are back, and we're taking a long detour to answer this question. First, giving you a background in how evolution works and reminding you that there is no true altruism out there in the animal kingdom, that in the end, it all benefits the individual, and that's how evolution works. So tell us, Kelly, how does this help us understand the answer to Karen's question about human behavior?

• 42:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, first of all, I'm hoping this wasn't too painful for Karen. They have professor parents, so hopefully they're accustomed to long-winded answers. And so they're not surprised.

• 43:03Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm afraid you might be making the wrong assumption there.

• 43:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 43:05Daniel Whiteson?

  My daughter Hazel is like oversensitized to long answers. If she senses one coming, she's like, I didn't ask for a college lecture.

• 43:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, I'll tell them that they can fast forward to 40 minutes in and get right to the point. Okay, so let's, let's hone in on mammals. And so you'll see, I actually haven't quite gotten to the answer. We're just getting to mammals. So, all right, two thirds of mammals are actually living alone. So only a third of mammals are social. In other cases, they get together to mate, and then they tend to split up. And the females will spend some time with the babies because mammals do lactation, which means the moms need to be around the babies for a while to feed them. But, okay, so now, why did humans in particular evolve to be social?

• 43:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hey there, extraordinaries. Well, Daniel and I actually recorded an answer to the question that I just asked. But after I listened to our answer, I decided it's like not a super satisfying answer. So instead, I reached out to an expert to get a way better answer. And I'm having our amazing audio guy, Matt, drop that much better answer in here. Dr. Nathan Lentz is a professor of biology at John Jay College, City University of New York, and he's the author of three books that touch on human evolution topics. We had him on the show on February 27, 2025, to talk about the sexual evolution, how 500 million years of sex, gender, and mating shape modern relationships, which is a book you all should definitely check out.

• 44:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you can also find more of his writing over at the Human Evolution Blog. And today, we're bringing him on to answer one of Karen's questions. And so Nathan, welcome back on to the show.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure. I love this podcast.

• 44:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, we love having you on the show. This is your third appearance now, which I think makes you tied with Scott Solomon for most regular appearances on the show. So that's awesome for us.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  The gauntlet has been thrown down.

• 45:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah, so folks, submit more human evolution questions and then we can, you know, we can get Nathan on even more. So yeah, so why did humans evolve to be social? And a little bit of context here, we just spent 40 minutes talking about social evolution in other animals. We've talked about kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and now we're talking about humans. Why do we cooperate? And why are we social? What do we know about this?

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, humans, so mammals and then primates evolved to be very, very social. Very few mammals live solitary lives. They live in communities, they live in families, and they interact with one another. And they're obviously, they're better off when they do. So humans have taken this to an Incredible extreme. And the reason why is humans are the ultimate generalists, right? We're actually not particularly well-evolved or suited for any particular habitat or lifestyle. Instead, we went the other way. We evolved to be adaptable and to live in a whole variety of ways. So, you know, there are animals that can throw better, that can run faster, that can climb better, that can swim better.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  But we can run and climb and jump and we could do it all. And we can eat a variety of diets. Think of how different world diets are around the world, you know, from shorelines and seafaring peoples to desert people, to tundra, to rainforest. So that that quality of being very general in our approach lends itself to division of labor, where individuals do not have to all do the same thing. Whereas most other animals, they all do the same thing. They can do different things and they can work together, but there's not like trades, you know, there aren't professions. They all basically do the same thing. And they basically all have to learn everything they need to know each generation, right? They don't inherit a whole bunch of knowledge.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  They do learn from each other, but they don't intentionally teach anything. And that's what humans do is we have this huge toolkit of knowledge, of cultural knowledge that gets passed on each generation and then gets specialized. So some individuals can do one thing, they can be homesteaders, you know, they can work with their hands. Other people are out hunting and they have great vision, whatever it is. There's lots of different ways that you can contribute to the group and be important and valuable. And therefore your genes are more likely to find success. Not because you're good at this one specific thing, but because you're good at something. So we were all contributing in this wide variety of ways. Well, that creates a social network that is better the larger it gets.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Because then that's how you add more and more skills to the toolkit is that not any one person doesn't have to do it all. They only have to do one thing. And and so our groups became highly intricate, highly cooperative and also large reservoirs of knowledge. And the the best support for this hypothesis is that the few examples we have of. Population declines where you get a bottleneck, they lose tons of skills. So we have societies like in Tasmania where we can tell from the fossils and the archaeology that they used to be able to do some things that they no longer can. Well, I mean, now they can, but when they were first kind of studied anthropologically, they had actually lost a lot of cultural knowledge when the population shrunk to a small size. So our large groups with intricate social structures and division of labor,

