The Incredible Evolution Of Aggression - Dr Richard Wrangham

Richard Wrangham is an anthropologist and primatologist, a Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and an author whose research focuses on ape behaviour, human evolution, violence, and cooking. Humans have the capacity for incredible benevolence and kindness, but also are able to execute other members of our species with a uniquely effective ruthlessness. Why would evolution give us such differing capacities to chimps and apes and what can this tell us about our civilisation? Expect to learn the fascinating evolutionary story of human aggression through the ages, how humans actually selectively bred ourselves to become less aggressive, how our capacity for violence informed the evolution of morality, the true reason for why humans might have a sense of right and wrong, what would have happened to a hyper aggressive male ancestrally and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Goodness Paradox - https://amzn.to/3YVQz6Z Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #aggression #anthropology #evolutionarypsychology - 00:00 Intro 00:26 Are Humans an Aggressive Species? 06:38 How Human Violence Evolved 21:08 The Self-Domestication of Man 24:33 Understanding Psychological Changes Through Bones 27:47 Has Female Aggression Evolved? 39:12 Did Violence Influence the Development of Morality? 52:26 How Much of Mythology is Justification for a Male Bias? 56:19 Evolution of Kin-to-Kin Aggression 58:44 How Sex Ratios Impacted the Local Ecology 1:06:03 Humanity’s Approach to Male Aggression in Today’s Society 1:19:17 Where to Find Dr Wrangham - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you look at males, it turns out that in a number of animals, males who have a relatively broad face are more aggressive. There was a Canadian team that looked at hockey teams and looked at the number of minutes that individual players spent in the penalty box for being too aggressive. There was a positive relationship between breadth of the face and the number of minutes spent in the penalty box.

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  Is it right to say that humans are an aggressive species, do you think?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Well, yes, in some ways we are incredibly aggressive because we are responsible for more deaths of members of our own species than is typical of other animals. And yet, at the same time, of course, you know, the great paradox about us is that in some ways, we're just incredibly nice and tolerant and friendly and unaggressive. And for years, we grappled with how to resolve these two contrary sides of our personality. But we cannot deny that part of us is a really aggressive streak. And we're seeing it at the moment in wars that occur around the world. And those, of course, have gone on throughout history.

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  What does it suggest about human nature, or what our role is, or what would be adaptive for us, that we seem to be very effective at the barbell ends of aggression?

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Well, you know, one of the great questions about human nature for 200, 300 years has been, are we biologically predisposed to be aggressive, or are we biologically predisposed to be tolerant? Are we an inherently aggressive species that is tamed by society? Or are we an inherently tolerant, unaggressive species that is made aggressive by society?

• 2:00Speaker 00

  And you know, my view, and I think increasing view is that that's that question is misconceived. You know, because the answer is that we're both or and either, if you like. That whether or not you look at our tremendous capacity and even interest in committing aggression, or whether you look at our tolerant aversion to aggression, both of them are part of our biology. So I think that what we're learning about ourselves is that we have to recognize that we are a mixture. And society is not responsible either for taming us

• 2:41Speaker 00

  or for making us the sometimes horrible species that we sometimes are. You know, this is us. Take us or leave it.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Who were the two philosophers that had this big push? Was one, it wasn't Foucault, who was the one, who was the French guy?

• 2:59Speaker 00

  The French guy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

• 3:01Chris Williamson?

  That was it? Sounds like Foucault, yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, writing just before the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. And, and you know, sort of very ironic, really, you know, because he has become associated with the notion that we are inherently nonviolent. And of course, everyone had such high hopes for the French Revolution. And then, you know, this wonderful charitable exotic new dawn of humanity turns into the guillotine and then, you know, Napoleon and so on. You know, the disaster that befell the sort of growing sense of civilization in Europe at that time.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  And then the other great philosopher, so Rousseau was associated with the notion that humans are inherently unaggressive.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Made aggressive by society. And then the opposite side was Thomas Hobbes, who was living in the time of the English Civil War, in the second half of the 17th century. And he was impressed by the fact that you really had to lock your door and you had to worry about who your neighbors were because they might come and kill you. And you know, the Civil War was a terrible thing. And so he was associated with the notion that there is something just inherently competitive, cruel, violent about humans. And that what you need to be able to control them

• 4:39Speaker 00

  is a superior body, an ultimate authority. He called it a leviathan. We would now think about it as the state. At that time, it might have been the monarch, to keep everybody under control. And you can look at both of these great philosophers who have been representing these two opposing views, superficially opposing views, and think that in many ways, both of them were right. They had a lot to them. And that's why people have sort of supported one or the other over these years. But you know, the wonderful thing is that we can now put the nature of human nature

• 5:21Speaker 00

  into a much broader perspective than ever was done by political philosophers who were basically, of course, sitting in their armchairs. You know, I mean, from the point of view of modern science. They weren't trying to really figure out what was going on in terms of the wet biology or in terms of our evolutionary relationships. But we can do that now. And we can look at our close relatives, the great apes, and we can see elements of...

• 5:51Speaker 00

  All these two contrasting types of behaviour in our cousins. And the fascinating thing about that is not that we can say, oh, well, you know, we have inherited a particular kind of quality from a particular kind of ape. But instead, what we can see is that evolution works in fascinating ways to generate in one species a certain level of some kinds of aggression and another species a different kinds of aggression. And we can figure out that there is a logic to the evolutionary history that leaves us deposited, in our case, in the 20th century or 21st century,

• 6:32Speaker 00

  with a particular set of inherent tendencies.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  What do you think is the evolutionary story of human, what we are now, our ancestors' journey through aggression?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  I think that we have to look back at the last 2 million years, which is the time that we have been members of the genus Homo. You know, just around 2 million years ago is when the genus Homo arose, when for the first time you've got a creature that could walk into a clothes shop on Main Street and take clothes off the peg. You know, they were our size and shape. They were smaller brained, they were much more robust, they were, you know, great big bow ridges and great big broad faces. But they were, they were an early kind of human, 2 million years ago. And I think that for the whole of the 2 million years,

• 7:35Speaker 00

  they were a species that were like wolves or chimpanzees or a few other species in being very good hunters and also very good killers of your own species.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Because once you're a good hunter, you know, like a lion, or a wolf, or a chimpanzee, then it means that you can hunt anything. And if you want to hunt a member of your own species, you're pretty good at that.

• 8:06Chris Williamson?

