How Evolution Shaped Our Societies | Professor Nicholas Christakis

Nicholas Christakis is a Professor at Yale University and an author. Much of what I've covered on the podcast has focussed on evolution's effects on the individual, but today we look at how evolution has shaped us as a collective. Expect to learn... Why is it that we live in groups? Why can we (mostly) rely on the person we're talking to to not lie to us, or kill us on sight? Why can we recognise different faces so effectively? And why do we even have different faces in the first place? Extra Stuff: Sign Up to Audible for a Free 30 Day Trial - https://amzn.to/2IQfiVS Buy Professor Christakis' Book - https://amzn.to/2Jac5iH Follow Professor Christakis on Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAChristakis Check out Professor Christakis' Lab - www.humannaturelab.net Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're born today and you inherit all this stuff that everyone before you, all the domesticated animals, other people domesticated these animals thousands of years ago. All the domesticated plants, all the roads which were built in England, starting with the Romans.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Calculus, which was invented by Newton 500 years ago. It's yours for free. All of this stuff, how to smelt iron, you know, all the knowledge about iron and fishing, how to fish hooks, I talk about fish hooks in the book, like the invention of fish hooks, the wheel, you go fire, you go on and on and on. All of this stuff, which was just given to you when you were born, was accumulated by other humans across time. And it's this that makes us so powerful a species because we have, if you think about it, rather pathetic bodies.

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I mean, it's not our bodies that are making us powerful on this planet. It's our culture, our brains that are making us powerful.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  I am joined by Yale professor, author, and incredibly wise human, Nicholas Christakis. Professor Christakis, welcome to the show.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:07Chris Williamson?

  I'm very excited to sit down with you. I really enjoyed you on Joe Rogan about six weeks ago, fell in love with the content that you guys put out and I've been looking forward to speaking with you ever since. So what are we going to learn about today?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Well, I think the topic that I've been thinking about lately is human nature and the part of human nature that interests me is not so much that part that we express within ourselves. So for example, you know, you could be spiritual within yourself, or you could be risk averse within yourself, or you could be, you could have wanderlust within yourself. These are qualities that human beings the world over might or might not express and that have been shaped by our evolution and by natural selection. The parts that I'm interested in are the parts of our human nature that we express between ourselves. For example, do we love each other? Do we befriend each other? Do we cooperate with each other? Do we teach each other things? These are things that we also are naturally inclined to do.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  And those are parts of our nature that we express between ourselves. And the reason I think these are important is that for too long, in my view, scientists and sort of people on the street, the citizenry, have been overly concerned with what I would regard to be the dark side of our nature. Our propensity to violence and tribalism and lying and selfishness. But the bright side, I think, has been denied the attention it deserves. Because equally, we are prone to all those things I mentioned, to love and kindness and friendship and so forth. And in fact, I would argue that those forces were necessarily more powerful than the evil forces.

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  If they weren't, we wouldn't have made it very far.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that well, yes, but more to the point, we wouldn't be living socially. If every time I came near you, you killed me, or gave me false, useless information, or took advantage of me in some way, I would be better off living as a solitary animal. So it must be the case that the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. Otherwise, we wouldn't be living socially. And so that's what I've been interested or thinking about lately. How and why did our evolution not just shape the structure and function of our bodies, you know, how our kidneys work, our pancreas works, or our muscles work, not just shape the structure and function of our minds, you know, how we think,

• 3:36Speaker 00

  how we cope with adversity, how we, you know, how we, our personalities, for example, but how as well shape the structure and function of our societies? How did we come to live socially the way we do? Is it the case that the way we live, the societies we make, the world over, actually have been guided by our long evolutionary past? And the answer is yes.

• 4:03Chris Williamson?

  Thinking to a lot of the conversations I've been having recently and a lot of the books that I lean towards, and I know that a lot of the audience will do as well, I certainly think that there is, I'm discriminating towards the individual on those books, a lot of things to do with understanding our nature. Recently had Robert Greene on the laws of human nature. Recently had-

• 4:25Speaker 00

  And what qualities, what qualities did he emphasize about human nature, for example?

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. So he talked about the fact that if you have brilliance in the world, you can be as talented as you want, but without the ability to understand others and communicate effectively, you will neutralize your brilliance and live a life filled with pain and misery. That was his synopsis.

• 4:50Chris Williamson?

  Which, and again, so we've touched on two things. You've touched on the fact that it's important to talk about the social aspect, the group, not necessarily always just the individual. You've also touched on the fact that talking in a positive light is something which appears to be lacking a little bit. And I would agree, I'd definitely agree on both counts. I think a lot about the fact that social media posts that anger people or agree with what they believe are the two most highly engaged posts on the internet. Presumably, that's going to lead to authors, and it will trickle either up or down, however you want to call it, to academics, to also think, well, if I want to write a book or

• 5:33Chris Williamson?

  have a paper or a study which is going to be highly recognized and interesting at the moment, it would appear that trying to maybe focus towards the darker side of human nature, the things that are bad, the things that maybe anger people, et cetera, maybe that's a bias. I'm not sure whether you think that's the case.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, okay, so, I mean, we have a number of biases. I mean, this attention to bad news is something which many people are thinking about, like, why, if that's part of what you're talking about, is why do we, why do we focus on the nasty things that are around us so much? Part of the reason is that- It is more advantageous to you to pay rapid attention to bad things, people theorize, than to pay rapid attention to good things. So for example, in our ancestral environment, it would have been more beneficial to you to pay attention to the location of a fire or flood or predators, for example, than to, which is all bad news, than to pay attention to the location of food, for example, which would be good news, because one of them is going

• 6:36Speaker 00

  to kill you fast. And the other one, you know, might take a while, the absence of good news, let's say. So, so this is one of the reasons that it is thought that we humans are wired to preferentially attend to bad news. And you know, why, why media constantly, you know, feature stories of, you know, misery and destruction, people click on it and read it. So, um, anyway, so that's part of, I think, what, what is going on. But there was another part to your question. I, I lost track of the other part.

