The Incredible Evolution Of Aggression - Dr Richard Wrangham

1. 0:00 – 0:26

   Intro

   1. RWDr Richard Wrangham0:00

      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. (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:25

      Is

2. 0:26 – 6:38

   Are Humans an Aggressive Species?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:26

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

   2. RWDr Richard Wrangham0:31

      Well, yes, uh, in some ways we are incredibly aggressive because, uh, 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 this is that in some ways, we're just incredibly nice and tolerant and friendly and unaggressive. Um, and for years, we've grappled with how to resolve these two contrary sides of our personality, but we cannot deny that part of us is, uh, is a really aggressive streak, and we're seeing it at the moment in, in wars that occur around the world and, um, and those of course have gone on throughout history.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:12

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

   4. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:27

      Well, you know, one of the great questions about human nature for, uh, two or three hundred years has been, are we biologically predisposed to be aggressive or are we biologically predisposed to be tolerant? Are we a- an inherently aggressive species that is tamed by society or are we a- an inherently tolerant, unaggressive species that is made aggressive by society? A- and, you know, my view, and I think the increasing view is that that's- that question is misconceived. You know, 'cause the answer is that we're both or we're neither, if you like. That whether or not you look at our, our tremendous capacity and even interest in committing, um, aggression, uh, or whether you look at our tolerant, uh, 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 or for, uh, making us the, the sometimes horrible species that we sometimes are. You know, th- this is us. Take us or leave it.

   5. CWChris Williamson2:51

      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, went and lived in the woods?

   6. RWDr Richard Wrangham3:00

      The French guy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:01

      That was it? Sounds like Fou- Foucault, yeah.

   8. RWDr Richard Wrangham3:03

      U- Uh, writing j- just, uh, just before the French Revolution, uh, at the end of the 18th century, um, and, um, and- and you know, sort of very ironic really, you know, because he b- has become associated with the notion that we are inherently non-violent and of course, everyone had such high hopes for the French Revolution and then, you know, there's, there's this wonderful charitable, uh, exotic new dawn of humanity turns into the guillotine and, uh, and then, you know, Napoleon, uh, and so on. You know, the, the disaster that, um, that befell, uh, the, the sort of growing sense of civilization, uh, in Europe at that time. And then the other great philosopher... So he, so Rousseau is associated with the notion that, that humans are inherently, um, unaggressive, uh, made, made aggressive by society. And, uh, and then the opposite side was Thomas Hobbes, who was living in the time of the English Civil War, uh, in the second half of the, uh, 17th century and, uh, and he was impressed by the fact that, uh, you really had to lock your door and, uh, you had to worry about who your neighbors were because, uh, 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, uh, there is something just inherently competitive, uh, uh, cruel, violent about humans and that what you need to be able to control them is a superior body, uh, uh, an ultimate authority. Uh, he called it a Leviathan, uh, we would now think about it as the state, you know, at that time might have been the, the monarch, um, to keep everybody under control. And- and you can look at, uh, both of these, these great philosophers who have been representing these two opposing views of, you know, superficially opposing views and think that in many ways both of them were right. You know, they, they had a lot to them and that's, that's why people have s- sort of supported one or the other over these years. But, um, uh, you know, the wonderful thing is that we can now put the, uh, the nature of human nature 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, to really figure out what was going on in terms of the wet biology or in terms of our evolutionary relationships. Uh, but we can do that now and- and we can look at our close relatives, uh, the great apes, and we can see elements of, uh, all these, these two contrasting types of behavior 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, you know, fascinating ways to generate in one species, uh, a certain level of, uh, some kinds of aggression, in another species a different kinds of aggression, and we can figure out that there is a, a logic to the evolutionary history that leaves us deposited, in our case, on the 20th century or 21st century, um, with the particular set of inherent tendencies.

3. 6:38 – 21:08

   How Human Violence Evolved

   1. RWDr Richard Wrangham6:38

   2. CWChris Williamson6:38

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

   3. RWDr Richard Wrangham6:51

      I think that we have to look back at the last two million years, which is the time that we have been members of the genus Homo. You know, just a, around two million years ago is when the genus Homo arose, when for the first time, you got a creature that, uh, could walk into a, uh, a clothes shop on Main Street and take clothes off the peg. You know, they were our size and shape. Um, th- they were smaller brained, they were much more robust, uh, they were, you know, big, great big brow ridges and great big broad faces, uh, but they were, they were an early kind of human, two million years ago. And I think that for the whole of the two million years, they were a species that were like wolves or chimpanzees or a few other, uh, s- species in being very good hunters and also very good killers of your own species. 'Cause once you, once you're a good hunter, you know, like a lion or a wolf or a chimpanzee, then that means that you can hunt anything and if you want to hunt a member of your own species, you're pretty good at that.

