How War Shaped Human Evolution - David Geary - #1172

Dr David Geary is an evolutionary psychologist, cognitive scientist, professor at the University of Missouri, and author. Expect to learn the disturbing reasons why humans are so intelligent, why men are obsessed with status, money, and power, the biggest differences between male and female competition, why human progress comes at the cost of bloody battles and war, why violence is an inevitability of man, and much more… Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline’s leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Why is the human mind so unique or interesting?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, great, great question. We are highly unusual species in many, many ways. In terms of overall brain size, in terms of the ability to learn novel things like reading, writing, inventing, mathematics, self-awareness is probably much more highly developed in us than in any other species. So there's a whole variety of cognitive abilities, social competencies that far outstrip anything else that we see in the natural world.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Why? Why, why, why did humans become so much smarter than every other species?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. That's the topic of one of my earlier books, The Origin of Mind, which I'm now writing a second edition of, and so re-reviewing all of the literature on brain expansion and a variety of other things. I start about four or five million years ago with what are called the Australopithecines. So that would be, would include Lucy there, and looking at their brain size, which was a little bit bigger than chimpanzees. And they were around for several million years. And we see kind of a gradual increase in brain

• 1:29Speaker 01

  volume during that time. So, you know, not a lot going on, probably a little bit more sophisticated than chimps, as I said. What was interesting is that a lot of these Australopithecine species emerged, and there's a sister genus, Paranthropus, that emerged as well. So there's a lot of things going on there, probably all living in somewhat different ecologies. That's important because, you know, the more variety you have, the better chances that one of them is going to break from the pack and evolve into something different. And that happened probably a little over two

• 2:13Speaker 01

  million years ago, maybe two and a half million years ago or so, with the emergence of the genus Homo, with Homo habilis, habilis, the tool, toolmaker sort of individual. So we saw a jump in brain volume there, some indication of some reorganization of parts of the brain called the parietal cortex, involved in things like working memory and tool construction and so forth. I think the real important jump emerged about 1.8, 1.9 million years ago or so forth,

• 2:51Speaker 01

  with the emergence of Homo erectus. And there we see larger body size, we see more brain expansion, more expansion of these areas involved in tool construction and a variety of other things.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  We also saw that these species, these individuals, these species were beginning to expand in Africa. Expansion follows from, you know, you got the tools, you got a better ability to extract resources from the ecology, you're better hunting. Cooking emerged, you know, along the way with, with later members of these species. All of this increases the amount of calories, resources available to the group, which decreases mortality rates and increases population size. You get population expansions with these technological advances. And that

• 3:54Speaker 01

  creates a conflict dynamic, you know, you get bigger populations, you get fewer resources per capita, you get within-group competition. One way to deal with that is to expand into the territory of other groups, which appears to be what happened with H. erectus. And so they're moving into other groups. Archaeological data suggests increased conflict during that time between group conflict and violence. In fact, when we see, look at extinction probabilities in Homo species, I should say aside, there's at least eight of them at one point. The more

• 4:38Speaker 01

  species, Homo species that were around in an area, the higher the probability that one or several of them would go extinct. So I think we have the technological advances, the population expansion with increase within group competition, increase between group competition, and the elimination of competitor species, the slow elimination of competitor species.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  I think, I think the term is fucking chaos. That's what it sounds like.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it, it was a shit show. How's that?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it, it was, it was violent, and I'll, I'll get to that. They eventually expanded, actually quite a while ago, about 1.8 million years ago, into out of Africa, and then eventually Eurasia, then Europe. So they really expanded around, probably displacing a lot of other

• 5:42Speaker 01

  primate species in the process. Eventually, we get to humans, and they are, I'm skipping a few points here, get to humans, and they had a couple of attempts to expand out of Africa, but didn't quite make it. Probably the Neanderthals put them in check. And eventually, they moved into Eurasia about 60,000 years ago. Eventually displaced, Neanderthals, I think, replaced Neanderthals. There's some interbreeding and stuff, but the archaeological records suggest

• 6:22Speaker 01

  that there was a lot of violence as well. So we have a couple of things here. One is organized coalitional competition. I'm arguing in the book and in my, I got a couple of pieces on this in my Substack, that this was driven by men, by males. Male kin-based coalitions was the start of it. In humans and chimpanzees, bonobos, and apparently our ancestors, men stayed in the birth group, women migrated out to avoid inbreeding. When you have the

• 7:06Speaker 01

  one sex that stays in the birth group, they have an increased chance of forming coalitions, integrating into coordinated social groups for collective action. So we see that with the males. So I think that was, the males were pushing the expansions. And then you add the technological changes with the tools, tool construction driven by males as well. A lot of these tools, some of them for hunting or doing, you know, things related to agriculture, but a lot of them are just weapons. They were organized to expand their territory. And we

• 7:50Speaker 01

  see that evidence, you know, in the archaeological data. We see it in the population genetic data, where we look at the number of individuals who were our male ancestors and our female ancestors. You can do that by looking at the Y chromosome, for example, which is just passed down from male to male, or the mitochondrial DNA, which is involved in intracellular energy production, it just goes from female to female lineages. So you can track female lineages and male lineages. And the process that almost certainly began with Homo erectus continued