• 48:26Speaker 01

  that created, you know, a society that was much better than just the sum of its parts. Right? We're not all doing the same thing. We're contributing to this larger group set. So that's why social evolution just really ran out of control. And in fact, it's what Dan Lieberman calls evolution in warp drive. Because you don't have to wait around for new genes or new alleles, you know, mutations to provide things. You can actually learn a new skill, teach it, and then boom, everyone has it. So it's really our socialities is key to our success.

• 48:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why just us? Why, why don't more animals do this generalist thing that has clearly been so great for us?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Well, to be honest, it's an unlikely scenario to play out. Because if you think about it, selection generally operates on the level of the individual. Right? So you don't get anything out of helping other people. For example, it doesn't, unless it directly benefits you, it won't, your, those genes won't persist. And in fact, I just finished a book not too long called The Accidental Homo sapiens. And it talks about how in many ways, our particular trajectory was not destined for success. It's actually quite costly to be, have these big, huge brains at the expense of our bodies. We use our brains instead of our bodies. And so our bodies actually aren't that great. I wrote a book about that.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Because we rely on our, on our brains so much, our bodies kind of aren't as heavily scrutinized by natural selection.

• 49:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  That book is called Human Errors, right?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Another great book.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Thanks for the plug. It's available at fine stores near you.

• 49:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, don't miss those opportunities.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  But the the best proof of the sort of futility of our approach is if you look at all of our close relatives, they all went extinct, right? And every whether it's Homo erectus or Homo habilis and you know, whole Riddolf fences, think of all of the named species, those were all the smartest things that the planet had ever seen and they all went extinct, right? Some of them because of direct interaction with us, but most of them probably not, you know? So this is not actually that successful of a strategy and our own species was kind of on the nice edge of extinction multiple times in our history, right? We have a lot of population bottlenecks in our genetic history. So what that means is it's a great system.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Once you get big enough and spread around far enough, then it's a great system. But until then, favoring the development of the brain over everything else was a recipe for extinction.

• 50:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  How sure are we of this hypothesis? This seems like a hard thing, you know, studying behavior is is tough because behavior rarely leaves fossils like how, you know, what percent confidence would you put on this explanation for why we're social?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's really hard to say. What we can do, the best way to to test these is to look at animal correlates and to look at closely related species that have some key difference and kind of see how it plays out. And, you know, for example, if you look at chimpanzees and bonobos, they're very closely related, they're sister species, separated by about a million and a half years of distinct evolution and their sociality is very, very different. In a very short amount of time, they developed very different social structures. The bonobo seems to be a bit more cooperative and egalitarian and gregarious. You know, they still have some, you know, competition and it can be ruthless, but in general, they're more pro-social than the chimpanzees, which are much more aggressive and hierarchical.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  But the common chimpanzees are more successful if you use numbers as your outfit. So it's, you know, our sociality, it was no, no guarantee of.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Success. So we don't really know. A lot of social evolution is speculative. But you know, when these hypotheses attract a lot of attention and a lot of scrutiny. And you have a lot of scientists who, you know, would try to think of clever ways to test them. So all we can do is say that this this explanation is has so far held up. And no, a lot without a time machine, we don't really know for sure. As you said, behaviors don't fossilize, but archaeology does. And we have a lot of evidence of an intricately pro-social ancestry. I mean, they're they're my favorite fossil of all time is called the old man from Dimonisi. He was it's a fossil of Homo erectus from about two and a half million years ago. And this is an old man who lost all of his teeth and survived.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Because we can tell by the healing of his bones that he survived for at least two years. Beyond having any teeth in his head. How does one survive before, you know, soft cooked foods? You know, the only explanation is that somebody was chewing his food for him. Someone was preparing his food, softening it. And why would you do this to this old man who was a burden to his group? Because he knew things.