  That weaponry can be turned inward, yes.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Yes, and it's not literally weaponry in the sense of a spear, you know, it's the weapons of your claws, and your brain, and your mouth, and whatever it is. And in the case of actually all the species I mentioned, the really important weapon is a coalition. It's your gang. It's ganging up for five of us against one of you. Because when you do that, then you make yourself safe. And none of these hunters will go out on their own and try and attack. You know, a wolf doesn't go out and try and attack a bison on its own. You know, it knows perfectly well, that'd be incredibly dangerous thing to do. But if you have ten wolves and one bison, well, now you're talking. You know,

• 8:53Speaker 00

  some of them can nip the wolf, its rear end while the others are confronting it at the front, and so on. You know, there's great advantage in numbers. And that is the way that humans have always tended to attack and kill other humans. It's through the advantage of numbers, or surprise, or other tactical arrangements that enable them to kill safely. So if you're asking, what is the evolutionary story of human aggression? I think the story that carries all the way through to modern warfare is that we were good at hunting, and

• 9:35Speaker 00

  we turned the hunting ability against members of our own species when it suited us to do so. And just, you know, we see this in war nowadays, because war consists of a series of asymmetric attacks. We bomb their side, they bomb us.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  It's an asymmetric attack in the sense that it's a pretty premeditated, planned attack when it's pretty safe for the attackers. What's not safe is what happens later when they attack us. So that's one kind of aggression. Wolf-like, chimp-like, lion-like. That's humans throughout the period of the genus Homo. The other kind of aggression is something that is probably the big event that changed everything happened around 300,000 or 400,000 years ago.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  And this is the invention of, or the development of, a sufficiently skilled language that groups of men were able to kill members of their own group using that same coalitionary ability, that same gang. But the huge complication when you are forming a gang against a member of your own group is, how the dickens do you know that the ones that you hope are going to be in your gang aren't going to turn against you? And you, as say the instigator of a gang, "Let's go and get that guy",

• 11:20Speaker 00

  might suddenly turn out to be the victim and they all turn against you. The coalitionary dynamics become terrifying if you are trying to organize a group against a member of your own group. It's different from when you're attacking a member of another group because then you can all agree, "We hate the members of that other group." But the emotions are mixed when you're talking about individuals within the same group. And the solution to that...

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Is sufficiently good language. Where individuals can talk to each other and get a real sense of reassurance slowly developing, you know, just floating an idea, so, you know, that guy isn't a little bit weird recently, don't you think, you know? And eventually getting confidence that, yes, okay, let's agree, you know, he really deserves to be sent back to the witches. And we'll get him. And we'll all agree. And that's it. Now, this ability to execute another member of your own group changes society hugely. Because until then,

• 12:30Speaker 00

  almost unimaginably for humans as we grow up in society today, we would have had a really bullying system. I mean, maybe it is imaginable if you remember high school.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  You know, where there is some guy at the top who really throws his weight around, you know, I mean, not all high schools are like this, but it does happen from time to time. And throws his weight around and, you know, he takes advantage of his his ability to physically dominate everybody else.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  All animals do this, basically. You know, all the primates, the chimpanzees and the gorillas, even the bonobos, all the monkeys, you have some top male and he takes out on everybody else and what does he get? He gets, well, the females. And he gets the majority of the mating, he gets the best food, he gets into fights a lot, of course, but but he really just bullies everybody. And once you get this ability to form a coalition that can kill a bully in your group. Then all of a sudden, everything changes.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Because nobody dares to be the bully that exerts his power, the tyrant that takes everything for himself. And all of a sudden, you get changes in society, and then slowly you get changes in the evolution of our aggressive tendencies. And what you're doing when you take out these bullies is you are doing to humans what farmers have long done to domesticated animals, or to wild animals as they became domesticated. You are selecting inadvertently, in the case of humans,

• 14:34Speaker 00

  for the non-bullies, for the less aggressive individuals. And at this point, we have to stop, just take a breather, and say, there are two kinds of aggression in animals in general, humans are no exception, that have very distinctive dynamics. And the one we first talked about, the one that is involved in hunting, is a premeditated form of aggression, which is not necessarily involved in the emotions very strongly at all. It's a very deliberate kind of aggression, saying to herself, that I have a goal, I want to go and kill that animal or that person.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  I want to go and steal that gold, and if I have to kill someone to do it, I'll get it. And then the other kind of aggression, so that was called proactive, premeditated, predatory. The other kind of aggression is reactive. It's when you, as a man, come into your home bedroom and find another man in bed with your wife, and you just lose it.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  This is not premeditated, thoughtful, unemotional. This is impulsive, it's defensive, it's reacting to a threat. And you just lash out and you are very emotionally aroused. And the aim here is to just get rid of that threat. Chase the guy out of the bedroom window, kill him, do whatever. And it turns out that these two kinds of aggression, proactive and reactive, are somewhat different in the way that they are controlled in the brain. And they can be following different evolutionary trajectories.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  So you can maintain a high level of proactive aggression and have a selection acting against your reactive aggression. And that's what happened in humans, starting about 300,000 or 400,000 years ago, when proactive aggression kept going. We were great hunters all the time. But reactive aggression started going down. We became much less reactive in our aggressive tendencies. How do we know that? How do we know that date? It's beautiful. When you select a wild animal and choose to have the successive generations being

• 17:09Speaker 00

  those that are the result of breeding by the less aggressive, the less reactively aggressive individuals, then they show elements of some quite surprising biological traits. And we know these traits very well because they occur in domesticated animals. All these different lines of domesticated animals, unrelated lines, dogs, cows, goats, cats, they all tend to have white patches of fur on them.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Why do they have white patches of fur? It's not because a farmer needs to have a cow that's got a white patch on his forehead, or a horse that's got white toes. These just occur spontaneously. We know this now because there's this wonderful Russian experiment, starting in the 1950s by a guy called Dmitri Believ. And he started breeding foxes. And lo and behold, within a few generations, the foxes got white patches of fur on them. Why is that? It's because the foxes he chose to breed were the ones that were least aggressive. He would walk towards the foxes when they were about six weeks old, when they were, you know, just, just young ones.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  And he would write down the distance that the human would get within the fox, with a, as they approached the fox. When the fox said, "Bah!" That was it reacting. And then he would breed from the ones that allowed the humans to get closest, the least reactively aggressive. And in 10 generations, they got white patches of fur. Hello? There's something mysterious going on here. And we're beginning to get a handle on what it is about the biology that says, when you select against reactive aggression, you develop these symptoms of the domestication syndrome, like white patches of fur.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Another one is floppy ears. There is no wild animal, actually, there's, there are, there's only one kind of wild animal that has floppy ears. Do you know what it is?