• 8:33Speaker 01

  up to, up through human prehistory, and continues beyond, well beyond that. So around, oh, 7,000 years ago or so, with, after the early emergence of agriculture, we began to see population expansions, agricultural communities moving into hunter-gatherer areas.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  At one point, we had 17 female relatives for every one male relative.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was this this massive drop off in male diversity lineage diversity like five to 7,000 years ago. What what happened?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  That that was a ma- yeah, massive drop drop off of that.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Where most male lineages disappeared throughout the world, you know, in various places.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  So, and that data suggests that it was, and it has to be because it's a Y chromosome, it has to be male kin groups that are driving that. Otherwise, it'd be you'd have more variation in.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Can you explain, can you simplify that a little bit? Explain what you mean there?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you have an organized male kin group with technology, weapons and so forth, that is expanding out, they're all going to have the same or very similar, you know, you know, fathers, sons, uncles and so forth. They're all going to have very similar Y chromosomes or identical Y chromosomes. They expand into another group, wipe that group out, that other group's Y chromosome.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  You mean wipe the other group of men out, not wipe the entire other tribe out, presumably keep the women?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Usually keep the women. Sometimes you get rid of them to it. It it it just depends. The archaeological stuff is is variable. If you're going to get rid of anybody, it's the men. So you take care, you take out the men, their Y lineage is is gone. I mean, it's erased from history. And the only way you could get the pattern of the 17 to one ratio is is intense, organized violence. That's just what must have happened.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  The violence must have discriminated to victimize men particularly though, right? Or else you would have just had a total population that would have dropped down and it would have been 17 times fewer people overall. But it's not. It's 17 times fewer men than there are women.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  That's right. So, you know, the other possibility for population crashes is disease, famine, so forth.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  But it would be disease and famine that only affected men.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah. If it was if it was disease and famine, the women would have been severely affected as well, probably as affected its men. So whatever happened, it was specific to men. And, you know, and when that happens, it's other men killing.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  What a, so, you know, for almost all of human history and ancestral evolutionary history, we've had relatively stable numbers of male female split. And then you have this

• 11:53Speaker 00

  incredibly novel sex ratio change. What do you think that caused to? Because that has to have some cultural sociological repercussions that stick about for a good while. But it's not going to be easy to rebalance that. It's going to very much put the power reproductively into the hands of the few men that are still around.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. And and that's exactly what happened. So we we can step back a little bit and look at male male competition among primates. And when males are highly competitive among primates, males are bigger than females. They're more aggressive than females. And there's more reproductive skew. So the more dominant males reproduce disproportionately, you know, to their numbers than less dominant males. And so you get their Y chromosome, you know, increasing in frequency across generations. And that that occurs in chimpanzees, mandrills, a lot of other primates.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Almost certainly occurs, does occur in hunter gatherer societies. It's kind of people talk about equality there. And often there's equality of material resources because nobody has much. But there's inequality in terms of hunting competencies, you know, physical skills, being a warrior, whatever. Reproductive variation is there, especially among men, where the top 10, 20% disproportionately reproduce. So the basic pattern has been there for millions and millions of years, for sure. If we look at the Australopithecines, the males are 50% to 100% bigger than the females,

• 13:47Speaker 01

  indicating very intense male male competition and reproductive skew. So what we're talking about here with the elimination of all of these male lineages is just a continuation of the same pattern, but amplified in intensity through a coalitional based, coalitional male kin based competition aided by technology, weapons and better social organization.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  Right. So is the suggestion that there would have been some groups of some tribes, some groups of males who accessed coordination, skill, tactics, weapons at a rate that basically gave them an unfair advantage on the battlefield. And these groups of men were able to move across the planet pretty quickly and wipe out other potentially competitive males. So previously, when we think about chimps, yeah, sometimes there are intergroup conflicts, but a lot of the time it's intra group conflicts.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  It's the alpha currently being taken down by number two, three and four. And this is a roving bands of males, kinship based males with better tactics than their competitors. And then consistently just leveling up over and over again, the better tactics, the better weapons, meeting poorer tactics, poorer weapons, wipe them out, keep the women, mate with the women, continue, just rinse and repeat. It's like a proto Genghis Khan.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Right, right. It's an evolutionary arms race driven by male coalitional competition and technological advantages. So on my Substack

• 15:39Speaker 01

  cases, and it will be in the book, it will be more elaborated in my book when it eventually gets done. I talk about the Yamnaya expansion from.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  What is that?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just a nomadic group, pastoralist group that was, you know, around in the caucuses. They had wagons, horses and other, a lot of weapons, technological advantages. And they moved into Central and then eventually Northern Europe and displaced all the hunter gatherer groups. And there are some evidence that they did reproduce with some of the women there. So some interbreeding, but a lot of displacement as well. And if we look at ancient history and we look at ancient DNA, which is now available, there is a mix of interbreeding

• 16:35Speaker 01

  and just outright population replacement. One group just replace, one group of men replacing another group of men.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's interesting. So I'm I'm kind of fascinated by whether male male competition is much more zero sum because historically, some men reproduced enormously while others sort of didn't reproduce at all. The difference between male competition and female competition ancestrally?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely critical. In hunter gatherer societies, the variation or reproductive skew, however you want to talk about it among men is about three times higher than it is about among women. So, meaning that there are more men who have a lot of kids and a lot of men who don't reproduce at all. Most women will have babies and but some are more successful at keeping them alive or they have one or two more or whatever. So there's some variation among women, but much more among men. Now, that threefold variation in reproductive skew