• 53:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Or maybe he was really fud to have around.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, he he made him laugh, you know.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  But the but the point is he contributed like and and that's, I think, as far as I know, the oldest evidence we have that that just being older, you know, was a value to the group. Because you old people know things, you know, they've been around longer, they teach things. And so when and and by the way, that fossil does not stand alone. We have a lot of other examples of clearly individuals that had been helped by their group. That by by having all kinds of, you know, injuries and deformities and yet continue to live for years on them. They couldn't have done that without help. So we've been caring for each other, taking care of each other and also respecting each other's contributions. We've been doing that for a very, very. A long time and I I I'm pretty convinced that that's that our sociality is the key, the key aspect.

• 54:03Daniel Whiteson?

  What do you think is the sort of leading alternative hypothesis?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Um, well, there's a lot of people still to this day who have a hard time accepting any benefits to the group that a particular, you know, uh, genetic trait, certain adaptation would have because if it doesn't directly benefit the individual. And and quickly, some biologists, many biologists can't see a way that it would be selected for. I'm not convinced of that. I think that the tide is turning against the opponents of group selection. The reason why is it's not hard to imagine when you have multiple groups competing against each other, that a cooperative group would out compete a non cooperative or less cooperative group.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And and this is the work of of David Sloan Wilson, and he's been, he's been ringing this bell for 50 years. And the idea is that it's true that really competitive kind of antisocial instincts can be rewarded within a group. Rewarded meaning success. But when you have groups competing against each other, that actually becomes the more powerful selective force. And to be honest, Darwin mentioned this in The Descent of Man when he talked about, if you look at any two human groups when they clash, the differences between them that determined which group is successful is never genetic. Right? It's always has to do with something entirely non genetic, something social, something cultural, something technological.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  And if you can imagine that same competition playing out for millions of years, not just a few generations, but millions of years. What you would see emerging is very cooperative, pro social groups would tend to out compete those that aren't.

• 55:43Daniel Whiteson?

  But isn't that social behavior somehow encoded in the gene? So indirectly, it is still a genetic advantage, right?

• 55:49Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And so, and and that's why I think group selection is starting to experience this renaissance where people can recognize that if the genes make you more social, then your whole group really is better. And if your group is competing against the last one, then those genes would accumulate. You know, the jury's still out on a lot of these, a lot of these questions, but. One thing I would point out is that competition and cooperation, we think of them as opposites, but actually they involve all of the same skill sets, right? Because to cooperate with someone requires the same things to compete against them. You have to understand them, you have to be able to predict their behavior. You have to be able to manipulate them and whether that's good or bad, you know, depending on who it is.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  But, you know, if you can try to get someone to do what you want, you have to understand them. So it's like empathy, and I mean that as like emotional empathy, cognitive empathy. And when you have that ability, you can either work with them or work against them. So it's the same skill set. So what the difference is, who do you identify as group? So the, so what makes you cooperative versus competitive is in-group versus out-group identification, which to me still proves the point that you had cooperative groups competing against each other. Cooperation and competition do exist together at the same time in the same individuals. And that's why you can have someone who's, you know, extremely, you know, generous and nice to his friends and absolutely ruthless to his enemies.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  I mean, the classic case is that Nazi soldiers used to come home and kiss their children gently on the head. You know, like, we're all capable of both evil and pro-social acts. Even on a dime, we can switch, right? So, because I think it's the same parts of our brain. It's just whether or not we identify as pro-social or anti is in-group, out-group identification, which is depressing, given the way the world is increasingly pitting us against each other.

• 57:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Agreed.

• 57:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Fascinating. Do you think when we meet aliens, we will discover the same sort of social structures there? And the same sort of, you know, arguments apply?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Um, it's really hard to predict anything about how life outside of, you know, the selective pressures of Earth, how that would evolve.

• 58:00Daniel Whiteson?

  But the arguments you've made are fairly general, right?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's very hard to imagine how a very antisocial species could ever evolve very far. And we see that in our own planet, right? So there are some creatures who have evolved to be very solitary as adults and are fairly hostile to one another. The orangutan is our closest relative, at least among the males. They're just generally. Hostile, they they kind of hate each other. So it's probably a dead end. Evolutionarily, it's hard to imagine getting much. And you know, Tasmanian devils are sort of the same way that they pretty much hate one another.