   4. CWChris Williamson8:06

      That weaponry can be turned inward, yes.

   5. RWDr Richard Wrangham8:09

      Yes, and it's not literally weaponry in the sense of a, of a spear, you know, it's the weapons of your claws and your wa- and your brain and your mouth and, and whatever it is. And, and in the case of, 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, and try and uh, a- attack a bison on its own. You know, it knows perfectly well that it'd be an incredibly dangerous thing to do. But if you have ten wolves and one bison, well now you're talking. You know, some of them can nip the w- the, uh, its uh, 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, um, that, um, 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, to, to modern warfare is that we were good at hunting and 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, later they bomb us. It's an asymmetric attack in the sense that it's a pre- premeditated, planned attack when it's pretty safe for the attackers. What's not safe is what happens later when they attack us. Hmm. 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, um, probably, uh, the big event that changed everything, happened around 3 or 400,000 years ago 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." - might suddenly turn out to be the victim and they all turn against you. The, 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 g- 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 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, saying, "You know, that guy is, isn't a little bit weird recently, don't you think?" You know? And, um, eventually getting...... confidence that, yes, okay, let's agree. You know, he really deserves to be sent back to the witches and, and we'll get him, and we'll all agree, and that's it. Now this ability to execute an- another member of your own group changes society hugely. Because until then, almost unimaginably for humans as we grow up, uh, in society today, we would have had a really bullying system. I mean, maybe it is imaginable if you remember high school. 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, um, throws his weight around and just, you know, takes advantage of his, his ability to physically dominate everybody else. Uh, all animals do this basically. You know, all the primates, the chimpanzees and the gorillas, even the bonobos, um, uh, all the monkeys. You have some top male and he takes it out on everybody else. And what does he, 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, um, 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 because nobody dares to be the bully that exerts his power, the tyrant that takes everything for himself. And all of a sudden, uh, 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, uh, ta- 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, 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 ourself that I have a goal. I want to go and kill that animal or that person, or 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, uh, come into your home bedroom and find another man in bed with your wife, and you just lose it. This is not premeditated, thoughtful, unemotional. This is impulsive, it's defensive, it's reacting to a threat, and you just lash out and, and, uh, you, you are, 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, uh, following different evolutionary trajectories. 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 3 or 400,000 years ago when, um, 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 domes- a, a wild animal, uh, and choose t- to have the successive generations, being those that are, are, uh, the result of breeding by the less aggressive, the less reactively aggressive individuals, then they show elements of, um, some quite surprising biological traits. And these, we know these traits very well because they occur in domesticated animals. All these different s- lines of domesticated animals, uh, unrelated lines, dogs, cows, goats, cats, they all tend to have white patches of fur on them. 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 its forehead or a horse that's got white toes. These just occur spontaneously. We know this now because there was this wonderful, uh, Russian experiment starting in the 1950s by a guy called Dmitry Belyayev, 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, and he would write down the distance that the human would, uh, get within the fox, with the... as he approached the fox. When the fox said... (imitates fox's scream) 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've 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. 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?

   6. CWChris Williamson19:26

      Elephant?

   7. RWDr Richard Wrangham19:27

      Yes, very good.

   8. CWChris Williamson19:28

      Nailed it.

   9. RWDr Richard Wrangham19:29

      On the nose. Boom. Uh, 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." Um, and, uh, the floppy ears, uh, 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. Um, and-

   10. CWChris Williamson20:01

       Or white fur.

   11. RWDr Richard Wrangham20:02

       ... we... What?

   12. CWChris Williamson20:03

       Or white fur.

   13. RWDr Richard Wrangham20:06

       Well, um, we don't often have, uh, white patches of fur, but, um, but there are some features of the domestication syndrome that are associated with our bones, and they are things like relatively, uh, slender, light-boned 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. 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.

   14. CWChris Williamson21:06

       Okay, let's, let's recap

4. 21:08 – 24:33

   The Self-Domestication of Man

   1. CWChris Williamson21:08

      the story so far. So, humans, our ancestors, develop the ability to, first off, uh, 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 coor- a little bit more, you have the problem of coordination up until about 400 to 300,000 years ago.

   2. RWDr Richard Wrangham21:33

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson21:33

      When you get language, especially advanced language-

   4. RWDr Richard Wrangham21:36

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson21:36

      ... you have the ability to coordinate more effectively. Not only do you have the, uh, 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, uh, 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 gonna take him down because he's being a dick."

   6. RWDr Richard Wrangham22:03

      Yes.

   7. CWChris Williamson22:03

      "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-

   8. RWDr Richard Wrangham22:15

      Yes.

   9. CWChris Williamson22:16

      ... 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. And if they have sons, the, like, the aggressive son hypothesis, I suppose, uh, if you have aggressive sons, they are more likely to be killed before they have sons, and so on and so forth. Uh, 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, a pretty rapid, uh, anatomical change-

   10. RWDr Richard Wrangham23:04

       That's right.