• 17:42Speaker 01

  was amplified to about 100 fold difference when we move into early empires.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  So, you know, in China, India, Eurasia and so forth. So the dominant men in their coalition had many, many wives, killed off competitors or.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  What sort of year, what sort of time, time zone are we talking about? What yours or this?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Well, so probably, you know, the, the crash of all the Y lineage, the, the male lineage is five, seven thousand years ago, around then, was probably part of that pattern. But we don't have an historical record of that. But then when we move into, um, the, you know, the Empire Building, we're looking about four million years ago, or four thousand years ago or so. So fairly recent, continuing into the Bronze Age and Iron Age. And then, of course, you get Genghis Khan, who had eight hundred kids or so.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  How much of modern male ambition do you think is a legacy of this asymmetry of reproductive lottery?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think most of it is, if not all of it. There are studies of, you know, we have the, the population genetic data showing that, you know, some males reproduce much more than others. So obviously, there's intense competition there. If you look at traditional hunter-gatherer pastoral societies today, and even modern societies, there is a consistent relation between men's cultural success, being good at whatever is important in that culture, and their marriage prospects, number of children, and so forth. It's a very, very consistent relation. It's clear that men who are status-driven, focused, and

• 19:41Speaker 01

  are successful in those endeavors reproduce more than other men.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's kind of fascinating to think that men's obsession with status and achievement and influence can just ultimately be traced back to reproductive competition.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Right, right. That, that is what it is. And that is what it is in these other primates, where you get a lot of intense male-male competition. The slackers just aren't attractive to females generally. Um, and they don't do well in male, uh, male status hierarchies.

• 20:12Speaker 00

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  offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. What's fundamentally different about female-female competition? Because it's not just like they're passive actors when it comes to what's happening ancestrally. But how does female competition and male competition differ?

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, great question. They're definitely not passive actors. So what, uh, what the, the model I'm building is that basically, male coalitional violence, initially kin-based, and then kind of expanding out to, say, a shared language. Everybody that speaks, you know, language X kind of will form together under periods of stress. And then, then ideological stuff like religion, or whatever ideology it is as a way of creating larger and larger groups. These male coalitions with technological advances, which is driven

• 22:06Speaker 01

  by conflict. So if you look at the Ukrainian war now, all sorts of advances in drone, uh, use of drones, of robots and so forth in combat, it's all driven by competition. So the same thing, the organization, the technological changes, as, um, uh, societies expand, you get different cultural niches in there. You get a political class, military class, an ideological class, and then an entrepreneurial class in there generally. So you get different niches to compete. And men are building these institutions, coalitions of men, and societies.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Women are embedded within these institutions, and their evolved strategy is to create kind of a social network within these groups that provides them so, social support and allows them to, um, extract resources, basically, from, from the group. That would be from the husband or other, other folks, um, that they're, they're connected to. So they're very good at working individual relationships, knowing all of, you know, who's friends with who, who is, um, you know, a coalitional partner with this other person, who's in

• 23:32Speaker 01

  a conflict or whatever, using all of this information to kind of manipulate and, um, improve their own status within the group, and also promote the well-being and status of their, um, children. So, so in, in one of my substacks, I talk about the manipulations and all of the drama, I guess, that happens in, uh, like harem settings, where you have a, you know, an emperor that has multiple wives, or concubines, or whatever. Lots of drama going on behind the scenes, trying to move their sons into positions where they'll,

• 24:13Speaker 01

  they'll become emperor, or high official, or whatever. It's all very subtle, typically, called relational aggression. Uh, but it is active, for sure, and has consequences. The, the women who are good at that sort of thing typically, um, had healthier kids, and are more likely to move their kids into positions that would allow them to be successful in adulthood. So it's not building institutions, it is working the dynamics within them.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Why was it not female-female coalitions roving around and attacking other groups?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and that's a great question, because if we, we look at primates, old world primate species, kind of Africa, Asia, there are actually more primate species where females stay in their birth group and males take off. And so you have more opportunity for female coalitions to emerge, because it's easier among kin. And in fact, in a lot of these species, there are female coalitions. They do organize along, you know, mothers, aunts, grandmas, and all that, uh, to protect important food sources, like, you know, fruit trees, or whatever, uh, the case might be. So we definitely do see coalitional competition

• 25:33Speaker 01

  among females. One of the differences is that, uh, as you mentioned before, male-male competition is more of a zero-sum game. Female-female competition is there, but it's lower intensity. They don't kill each other, and they can't really escalate it if they have, you know, if they're breastfeeding, or they're pregnant, or whatever. And the, um, the cost-benefit trade-offs are, are different. If you are female, and you're pregnant, and you get into a massive fight, you got, you're risking an abortion, or injury, or death, or whatever. Um, but for a guy, he's a low-status guy, middle-status guy, if he doesn't really