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  So part of it is the anger and the leaning towards negativity. And the other part is the focus on the individual rather than the group. I think

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  The meritocracy that we're in at the moment with the Gary Vee hustle and grind culture that we have going, says that your successes and failures are yours to hold on your own. And I think that that leads people to look inward towards how can I make myself

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:33Chris Williamson?

  And not necessarily maybe think about the group.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yes, I take your point. I mean, a lot of these qualities, we have to distinguish between those aspects of the point you just made that relate to, that are culturally specific, you know, that have to do with the society you were raised in, or that are individually specific, the kind of person you are, from those qualities that have been shaped by the long arc of our, our natural selection. And, um, and so, I guess what I would say is, is that while it is the case that there's a lot In our nature that makes us pay attention to our individuality and how we act. In fact, I'm going to come back to this point in a moment. Uh, much more interesting to me and much more relevant to our survival is our capacity to work together.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  But let me, let me say two things about this. First of all, this notion that we're individuals, which you take for, which many people take for granted, actually is kind of an interesting aspect of our species. So it is, if you think about it, every, every, you know, we, we humans are capable of being individuals. And not only are we conscious about it, but we, we signal our unique identity and we humans do that with our faces. So our faces, every human face is, is different. While in principle, every pancreas should work the same. Every face should not look the same. Every face should look different. And those regions of our genome that are responsible for the faces we're born with,

• 9:02Speaker 00

  those regions are highly variable and highly recombinable in ways that explain in large measure, the great variety of human faces. But not only do we signal our individual identity, not only do each of us have the capacity to say, this is me, not you, or not someone else, but each of us is capable of detecting other people's individuality. Our brain has regions that are devoted, a lot of energy and brain space is devoted to the ability to tell the difference between people. You can look at a sea of a thousand people in a nightclub, for example, and you can tell each person is different, who is who on the dance floor. And this is important. So you go and you dance with your own partner, not some random person on the, on the partner.

• 9:45Chris Williamson?

  That would be, that would be a bad idea.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it would be awkward and, and you want to reciprocate, you know, like, you know, this person kissed you and now it's time to kiss them back, not a different person back, for example. So, but to do that, but to do that, you need to be able to tell who is who. And so this, all of this machinery, the face that signals identity, the brain power that detects identity, all of this is an evolutionary luxury. Other animals don't do this. We do this. And one of the deep paradoxes about Living socially as a mammal is that first we must be individuals. This, the, there's a lot of capacity that, uh, that, that we have. That makes us capable of sick, being individuals and signaling our identity.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Which actually allows it, uh, lies at the foundation of our ability to live socially. So, so for example, this relates to our ability to be friends. How, how can you have friends with other people unless you can track who is who? In order to have a sustained relationship with Tom and not Dick or Harry. You have to be able to reliably tell this is Tom, not Dick or Harry. And this is Tom yesterday. Now this is still Tom. So, so this, this, this capacity to be individuals is very deeply connected to our capacity. Uh, to live socially. So, um, now I forgot how I went off on this tangent. You asked me about.

• 11:06Chris Williamson?

  I wanted, I wanted to ask there. So you've touched on the fact that other animals don't do this.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Uh, right.

• 11:10Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean don't do this and how so?

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Well, have you ever, ever looked at a sea of penguins and, or cows? I mean, I guess farmers can sometimes tell their cows apart, but you know, a cow is a cow. I mean, there's a herd of cattle and we don't have any sense.

• 11:26Chris Williamson?

  Is, is that our interpretation of the cow? Or is presumably the cows must be able to tell each other apart?

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Not as unique individuals. They can tell their offspring. So for example, cows can tell this is my calf. I should milk, feed milk to this calf, not anyone else. But they don't tell, as far as we know, the difference between strange cows individually. Here are a hundred strange cows. Oh, but this is this strange cow and this is that strange cow. Elephants do it. Now we're not the, we're not the only animal that does it, to be clear. Other social mammals do this. Uh, so we do it. We have this capacity for individuality. Uh, uh, certain other primates do it. Uh, elephants do it, both African and Asian elephants. Certain cetaceans do it. There's very interesting evidence from dolphins. That dolphins have names, uh, and that they, um, and that they, when they whistle to each other.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  They have a, a particular, a whistling sound they make, which identifies themselves like a call sign. Like you might say, you know, Delta two one four, this is tower, come in. And, and, and that means, you know, that's identifying, that's how the dolphins repeatedly say. I am speaking now. This is me. And the other dolphins know, oh, you know, that's, you know, that's Chris speaking, not Nicholas. They can tell the difference.