   11. CWChris Williamson23:04

       ... with regards to the fur. This is met with certain anatomical changes in humans, which includes shortening of the, uh, face, less aggressive, uh, less, uh, powerful jaws, less large teeth, reduced brow ridge I'm 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. Uh, and that means that we have very much not only, um, adapted to the selective pressures outwardly that the environment gave to us, but k- almost kind of adapted to the selective pressures that we placed on ourselves socially through this execution.

   12. RWDr Richard Wrangham24:04

       Yeah. (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson24:04

       Is that about right?

   14. RWDr Richard Wrangham24:05

       Yes, absolutely. Exactly. Yeah, so, so we have been very responsible for our own evolutionary trajectory, uh, for the last, you know, quarter of a million years and more.... and, 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, uh, for the last quarter of a million years and

5. 24:33 – 27:47

   Understanding Psychological Changes Through Bones

   1. RWDr Richard Wrangham24:33

      more. Um-

   2. CWChris Williamson24:34

      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 bro- bone and teeth structure. How can you talk about the implied psychological changes?

   3. RWDr Richard Wrangham24:57

      Well, I mean, the only way we can really do it, uh, confidently is through this correlation w- with the bones. And, uh, there are some correlations that are, you know, still very fascinating today. I mean, one of them is, uh, concerns the breadth of the face, uh, in relationship to the length of the face. And, uh, it turns out that, uh, in, in a number of animals, and humans is one of them, uh, if you look at males, males who have a relatively broad face are more aggressive. And there have been a bunch of studies which show that this is true for humans nowadays. So, it's n- uh, you know, our, the breadth of our faces has been reduced, uh, is become, in, in males, more female-like, uh, relatively narrower faces. Uh, here's a, a lovely example of a study, um, which I think makes a couple of i- important points. Um, there was a, a Canadian team that looked at, uh, ice hockey, as we would call it, or hockey as, uh, we call it in the States. Um, uh, looked at, uh, a, 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, uh, the penalty box for being too rough, being, for being too aggressive. And of course, it's interesting to think about this because, uh, you know, what we're gonna see is that the players who had broader faces spend more time in the penalty box on average. Uh, but the referees are not really particularly aware of this 'cause they've got helmets on, so you can't, you know, you, it's, it's difficult to even notice.

   4. CWChris Williamson26:46

      It's not like it's prejudice by the referees against-

   5. RWDr Richard Wrangham26:49

      Thank you.

   6. CWChris Williamson26:49

      ... the broad-faced community.

   7. RWDr Richard Wrangham26:51

      Exactly.

   8. CWChris Williamson26:51

      Right?

   9. RWDr Richard Wrangham26:51

      That's right. An important point in this study was that for each of the stu- e- each of the teams that they looked at, there was a, 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, uh, within each team, but in every team it happened. Every college team and every professional team. I think it was, uh, uh, a total of 12 teams. So, that the overall significance was very clear, but you cannot look at in, an individual man and say, "Yeah, you know, you've got a broad face. We know that you are an-"

   10. CWChris Williamson27:38

       (laughs)

   11. RWDr Richard Wrangham27:38

       "... aggressive type."

   12. CWChris Williamson27:39

       (laughs) F- f- f- face, you're gonna punch me. Yeah.

   13. RWDr Richard Wrangham27:41

       Right.

   14. CWChris Williamson27:42

       Yeah. Wow.

   15. RWDr Richard Wrangham27:43

       So, so it's a trend, you know?

   16. CWChris Williamson27:45

       Okay. So,

6. 27:47 – 39:12

   Has Female Aggression Evolved?

   1. CWChris Williamson27:47

      what is... Y- y- 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-div- uh, domesticated at all throughout this period?

   2. RWDr Richard Wrangham28:07

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

   3. CWChris Williamson28:14

      So, you're saying that the, uh, 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?

   4. RWDr Richard Wrangham28:28

      Well, um, you know, it-

   5. CWChris Williamson28:30

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

   6. RWDr Richard Wrangham28:33

      (laughs) Yeah. Um, what we, we, what we don't have with females is, um, the equivalent evidence of, uh, the changes that were happening in males independent of the males. Um, you know, it seems to be very likely that females were indeed, um, much more sort of independent, um, uh, aggressors in those days. Um, but we don't know. The reason I say that is because in some ways, females have changed particularly strongly compared to, um, our sort of, uh, apish past, compared to males. You know, the males are still a little bit more brutish, um, a little bit less refined, a little bit hairier, um, uh, a, a little bit more like our, uh, apish ancestors and, and the, you know, the early forms of homo. So, f- females have in many ways changed particularly strongly. They've become, you know, feminization has really changed them from, um, from what they probably were, which was a, a much more, uh, male-like, uh, set of individuals. But, but we don't have at the moment, um, any kind of really clear story involving how that happened. Was that just, uh, an incidental consequence of selection on males? It doesn't seem very likely, but it's a theoretical possibility. Um, or, uh, was there intense selection on females to become less aggressive themselves? That could well, well be the case.