• 26:16Speaker 01

  push the envelope as much as he can, he's out of the gene pool. And so the, the trade-offs are, as you said, and I said, uh, much more zero-sum for male, particularly when you get a polygynous system.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  How much do you think war, we can attribute to war, the building of civilization?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Um, I think war was the primary driver of the building of civilizations.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Other people have said that as well, that you know, you get these coalitions that when you get the between groups stuff, you get advantages to larger and larger groups there. So nomadic raiders invading agricultural communities was a common dynamic before the emergence of empires. And then so the agricultural communities unite, maybe start building defensive structures and so forth. The nomads need to unite, better organized to get larger groups to be competitive. And you have this, this arms race situation where both sides are ramping

• 27:30Speaker 01

  up and developing new technologies and so forth. And as you expand, societies, you know, not all of the guys can be in the military. You need weapons makers, you need people to do the harvest, you need entrepreneurs, you know, for markets, you, you have a, you know, economic diversification of society. But, but the stressor for the building of these large groups to begin with was between group competition.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, I think you say that intense cooperation and intense conflict are sort of two sides of the same coin. What do you mean by that?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Right. So, yeah, a lot of social scientists don't like to hear that we're a violent species. They just, it's kind of like off the table for them, which means they'll never fully understand our evolution. And they focus on the ultra cooperative side of people. People are intensely cooperative. I mean, we live in large cities, a lot of this, large societies, multiple layers of organization. You can drive down the street and, you know, nobody's going to do anything to you. Go to a shopping center, you're safe and so forth. And different people are doing different things, amazingly cooperative amongst non relatives.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  And most other species of cooperation is typically among kin. And the question is, so how do we get there? And my argument is, well, what are the benefits to cooperation in large groups? And the primary benefit is defensive or offensive in terms of competing with other groups. Now, the, the competition doesn't need to be violent. It could eventually merge into trade wars or other ways of competing across groups. But I think violence was the driver, the initial driver. It's the other side, more, more violence, more push for large scale cooperation.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I'm trying to work out why civility is a thing at all. If competition and prestige are our main human drivers, I, I don't understand why social hierarchies and monarchies would form. Why isn't it just chaos all the time?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah. In, in, yeah, there, there's an interesting pattern, pattern there with the formation of, you know, early polities like, like nation state, you know, states, and then, you know, larger empires. Lot of conflict in the beginning, when a hierarchy is established, finally, a group of males and their kin and their supporters and so forth, have kind of taken control of society and organized that. They then develop systems for suppressing in-group competition and of course suppressing people who want to displace them. So you have a lot of violence at first and then suppression

• 30:37Speaker 01

  of that, once the, the hierarchy is established, you know, and eventually people get tired of that and there's revolts and so forth, or externally displaced or, or whatever. But the formation of a hierarchy does suppress in-group violence.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Hmm. If conflict helped to produce intelligence and cooperation, technological progress and stuff, what happens when humans become substantially more peaceful?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  What happens? I think they, they get bored and they start attacking each other on social media. You got cancel culture. So a lot of the aggression and manipulation and social status driving is still there. It's just digital or a lot of the violence part of it is stripped out. But the motivation to be right and to have social influence and, and move up whatever hierarchy is important to you is, is still there. It's just expressed in a different way.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Why do you think humans evolved such an extraordinary capacity to imagine the future?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Right. So part of the process of this between group competition and also kind of the within group stuff, we see the evolutionary elaboration of a number of brain systems. So we can look at that by looking at macaque brains and chimp brains and human brains, and then look at the organization of some of these large scale brain networks. Two critical ones, one is the default mode network, now there's the frontal parietal network. And in both of these, they're there in, you know, the monkeys, apes and people. But for

• 32:31Speaker 01

  people, they're much more integrated with other systems and the white matter tracks of connectivity from the front of the brain to the back of the brain where some of the work goes on, is much more elaborated in monkey than in chimpanzees and macaques, for example, and much more elaborated in humans than in chimpanzees. And some of these areas are evolutionary hotspots, meaning there's been a lot of genetic changes in them. So, so the default mode network is the ability to generate, you know, a mental simulation

• 33:14Speaker 01

  of something going on in the world. So if you just kick back, you know, it's Saturday, you're relaxing, not thinking about anything intense, your default mode network is going to kick in and you've got some daydreaming sort of things there, usually self referential images and thinking about stuff that is important to you. So that's kind of the mental model kind of aspect telling you what's important to you. What's important in human evolution, since we have these better connections between the front and the back, we can take that system and generate images ourself. Instead of just reliving past stuff, we can take

• 33:58Speaker 01

  that system and generate a future state. So it's like, where do we want to be five years from now? So in my classes, I, I talk about the system. And when people fantasize about things, you know, you could fantasize, well, I'm homeless. Yeah, don't have any rent to pay. I don't have to worry about, you know, paying the gas bill or those sorts of things. But people don't do that. They fantasize about being higher status, having a better job, having a bigger house, whatever it is, having luxury food, living in a, you know, high status, you know, cool environment and so forth. They're thinking about things

• 34:42Speaker 01

  that would enhance their social status. And historically, gaining those things would have reduced their mortality risks and reduced the mortality risk of their children. So we get these models of, you know, this is where I want to be in X number of years or months or whatever. And this is where I am now. And now we kick in the rational problem solving frontal parietal system can now think about, okay, what can I do to reduce the gap between these? You know, I go to school for four years and get an engineering degree, get a good job or something like that. So you're thinking ahead and problem

• 35:21Speaker 01

  solving and, you know, trying to figure out how to get where you want to be. System also works with, you know, more intimate dynamics. It's like, okay, I want to get person A to do this for me. And I know this person pretty well. And I know that if I try strategy one, he or she is going to reject. It's not going to happen. Strategy two might work sometimes. And this is how I would do it. So you rehearse the whole thing in your head and tweak it before you actually try it out in the real world. And so you're able

• 36:01Speaker 01

  to create various scenarios of the future, figure out different approaches to make the future happen the way you want it to happen. And you can all do that without, you know, kind of imagined scenarios before they happen and mentally try out things to get people, other people to do what you want. And I would think anybody who has good abilities in that area are going to have a real advantage over folks that really can't think too far into the future.