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  Elephant?

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Yes, very good.

• 19:28Chris Williamson?

  Nailed it!

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Boom. That's, that's what Darwin pointed out. He said, "But all the domesticated animals, you will find some individuals and some, some groups that have got floppy ears." And the floppy ears, you know, they're associated with young ones in wolves, but in, in many dogs, they retain those floppy ears all the way through adulthood, into adulthood. So this is a, another feature of the domestication syndrome. Well, now, obviously, humans don't have floppy ears.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  Or white fur.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  We, what?

• 20:03Chris Williamson?

  Or white fur.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Well, we don't often have white patches of fur. But but there are some features of the domestication syndrome that are associated with our bones. And they are things like relatively slender, light bones compared to our ancestors. Shorter faces, smaller chewing teeth, males becoming more female-like. And guess what? All of these things started happening around 300,000 years ago. And just became more and more developed with time.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  And so that's why we can say that was selection against reactive aggression starting at that time. And that's why we've ended up relatively reduced in our tendency for reactive aggression. Unlike our very well maintained, unfortunately, tendency for proactive aggression.

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay, let's let's recap the story so far. So humans, our ancestors, develop the ability to, first off, coalitionally hunt. That then allows them to take down bigger prey. That is something which can get turned inward. But for the next one and a half million years, you have the problem of a little bit more. You have the problem of coordination up until about 400 to 300,000 years ago. When you get language, especially advanced language, you have the ability to coordinate more effectively. Not only do you have the literal weapons of the size and the shape and the fists and the teeth. And now the tools that we've been using, the spears and the arrows perhaps.

• 21:51Chris Williamson?

  But you also have the ability to plan in advance, to be able to also gauge the reliability of your other coalitional members. And to be able to say, right, we're going to take him down because he's been a dick. So it's time it's time for him to go. What that ends up happening is a self-domestication of humans by humans, where the most aggressive, mostly males, I'm going to guess, will be pruned off the top. The ones that are too tyrannical end up being executed by the remainder of the group. What this means is that those ones, some of them very well may have ended up reproducing before they were executed, but on average, you're going to have a lower level of reproduction from those individuals.

• 22:35Chris Williamson?

  And if they have sons, like the aggressive son hypothesis, I suppose, if you have aggressive sons, they are more likely to be killed before they have sons and so on and so forth, which means that over time, the most aggressive males are removed. Now, this is a relatively short period of time, you know, 300,000 years ago doesn't sound like long for us to have been doing this, but as you've identified, in only the space of between five and 10 generations of foxes, you're able to see a pretty rapid anatomical change with regards to the fur. This is met with certain anatomical changes in humans, which includes shortening of the face, less aggressive, less powerful jaws, less large teeth, reduced brow ridge, I'm

• 23:20Chris Williamson?

  going to guess. And then you said that men or males became more female-like, which I'm going to guess means less muscle mass overall, lower bone density, et cetera, et cetera. So for the burgeoning professional athletes amongst us, maybe a little bit unhappy that those males were selected out of the group. And, you know, we see this with the difference in strength between ocean chimps, right? That a chimp could easily rip a human limb from limb, or so I've heard. And that means that we have very much not only adapted to the selective pressures outwardly that the environment gave to us, but almost kind of adapted to the selective pressures that we placed on ourselves socially through this execution. Is that about right?

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. Exactly. Yeah, so we have been very responsible for our own evolutionary trajectory for the last, you know, quarter of a million years and more. And you say, you know, it all seems to be relatively recent and it's true, but of course we, we have an excellent fossil record. And so, you know, we know very well that there have been these changes going pretty continuously for the last quarter of a million years and more.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  How can you talk about psychological changes compared with our ancestors who are no longer around? It's not like you can study our ancestors 300,000 years ago. You can see the anatomical changes, but even those are mostly wasted away apart from what's left in terms of bone and teeth structure. How can you talk about the implied psychological changes?

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the only way we can really do it confidently is through this correlation with the bones. And there are some correlations that are still very fascinating today. I mean, one of them is concerns the breadth of the face in relationship to the length of the face. And it turns out that in a number of animals, and humans is one of them. If you look at males, males who have a relatively broad face are more aggressive. And there've been a bunch of studies which show that this is true for humans nowadays.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  So it's, you know, our, the breadth of our faces has been reduced. It has become, in males, more female-like, relatively narrow faces. Here's a lovely example of a study, which I think makes a couple of important points. There was a Canadian team that looked at ice hockey, as we would call it, or hockey as we call it in the States. Looked at a number of college hockey teams and a number of professional hockey teams. And looked at the number of minutes that individual players spent in the penalty box

• 26:23Speaker 00

  for being too rough, for being too aggressive. And of course, it's interesting to think about this because, you know, what we're going to see is that the players who had broader faces spend more time in the penalty box on average.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  But the referees are not really particularly aware of this because they've got helmets on. So you can't, you know, it's difficult to even know.

• 26:46Chris Williamson?

  It's not like it's prejudice by the referees against the broad faced community.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Exactly. That's right. An important point in this study was that for each of the study, each of the teams that they looked at, there was a positive relationship between breadth of the face and the number of minutes spent in the penalty box. But in no case was it significant, statistically significant. That is to say, it's not a very strong relationship within each team, but in every team it happened, every college team and every professional team. I think it was a total of 12 teams. So that the overall significance was very clear.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  But you cannot look at an individual man and say, yeah, you know, you've got a broad face. We know that you are an aggressive type.

• 27:39Chris Williamson?

  You're going to punch me. Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  It's a trend, you know.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so what is, you mentioned about the changes that would have happened with regards to mostly male to male aggression. What is interesting, or is there anything that you know about changes which occurred to females? Were females self domesticated at all throughout this period?

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's hard to know. I mean, we don't have the same kind of evidence concerning females.

• 28:14Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying that the female from 300,000 years ago would have been able to walk into the department store and garner fewer looks perhaps than the male because on average they would have changed less? Is that right to say?

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Well.

• 28:30Chris Williamson?