• 58:34Daniel Whiteson?

  So we're not going to be visited by space orangutans. That's your prediction.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think like if you if you watch Star Trek and and you know, Galaxia, you know, all of these. It's hard to imagine the really nasty, anti ruthless ones ever becoming that successful. But I'm an optimist, so maybe that's where that's coming from is I just refuse to believe that evil is gonna win. But I don't know.

• 58:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that attitude is is helpful to keep us all going personally.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  But.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Even if it's wrong, it's a youthful illusion, right?

• 59:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I mean, you need something to get you up in the morning and get you out of bed and keep you going. Of course, maybe I'm speaking for myself now, but.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, use useful illusions. That's a whole area of evolutionary thought as well. Useful illusions, I mean, free will is very likely a useful illusion. Even our sense of self as an as a as an identity is a useful consciousness, useful illusion.

• 59:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, we are getting into a whole new episode there and we will have you back on to talk about that some other time. So.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  I look forward to it.

• 59:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you so much for answering that question and we'll chat with you later.

• 59:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, we're back to our regularly scheduled Daniel and Kelly programming. So Karen also wanted to know, why do we go crazy if we're isolated? And why doesn't that happen to other species like whales? And so the first thing I do when when I have a question like, why do we go crazy? Is first I want to ask, do we go crazy? Let's make sure that there's evidence for that statement. And so, you know, first of all, I'll note that some of us, there's a lot of variability in how our species responds to social isolation. Some of us really would rather be by ourselves.

• 1:00:15Daniel Whiteson?

  The Unabomber.

• 1:00:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. But for some of us loneliness is detrimental to our health. And so according to the Centers for Disease Control, social isolation and loneliness can increase a person's risk for heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression and anxiety, suicidality and self-harm, dementia and earlier death. Yikes. Okay, so lots, lots of things. Yeah. And so why? Well, you know, we, for, for species that are social, our brains are sort of hardwired to expect that level of connection. And so when we don't have that connection, when you want that connection, that can be stressful. And so there's evidence that people who are isolated, who are feeling isolated and feeling lonely, they have higher levels of stress hormones.

• 1:01:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we have these like hormones that our body releases when we're stressed out. And in acute stressors, so like, you know, if you need to run out in front of a car, to pull your dog out from, you know, the path of the car, having a big release of stress hormones is good because you, you know, you run out there quickly, you go back and your body then returns to normal. Like it helps you in that immediate moment. But if you have high levels of stress hormones all the time, that's bad for your body. It does things like mess with your immune system. And if your immune system is messed up, then when you get sick, you get sick worse. And it can do things like increase your risk of type 2 diabetes. And over time, it can make you sort of depressed and anxious and stuff like that. And so this can have negative impacts on our bodies,

• 1:01:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  especially if you're feeling isolated for a really long time. So Karen is right. Being isolated is definitely bad for your health, but it also is bad for other social animals as well. So any animal that's highly social does show evidence of being harmed, like physically, by being isolated socially. And I, and I don't know about whales in particular, because it's hard to do these kinds of studies on big animals like whales. But there are monkeys that have been in labs and we've infected them with viruses. And if they're socially isolated, they show similar things that you see in humans. They show high levels of stress hormones. Their immune systems don't respond to the virus as well. And so you see more- More of the virus particles moving around in their body and they're more likely to die

• 1:02:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  from that viral infection. So very similar to what we were talking about in humans.

• 1:02:34Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a terrible experiment. Not only are you making the monkey sick, but then you make them be on their own and see if that makes it even worse.

• 1:02:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, so there's a really interesting book by Robert Sapolsky called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And this was an example he used in that book. And so, you know, monkeys are often used as a way of trying to understand diseases that humans get associated by having chronic stress. And that book is a really interesting look at how chronic stress can impact a lot of different aspects of our lives. But yes, I agree, that's a horrible experiment. Here's another horrible experiment. Harry Harlow in the 1950s and the 1960s was living at a time where people were arguing that the main reason babies were attached to their moms is because they're a source of food. And that's it. They're a source of food.

• 1:03:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, is this the wire monkey experiment?