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• 37:40Speaker 00

  Do you think that the ability to imagine a better life and how the future might unfold also limits our capacity to enjoy the life that we have? I think about, you know, you see a dog and people always look at their dog and it just seems so content. If you were able to find a common currency of happiness between us and other animals, do you think that the animals would sort of win in terms of moment to moment fulfillment and happiness?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, yeah, it probably depends on the animal. You know, if you're a gazelle and a pack of lions is parallel walking with you, probably you're not too happy. But, um, yeah, I, I think, you know, your dog and cat, they're not going to have the same self-awareness as you, as you're going to have. They're not going to be evaluating themselves relative to other dogs and cats. And, you know, in a, in a good context, they don't really need to think about moving up in the status hierarchy or maintaining their position in the, the status hierarchy. So, you know, in a large, dynamic social system, there's always movement going on.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  You always have to, you know, try to move up or maintain or, you know, anticipate potential conflicts or whatever. And, and so, yeah, I think that, that does occupy, uh, people more than it would say a dog.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. So when it comes to childhoods and, and sort of how human babies came about, I've done, I've listened to some really interesting stuff around how fathers saved the human civilization because babies' heads were getting so big. There was this sort of battle between brain size and mother's hip width and how much they can locomote throughout their lives and stuff, which I think is kind of endlessly fascinating. Also had a conversation recently about if humans become Martians, if humans move to Mars, bone density is going to be way lower, which means that women's hips are not going to be able to deal with natural births in the way that they could. So almost all children are going to be born through C-section.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  If we move into space, lower bone density, higher risk of, of tearing and horrible fractures and stuff during pregnancy or giving, through giving birth. But then as soon as you go to C-section, you no longer have the constraint on babies' heads anymore. So now we've maybe had this brief window in human history, hominin history, heads get bigger, brains get bigger, heads get bigger, brains get bigger, heads stay the same size. They actually got probably a bit too big for a while. A lot of women died in childbirth. We pull it back, those ones aren't going to continue. We keep it the same, we keep it the same. And then we move to Mars and then it's just off to the races again.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. If, if, if the same competitive dynamics that initially kind of pushed the expansion of brain size continued on Mars, then yeah, that's what would happen.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  What's unique about human children and the way that we develop as babies and infants?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a, a number of things there. And I can circle in with dads. So Mark Flynn and I argued 25 years ago now that our Australopithecine ancestors were more like gorillas, uh, single male harems, a few females in the offspring, where males and females form long-term relationships. The males are, uh, at least hang around and play with the offspring. And most importantly, they protect them. So you have the, the, the germ of a human family there and human paternal investment from that perspective that goes back five million years or more. Excuse me.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  You get a human gatherer group when the males start coordinating together. Then you have multiple of these kind of male-centered families, uh, in the group. But, uh, moving forward, you know, as brain size increased, as humans got better at tool construction, hunting, extracting resources from the environment, uh, there was, you know, part of the brain expansion was due to that type of thing. And so of course the, you know, the birth canal needs to be larger for one. The other thing is that, uh, you know, kids are born premature.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  So if you were to take gestation time, uh, for a human baby and say, well, we're going to stretch that out until the infant's brain is just as mature as say a chimpanzee infant's brain. The gestation period would have to be almost two years and nobody wants to birth a two year old. So, yeah, so they're born premature in a sense, and so they're much more dependent on, uh, care. They have a longer, uh, growth period for brain and other things.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  But as, as humans got better at getting stuff out of the ecology, this also, uh, meant that kids had to learn how to make tools, how to hunt, how to forage and so forth. And studies of hunter-gatherer groups suggest that it takes a long time to become a skilled hunter or skilled at foraging or whatever needs to be done in a traditional group or some early farming types of things. So some, for some things, they may not be experts until they're 30 or so. So you need this delayed period of basically learning how to be successful in whatever cultural niche, uh, that you're in.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I am, I'm kind of fascinated by how many of the adaptations that we see among humans are done in an attempt to compensate for how meotinous and useless we are as children. What, looking sort of across this entire history, what is the part of modern human behavior that makes the least sense until you understand our history, in your opinion?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  That makes the least sense?