   7. CWChris Williamson30:18

      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, uh, intersexual competition, your Joyce Benenson's of the world, and so on and so forth have been on this show a lot. And, um, the female capacity for gossip and coalition making, breaking, backbiting, venting, and all the rest of it is otherworldly. And it, the, the, it, it has to have been... The difference as well between the way that males display, um, power struggles, aggression, um, e- the, uh, compet- competitions for status, who it is that they're concerned about with status, the fact that men are positively, um, 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," or I don't know how you take down a, a mammoth, um. 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, uh-

   8. RWDr Richard Wrangham31:51

      Intrigue.

   9. CWChris Williamson31:51

      ... of changes. Yes, for sure.

   10. RWDr Richard Wrangham31:53

       Yeah. And there, it's, it's very plausible. Um, there's another dynamic as well which is that, uh, the evolution of patriarchy.

   11. CWChris Williamson32:02

       Ooh, what do you mean there?

   12. RWDr Richard Wrangham32:03

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

   13. CWChris Williamson32:48

       What would be a, an ancestral example of one of those?

   14. RWDr Richard Wrangham32:53

       Um, you could say, um, that uh, uh, females who have adulterous relationship, uh, are gonna be punished more heavily than males who do. Which is something that happens pretty much universally, you know, across societies. It's a, 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, uh, an alliance among the males. They don't like it when females, uh, are adulterous because each of the females belongs to a particular male.

   15. CWChris Williamson33:39

       Let me fold a very interesting piece of information that I learned a couple of weeks ago. Uh, I want to say that this was maybe Christina Duranti or someone else who taught me that women condemn promiscuity more the more sons that they have.

   16. RWDr Richard Wrangham34:01

       Oh.

   17. CWChris Williamson34:01

       Because they want the male parental uncertainty, they want to tune that down. So women who have sons show an increased, uh, uh, distaste for promiscuity. Uh, and I thought that that was absolutely fascinating. So I wonder-

   18. RWDr Richard Wrangham34:20

       Yes, absolutely. On the contrast-

   19. CWChris Williamson34:20

       I wonder how much it's just, uh, it's just the men that would have been behind the condemnation of the promiscuous woman. I mean, you, you know, you roll intersexual 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 are a single woman, that's one fewer competition, uh, o- one fewer competitor within your mating market for a future potential mate. And if you are 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-

   20. RWDr Richard Wrangham35:04

       Yep.

   21. CWChris Williamson35:04

       ... for women here as well.

   22. RWDr Richard Wrangham35:05

       Yeah, and then if, if a woman has daughters, then, uh, she would quite like her daughters to be able-

   23. CWChris Williamson35:10

       (laughs)

   24. RWDr Richard Wrangham35:10

       ... to be able to have the choice, uh, of, um-

   25. CWChris Williamson35:13

       Of more men. (laughs)

   26. RWDr Richard Wrangham35:14

       ... you know, ch- choosing which man she has for which, which baby.

   27. CWChris Williamson35:17

       Promiscuous women have got, I mean, eh, b- aside from the, the whole slut-shaming thing, uh, 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 n- 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.

   28. RWDr Richard Wrangham35:49

       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, 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-

   29. CWChris Williamson36:28

       What's the alpha alliance?

   30. RWDr Richard Wrangham36:30

       The alpha alliance, uh, is, is what I call the, the group of males who are responsible for, um, killing the tyrant.
7. 39:12 – 52:26

   Did Violence Influence the Development of Morality?

   1. CWChris Williamson39:12

      So this, this is what particularly interests me that we, we're m- sort of moving now from the realm of individual, uh, anatomical, psychological, and then societal, civilizational changes into morality now. We're kind of moving ourselves across into values and virtues and what is upheld and how the interplay of all of this works. Am I right in thinking... Well, actually, how, how has this impacted morality? How, how did these changes inform the evolution of human morality in your view?