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  So. So, um, and now some birds can do it too, incidentally. There's some evidence that uh, certain uh, very social birds.

• 12:48Chris Williamson?

  Can ravens do it? Ravens are bad asses.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, ravens are very bad. I don't know about ravens and individuality. I'm sure it's known. I just don't know the answer.

• 12:55Chris Williamson?

  Ravens are crazy clever man.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Yes, very, very.

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  Finding out about ravens and uh, uh, cephalopods. They're my two little obsessions at the moment.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yes, I think if you come back in uh, in um, 20 million years, I think ravens may be the ascendant species on the planet and 100 million, it may be octopuses.

• 13:17Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. I can't wait for the war between the ravens and the octopuses.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  No, they'll die out. We'll die out. Then the ravens will be ascendant. Then the ravens will die out. The octopus will be underwater.

• 13:26Chris Williamson?

  Sweet.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  And then they will evolve. There's actually a lot of debate about whether in other planets, submarine animals could evolve into sophisticated civilizations because of the impossibility of having fire underwater.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  So, some people speculate, most people think this would not be possible. There should be a terrestrial mammal, a terrestrial animal to have a civilization. But other people think that's just us being anthropomorphic, that in some alien planet, there could be um, very smart underwater creatures that for example, develop the capacity to create air bubbles into which they put fire.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh wow.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Or they have other, other technologies we can't imagine, that they manipulate the natural world in some way. So who knows? But anyway, it'll be octopuses 100 million years. That's my prediction. You can come back and let me know if, if it just didn't work out as I predicted.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  I get you. Um, have you ever read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky?

• 14:26Speaker 00

  No, but I do talk about science fiction, utopias and dystopias in my book because uh, one of the things that I try to do is I try to imagine. Sort of counterfactual types of social order. So I look at science fiction authors to see, you know, what kind of, what kind of crazy social worlds did they come up with? And to what extent did those resemble or not resemble our own?

• 14:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think if you've got, if you've got room in the reading schedule over the coming months, I highly recommend Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky was, I think, Pulitzer Prize award or some, some crazy big prize award. And in that, Future Civilization of Earth creates a rapidly evolving amendment to the genome and then throws a bunch of monkeys, primates onto a planet which is habitable. And they've all got this particular amendment. And the thinking is, we will go to sleep for a long time. And over a shorter period of time, like a couple of million years, they will go from being normal primates to

• 15:31Chris Williamson?

  these highly ascended beings. What happens is all of the, this isn't, this doesn't spoil the story, thankfully, all of the monkeys burn up on entry. And it turns out that the only couple of species that are left to absorb this particular kind of genetic information are spiders and ants. And you see what happens over a few million years. And Adrian rolls the clock forward about how they all evolve. And one of the things really interesting that he touched on was when you have young planets, you don't have the mineralogy, mineralogy? You don't have the minerals?

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, not mineralogy. It's, I can't remember the word right now. Go on. Yes, you don't have the right minerals. Yes.

• 16:14Chris Williamson?

  You don't have the right mineral makeup to be able to create like smithing and stuff like that. Cause it's just not, not existed for long enough to have those fossil fuels, et cetera, et cetera. So they create biological technology. It's absolutely fascinating. They make, they make a computer, essentially a computer out of.

• 16:33Chris Williamson?

  Um, pheromone controlled ants linked together in a hive. Oh, it's really, really cool. But I mean, getting out of the realm of science fiction and back to the, back to the real world. Um, I totally get what you mean. The, the fact that we are a social species, the fact that we can tell each other apart, it shows that there has to be a degree of collaboration. And also, a lot of what we've been learning about recently, listeners will remember William von Hippel's episode, which is fascinating, talking about pair bonding, talking about the fact that you have to spend a lot of time with the partner to protect the child. Um, all of this, I guess, lends credence to the fact that we're an incredibly social species.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I talk about pair bonding. And one of the things that many people take for granted is that, you know, we could be a species that just had sex with each other, but we don't just have sex with each other. We are attached to each other. We tend to be attached to our partners. This is very rare, uh, in the mammals. It's common in birds, actually, which is another interesting thing again. But, um, in mammals, uh, you can have a one-off kind of reproductive interaction, and you don't stay together in a kind of monogamous way for a sustained period of time and multiple, uh, you know, offspring being produced by the same union. But we do do that. And in humans, that sense of attachment is expressed or felt as love, that we love our partners. And there's interesting ideas

• 17:59Speaker 00

  as to why we do that. You already alluded to one of them. One has to do that, if you have love between partners, you can have more successful, a higher number of surviving offspring. So the, uh, so the male will stick around to help invest in the young, but, um, but he will only do that if he can be, this is the theory, if, uh, if he can be confident that those are his offspring, not another man's offspring. And one of the ways that women will signal that to the male, the females will signal to the male, is by, uh, by love, by expressing love for them in a way. So, and, uh, anyway, so there's, there's some interesting ideas about the evolution of pair bonding. Why, why we have this, this, this phenomenon that is all around us, that if you stop and think about it, is

• 18:44Speaker 00

  unnecessary. We could be a sexually reproducing species without having an emotional attachment. And yet we do feel this attachment. And the reason is why. It's part of our nature. What purposes it serve. And one of the purposes is what you alluded to it. It's felt to enhance reproductive fitness.