  We'd have to give her a makeover before she went in, obviously.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  What we don't have with females is the equivalent evidence of the changes that were happening in males, independent of the males. You know, it seems to me very likely that females were indeed much more sort of independent

• 28:57Speaker 00

  aggressors in those days, but we don't know. The reason I say that is because in some ways females have changed particularly strongly compared to our sort of apish past compared to males. You know, the males are still a little bit more brutish, a little bit less refined, a little bit hairier, a little bit more like our apish ancestors and the, you know, the early forms of Homo. So females in many ways changed particularly strongly.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  They've become, you know, feminization has really changed them from, from what they probably were, which was a much more male-like set of individuals. But, but we don't have at the moment any kind of really clear story involving how that happened. Was that just an incidental consequence of selection on males? It doesn't seem very likely, but it's a theoretical possibility. Or was there intense selection on females to become less aggressive themselves? That could well, well be the case.

• 30:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, interesting, because the ability, the male-male ability to coordinate more complex coalitions to physically take down a male would have had a similar impact on female capacity to form coalitions. I've been learning a lot about intrasexual competition, your Joyce Beninsens of the world and so on and so forth have been on the show a lot.

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  The female capacity for gossip and coalition making, breaking, backbiting, venting and all the rest of it is otherworldly. And it has to have been the difference as well between the way that males display power struggles, aggression, the competitions for status, who it is that they're concerned about with status, the fact that men are positively inclined toward a member of their group who is stronger than them or better than them at a thing, because typically that coalition would have meant, well, if we've got to go take down that mammoth together, Richard, you look like you've got a good set of biceps on you. That means that we can, you can grab it and I'll get it with the spear.

• 31:31Chris Williamson?

  I don't know how you take down a mammoth. The women, on the other hand, have such an unbelievable divergence in the way that they go about things. So it seems like it would make sense to me that this increased coordination, coalitional capacity would have caused women during that period as well to have opened up a whole new world of

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Intrigue.

• 31:52Chris Williamson?

  Changes. Yes, for sure.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very plausible. There's another dynamic as well, which is that the evolution of patriarchy.

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean there?

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Well, humans, I think, can be thought of as having two kinds of patriarchy. One is the sort of more individualistic, the type that occurs in animals, where a male can beat up on a female just because he's bigger than her, because he's stronger. He can dominate her. But there's another type as well. And that is what you might call institutional patriarchy, where within the group, there are rules that develop in the society as a whole that benefit men at the expense of women.

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  What would be an ancestral example of one of those?

• 32:57Speaker 00

  You could say that females who have adulterous relationship are going to be punished more heavily than males who do.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Which is something that happens pretty much universally, you know, across societies. It's extremely common and you never get it in the other direction. You never find that males are punished more heavily than females. So, you know, I think what's going on here is that you have an alliance among the males. They don't like it when females are adulterous because each of the females belongs to a particular male.

• 33:39Chris Williamson?

  Let me fold a very interesting piece of information that I learned a couple of weeks ago. I want to say that this was maybe Christina Durante or someone else who taught me that women condemn promiscuity more the more sons that they have. Because they want the male parental uncertainty, they want to tune that down. So, women who have sons show an increased

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  distaste for promiscuity. And I thought that that was absolutely fascinating.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely.

• 34:20Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much it's just, it's just the men that would have been behind the condemnation of the promiscuous women. I mean, you know, you roll intrasexual competition into this and you say, well, I have a man. What we actually want to do in almost like a form of capital punishment to be able to show this is what happens if you do that. Now, if you were a single woman, that's one fewer competition, one fewer competitor within your mating market for a future potential mate. And if you were a partnered up woman, that would be one fewer potential competitor for your existing mate. And if you're a woman who has sons, that is one fewer potentially promiscuous male parental uncertainty inducing partner for one of your sons. So I actually think that there might be some motivation for women here as well.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then if a woman has daughters, then she would quite like her daughters to be able to have the choice of, you know, choosing which man she has for which baby.

• 35:17Chris Williamson?

  Promiscuous women have got, I mean, aside from the whole slut shaming thing.

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

  It's, there are a lot of pressures from pretty much everywhere and a lot of incentives from both men and women ancestrally and in the modern world to really, I mean, that's not to say that there isn't against male promiscuity too, but it definitely seems like, uh, yeah, there's a lot of pressure for, for women to tune down that promiscuity.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and I mean, so when you had, um, men taking it out on the tyrant, uh, take, in other words, taking it out on the alpha male, uh, by ultimately killing him. So they're controlling anybody who is taking more than his fair share of the females, which until then he always did as the alpha male, you know, the alpha chimp takes a big share of paternity. But after that, then, um, it's a really important feature of, uh, belonging to the alpha alliance, that every male gets a female.

• 36:27Chris Williamson?

  What's the alpha alliance?

• 36:29Speaker 00

  The alpha alliance is, is what I call the, the group of males who are responsible for, um, killing the tyrant.

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  Ah, okay, okay.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  And so they, they, they become the leaders of the, the society. And, and of course, once they have discovered that they can kill the tyrant, then that means they can kill anybody.

• 36:52Chris Williamson?

  Including each other.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Including each other. So, so there's this tremendous, um, selection for, in favor of conformity, in favor of all the emotions that show that you are part of the gang. Um, but also, uh, it imposes tremendous pressures on females. Because from now on, any female who goes against the norms that are imposed by the alpha alliance is going to be vulnerable to herself being executed.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  And you see horrendous accounts in the hunter gatherer ethnographies of the 19th and 18th centuries, where people were still getting glimpses of what it was really like to be hunter gatherers before the missions had come in and the governments had come in to get rid of all of the more violent forms of interaction. And you get these stories of a woman who has committed adultery, she gets killed. A woman who has even seen the sacred trumpets of the men, kill her.

• 38:09Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean? What sacred trumpets?

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Well, men often have rituals that are associated with the reasons or the justifications for males being dominant over females. So, you know, the sacred trumpets, you know, these are things that literally you can find in particular societies, but they're iconic of the justifications that men produce. You know, why should you men, you know, always get the best food, right? Which they tend to do. The meat, the females will get some, but the males will get the best opportunities.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Why should the men get? Well, you know, that's what the gods say. Who said the gods said that? We go off and we talk to the gods.

• 39:08Chris Williamson?

  The sacred trumpet.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  The sacred trumpets.

• 39:10Chris Williamson?