   2. RWDr Richard Wrangham39:48

      I think that, uh, the emergence of, uh, what I'm calling the alpha alliance, the, the, the gang that is able to control the tyrant, uh, is essentially simultaneous with the evolution of, um, uh, of moral principles that are based on the concept of right and wrong. So there's a kind of morality of sympathy that you see a little bit developed in, uh, the higher primates and, and maybe, you know, dolphins and so on, uh, where there is a tendency for individuals just to understand, to be empathic towards, uh, another individual who is suffering. And some people call that morality, and it, that's fine, you can call it morality. But it's not a morality based on the principles of right and wrong. Morality that's based on the principles of right and wrong is much more arbitrary. 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 behavior and here is wrong behavior." You know, right behavior is, and then they'll lay out a series of things that are good for the group as a whole, like, "We're not gonna steal from each other anymore, okay? Anybody caught stealing, we're gonna punish you. If you carry on doing it, you're dead." 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. If there's any problem with the food supply, the men get the first choice. If we find that, uh, a man and a woman have, uh, been having sex that, uh, is outside, uh, let's call it marriage, well, man can be understood, but the woman, that's no good. So I think that there are, 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, have that ability to talk about it and do it-... and there, there's 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson42:38

      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.

   4. RWDr Richard Wrangham42:51

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson42:52

      So-

   6. RWDr Richard Wrangham42:52

      Yeah. The-

   7. CWChris Williamson42:53

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

   8. RWDr Richard Wrangham43:08

      That's pretty much exactly right.

   9. CWChris Williamson43:11

      (laughs)

   10. RWDr Richard Wrangham43:11

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson43:13

       There are moral philosophers that are throwing themselves off bridges at the moment-

   12. RWDr Richard Wrangham43:17

       (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson43:17

       ... hearing this, thinking, "No, it's ............................ There must be more."

   14. RWDr Richard Wrangham43:21

       Well, um, I, I think, you know, this, this is a, an area of discussion that has not been, you know, sufficiently aired, uh, at the moment. Um, but I feel very, very comfortable, uh, thinking that this all derives from, uh, power dynamics, that, uh, that the, the sense of right and wrong is ultimately a sense of how to protect yourself from this, um, evolutionary novelty, which is the fact that individuals can be killed at very low cost to the killers.

   15. CWChris Williamson44:01

       Do you have any inclination or is there any suggestion that this sense of right and wrong exists outside of culture, that, you know, is it, 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?

   16. RWDr Richard Wrangham44:23

       Well, I mean, we're, we're clearly very conformist, uh, as a, as a species, um, and, uh, you know, children, uh, at a very young age, uh, learn to con- to con- conform, and they learn to impose rules on each other and, and/or they... When I say learn to, you know, they do it almost spontaneously. So, that certainly suggests that they, you know, the, the basic norm psychology as, uh, it's being called, uh, has been inculcated into us. But what you're asking, uh, are there specific versions of what's right and wrong, uh, and, um, I'm not, I'm not convinced about that. You know, uh, the, the, the... there might be, uh, something like, um, uh, involving theft, you know, some, some very basic principles, uh, involving harming each other-

   17. CWChris Williamson45:18

       Oh.

   18. RWDr Richard Wrangham45:18

       ... but most of these things are subject to some kind of fluidity.

   19. CWChris Williamson45:22

       Yeah. So, I guess, f- some sort of inherent feeling of fairness, uh, maybe, um, 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, uh, soldiers deal with things like PTSD would be pretty maladaptive if we were just supposed to be, uh, proact-, um, how would you say, unboundedly proactive aggressors. Uh, you would just come back and-

   20. RWDr Richard Wrangham45:54

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson45:54

       ... why would that be an issue? You know, I just, I did the thing, I did the thing that I'm supposed to do. Um, so speaking of that actually, has there ever been, have you ever discovered or could you imagine a situation in which proactive aggression was selected against in any animal?

   22. RWDr Richard Wrangham46:14

       Um, well, uh, if you take, uh, our two closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, the, uh, you can make two strong claims, I think. First of all, that, uh, 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, 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 in bonobos compared to chimps.

   23. CWChris Williamson47:04

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

   24. RWDr Richard Wrangham47:16

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson47:17

       Can you explain that? Why females? Why not males? You've just, 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 us? What power do females have?

   26. RWDr Richard Wrangham47:31

       Yes. Right. Right. The, uh, it's fascinatingly similar and it's fascinatingly different. Uh, I think it's similar because you get the same evidence of self-domestication in the bones and the anatomy of bonobos compared to chimps as you do in humans compared to our ancestors or, by the way, compared to Neanderthals. Um, a difference is that in bonobos, you still have alpha males, whereas in humans, you don't have alpha males in the primate sense. And so, the self-domestication that's happened in human, in bonobos does not involve removing the alpha male. Alpha males don't get killed. Um, and, you know, we certainly don't have a, a really good handle on the dynamic in 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 and they all go chasing that male. And he runs off and is, is terrified, and rightly so, because those females can impose a lot of damage, uh, you know, like any gang, they're pretty effective and they can bite his knuckles off or, uh, uh, 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. Uh, it's not directed at, um ... or the current behavior is not directed at, um, eliminating the tyrant males. What it is directed at is stopping the males from being aggressive towards the females.