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and so why are we

• 19:05Speaker 00

  And I should say, in the book I talk about, this sense of attachment is seen, of course, in homosexual unions. It's seen in polyandry, which are, of course, not reproductive unions. It's seen in polyandry, it's seen in polygyny, it's seen in monogamous cultures. So the important thing that's very constant the world over is not how we pick. It's seen in arranged marriages. So, so even though love is seen as a dangerous phenomenon in countries that have arranged marriages, it's dangerous before marriage. Even in countries with arranged marriages, love is seen as a very much to desired outcome of marriage.

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  So, so it's seen as a desirable and normal property to love your mate. And if you measure, uh, using some various psychometric scales, sort of, uh, the sort of the passionate love scale is one of them. Uh, of partners, you looking at arranged and, and marriages and, and non-arranged or so-called love matches, within a few years of marriage, there's no difference. In fact, there's evidence that the divorce rate, more than a little evidence, that the divorce rate, of course, it's complicated to know why, but the divorce rate is also lower in arranged marriages. So anyway, no matter what the marital system, and there are many all over the world, one of the universals is that people love their partners, which is beautiful, actually, if you think about it. I mean, one of my arguments is that these qualities that are universal also are good.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Um, and, and in fact, that's one of the reasons they're universal is that they, they were fitness enhancing, they made our world better for us.

• 20:31Chris Williamson?

  I recently did a podcast with Caleb Jones, who is a very big non-monogamy advocate. And that, I found that incredibly interesting to hear his point of view and the listeners will at home. I don't want to delve too deeply into that, but I'm thinking an awful lot about what it is that he was talking about. And he also alluded to the, uh, the divorce rate, the increasingly, uh,

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Well, there are some, there are some people, I mean, just as a, as a sort of a, a moral matter, I have no issues with polyamory and, um, uh, and I, I don't think, um, and there's certainly some people who find that very appealing, and I think that's totally fine. I mean, they can find each other and they're adults and they can do, you know, free society what they want. But there is no, to my knowledge, no successful society or even commune that has endured long, and I discuss this in the book, that's been organized around polyamory.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  It's a very unstable arrangement for a large group of people. It's not necessarily unstable for couples. I know many, not many, I know a couple of couples that practice polyamory among themselves. But I don't know of any society that's organized that way, or even any commune that has survived more than one or two generations organized around polyamory.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Many have tried. Do you know the reason? Do you know the reason? It's very interesting, actually. So if you think about the establishment of utopian sects or communes, they have a problem, which is that they want the group members to have allegiance to the whole community. You're supposed to feel a member of the whole community. And this is why, for example, in many communes, not all, and also in certain totalitarian states, the family unit is a threat to the loyalty that the individuals, the allegiance they feel to the state or to the commune. So they try to break down the family. Kibbutzes in Israel tried to do this also, by the way, sort of break down the family unit. Also, they try to break down friendships.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  For example, in East Germany, everyone was, you couldn't have friends, because they could be Stasi agents. Everyone was ratting on everyone else. So this type of breaking down intimate connections or friendly connections between people is often seen as necessary in order to foster allegiance to the total group, the totality.

• 22:55Chris Williamson?

  Very Orwellian.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. But here's, it is, but here's the thing about sexuality and love of partners. So some communes address the problem that humans naturally love their partners and wish to be in love and wish to be loved. This is a very natural thing that most people feel and all societies manifest.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  This could be seen as a threat to the to the maintenance of kind of social cohesion for these utopian sects, or, for example, we're talking about now. But they have adopted very different practices to address that. Some sects have tried to adopt polyamory. So they say, everyone can, there's no, we don't want any sexual jealousy. Everyone can have sex with everyone else.

• 23:41Chris Williamson?

  Brave new world.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Yes. So, but again, for the reasons we just discussed. Opposite extreme, nobody can have sex with anyone else, a totally celibate. But both of those extremes are serving the same purpose. If you think about it, both those sects that want you to have sex with everybody, and those sects that want you to have sex with nobody, in both of those cases, they're trying to break down a kind of intimate connection to particular people. They're trying to anonymize or atomize the experience. So, so the paradox is that in communes, you could, these very opposite practices actually are in the service of the same end, which is to foster allegiance to the group. The Shakers, for example, famously prohibited sex, which of course makes it very difficult

• 24:27Speaker 00

  to sustain the community, it can't be produced. But, but anyway, I'm sorry, there's a digression within a digression.

• 24:35Chris Williamson?

  I get it, I get it. It's, I mean, you've touched on a point that I wanted to go to there, which is the fact that humans naturally seek some sort of companionship. And by removing the ability to go deep with either some people or anyone, like either everyone, everyone or anyone, you force people to look for this connection elsewhere, and that's where the state comes in. So, is the reason that humans are...