  I see. So, this is what particularly interests me, that we're sort of moving now from the realm of individual anatomical, psychological, and then societal, civilizational changes into morality now, kind of moving ourselves across into values and virtues and what is upheld and how the interplay of all of this works.

• 39:36Chris Williamson?

  Am I right in thinking, well, actually, how has this impacted morality? How did these changes inform the evolution of human morality, in your view?

• 39:48Speaker 00

  I think that the emergence of what I'm calling the Alpha Alliance, the gang that is able to control the tyrant, is essentially simultaneous with the evolution of moral principles that are based on the concept of right and wrong.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  So there's a kind of morality of sympathy that you see a little bit developed in the higher primates and maybe dolphins and so on, where there is a tendency for individuals just to understand, to be empathic towards another individual who is suffering. And some people call that morality, and that's fine, you can call it morality. But it's not a morality based on the principles of right and wrong. Morality is based on the principles of right and wrong

• 40:43Speaker 00

  is much more arbitrary.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  The right and wrong varies among different societies, what is right and what is wrong. And I think the way to think about it is that once you have a power group, the Alpha Alliance, that is capable of executing anybody in the group and are therefore able to impose on the group their ideas about what benefits them from a selfish perspective, what they do is to say, here is right behaviour and here is wrong behaviour.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  You know, right behaviour is, and then they'll lay out a series of things that are good for the group as a whole, like, we're not going to steal from each other anymore, okay? Anybody caught stealing, we're going to punish you. If you carry on doing it, you're dead.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  But they also have a different kind of moral principle as well, which is purely selfish, not just good for the group as a whole, but good for the men.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  If there's any problem with the food supply, the men get the first choice. If we find that a man and a woman have been having sex that is outside,

• 41:59Speaker 00

  let's call it marriage, well, man can be understood, but the women, that's no good.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  So I think that morality begins with the concept of right and wrong. Right and wrong is the result of what benefits the alpha alliance, the group that can get rid of anybody, can kill anybody because they have that ability to talk about it and do it.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  And there are those two ways in which they think of right and wrong. One is what's good for the group as a whole, and the other is what's good for the men.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  And the reason that it would be adaptive for everybody within a group to conform to that is that anybody who decides to transgress it is going to pay a very high individual price.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  So in your, in your view, does that mean that our sense of right and wrong is basically us working out how to be, how to avoid being killed by small groups of alpha males?

• 43:08Speaker 00

  That's pretty much exactly right.

• 43:13Chris Williamson?

  There are moral philosophers that are throwing themselves off bridges at the moment, hearing this, thinking, no, it's good, there must be more.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think this is an area of discussion that has not been sufficiently aired at the moment.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  But I feel very, very comfortable thinking that this all derives from power dynamics.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  That the sense of right and wrong is ultimately a sense of how to protect yourself from this evolutionary novelty, which is the fact that individuals can be killed at very low cost to the killers.

• 44:00Chris Williamson?

  Do you have any inclination, is there any suggestion that this sense of right and wrong exists outside of culture? That, you know, is it that each generation must learn what is right and what is wrong anew? Or is there something which is embedded in us genetically which gives us an inclination toward this too? Or a predisposition perhaps?

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, we're clearly very conformist as a species. And, you know, children at a very young age learn to conform and they learn to impose rules on each other. And or they, when I say learn to, you know, they do it almost spontaneously. So that certainly suggests that they, you know, the basic norm psychology, as it's been called, has been inculcated into us. But what you're asking, are there specific versions of what's right and wrong? And I'm not convinced about that.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  You know, that there might be something like involving theft, you know, some very basic principles involving harming each other. But but most of these things are subject to some kind of fluidity.

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so I guess some sort of inherent feeling of fairness, maybe like disgust aversion or your disgust threshold, stuff like that. You know, if you were to do something that made you feel very traumatized yourself. You know, the fact that soldiers deal with things like PTSD would be pretty maladaptive if we were just supposed to be proactive, how would you say, unboundedly proactive aggressors. You would just come back and, why would there be an issue? You know, I just, I did the thing that I did the thing that I'm supposed to do. So speaking of that, actually, has there ever been, have you ever discovered or could

• 46:03Chris Williamson?

  you imagine a situation in which proactive aggression was selected against?

• 46:11Chris Williamson?

  In any animal?

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Well, if you take our two closest relatives chimpanzees and bonobos, you can make two strong claims, I think. First of all, that bonobos have much less proactive aggression than chimpanzees. And secondly, that their common ancestor was much more like a chimpanzee than like a bonobo. And the reason you can say that is that there's an out-group, which is the gorilla. And gorillas are much more like a chimpanzee than a bonobo. In terms of their anatomy and probably their psychology. So, what that means is that there's probably been selection against proactive aggression

• 47:02Speaker 00

  in bonobos compared to chimps.

• 47:04Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Wasn't there something unique about the fact that bonobos had a female-led coalitionary self-domestication route?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:17Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain that? Why females? Why not males? We've just spent half an hour explaining about how the alpha alliance and the guys and they take down and so on. What power do women have in a very close relative of ours? What power do females have?

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Right. It's fascinatingly similar and it's fascinatingly different. I think it's similar because you get the same evidence of self-domestication in the bones, in the anatomy of bonobos compared to chimps, as you do in humans compared to our ancestors, or by the way, compared to Neanderthals.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  A difference is that in bonobos, you still have alpha males.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Whereas in humans, you don't have alpha males in the primate sense. And so the self-domestication that's happened in bonobos does not involve removing the alpha male. Alpha males don't get killed. And, you know, we certainly don't have a really good handle on the dynamic of bonobos, but what you see nowadays is that when a male gets out of hand, he is not taken down by males, he is taken down by females. So you get a male who challenges a female over a piece of food, say. And she gives a squeak and the five females who are closest all rush to her aid

• 48:45Speaker 00

  and they all go chasing that male. And he runs off and is terrified and rightly so because those females can impose a lot of damage. You know, like any gang, they're pretty effective and they can bite his knuckles off or give him some nasty wounds. Maybe in the end we'll see some evidence of killing like that, I don't know. So there's something very different that's going on in the self-domestication of bonobos from humans. It's not directed at, or the current behaviour is not directed at eliminating the tyrant males.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  What it is directed at is stopping the males from being aggressive towards the females.

• 49:36Chris Williamson?

  What's different? Why? What's the pressure that's different there between humans and bonobos?