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. What's this, or what's the thing that an ancestral perspective, intergroup conflict and the pressures and stuff, what does that explain best in the way that people behave in the modern world?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the, um, well, the patriarchy, I guess, you know, we hear a lot about that. And, you know, a lot of debate about it, but basically my argument is that, well, yeah, it's real. The male-based coalitions came together, you know, fought for probably since Araptus emerged, you know, 1.7, 1.8 million years ago. So it's been going on for a long time. They build institutions, they build culture, the cultures.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  And therefore we would expect that males will dominate in these institutions and be motivated to dominate in these institutions.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  And also have the capacities, predisposition capability, um, to dominate as well.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Right. And, and domination in there means you have social skills, you have the ability to organize large numbers of other individuals, mostly men, to engage in collective action that increases the group's competitive ability. You can see that militarily, obviously, but also in any corporation, um, any other, you know, a football team, whatever, the, the coordinated behavior of the individuals is what is going to influence, um, the outcome of the competition. Now, women didn't have that same selection pressure.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Their pressure was more working within the, you know, the confines or so forth of, of these institutions and involved developing, um, more intimate network of relationships that provide social support. A lot of these networks are focused on consensus, um, you know, agreement, support and so forth and not, they're not hierarchical. Hierarchical is, is frowned upon in these, uh, female networks. So they try to level out each other and they're focused on the dynamics within it rather than coordinating together to compete against another group.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  So then when you take bunches of females, um, when they begin to dominate, this has been talked about recently, social media and elsewhere, uh, move into these male systems that are hierarchical, organized for out-group competition, they don't function as well because the, the, the female default is to focus on in-group dynamics, not coordinating in-group behavior so that their collective actions will make them all better at outdoing this other group. And so there's a lot of confusion and consternation, arguments and so forth, um, over that dynamic right now.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  But I, I think, I think it's real and explains a lot of, uh, current social issues.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Why is that unpalatable for a lot of people?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Um, well, because uh there are a lot of women who are now competing in traditionally male hierarchies, uh male professions, so forth, and they're designed to function, you know, hierarchically, collective action and so forth. Women generally don't like that type of social dynamic and system. And so they, you know, they do something else. But it creates problems because a subset of women are work focused and status focused,

• 48:13Speaker 01

  about fifteen percent or so. Um, and they're directly competing against men in these hierarchies. And a lot of them aren't doing as well as they think they should do. And so they're looking at the status differentials between the most successful men and the most successful women, and there's still gaps there. And so they come up with post hoc explanations like bias, systematic sexism and so forth. But the differences are really, uh, men are more focused on status. They're willing to trade off friends, health and so forth, to move with status. And they more easily join together collectively to finish um

• 48:58Speaker 01

  common goals and projects or whatever. That's weird. Female groups are less efficient at that.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  What about the desire for control? I never really thought about this as a fundamental human motivation, but you seem to think that it is.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  So I use use a history, uh, uh, a kind of rule of thumb heuristic that, you know, we have a fundamental motivation to control. And that doesn't mean, you know, you're you're you want to be Hitler or Genghis Khan or whatever. But it means that you want to organize your world in ways that reproduce um the outcomes that increase social status previously, reproductive opportunities and and so and so forth. So you so the things that help

• 49:52Speaker 01

  the human brain um evolve, so status related competition, for example, you want to recreate those conditions. So you want to move up a status hierarchy. Um, or i- if you're a woman, you want to create a network, social network that will provide um social support for you, help with your kids, sometimes economic support or whatever. So you want to organize your world and control it in a sense that you're you're recreating the

• 50:31Speaker 01

  same networks that led to the evolution of these systems. Now, I I think of it in terms of kind of a concentric rings. Some people, they just want to control their day to day life, their job, what happens at the job, what happens with their friends and networks. And then other folks, you get Hitler, Genghis Khan, other despots, want to control the world. It's just the the scope of that, which means they want to organize the world at whatever scope it is in ways that are beneficial to them.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  So control is, I am able to change the environment and the future to disproportionately benefit me versus other people?

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty, pretty much. It it is. You want to organize the world. So social relationships, for example, who's friends with who, who you're friends with, you know, what what's going on in this network. You're going to put energy into moderating or curating those relationships. So the pattern fits what's your best in your best interest. They pay attention to you over other women, for for example, when you need it. And if it doesn't happy happen, you get angry or upset or whatever, which triggers the default mode network and these other networks that kick in the problem solving. It's like, okay,

• 52:06Speaker 01

  yeah, things aren't quite right. What do I need to change? How do I need to, you know, interact with this network in order to realign things so that it's now working best for me?

• 52:20Speaker 00

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• 53:05Speaker 00

  And right now, you can get twenty-five dollars off, bringing it down to three hundred and forty bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save twenty-five dollars by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Are humans ever truly satisfied with the amount of control that they have? Or will we always want more?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, unfortunately, I think uh it's hard to be fully satisfied for a lot of people. So I talk, I'll talk about it in the book and I talk about it in the Substack, sort of things that, you know, there is and has been a very uh clear relation between social status and mortality risks of you and your kids. So moving up the status hierarchy, men and women, uh, increase your chances of survival and increases the chances of your kids surviving, especially when shit hits the fan. There's a plague or a food

• 54:10Speaker 01

  shortage or something like that. Uh, the relation between mortality risks and status is inverse, higher the better. And, you know, when shit hits the fan, it's unpredictable. You don't know when another group is going to invade typically. You don't know when uh, you know, the another plague or whatever is going to hit. You don't know what the growing season is going to be and so forth. So you can't relax. It it's a kind of a, you know, and you get this within species arms race. So you've always got to move up a little bit as protection, as a buffer against when the bottom falls out. And so I think