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, but the state, the state can't take the place. You see, one of the things that's also true... Is that in our ancestral environment, being alone was deadly. So we, for reasons I discuss in the book, we explore the origins of friendship and some theories to why we developed the capacity to, why we live groups, all of this stuff, which has to do with coping with the dangers in the environment. So, so, so feeling, we evolved this kind of sense that being alone could be dangerous and risky, and we crave intimate friendships, that we can all, every human being that is

• 25:47Speaker 00

  listening to this, almost everyone, knows what I'm talking about. When I say you have an intimate friendship, someone you trust and you, you talk to them and, and you have a sense that they know you as a person and they value you as special and unique, you're irreplaceable to them. Each of us is totally replaceable to strangers, but we are irreplaceable to our friends, right? We are unique individuals and that friendship is special. So, so this, this, all this apparatus that we have, all these emotions and sensibilities and behaviors that sustain friendship, in a modern environment, where you're interacting with people anonymously, or where you go to bureaucracies and you interact with bureaucrats. So now, instead of interacting with people face to face as individual people, you interact

• 26:30Speaker 00

  with them as replaceable cogs in a system. They're just, you know, it's the person at the Department of Motor Vehicles who's, you're interacting with and they're doing their job. And we all sense that as awful. And, and the reason we sense it as awful is because on some level we recognize, these are not, our evolved psychology is starting, "Warning, warning, warning, these aren't your real friends, you know, these are, these are, these are not real relationships." And so we sense that kind of anomie. And this is why, incidentally, I also think that a lot of online interactions make people so miserable, because our evolved psychology wants real...

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Intimate, face-to-face, deep, sustained, social relationships. And instead, what we get is, you know, acquaintances. And, uh, and, and that's immiserating, I think. So anyway, so it's kind of, all of this stuff is, is connected, actually.

• 27:24Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. It's interesting that you touch on, um, the online connections because, you know, it's a trope to say we're more connected than ever whilst feeling more alone, et cetera, et cetera, all that sort of stuff.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it is, there's something specific about the face-to-face interaction? About the fact that, um, the, I think it's more than half of communication cues are non-verbal? And a WhatsApp chat doesn't quite fulfill that need?

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Yes, I mean, for example, in promoting the book or supporting the book, I've done a whole bunch of interviews. And I've noticed that quite a few of the, like you, quite a few of the more sophisticated podcasters, even if there's going to be an audio-only file, they want to do video. That's, in fact, I asked you at the beginning, I said, are you gonna, you know, you were gonna do this video? Are you gonna record the video or are you just, we're just seeing each other? Well, why is that? It's because the conversation is more natural, more fluid. I can see, are you laughing at my joke or not? You know, I can see you're getting bored by what I'm saying and I should move on.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  Never, never.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  You know, all of those things, yeah, all of those things, you know? So, um, you know, those are fundamental parts of how we communicate.

• 28:33Chris Williamson?

  Got you. So going back to the real beginning, the evolutionary, um, uh, I guess prerogative for why we are a social species. Is it simply that a human on its own is a human that's dead? And our main advantage as evolving humans was that we could coordinate well as a group? Does that appear to be?

• 28:55Speaker 00

  There are many, there are many, there are many things that have made us one of the most ascendant species on the earth. Humans, I think, have the broadest or one of the broad, the, humans have the broadest. I think ants also have an equally broad, but it's side, set that aside for a moment. Yep. One of the broadest geographic ranges of any animal species. So everyone knows that some animals live in some places, but not in other places. Yeah. But there's no place humans don't live. We live all over the world, from the Arctic to the equator, in deserts, in, in snow-covered plains. We live everywhere. And the reason we do that is not because of our, our bodies. We haven't adapted physically, although we have also in some cases done adapted physically. Yep. It's because of our culture. It's because of what we can teach each other.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  It's because of our ability to accumulate knowledge. So slowly over generations, people invent kayaks or they invent parkas. Or slowly over generations, people invent technologies to, to find water in the desert. And, and because of those innovations, we are able to, uh, to transmit that knowledge from person to person. And so in order to survive, we have to be part of a community that has this type of knowledge. A teenager, we, we do a lot of work with the Hadza. Actually, we don't anymore, but we used to, which is a, one of the last forager groups on the planet. They live around Lake Ayasi in Tanzania. There are only about a thousand of them left. These people hunt and gather for their food, just like every human did until about 10,000 years ago.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Just to interject there, what, um, period of history do they align with? The Hadza are still alive. No, no, what, what, what would they be representative of in our past? Oh, uh, the way we lived until about before the agricultural revolution, till about 10,000 years ago. Wow. So the Hadza, the Hadza hunt and gather for their food. They have no material possessions to speak of. They sleep out under the stars.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Uh, and, um, and they live in this environment in, in Tanzania, around Lake Ayasi. And, um, and if, if I dropped you there or me there. We would, we would be killed in an environment, we would die in an environment that a Hadza, you know, seven-year-old could survive.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  Flourishes in, yeah.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And it's not because of the differences in our bodies, it's because we have none of the knowledge. And so, the knowledge is of course transmitted socially. It lives, the knowledge lives in the interstices between people. That's where the knowledge lives and survives across time. Then it comes into my brain, and then it goes into your brain and so forth. So it spreads across these connections, this knowledge, and is produced by groups of people, this, this knowledge. And so, this is what makes it possible for us to survive, uh, this, this, this living socially.

• 31:41Chris Williamson?

  I think one of my favorite quotes from Warren Buffett is that compounding interest is the, uh, eighth, eighth wonder of the world. And it's occurring, as we see in front of us, with knowledge, right? I can put my hand in a, I can put my hand in a fire, burn my hand, and then tell you, and you know not to put your hand in a fire without having to go through it. That fact alone, accumulating over however many generations.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:06Chris Williamson?