• 49:45Speaker 00

  Well, it may not be the pressure that's so different as the ability. So, you know, you could argue that the pressure in bonobos might be just as great for males to take out the tyrant male. And that would be a very fair argument because we know about the distribution of paternity in bonobos. And we know that even though you've got this sort of relatively pacific, self-domesticated form, it is still the case that the alpha male is getting just as high a proportion of the paternity as occurs in chimpanzees. Namely, you know, 70% in small groups. I mean, it's really high.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  But what the bonobas don't have is the human ability for the subordinated, annoyed, frustrated, incel-type males to be able to get together and attack the tyrant. I think because of this difficulty of forming a confident coalition.

• 50:50Chris Williamson?

  Presumably those males, those underlings, would have the same ability of coordination and coalition as the females, though. It's not like the females have something specific that the males don't.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  That's true. What the females have, unlike humans, is an ability to spend time together on a relatively permanent basis. So that whenever a female is frustrated and annoyed by a particular male, then there are always females there to be able to attack him. And that's unlike humans, where in all societies, humans break up by day and go off in small groups. And a man can find an opportunity to beat up on a female when there are no females around to support her.

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  I suppose as well being patro local, at least on average, where the woman perhaps gets married off to the husband, maybe is displaced slightly geographically away from kin.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Kinship issues may help. And then in addition, there's the fact that, once you've got the alpha alliance, who have already shown that they can kill the tyrant male, then, once you have language, any male who says, you know, "I was attacked by half a dozen females the other day," you know, "I can't believe it!" And he goes and tells his mates then, and all of a sudden, you've got a very powerful male group that can do something about those females.

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Okay, so getting back to the morality thing, so I think this is really interesting. You mentioned before that...

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  Men typically throughout history have come up with, some would say arbitrary and fantastical solutions and excuses for why they may be given preference in certain areas of life. Does this make the mythology and the storytelling around a lot of this essentially just plausible justifications for what men want to do?

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Yes, for what benefits the male alliance. So I think the story of human society, you know, major, major story of human society is that it is designed around what benefits the group of males that have taken power. So they've taken power from the alpha male. They, they have a monopoly on violence. You know, their monopoly means that they, one of the rules is, we're not going to tolerate violence within our group.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  So that leads to a series of moral principles associated with that. The, I think that basically you're right, that the morality of a group is intimately associated with what benefits the males as a group. And that might mean that some individuals are frustrated because the rules that have emerged out of the, the group are not necessarily beneficial for a particular male. You know, the male who is the cleverest or the strongest or whatever, he has to conform to the rest of the group himself.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  But from the point of view of the group as a whole, these moral principles work for their own benefit. And so, you know, religions are of course, you know, very male biased in terms of the way they work, the, the precepts that come down from on high, you know, God, gods are typically personifications. They are personifications of something. And what are, what are their personifications of?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Well, I think the answer is the personifications of the interests of the male group.

• 55:01Chris Williamson?

  A lot of third rails here, Richard. First off, we've come for morality and cleanly decapitated that one. And then next up is perhaps the entire institution of religion at large as being a more elaborate storytelling justification. But I can completely see the logic. I can completely see how it would be the case that emergently, there needed to be a more sophisticated, ethereal, harder to refute. It couldn't be something rational. It couldn't be something that was provable or disprovable here and now. It couldn't be like the number of cows that somebody had killed or whatever. It had to be the special trumpet, the magical trumpet of the gods or whatever. But there was something that you said about a special path. If women walked on a particular path.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  In quite a lot of these societies, small scale societies, you have areas that are restricted for males only to use. And if females, even by accident, not knowing about them because they're a new female in the group or something, walk on the male path, then they can just be killed.

• 56:05Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Because it's so important for the males to maintain complete control over the male cosmology, the male.

• 56:18Chris Williamson?

  There was a lot of evidence that you found for even kin kin executions or whatever. There was a story, I think, of a mother strangling her son in his sleep because he'd slept with somebody else's partner at some point. This to me seems like a very, this should be selected against incredibly heavily. Why would you choose, you know, in terms of fitness adaptation, why on earth are you going to kill your own son as opposed to try and take on maybe the entire, it's me and you, son, let's take on the entire tribe. What's your understanding?

• 56:55Speaker 00

  You're right, that this is very extreme. And in terms of the ordinary expectations of individuals being expected to favor their own kin against non kin, it doesn't really work. But I think what it reflects is the incredible power of the dominating group with its ability to impose its own morality on everybody else. And there may come a point

• 57:26Speaker 00

  And a cynical examination of an appropriate strategy would say, if I support my son, who has been irritating others in this group, then he's going to get killed and I'm going to get killed and all our family is going to get killed. And it may just behoove me to recognize that this individual is dragging us all down. And I'll get rid of him and then we'll all be safe again. The, you know, the, and the, the big picture here is that the ability to kill,

• 58:04Speaker 00

  the ability of, of a group to develop rules that they can enforce is behind so many of the complexities of human society. Complexities and, and patterns that are very different from what we see in any other animal. I think we've just massively underestimated the extraordinary revolutionary effect of the development of capital punishment. It changes all the power dynamics.

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  What happens when we reach a period of human development, of civilizational development, where we now have a surplus of resources? Or actually, here's an even more interesting question. Have you thought about what would have happened? How the local ecology, the local resources and mating market could have influenced the response to aggression? So for instance, if there was a period shortly after a, a big war with a, a local tribe, where there was a high female skewed sex ratio, for instance, or if it was a, a period after an ice age,

• 59:26Chris Williamson?

  where there was a more abundant amount of food to go around? Have you considered how the human aggression response might have been adapted to those kinds of situations?

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Well, not really, but but the the sort of gut gut feeling I have about this is that male desires, male motivations are almost infinite.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  You know, think about the fact that emperors in various different societies around the world, China, India, Peru, when they get absolute power, you know, they're not quite the same as alpha males in chimpanzees, but they have the power equivalent in some ways. And what do they do? They just get infinite, I mean, essentially infinite numbers of females. So you can take hierarchies in these empires where you look at the most powerful individual man, and he might have a harem of 10,000 women.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  And and he acts like a breeding bull, where two females are brought to him every day whose menstrual periods have been monitored so that they're most likely to be fertile on that day.

• 1:00:57Chris Williamson?