• 1:03:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is the wire monkey experiment. Oh, my God. And so, so he was like, no, it's not just food. It's because there is like, there's comfort and love and that and attachment and those things matter, too. And so to show that, he took infant rhesus monkeys, and he created two kinds of quote unquote moms. Both of them started from a wooden and wire frame, but one of them also had like a rubber or a foam support and then a terry cloth on top of it. And he alternated which one got a bottle. And so

• 1:03:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Which mom got a bottle?

• 1:03:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which quote unquote mom, yeah, got a bottle. And so if like comfort didn't matter, the baby should just stick to the bottle, wherever the bottle was. But it turned out if the bottle is on the wire mom, the baby will go over to the wire mom, drink its milk, and then immediately go back to the terry cloth mom for support. So clearly, it's more than just where the bottle is. It wants to feel like the comfort.

• 1:04:19Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's something just so sad about how a terry cloth is a stand in for comfort.

• 1:04:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know.

• 1:04:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Like not even the presence of another monkey. It's like, this thing is so desperate for love that it will find comfort in a towel.

• 1:04:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know, I know. And then they also did experiments where he just kind of put it in a space like without any sort of comfort and it would sort of stare at the wall and go in circles and just sort of freak out. And then if you would put it and it would hurt itself. And then if you put it in a room with other infant monkeys, eventually it would be totally confused about how to interact with them. And some of them stopped eating and would pass away. And I should start this episode with a disclaimer. Anyway, so that he did a variety of experiments and, and the monkeys that had just the terry cloth were in a much better shape. Like they would go out and explore the environment and they would like explore the environment and then run back to the terry cloth mom if they got scared. And then they would go back out and explore again. And the one that didn't have

• 1:05:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  a terry cloth mom in the cage at all would just kind of like sit in a corner, like huddled up sucking its thumb, being totally upset. And so, anyway, the point is, there are lots of other animals that really need love and social connection as well. And so, humans, we get totally messed up without it, but so do other animals also. And so, any animal that it seems like any animal that's wired to need social connection who misses, who doesn't have it, really suffers from that.

• 1:05:46Daniel Whiteson?

  This reminds me also of the sort of accidental terrible experiment of the like Eastern European orphanages where there were a lot of kids that were sort of raised mechanically in cribs and left in their cribs like most of their childhood until they were seven and then had difficulty forming attachments.

• 1:06:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. So I think that was in Romania, Ceausescu outlawed birth control. And so you ended up with a bunch of babies all at once from a bunch of parents that were not quite ready to take care of them. And half, maybe it wasn't half, but a subset of those children were then given to foster families and you could compare the outcomes. And the kiddos who ended up in foster families did a lot better. And so, yes, there's a lot of evidence that even just getting hugs makes a huge difference.

• 1:06:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, and then the last question was, what would happen if a human lived its whole life without ever having contact with another human?

• 1:06:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh my god, that's dark.

• 1:06:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is so depressing. This is where we hope that Kelly is not going to cry here. So the answer is nothing good. So for ethical reasons, this is of course, an experiment that we can't do. And any experiments that have happened, quote unquote, naturally, have had like abuse layered on top of them. So it's not like a clean experiment, essentially. So let's see. So there have been like, quote unquote, feral children that have been like, found out in the wild that have been raised by animals. And in these cases, these children had to have been, at least for a while, raised with adults. Because you know, they had to

• 1:07:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  have been born to adults. They had to have been raised up until a point where they could, you know, probably walk around.

• 1:07:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Wolves can't nurse an infant, for example.

• 1:07:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're probably not going to nurse an infant. Right. And so, one, there's a lot of evidence that some of these stories are actually just stories and didn't actually happen. There's also some evidence that some of these are cases of kids that hit age six or seven, their parents identified that the kiddo had a disability and they decided they were just going to abandon the kid in the woods. And then the kid was found, you know, months or years later. And the kiddo had difficulty communicating and it wasn't necessarily clear if that was the disability, or if that was the time alone in the woods.

• 1:08:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, humans are horrible, is really what I conclude from the feral children examples. But, but in general, if there is a lesson from the feral children stories, it appears to be that language is impacted. If there are any cases where children who could have developed language normally were released out into the wild, it seems that their language is impacted and some of their ability to exhibit social behaviors that we've come to expect from kids in society. Things like eating with a fork, and knowing which behaviors are acceptable when you're in private, and which behaviors are acceptable when you are in public.