• 54:52Speaker 01

  that's why people are so obsessed with social comparisons. A lot of social media is flaunting, showing off. And then people are comparing themselves to others. And and we have the self-aware, I think, that drove self-awareness to some point. I know this competency, A, B, and C, and these other people are getting them higher up in whatever status hierarchies is important to you. And then you need self-awareness to reflect on your own skills on those same traits and think about, okay, well, how do I improve those so that I too can move up

• 55:31Speaker 01

  a bit? And and so, yeah, it it is unfortunate. It's hard for a lot of people to break out from that and relax because we live, most of us live very comfortable lives, at least in the Western world, lot of resources, not much relative relative to what we had historically, not much violence. So in absolute terms, things are great. We should be just kicking back, watching TV, playing video games or whatever. And, you know, and some people are able to do that, but a lot just can't turn it off. And it's because of the relation between uh status and mortality risk and the unpredictability of when the population will crash again.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  And ancestrally, that would have been very adaptive. We, it doesn't really matter whether or not you're feeling satisfied or or at peace as you go to bed tonight. What matters is whether or not you're driven enough to keep on pushing forward. I I mean, it's kind of surprising to me, to be honest, that passive pleasure is something that exists at all. But the fact that we are able to be as partially happy in non-pursuit as some humans are.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Is kind of amazing. It's that wow, you really threaded the needle through this minefield of evolutionary pressures to, if it's anything other, you know, there's like common productivity wisdom, which is, hey, make sure that you don't just use your rest time as a foot off the gas in service of putting your foot back on the gas even harder tomorrow, right? You, you should be going for a walk because you enjoy going for a walk and it fulfills you, not because you listen to an Andrew Huberman podcast episode that suggests that it means that you are 15% more productive tomorrow if you go for a walk this evening, something like that. But like, if you look at the evolutionary pressures, everything should be pushing us towards survival and reproduction, whether

• 57:33Speaker 00

  that's intergroup conflict or intra-group status seeking, whether it's resource gathering or social game playing or skill acquisition or weapon development or whatever, everything is in service of that because we had to negotiate for almost all of human history, really, really aggressively negotiate with an environment that was uncivil, uncivilized, out of our control. Heat could have killed us, cold could have killed us. We didn't know if there was going to be a famine. But the fact, the fact that we're able to just in small micro doses chill and just be happy kind of blows. That's the most amazing thing of all of this. Do you not agree?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you have to, even when you're pushing hard, you have to recuperate. You need recuperation times. If you're working, you know, if you're physically doing a lot of labor, whatever, fighting, whatever, you need to pull back and recuperate to, you know, you're going to deplete resources, mental resources, physical resources or whatever. So you need these break periods for your body mentally to recuperate. And, and I think that's, that's what you're getting at. We, some people just have larger recuperation periods, you know, sometimes decades. They just take it slow. But, but, but that's true in other species as well. So with northern elephant seals, for example, lot of intense

• 58:52Speaker 01

  male male competition, five, 10% of the males sire most of the offspring. Some of the males just don't compete. They, they're slackers. They hang out on the beach. They live longer than the other males. Um, you know, they, you know, don't reap, but, but there's going to be some of those in every generation that just kind of either can't compete or don't want to put the effort into it, or just want to take advantage of the here and now, whatever's available.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  If you were to assess the successful people in the modern world, the ones that we look to and think, wow, their ambition and competence has really driven them to do amazing, impressive things. How likely do you think it would be that the traits that made that person successful in this environment would be the same ones that would make them successful 50,000 or 100,000 years ago?

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Right. Great question. So, yeah. So when we get larger societies, we get kind of different types of classes and hierarchies. The main ones have been talked about, I said before, military, political, entrepreneurial and ideological. Certainly is the military type of, of class and probably in cooperation with the political class that had the earlier advantages, you know, with, with Rome and, and other early empires. Those are the people that dominated things. As a society grows, you know, you get more entrepreneurial

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  folks, ideological folks, you get the Roman Empire, kind of an empire at some point that has a lot of social influence.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, social complexity, communication.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Right, right. And then the entrepreneurial class raises up and they become wealthier. And so now they want to compete with the political class for social power and so forth. And, and you see these groups competing. So in China, as I understand it, the political class kind of keeps the entrepreneurial class and even the military class in check to maintain their power. Here in the US, you know, it's more of a capitalistic and the entrepreneurial class is very wealthy and therefore much more influential than in other empires where the political class kept them down. But the entrepreneurial class

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  or the, you know, entertainment class, I guess that's part of the, you know, entrepreneurial stuff. So, you know, I liked the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger and stuff, but my guess is he wouldn't last long on a medieval battlefield.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I get the sense too. It seems like it's a, it's a unique, it's more precise, it's more civilized, it's going to be more about

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  nonviolent competition. You're going to need to be much more socially aware, complexity, what does this person want? Interpersonal communication is going to be way more, I, I get the sense that maybe even like pro-sociality and extroversion might be a little bit more important because people can, they don't need you from a resource gathering perspective quite so much. Maybe in the past, you would have put up with an asshole that was really great with a spear because you go, oh, hey, wait, like if we, if we, yeah, sure, he's a dick. But if we piss him off too much, the next time that we need some meat, we're screwed. Or the next time that the tribe comes along, we're screwed. But when you