  The logistical nightmare.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  Yes, and and even the emperors themselves complained about, you know, the obligations here, but but nevertheless, you know, that's what it can go for. And then but then, you know, the vice emperor, whatever they call, you know, the the people under him, they get a certain proportion, and then under him, another proportion. And so, you know, all the people in the government hierarchy have got their own rich number of females.

• 1:01:25Chris Williamson?

  The trickle down effect of whatever is going on.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Of of power.

• 1:01:29Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  So when you say, you know, well, so maybe everyone would just sort of stop and give up and and and make nice if they had lots of access to lots of females. It seems to me more likely that what would happen is that that they would just all be competing for all of these females again.

• 1:01:47Chris Williamson?

  Desire would expand appropriately. I so I can see that absolutely in a post agricultural world. The interesting thing to fold in was the first question that I bailed out of, which is, there has to be some sort of a change in terms of how

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  Tyranny or aggression is treated when one individual can start to accumulate far more resources. Once we get to the stage, once we've got the agricultural revolution, once we stop being nomadic, once we stay still for long enough to actually be able to accumulate defensive fortifications and stores of food and all the rest of the stuff.

• 1:02:26Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me that that would maybe not be a hockey stick, the same as the introduction of language, but should have made a change to the dynamic of how humans relate to each other sufficiently. Because before that period, how many women are you going to support? A hundred thousand years ago, how many women can one man support realistically?

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Yes, that's right. And of course, you probably know about the famous studies, the Tiwi of Northern Australia, where you had hunters and gatherers in general becoming more polygynous as you went further north in Australia. And as you go further north towards the warmer regions, you find that it's increasingly possible for women to look after themselves without any male input in terms of the accessibility of plant and animal resources. And the animal resources are generally fairly small. There's lizards more than buffalo, if there weren't any. And you had intense polygyny with men having,

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  say, 20 wives. And the support all went in the opposite direction to the one you were talking about. That is, a man would say, oh, my goodness, you know, I'm not going to get enough food unless I have at least five wives. And now I have 20, then I get lots of food. Because the women were supporting the men.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Men supporting women.

• 1:03:53Chris Williamson?

  So is that, is that, is that, is an element?

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  These are hunters and gatherers with intense polygyny.

• 1:03:57Chris Williamson?

  Is that an element of the fact that when there is a surplus of resources, the requirement for women to date suboptimally, for want of a better term, there is less pressure for them to do that, because them on their own are more likely to be, fine, they don't need the male protection in this way?

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Well, yes, they don't need the male support. And so, you know, in contrast to what you had in Africa, probably, where there were large animals that did contribute significantly to the economy and where men were needed to be able to provide for females in that way.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  Where that doesn't happen, then, as we're saying, it's increasingly possible for a few men to dominate access to the females. And you had a very interesting system where it was the elders were really quite old, like, you know, forty years old.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Almost like a gerontocracy type thing?

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  It was very gerantocratic. That's absolutely right. Yeah, relatively few old men. They had a hard time of it because, you know, there's no lights, of course, so they'd go to sleep, go to bed, or they'd have their evening meal with maybe twenty-five fires for the twenty-five women that are the wives of a particular man. And it was all too easy for some women to go out of the firelight and go and meet bachelors and get into trouble that way. And so the bachelors were supposed to go off a long way. They were supposed to go and live in a different part of the bush for, you know, ten years

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  or something before they were allowed to come back and be part of the system at all.

• 1:06:01Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered, in the modern world, the changing dynamics that we have of...

• 1:06:13Chris Williamson?

  Peace, relative peace in our time, the lack of requirement for men to do both big game hunting and warfare, the condemnation generally of both proactive and reactive aggression, whether that be socially or legislatively, and also the increasing female achievement and independence that they have from men, that in terms of resources, education, employment, you know, a sperm donor and a good education will get you a long way in being able to raise a family without the requirement of a male. Have you considered what the goodness paradox or the approach, our humanities approach to aggression, looks like in this current version of civilization that we're in now?

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Well, I agree that it raises questions about male roles. And, you know, I see all this stuff in the news about adolescent boys feeling frustrated that they're not able to be as male as their perceptions would like them to be. And the way that Andrew Tate and his philosophy are appallingly appealing to boys. And I agree that it kind of raises some really big issues about the future, about whether or not it's going to be satisfactory

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  for males to be increasingly powerless, increasingly unnecessary. But I've not considered, you know, exactly what's going to happen.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  It's not always easy to appreciate, I think, the fact that the same essential dynamic, as you can see in a group of hunters and gatherers, that is, you know, 20 people, is, I think, at play in our society today. In the sense that we have moral and institutional systems that keep violence in its place. And if you are violent in a small hunter gatherer society, then you will be subject to an arrow in the back. And everyone will say, yes, he deserved it, you know, or maybe planned it in advance. And the same happens nowadays with us.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  If you are too violent, then you will end up nowadays in prison.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  And presumably that will lead to a reduction in your reproductive success. And we all have developed a whole series of sensitivities to these complex rules that keep us in in control.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  Now, you're asking, is it possible that

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  these rules will get so burdensome and so at variance with our male spontaneous tendencies to, you know, do the equivalent of go hunting?

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  That that somehow the system will break down?

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  You know, I tend to doubt it, but but, you know, it's a it's a future that that we haven't been to before. So, you know, who knows what's going to happen?

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  I went for dinner a few weeks ago with David Buss. And I was sat down and I've been pondering this question for a good while now. Richard Reeves, who wrote a book called Of Boys and Men. He's a policy wonk type guy from Washington DC, but wrote a phenomenal book. It's very short. You'd really enjoy it. It's called Of Boys and Men. Just won New Yorker Book of the Year 2022, actually. And

• 1:10:07Chris Williamson?

  I asked the question of David and his partner, who is a very accomplished social psychologist, what use are men in 2023? Really, what role do they have when big game hunting and coalitional warfare is outsourced to the state, you know, in the form of armies and law and a supermarket? Really, really, what role do we have? Because we're seeing women outperform men in education. On average, they're more conscientious.

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  They have fewer geniuses, but they also have fewer ADHD autistic retarded members. Then when you sit them down and you put them into an office, the kind of knowledge based office work that we have now also seems to lend itself towards women's predispositions, at least in part.

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  And now that they are able to achieve educational and employment parity with men, they don't need them quite so much anymore. And then the previous roles that men had, that they would have relied on, you know, that Andrew Tate sort of gives a little bit of a nod and a wink to.

• 1:11:23Chris Williamson?