   27. CWChris Williamson49:36

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

   28. RWDr Richard Wrangham49:45

       Well, uh, 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 because ... and you, and that, that would be a very fair argument because we know about the distribution of paternity in bonobos and we know that even you, 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, you know, it's really high. Um, but what the bonobos 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.

   29. CWChris Williamson50:50

       Presumably those, 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?

   30. RWDr Richard Wrangham51:00

       That's true. What the females have, uh, unlike humans is, um, 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 the f- there are always females there to be able to, uh, attack him. And that's unlike humans where, uh, you know, in all societies humans break up by day and, and go off in small groups and, uh, and a man can, uh, find an opportunity to beat up on a female, uh, when there are no females around to, to support her.
8. 52:26 – 56:19

   How Much of Mythology is Justification for a Male Bias?

   1. CWChris Williamson52:26

      the morality thing, so I think this is really interesting. You mentioned before that, um, men typically throughout history have come up with, uh, 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?

   2. RWDr Richard Wrangham53:00

      Yes, for, for what benefits the, uh, the male alliance. Um, so I, I think the story of human society, you know, major, uh, major story of human society is that it is designed around, uh, what benefits the group of males that have taken power. So they've taken power from the alpha male, uh, they, um, they, they have a monopoly on violence. Uh, you know, them, their monopoly means that they ... one of the rules is, uh, we're not gonna tolerate violence within our group. Um, so that leads to a series of, of moral principles, uh, associated with that. Um, the ... I, I think that basically you're right, that, um, uh, the, the morality of a group is, uh, intimately associated with, uh, what benefits the males as a group. And that might mean that some me- individuals are, 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, the strongest or whatever. He has to conform to the rest of the group himself. But from the point of view of the group as a whole, these moral principles work for th- for their own benefit. And so, you know, religions are, are of course, you know, very male-biased in terms of...... um, uh, th- the way they work, the, um, uh, the precepts that come down from on high. You know, god- gods are typically personifications, where they are personifications of something. And, and what are p- what are they personifications of? Well, I think the answer is, they're personifications of the interests of the male group.

   3. CWChris Williamson55:01

      A lot of third rails here, Richard. First off, we've come for morality and, and cleanly decapitated that one. And then next up (laughs) is perhaps the entire institution of religion at large as being a, 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, um, provable or disprovable here and now. It couldn't be like the number of, of cows that somebody had killed or whatever. It had to be the, the special trumpet, the magical trumpet of the gods or whatever. It wasn't the ... there was something that you said about a, a special path. If women walked on a particular path and, and-

   4. RWDr Richard Wrangham55:47

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

   5. CWChris Williamson56:06

      Interesting.

   6. RWDr Richard Wrangham56:06

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

   7. CWChris Williamson56:18

      There was a lot

9. 56:19 – 58:44

   Evolution of Kin-to-Kin Aggression

   1. CWChris Williamson56:19

      of evidence that you found for even, um, kin-kin executions or whatever. There was a story, I think, of a m- 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 s- uh, this should be selected against incredibly heavily. Why, why, 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 trying to take on maybe the entire ... uh, it's me and you, son, let's take on the entire tribe. What, what, what's your-

   2. RWDr Richard Wrangham56:55

      Yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson56:55

      ... understanding there?

   4. RWDr Richard Wrangham56:55

      Well, no, you're, you're right, that this, this is very extreme. And in terms of the ordinary expectations of, um, uh, individuals being expected to favor their own kin, uh, against non-kin, uh, it doesn't really work. But I think it, what it reflects is the incredible power, uh, of the, the dominating group with its ability to impose its own morality on everybody else. And there may come a point at which, I know a cynical, um, uh, examination of, uh, an appropriate strategy would say, "If I support my son who has been irritating others in this group, then he's gonna get killed and I'm gonna get killed and, and all our family's gonna 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, uh, the, and the, the big picture here is that the ability to kill, the ability of a, of a group to develop rules, um, that they can enforce is behind so many of the complexities of human society, s- complexities and, and, uh, 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.

10. 58:44 – 1:06:03

    How Sex Ratios Impacted the Local Ecology

    1. CWChris Williamson58:44

       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, um, 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 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?

    2. RWDr Richard Wrangham59:43

       Well, not really, but, but the, the sort of gut, gut feeling I have about this is that, uh, male desires, male motivations, um, are almost infinite. You know, think about the fact that, um, emperors in various different societies around the world, uh, China, India, Peru, when they get absolute power, uh, you know, they're not quite the same as alpha males and 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, um, powerful individual man, and he might have a harem of 10,000 women.... and, and he acts like a, um, a breeding bull, where, uh, two females are brought to him every day, uh, whose menstrual periods have been monitored so that they're most likely to be fertile on that day.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:00:57

       A logistical nightmare.