  Leads to me and you talking over Skype.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Correct. And in fact, in fact, you could take, you could take, you could take the average British, uh, you know, uh, high school student that studied calculus, let's say, in, uh, when they were seventeen. And if you move them back five hundred years, they'd be the smartest mathematician on the planet. I mean, this, you know, this, the, the, and, and, and we get calculus, which, you know, Isaac Newton and, and Leibniz invented. Actually, just as an aside, we learn calculus, we are taught calculus at the speed at which Newton invented it. It's astonishing. Isaac Newton takes a year to invent calculus. I mean, it's just, the man is just unbelievable.

• 32:51Chris Williamson?

  Force of nature.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Anyway, so and now, but the point is, you're born today and you inherit all this stuff that everyone before you, all the domesticated animals, other people domesticated these animals thousands of years ago. All the domesticated plants, all the roads which were built in England, starting with the Romans. Calculus, which was invented by Newton 500 years ago. It's yours for free. All of this stuff, how to smelt iron, you know, all the knowledge about iron and fishing, how to, fish hooks, I talk about fish hooks in the book, like the invention of fish hooks, the wheel, you go fire, you go on and on and on. All of this stuff, which was just given to you when you were born, was accumulated by other humans across time.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  And, um, and it's this that makes us so powerful a species, because we have, if you think about it, rather pathetic bodies. I mean, there are very few animals our size. I don't think there's any animal our size that we could, you know, one on one battle. Uh, I mean, we'd probably, even a doe.

• 33:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  A doe would kill.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're probably about the same weight and biomass as maybe like a cheetah or something like that.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Well, we died with cheetah. I mean, I can't even think, what is an animal that's about our size that we could kill?

• 34:08Chris Williamson?

  Penguin?

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Penguin's not our size. I mean, obviously tiny animals, you can kick a penguin.

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, any tiny insects you could, I mean, they could kill us too. They're poisonous spiders, everything else. But my point is, we are, we have pathetic bodies. I mean, it's not our bodies that are, are making us powerful on this planet. It's our culture, our brains that are making us powerful.

• 34:30Chris Williamson?

  I've got, I've got one of the most important questions to ask you right now, Professor Christakis, and it's, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 20 duck-sized horses?

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Twenty duck-sized horses.

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  What's your strategy gonna be?

• 34:50Speaker 00

  You kick one and move, kick and move, kick and move.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I mean, you actually, you move to the place where you fell the first opponent.

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  Got you, and you pile these bodies up like three hundred.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Well, you said twenty.

• 35:04Chris Williamson?

  Like in three hundred, the movie.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Ah, right.

• 35:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and you've just got mounds of these dead duck-sized horses everywhere. Well, cool. I think, so I asked one of the fittest men on the planet, Dan Bailey, this question as well, and he gave the exact same answer. So you are on a level with elite athletes with regards to your answer.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Well, I spent years training in the martial arts, but that's another story.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  Practicing duck-sized horse kicking.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  No, practicing. To get your black belt, they put you in a ring with four guys. And you have to learn how to fight against multiple opponents. And, you know, it's not easy. It's for various reasons. Anyway, there are basic techniques you can use.

• 35:48Chris Williamson?

  If this situation occurs, I'm gonna call on you.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm way, way, call Joe Rogan instead.

• 35:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He'll kick them into the next week, won't he? Yeah. So we've talked about our evolutionary past. Moving into where we are now, did you reflect in the book on what the advantages and disadvantages of modern society are doing to our desire for social cohesion?

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Um, yes and no. I mean, I'm interested in the long arc of our prehistorical past. You know, so we've evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. And it's only in the last 10,000 years that we've even had history at all, that we've had historical or political or cultural, well, not cultural, we've had a long time, but specific kinds of cultural forces acting on us. So I'm interested in the ways in which our capacity for social interaction and living together were shaped at a time that preceded the invention of cities or the invention of the internet or anything like that. Now, these cultural products, the cities and internet and everything else,

• 37:03Speaker 00

  are also shaping our evolutionary trajectory. But that's not the main driver of the way we live socially today. For example, My Greek grandmother was born in a, in a, in a little village in, in southern Greece. And if she's not alive anymore, she was born over a hundred years ago, but if you, you could, if you had asked her when she was alive, what, you know, when she was a 10-year-old girl, how many friends did she have? And she would have said, I have one or two best friends and there are four or five of us girls, we hang out together. It's a little village in southern Greece, you know, a hundred years ago. And if you could ask my daughter Lena, who's now 21, but back, let's say when she was 10, you know, 10 years ago, you ask her the same question,

• 37:48Speaker 00

  and she has an iPhone in her pocket, she would give you the same answer.

• 37:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  So it's something deep and fundamental about our nature, about this desire for one or two best friends. Most people, not everyone, about, about 90%, 92% of people in developed countries have one, at least one best friend or one intimate, very intimate social contact. 8% of people, 8% of no one, which is very sad. Some of these people are elderly widowers, their spouse has died, everyone they know has died. Others of them, others of them have other sort of disabilities that make it difficult for them. But anyway, so most people have the sense of they have one or two best friends and they're four or five of, you know, your intimate friends that you hang out with. And then there are broader circles. The point is the technology didn't change that, right?