  Those are no longer required of men. And kind of the nerfed kiddie version of that, which was capitalistic conquering and upward mobility, or if it was, you know, 500 years ago, you were commanding a legion of serfs, or you were a baron or whatever, right? You know, whatever hierarchy you choose to have, that was still very easy for men to dominate.

• 1:11:47Chris Williamson?

  All of those have fallen away now. And, you know, I asked one of my smartest friends, who's thought about intersexual, intra-sexual dynamics, mating, attraction for what, 40 years, 50 years, something like that. And he didn't have an answer. And I think that folding in your work around aggression, around where morality may come from,

• 1:12:12Chris Williamson?

  adds what may be a slightly bleak, but very interesting new.

• 1:12:20Chris Williamson?

  Area of spotlight onto this discussion, which is that a lot of the morality that we were working off of the back of was built in order to protect some of men's interests. And now in a world during which those interests have been emancipated so much that anybody can access them, the gatekeeping no longer works. We've seen the downfall of all of the things that we spoke about, you know, whether it's spirituality with or without religion, you know, the advent of scientism, the rationalist world, all of this is slowly just chipped away and degraded at all of the different little gatekeeping elements that we had that would keep this going. And then the final

• 1:13:04Chris Williamson?

  decapitation was the fact that women didn't need men for resources anymore. And yeah, I do, I'm going to Doha, it looks like, to do a debate on, literally on masculinity. They want me to be the, like, the card carrying, traditional masculinity is under attack and we need to stop it from happening. I'm not, I'm not convinced that I actually agree with that position, which is maybe going to make me bad as a debater for that side. But I certainly do feel a lot of sympathy, both for myself and for a lot of other young men who go, well, okay,

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  definitions and roles within society need to change to adapt to what is happening in the society, right? It would be pointless for us to all value a man based on how much of a warrior he is when we're not at war, for instance, right? So you need to reflect the roles with the ecology or with the local environment, whatever's going on right now.

• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  But you can get to the stage where you erode and dissolve and evaporate so many of the constituent parts of what a concept used to mean, to the point where it essentially means nothing anymore. Where the word masculinity would not resemble anything compared with what it would have done previously. Therefore, it's basically, it's a moot point and we now need a new word to talk about what men are.

• 1:14:27Chris Williamson?

  So yes, very, very, very interesting. Richard, I absolutely adore your work. I think this is, this is a fascinating intersection of morality, of anthropology, of evolution, of psychology, of all of the stuff that you've gone through. Are you working on anything next? Can we expect anything from you soon?

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  I think I'll probably develop the ideas about patriarchy a little bit more. And I think the, so the questions that you're, you're raising are really big, you know, really important about what is the role of men. The one thing that I thought that you didn't mention just then is, is kind of an odd one in a way, but men have got a tremendous role as fathers of sons.

• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  You know, helping to bring to rear sons. Because it does seem as though sons benefit very often from having a male father figure. But, but it's a funny thing that because the fathers very often don't know exactly what it is that they're trying to do.

• 1:15:29Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  In, in raising those.

• 1:15:31Chris Williamson?

  And it's not upheld, it's not high status. You know, to be a stay at home dad is still not high status. It's not high status for men to other men, and it's not high status for men to their partner.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:42Chris Williamson?

  So we also have this evolutionary mismatch of relationships where the woman out earns the man, the man is 50% more likely to need to use erectile dysfunction medication. It's twice as likely to end in divorce. It's four times as likely to end in divorce if she contributes more than 80% of the household income, da, da, da, da, all the way down.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  I mean, I wasn't literally thinking that, that he has to be a stay at home dad, but, but just to be, to be a dad at all, you know, because, I mean, I think one of the fascinating problems going to arise in the pretty near future is that women are not going to need men for reproduction.

• 1:16:17Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, that's, that's already, that's already happening. I have a friend who has got a PhD. She's a self-made millionaire, 37 years old. She's done not IVF, but whatever embryo selection, sperm donor thing. And she's, she's ready to go.

• 1:16:35Speaker 00

  So that's, that's halfway there. But I bet you that it won't take many decades before we don't need sperm at all.

• 1:16:44Chris Williamson?

  How would that work? What would you do?

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  Well, you know, there are, there are birds that are pathogenetic, that have reproduction without any sperm. And it seems to me that people will increasingly be able to discover what it is about sperm that is necessary for an egg. And it won't be long after that before we figure out a way to have two over fuse. So women will be able to have a baby with each other.

• 1:17:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  There's no theoretical reason why that shouldn't happen.

• 1:17:23Chris Williamson?

  We are racing to, we must find a new thing for us to do, Richard, or we are racing toward obsolescence, I fear.

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, but if you think about the species as a whole, you know, I mean, this gets fantastical, but it seems to me that ultimately, if you really want to envisage a stable, relatively stable future for the human species, I think it'd be a very good idea if, if there are no Y chromosomes. Because the, the ultimate source of violence is the Y chromosome. Women are clearly less given to what we might call irrational forms of aggression than men are.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  And I would think that it would ultimately behoove us in a world of, of new kinds of reproductive technology for a moral agreement in whatever kind of social structure we have in the world, for the Y chromosome to be put into a test tube like smallpox and, and for it not to be manifest in...

• 1:18:39Chris Williamson?

  Is that ethical to talk about essentially an entire gender's eugenics removal from the future of civilization?

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  There's a question for you.

• 1:18:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, we have decided to touch the final third rail, just to leave that there. I've never even thought about that before, and I have no idea what to think about it, other than I don't quite like the idea of all men going and leaving. But I also thought before I read your book that human morality hadn't occurred as a byproduct of alpha alliances, so we'll see. Richard, look, like I say, your work's fantastic.

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  Great conversation, thank you so much.

• 1:19:19Chris Williamson?

  It's my pleasure. When you come up with something new, let's discuss it. I would love to discuss it. And if you do end up coming through to Austin at any point, David has told me that we need to go for dinner. So if you do fly through Texas, make sure that you add an extra day into your trip. If people that are listening want to check out more of the stuff that you do, where should they go on the internet?

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  Well, I study chimpanzees, and we have a website called Kibale Chimpanzee Project, K-I-B-A-L-E, Kibale Chimpanzee Project, and look up The Goodness Paradox.

• 1:19:55Chris Williamson?

  Richard, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  Thanks, Chris.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. So y'all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:20:16Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:20:20Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.