    4. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:00:59

       Yes. And, uh, and even the emperors themselves complained about, uh, you know, (laughs) uh, the obligations here. But, but nevertheless, you know, that's what he can go for. And then, but then the, you know, the vice emperor or whatever they're called, 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, uh, have got, uh, their own, uh, rich number of females.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:01:25

       The trickle-down effect of whatever could be going on.

    6. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:01:28

       Of, of power.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:01:29

       Yes.

    8. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:01:30

       Uh, so when you say, uh, you know, well, so maybe everyone would just sort of stop and give up and, and, uh, and make nice if they had lots of, access to lots of females-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:01:39

       Mm.

    10. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:01:39

        ... it seems to me more likely that what would happen is that, that, uh, they would just all be competing for all of these females again.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:01:47

        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 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, uh, all the rest of the stuff, it, 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 100,000 years ago, how many women can one man support, realistically?

    12. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:02:46

        Uh, yes, th- that's right. And of course, um, you probably know about the, the famous study, the Tiwi of northern Australia, uh, where, uh, you had hunters and gatherers in general becoming more polygynous as you went further north in Australia. Um, and as you go further north towards the warmer regions, uh, you, uh, find that it's increasingly possible for women to, uh, look after themselves without any male input, uh, in terms of the accessibility of plant and animal resources. And the animal resources are, are generally fairly small. There's sort of lizards more than, um, buffalo.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:03:25

        Mm, mm.

    14. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:03:26

        If there were any. Um, and, uh, and you had intense polygyny with the men having, say, 20 wives, um, and the support all went in the opposite direction to the one you were talking about. That is to say, a man would say, "Oh my goodness, you know, I'm not gonna get enough food unless I have at least five wives. And, you know, now I have 20, then I get lots of food," 'cause the women were supporting the men.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:03:50

        Wow.

    16. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:03:50

        So not men supporting women. Um, so you had-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:03:54

        So is there, is it, is it, is it an element-

    18. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:03:55

        These are hunters and gatherers with intense polygyny.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:03:57

        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.

    20. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:04:23

        Well, yes, they don't need the male support.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:04:25

        Yes.

    22. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:04:25

        And, and so, you know, in contrast to what you had in Africa, uh, probably where, uh, 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, um, where, where that doesn't happen then, um, uh, as, as we're saying, uh, it's increasingly possible for a few men to dominate access to the, the females. And you had a very interesting system where, um, it was the, the elders, uh, were really quite old, like, uh, you know, 40 years old. Um-

    23. CWChris Williamson1:05:09

        Almost like a gerontocracy type thing?

    24. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:05:11

        It was very gerontocratic. That's absolutely right. Yeah, relatively few old men. Uh, they had a hard time of it because, um, you know, there's no lights, of course, so they'd, uh, they'd go to sleep, uh, go to bed or they'd have their evening meal, um, with, uh, maybe 25 fires for the 25 women that are the wives of a particular man. And it would be all too easy for some women to go out of the firelight and go and meet bachelors, uh, and, uh, and get into trouble that way. And so the bachelors were supposed to, uh, to go off a long way. Um, they were supposed to go and live in a different part of the bush for, uh, you know, 10 years or something before they were allowed to come back and, and be part of the system at all.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:06:01

        Have you considered,

11. 1:06:03 – 1:19:17

    Humanity’s Approach to Male Aggression in Today’s Society

    1. CWChris Williamson1:06:03

       in the modern world, the changing dynamics that we have of, um, peace, relative peace in our time, the, uh, lack of requirement for men to do both big game hunting and warfare, uh, the condemnation generally of both proactive and reactive aggression, whether that be, uh, socially or legislative- legislatively, um, and also the increasing female achievement and independence that they have from men that, uh, w- in terms of resources, education, employment, you know, uh, uh, 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, um, approach our humanity's approach to aggression looks like in this current version of civilization that we're in now.

    2. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:07:00

       Well, I agree that it, it raises, um, questions about male roles. And, you know, I see all this stuff in the news about, um, adolescent boys, uh, feeling frustrated, uh, that, um, they're not able to, to be as male as (clears throat) their perceptions, uh, would like them to be. Uh, and the way that, um, Andrew Tate and his philosophy are incredi- uh, appallingly appealing to, to boys, and I agree that it, it kind of raises some really big issues about, um, uh, about the future, about whether or not it's gonna be satisfactory for males to be, you know, increasingly, um, powerless, uh, increasingly, uh, unnecessary. Uh, I, uh, but I've not, I've not considered, you know, exactly what's gonna happen. I mean, um, 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, uh, we have, uh, moral and institutional systems that, uh, keep violence, uh, in its place. And if you are violent in a small hunter-gatherer society, then you will be subject to, uh, an arrow in the back, um, and everyone will say, "Yes, he deserved it," you know, or, or maybe plan it in advance. And the same happens nowadays with us. If you are too violent, then you will end up, nowadays, in prison, um, and presumably that will lead to a reduction in your reproductive success, and we all, uh, have developed a whole series of sensitivities to these complex rules that, um, keep us in, in control. Now, you know, you're asking is it possible that, um, these rules will get so burdensome and so at variance with our, uh, male spontaneous tendencies to, uh, you know, do the equivalent of go hunting, um, that, uh, that somehow the system will break down? Uh, you know, I tend to doubt it, but, but, you know, it's a, it's a future that, that we haven't been, uh, to before, so, you know, who knows what's gonna happen?