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  outsource that to a supermarket and law enforcement, you think, ah, I don't really need that in quite the same way that I used to. Yeah, it's, it's really fascinating. And this is, it's mismatch, and we're talking about mismatch, evolutionary mismatch, but it's coming at it from a really interesting angle, which is what would have been adaptive from a group perspective and an individual competency perspective that now is repurposed or warped? There's this meme I always think about. It's a guy who is working in retail, young dude, like really, really big, like Jack guy, looks like he was maybe a football player in college or something with a shirt and a tie on, kind of a shit shirt and a tie on, stood at the

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  front of a Bed Bath & Beyond. And the, the caption above it was, 15,000 years ago, I would have been a proud warrior. And this pivot from a brain-based, a brain-based to a brain-based economy, increased social, all this stuff is, I know, it's just, I would love to see what happens if we could create another virtual reality, just pick everybody up, drop them in it and be like, how does everyone get on? Like, is Elon Musk that just driven and competent and, and flexible and tyrannical and megalomaniacal that he is able to still win? Or does the fact that he doesn't have this capacity mean that he doesn't so much? It's, it's, it's pretty unique.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. He's, he's, he's in a kind of a mix of an entrepreneurial and technological kind of hierarchy. So he's able to mix them together and almost certainly is using a lot of the default mode in the, in the frontal parietal networks to think about things in new ways, electric cars, or try to do existing technologies better. So he's, you know, the ambition, but he's also using these very complex evolved systems to try to think through better ways to do, you know, whatever, A, B, C, he's focusing

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  on in the time. Now, going back 50,000 years, 100,000 years, 200,000 years, people like him would have been the ones inventing the new tools, the new weapons and stuff. Maybe not on the front line, but the technological advances were, are critical piece of where we are now. It's a human coalitional formation, the between group, social competition and the technology, the, the male-based coalitional between group and the technology. Take away any of those and we're not here.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

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• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernd wisdom at modern wisdom at checkout. Near beer. Terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. If you could bestow on most normal people a broad understanding or a broad lesson or principle from your study of the human mind, what do you think would improve everyone's quality of life or their understanding of themselves and the world around them?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of what people do is driven by kind of unconscious or their feelings about, you know, so-and-so's got more than I do and it's making me feel bad and so forth. And so I need to go out and up her or up him, often by spending extra money and paying a lot of interest on it and, you know, going into debt and so forth. So that's based on this kind of the status driving need that we have to kind of move up the ladder before the bottom of the ladder gets cut out. But, you know, we live in a,

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  but it's good to understand where we live. We live in a place and time where those risks are much lower than they were when that system to continuously move up was in place. So understanding that and reflecting that, yeah, you know, they have this, but really what do I need for my personal wellbeing and those of my kids? So you get these competitions for, you know, getting your kid super good at baseball or whatever, you know, unless they're going to go to pros, it's really not that important. Or the PTA moms, they go in and they, you know, organize things in the middle school and high school and

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  their kids just by chance happen to get the most awards and all of that. In traditional societies, the PTA moms did help their kids. It mattered. You know, in a middle school today, you're putting all this effort into it, probably a lot of drama, a lot of time and work and all that. In the long run, we know, it doesn't make any difference for your kid.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Anymore. So you can chill a bit.

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  That would be nice. David Geary, ladies and gentlemen, David, appreciate you. Why should people go to check out the Substack, the book, everything you've got going on?

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the the Substack, I initially just had a bunch of reprints from a number of articles, mostly on sex differences, that I published in Corlette. They gave me permission to redo them. And now I'm redoing Origin of Mind, which will take another year or so to finish. But along the way, I have a few posts here and there. I'll have them on certain topics as I work through them on the chapters. Chapters will be much more elaborated, more evidence and so forth. So have snippets. Oh, yeah, yeah. Just a very kind of innovative name, Geary Substack.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  So it's there. I've got dozens of subscribers already. So it's awesome. Did you also want to talk about the Great Divergence, maybe some other time?

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're gonna have to do that another time. But dude, I'm always super down to talk to you. So we can we can run that back. I think it's fascinating to have an ancestral perspective on why human brains sort of developed the way that they did. It really helps to to explain what's going on with human behavior. What's happening with the second edition of the book? What's going on with that?

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I've got through a few chapters there. I'm actually, I'll hear from my publisher, American Psychological Association, if they're actually going to publish it or not. I think probably they will, but who knows?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  And so I'll move on. Next chapter will be on the development of the brain, prenatal development and kind of neurobiological organization to it, basically saying, you know, there's no way it's a blank slate. You know, the only, the only place you get a blank slate is academic social scientists. Otherwise, that's there. So I'll present that evidence, probably pare it back a little bit from first edition. Then I'll have either that second after that chapters or basic, single chapter on

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  big

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  big brain networks, like the default load network. I'll get into some details there. I'll move in and talk about things like problem solving, self-awareness, that sort of thing. And then toward the end, I'm going to integrate all of this with domain general intelligence, which a lot of people wonder about, the ability to easily learn novel information and the ability to draw inferences about kind of basic patterns and stuff. I'll talk about that. And then in a final chapter, the relation between domain general abilities, maybe the default mode network and others in the modern world and occupational performance, creative innovation, so forth.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  Heck, yeah. David, I appreciate you, man. Until next time.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  All right. Thank you. Enjoyed it.