• 38:38Speaker 00

  I mean, Chris, this is a cultural constant. In fact, we've done this, we've looked around the world in my laboratory, we've mapped networks in, in, in Uganda and in, in Tanzania and in, in India and in Honduras and in the United States. And wherever you go, you find the same thing. People organize themselves in the same way. So it's not to do with the technology.

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  Does that specifically maximize fitness, do you think, or did it over the years? Like the likelihood of survival?

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, I think that the specific mathematical structure of the social networks that we make, and we've done some other evidence on this using a variety of tools from genomics and also some actual anthropological tools, that the mathematical structure of networks that we make, I believe, have been shaped by natural selection.

• 39:27Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  And, okay, well, this is a little hard to explain, so it's a bit of a tangent, but...

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  Let's do it. We've got it, we've got it. The listeners, the listeners are rubbing their hands together, they're ready to go, come on.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  Okay, so here we go. So, there's a very fundamental property about human social networks, which is that we have this thing called degree assortativity. Degree is the number of connections that each person has, so it's how many friends you have. You have, you have a degree five, you've got five friends. I have degree 10, I've got 10 friends. Someone else has degree two, they've got two friends. And degree assortativity means people with similar numbers of friends are preferentially connected. So, popular people befriend popular people, and unpopular people befriend unpopular people, okay?

• 40:10Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  This property of degree assortativity is the opposite of a property known as degree dis-assortivity, which is the way the airport network is organized. So unlike human social networks, which have degree assortativity, popular people are connected to popular people, and unpopular people are connected to unpopular people, in the airport network, it's the opposite, right? We have a hub-and-spoke system. So, the unpopular airports with few connections aren't connected to other small airports with few connections, they're all connected to London, and Gatwick, and Chicago, and Denver.

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  And if you want to get from one place to another place in an airport network, you've got to go from, you know, New Haven, Connecticut, to Chicago, and then from Chicago, you can go anywhere.

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  You can fly to any city. So in two hops, you get there, because the network is organized in this degree dis-assortive way.

• 40:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Okay? Now, if you think about it, in which of those two kinds of networks, if an epidemic, if you infected a random person...

• 41:11Speaker 00

  In in these two networks, a degree assortative and a degree disassortive network, in which of those two kinds of networks would you get a bigger epidemic?

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yes.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  You should have, you should have the intuition that you'll get a bigger epidemic in the degree disassortive network, because in the degree disassortive network, the first person that gets infected, the next step, they are, uh, they are connected to the most popular person, and then that person spreads it to everybody. So, so in a degree disassortive network, epidemics will spread very rapidly. Whereas in a degree assortative network, like humans make, epidemics can be contained within one part of the network. So one unpopular person gets an infection, and they infect their unpopular friends, and they are all infected over there. The rest of us are okay. Because they're not connected to the popular person, let's say.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  The story is more complicated than this, but this is the gist. So what's very interesting to me is that of all the kinds of ways that we could form social networks, we form them to have this property of resistance to epidemics, because we form a degree assortative networks. And amazingly, elephants do the same thing. This is discussed in the book. And so whales, so do orcas. And so other social mammals, when they go about making their friendship networks, even though our last common ancestor with those, with elephants was eighty-five million years ago, they independently have converged on the same way of social, socially organizing

• 42:48Speaker 00

  themselves that gives them this sort of epidemic resistance property at the population level.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  That's so fascinating.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  So, yeah, so these are some ideas about, you know, uh, in response to what you asked.

• 43:02Chris Williamson?

  That's really fascinating, and it makes complete sense. Um, I, I, I totally understand. I think, um,

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that's come to mind, Dunbar's number, which is the supposed upper limits, upper bound that a human can have in terms of friends. Did you look at that? And I've never delved into this. Is there, is that like a gospel? Or is there some, some criticism of that?

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Robin Dunbar is a very famous physical anthropologist at Magdalen College at Oxford. He, he is well known for this finding, which is, is a correct finding, which is that human beings, it's not the upper limit, it's that on average, our capacity to track social relationships is about 150. And he made this prediction based on a comparative analysis of different primate species and the size of their groups. And there's been abundant evidence sort of confirming his ideas in this regard. And the notion is that, is that you are able to, our brains are endowed with the ability to, and he uses as a kind of approximation of what he means by knowing someone is

• 44:13Speaker 00

  knowing someone is if you can pick up your conversation where you left off, where you left it off before. So you remember enough of who they are and what kinds of things you're discussing. So that if you meet them again after an absence, you can pick up the conversation. And so he, the number of people we can do this with is about 150. We can, we, we can know if these people are friends or enemies. We can also know something about the relationships of all the pairs of people. So you know, if you have a hundred friends, you know, does this person like that person or not get along? And for example, many of the listeners will have this experience. Some listeners will have gone to high schools that had small. But I know the word is different in English, in British English and American English. So when I say class, I mean, the group of people that are in, you know.

• 44:57Chris Williamson?