    3. CWChris Williamson1:09:40

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

    4. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:10:05

       Ooh.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:10:05

       And, um, I asked the question of David and his partner, who is a very a- accomplished, uh, social psychologist, um, what use are men in 2023? Really, what, 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, and law, and a supermarket, really, really what role do we have? Because we're seeing women out-perform men in education, on average they're more conscientious, they have fewer geniuses, but they also have fewer, um, ADHD, uh, autistic, r- retarded members. Uh, 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, uh, predispositions, at least in part, um, 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, the, you know, that Andrew Tate sort of gives a, a little bit of a nod and a wink to, those are no longer required of men. And kind of the, the, the nerfed kiddy version of that which was, um, 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 male- men to dominate, all of those have fallen away now. And, uh, you know, I asked one of my smartest friends who's thought about intersexual, intrasexual 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, uh, adds what may be a, uh, slightly bleak but very interesting new 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 man's interests. And now in a world during which those interests have been emancipated so much that anybody can access them, uh, 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, the advent of a s- of scientism, the rationalist world, uh, all of this has 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, uh-... decapitation was the fact that women didn't need men for resources anymore. And, yeah, I do, I- I'm going to Doha, it looks like, to do a debate on m- 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."

    6. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:13:23

       Mm-hmm.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:13:23

       I'm not, I'm not convinced that I actually agree with that (laughs) position, which is maybe gonna make me bad as a, uh, 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, definitions and roles within society need to change to adapt to what is happening in the society." Right? "It, it, it would, it would be pointless for us to all value a man based on how much of a warrior he w- 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. 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, would not resemble anything compared with what it would have done re- uh, previously. Therefore, it's basically, it's- it's a moot point, and you- we now need a new word to talk about what men are. Um, so yes, very, very, very interesting. Richard, I- I absolutely adore your work. I think this is, this is a- a fascinating intersection of morality, of anthropology, of evolution, of psychology, of a- all of the stuff that you've gone through. Uh, are you working on anything next? Can we expect anything from you soon?

    8. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:14:46

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

    9. CWChris Williamson1:15:09

       Yes.

    10. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:15:10

        Uh, you know, helping to- to bring, to rear sons.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:15:13

        Mm-hmm.

    12. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:15:13

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

    13. CWChris Williamson1:15:29

        Correct.

    14. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:15:30

        ... in- in raising those-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:15:31

        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.

    16. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:15:41

        Yeah, that's right.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:15:42

        So we also have this evolutionary mismatch of, uh, relationships-

    18. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:15:46

        That's true.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:15:46

        ... 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.

    20. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:16:00

        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?

    21. CWChris Williamson1:16:06

        Mm-hmm.

    22. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:16:06

        Because, I mean, uh, I think one of the fascinating, uh, problems that's going to arise in the pretty near future is that women are not going to need men for reproduction.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:16:17

        Yes. Yes. That's- that's already-

    24. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:16:19

        You know, uh-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:16:19

        That's already happening. I have a friend who's got a PhD. She's a mil- self-made millionaire, 37 years old, uh, she's done not IVF but whatever embryo selection sperm donor thing, and she's- she's ready to go.

    26. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:16:35

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

    27. CWChris Williamson1:16:44

        How would that work? What would you do?

    28. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:16:48

        Well, uh, you know, there are, um, there are birds, uh, that are parthenogenetic that- that- uh, that have reproduction without any sperm. And, uh, it seems to me that people will increasingly be able to discover what it is about sperm that is necessary, uh, for an egg, and it won't be long after that before we figure out a way to have two ovar fuse.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:17:15

        And because-

    30. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:17:16

        So women will be able to have a baby with each other.
12. 1:19:17 – 1:20:18

    Where to Find Dr Wrangham

    1. CWChris Williamson1:19:17

       um, when you come up with-

    2. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:19:18

       Great conversation. Thank you so much.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:19:19

       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, uh, 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?

    4. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:19:40

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

    5. CWChris Williamson1:19:56

       Richard, I appreciate you. Thank you.

    6. RWDr Richard Wrangham1:19:58

       Thanks, Chris.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:19:59

       (instrumental music plays) What's happening people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:20:18