• 1:08:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, can you bring up poop at the dinner table, only if there are biologists there?

• 1:08:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Exactly. Was Katrina feral?

• 1:09:03Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm just saying, behavior is surprisingly context dependent.

• 1:09:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is, it is. Okay. And then there are a handful of kids that you'd maybe call cases of isolation, where they were kept in houses where they weren't really interacting with people. But again, this is isolation layered with abuse. So it's not just isolation. So for example, in the 1970s, there was a kid named Jeannie, who for years was locked in a room by herself. She was tied to a toilet and was abused by her father. And

• 1:09:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, man.

• 1:09:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Eventually she was found and she had very few words. She was able to develop some words with a little bit of extra help, but she never was really able to develop grammar. And so grammar seems to be maybe something that we need to develop early if we're going to develop it at all, or it needs to be something that we hear a little bit when we're younger. And she also had some trouble with understanding what was societally acceptable. You know, again, like what is okay to do in public, what is not okay to do in public.

• 1:10:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 1:10:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, how close is it acceptable to be when you're interacting with someone, stuff like that? In general, like I read through a couple cases before I felt like I wasn't going to be able to not cry. And it seemed like in general, language and meeting societal expectations were the things that tended to get impacted most strongly by these isolation things. But again, in all of these cases, you also have like abuse layered in. So it's complicated.

• 1:10:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Isn't it amazing that you need like a license to drive a car, but not to become a parent?

• 1:10:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sometimes I do feel like it is amazing. Yeah.

• 1:10:41Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So bottom line for us, Kelly, what is the overall answer to Karen's question?

• 1:10:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm. My brain is so mired right now in all of the depressing stuff that we just talked about. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to lift it up a little bit. So our species does some absolutely amazing things socially, you know? So like, we share information with each other that has resulted in our ability to do things like create vaccines. Everybody knows how excited I am about vaccines that like save the lives of our children. We are able to share technologies that heat our homes and make it so we can live even in Virginia and love Virginia.

• 1:11:22Daniel Whiteson?

  And on that point, make jokes, which can like bring light to the darkness and make people feel happy and together, even if they're suffering.

• 1:11:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, exactly. And you know, these, these horrible stories of isolation that I read about? Part of why they're so horrible is because they are really rare.

• 1:11:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Uh, and for example, I live in a place where there is incredible support for, you know, for kiddos with disabilities and there's just, you know, incredible school system and there's just incredible support in general. Uh, and so we are a species that in a lot of cases takes care of each other. I would love to see us make more progress there. Uh, but in general, you know, there's, there's a lot to be excited about.

• 1:12:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And so thanks to everybody out there who has a job where you're taking care of people. You're not directly related to teachers and soldiers and firefighters and everybody out there who's helping to make the world a little bit of a better place. Thank you all.

• 1:12:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And, and one of the amazing things about our species is I think that maybe we are the only species where you really see altruism, where you'll see people make a huge donation or something to an organization anonymously, where they really don't expect to get anything in return. And so way to go, humans. We're not perfect, but a lot of us do some good stuff.

• 1:12:35Daniel Whiteson?

  And for all of these examples of terrible parenting, there are millions and millions of people out there who just love their kiddos to smithereens, right?

• 1:12:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh my gosh, yes. Amen.

• 1:12:46Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. And we love all of you and we love all of your questions and your curiosity and your desire to know everything we do and don't know about this amazing, beautiful and crazy universe.

• 1:12:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  And thank you to Corinne for sharing your question with us. I'm sorry it got so dark at the end there. We look forward to hearing what you thought of the answer.

• 1:13:06Speaker 04

  Hi guys. Thanks so much for answering my question. I don't mind the long-winded answer and I thought it was really interesting to take a tour of altruism throughout the animal kingdom. I also thought it was interesting that some animals will be promoting their genes by helping others who are closely related to them. Thanks so much. Bye.

• 1:13:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:13:39Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:13:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:13:52Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 1:13:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:14:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 1:14:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com. Hey, it's Covino and Rich Davis from Covino and Rich. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an off-road, ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks.

• 1:14:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between.

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  Built on reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  What's that? My fresh detector? Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:15:29Speaker 05

  Apparently we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.

• 1:15:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:16:14Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.