  Your year.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Your year, exactly. So there might be in your school, let's say it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a private school. And there are a small year of let's say a hundred students.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  If you went to such a school, you know that you know every other student and you knew something about the relationships of every other student. And if you contrast that, for example, with a.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  With a municipal school that's run by the state, which is bigger. And there might be a thousand people in your year or 500 people in your year. You know, you didn't know all those thousand people. Uh, and you didn't know the relationships of all those people. And that's a limitation of your, of your brain, of our brains. So, um, so this is what Robin Dunbar's, uh, arguments are about.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that that was maximizing evolutionary fitness as well? I do remember when I spoke to.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  No, I think in our ancestral environment, we didn't need to brains that could track larger numbers of people because there weren't bigger groups.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I see. Apparently I was again, uh, William Von Hippel is the closest, um, podcast that I've done to what we're discussing at the moment. I think he alluded to the fact, or at least posited that groups over, he said around about 50, he thought would tend to disband. He thought that groups, at least when we're talking Australopithecus, that kind of era, that those groups would disband into groups of 50 because the larger groups end up being, I think it was, I, I, I can't remember the reason why, but he, I think he thought that was the case.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Yes, and, and he may be right. I don't know the answer to that question. There's a, there's a lot of, um, suggestive evidence about the group sizes of ancestral hominids. Um, we can certainly study living primates and do comparisons. And that's what, what Robin Dunbar did for his, um, analysis.

• 46:46Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. I got you. So moving forward, as we, as we go on, obviously you have looked at the past. Do you have any predictions about the future? Do you have any sort of suggestions for the future?

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, one kind of speculative set of ideas that interests me right now is, um, what I call hybrid systems of humans and machines. So increasingly, you know, the, the relationship between human beings and technology is an ancient topic, you know? Homer talks about this in the Iliad, you know? What's the role of bronze spears in warfare? You know, we invent a new, a new technology and it has, uh, you know, certain, um, implications, for example, uh, or, or, you know, Odysseus uses the Trojan horse to get it to the city. You know, that's a technology. Um, and, and, uh, you know, you had the Luddites, you know, breaking the, the looms, you know, in England.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  And so there's lots of, you know, our relationship technology is complicated and longstanding. But what's different now is that we are beginning to endow these machines with a kind of volition of their own. I mean, they're, they're not obviously human. They don't really have their own desires. But they're able to act independently and they're living amongst us. So we have digital assistants like Alexa, for example. Or we have autonomous vehicles on the car, on the road. So you're driving down the road and they're mostly human drivers, but there are also some autonomous vehicles that are driving down the road, doing their thing. Um, or online, you know, we, you have your Twitter friends and, you know, I'm on Twitter and some of the people that follow me, I think are bots, you know, and so there they are. They're in the system. They're humans and some bots that are interacting.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  I call this a hybrid system because it's hybrid between humans and machines. But what's interesting to me is not the interactions between a human and a machine. It's the ways in which the presence of those machines acting as if they were human modifies how we interact with each other. Let me give you an example. So you add, bring an Alexa into your home. And the people who design the Alexa make it, want to make it very obedient. They're not interested in you having to do, you could just say, you know, uh, you know, play Little Richard. You know, or play Beethoven and the machine does what you ask, or you know, order milk. Um, it doesn't, you don't have to say, please, could you order some milk or would you please, you know, do this or whatever?

• 49:05Speaker 00

  You, you don't have to be polite to the machine. Yeah. So, but think about how the addition of this machine into a home might train a child to be rude. And it's not a problem if the child is rude to the Alexa, but then the child goes to the schoolyard and is rude to his or her friends. Hmm. And so now we have a rude group of children that has arisen because of the introduction of this machine into the social system. Or you think about driverless cars in a world in which we have only human drivers. They're all human. And eventually we'll have a world in which they're only autonomous vehicles. None of us will drive cars anymore. You'll go to racetracks to drive cars. That's like thirty years from now, if not sooner. So, uh, and those cars will be, will be Bluetooth enabled and they will communicate with each other

• 49:48Speaker 00

  and they'll move in a kind of laminar flow down the highway. Or they'll entrain with each other and they'll be fine. There'll be no collisions. It'll be all fine. But between now and then, we're going to have a hybrid system of humans and machines. And the question is, how should we program those autonomous vehicles? So that as they move among us, they improve rather than degrade our behavior. So for example, the car maker might want to design the car to move very smoothly. So that the occupant of the autonomous vehicle has a nice pleasant ride. But now the human drivers behind this vehicle might be lulled into a false sense of security and become inattentive. And so when they veer off to go and go to the part of the highway that has just human vehicles, these inattentive drivers might cause more collisions.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Now, the person who bought the vehicle, the autonomous vehicle and the designer of the autonomous vehicle doesn't care at all about those people who are, you know, killing themselves over there because of the new bad driving practices. But we should care. So, so one of the things I'm concerned about is the ways in which these new technologies in the future are going to reshape our social interactions, are going to modify how we live together and might potentially threaten some of these fundamentally good qualities about how we have evolved to live together that you and I have been talking about.

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  Moving on, where can the listeners find you online if they want to find out a little bit more?

• 51:11Speaker 00

  Uh, well, my laboratory is, uh, www.humannaturelab.net. And, um, of course, we've been talking about my book Blueprint, The Evolutionary Origin of a Good Society, which is available everywhere. Uh, and on my lab, we have videos and papers, scientific papers and all kinds of other information.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  People want to delve deep, it will be in the show notes below along with the links to Blueprint and your Twitter.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Uh, yes, I'm on Twitter, of course.

• 51:38Chris Williamson?

  You are incredibly interesting on Twitter. I'm looking forward to reading through some of your stuff. I'll get it saved for this evening. Uh, Professor Chris Stakkis, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Thank you for having very much, Chris. I'm very grateful.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Get away, get off it.