William Von Hippel - How We Evolved

1. 0:00 – 4:19

   Why humans left the trees: introducing “The Social Leap”

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      (wind blowing) Hello, friends. This week, I'm sitting down with William Von Hippel, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia. His work's been covered in The Australian, New York Times, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and the Sydney Morning Herald, amongst many other publications. And on top of that, William Von Hippel sounds like a baron from medieval times, which is- it's the sickest name ever. So, I first came across Bill's work when I heard him on Joe Rogan's podcast a couple of weeks ago, and I was absolutely fascinated. Very fortunately, we've managed to find a slot in Bill's book tour, which he's currently undergoing in America, and I managed to sit down with him to go through his new book, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy. If you have ever wondered about how great apes in trees became bipedal beings out on the plains and then evolved into the humans that you see before you today, this podcast is really for you. There's a beautiful story element and a narrative behind what Bill talks about, plus there's loads of implications for how we operate today. Again, the same as with my podcast I did with Professor Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain, why we are the way we are nowadays is a lot due to the environment that we evolved in. But in other news, I have got some messages about why there wasn't a podcast up on audio platforms last week. And if you do not follow me on social media, you may not know why. However, we did another YouTube exclusive, what it's really like starring on Take Me Out. Uh, after the What It's Really Like On Love Island podcast, we decided to double down. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Sure enough, the podcast has taken off really quickly and it's been covered by some of the UK press, which is always good news, despite them misquoting me and one of them misspelling my name, but whatever, it's fine (inhales) . Um, but we're back on a schedule. I've got Johnny and Yusuf coming up very, very soon to do some special edition Christmas podcasts. I've also got the fattest, thickest, longest section of recording (laughs) that I've ever had to do in the build up to Christmas, so you may even get two a week over the Christmas holidays, but don't hold me to it. In the meantime, we're gonna find out why we are the way we are and where we came from. Oh yeah, P.S. The first minute and a half might sound slightly different to normal. I was still fighting with Skype at this point, but don't worry, I was victorious. Normal audio services resumed after a couple of minutes. (upbeat music) Professor William Von Hippel, how are you today?

   2. WHWilliam Von Hippel3:03

      Good. Very happy to be here.

   3. CWChris Williamson3:05

      Very happy to have you on. It's been (laughs) , uh, a technological catastrophe so far, but it would appear that we've managed to, uh, tame all of the electronics that we're using to get this call to work, which I'm really, really happy about. So thank you for that.

   4. WHWilliam Von Hippel3:18

      Oh, totally my pleasure. I've got high hopes.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:20

      (laughs) Um, so The Social Leap. You are currently-

   6. WHWilliam Von Hippel3:24

      Yes.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:24

      ... on your book tour, that's right?

   8. WHWilliam Von Hippel3:26

      That's right.

   9. CWChris Williamson3:27

      Amazing. So The Social Leap, what is it?

   10. WHWilliam Von Hippel3:31

       So that's the term I use for the kind of solution that our ancestors came to when they left the rainforest and were forced to move to the savanna. And so, you know, here they were, these sort of chimp-like creatures who were really at the top of the food chain when they were in the canopy, but were very vulnerable on the ground. And so how did they solve that problem? Well, I think it took a few million years of sort of skulking around the edge of the savanna, but eventually, and I believe by the time we got to Australopithecus, they had learned to cooperate and band together, um, in their mutual defense. And so I call this the- this leap from the trees to the savannah, and then this increasing sociality that, uh, came with that leap and that, in fact, I believe started off our entire evolutionary process that brought us to where we are now, that's what I call The Social Leap.

2. 4:19 – 5:27

   How the book’s evolutionary story was built (and its evidence limits)

   1. CWChris Williamson4:19

      Amazing. What was the process of researching the book? Before we get into it, what was the-

   2. WHWilliam Von Hippel4:25

      Sure.

   3. CWChris Williamson4:25

      Is it a lot of deductive reasoning? Is it, uh, analysis of-

   4. WHWilliam Von Hippel4:30

      Well, there's a lot of really fabulous, um, archeology and paleoanthropology and other forms of anthropology that people have done to try to make inferences about where we came from, what were the cognitive capabilities of our ancestors and their social lives like. And, you know, there's not much to work with when you're looking at fossils that are millions of years old.

   5. CWChris Williamson4:51

      Mm-hmm.

   6. WHWilliam Von Hippel4:51

      Uh, but- but these people have done a fabulous job of trying to infer cognitive abilities in the deep past. And all I did was really come along and read this literature. Um, I've got a wonderful colleague, set of colleagues at UQ who are expert in these areas, and we all- we have these, uh, fortnightly meetings where we hash it out. We've been doing that for about the past dozen years.

   7. CWChris Williamson5:12

      Wow (laughs) .

   8. WHWilliam Von Hippel5:12

      And I finally got to- yeah, I finally got to the point where I felt like, "Okay, I- I think I've got the story figured out and it makes sense to me how it fits with our modern psychology. I think it's time to try to tell that story."

   9. CWChris Williamson5:23

      Fantastic. So let's start the story then. Where does it begin?

3. 5:27 – 6:38

   Rift Valley upheaval and the forced move to the savanna

   1. WHWilliam Von Hippel5:27

      So it begins six or 7 million years ago. We don't know exactly, of course, but basically the story is, um, as the, uh, tectonic activity in the Great African Rift Valley increased, you got a lot of upwelling on the east side of the Rift Valley as, um, I gather it's a bit of thinness in the crust or a hotspot or something that's a result of the, um, two plates tearing apart, or the single plate becoming two plates, you know, starting up at the Red Sea and working its way down to the coast of Mozambique. So the whole right side of that, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, um, vast areas of air, you know-... today about a mile up. And what that appears to have done is cause the rainforest to slowly dry out, um, with the end result that our ancestors had very little choice but to move to the savanna because the, there simply wasn't enough forest left for them to make a living.

   2. CWChris Williamson6:19

      Right. Okay. So that move, it must have been very biologically expensive and very vulnerable for a while.

   3. WHWilliam Von Hippel6:27

      Absolutely. I mean, I, I, I suspect that it was devastating and that we, you know, if you replayed that a dozen times, I bet you that 11 times out of 12, all you'd get are a bunch of dead chimp-like animals.

   4. CWChris Williamson6:38

      (laughs)

4. 6:38 – 8:09

   Surviving on the margins: what savanna chimps may tell us

   1. WHWilliam Von Hippel6:38

      But somehow we got lucky. And, and you can look at cues of how we got lucky by looking, for example, at, um, the chimpanzees in Senegal who live on the savanna and by looking, of course, at savanna baboons and other primates who've chosen to live on the ground. Um, I suspect that the, the chimps in, um, in, in Senegal are a great choice because if you look at what they do, they basically do the kinds of things that I would imagine our ancestors would have done, which is sort of skulk around the margins, try to keep a tree in sight at all times, and make a break for it, um, whenever, you know, a predator comes along because leopards, lions, hyenas, all those would now be an enormous threat-

   2. CWChris Williamson7:18

      Yeah.

   3. WHWilliam Von Hippel7:18

      ... despite the fact that when they were in the trees, they were not a threat at all.

   4. CWChris Williamson7:21

      Yeah, I get that completely. So is there any crossover? Are chimps moving towards... Are those chimps actually moving towards the development that we had?

   5. WHWilliam Von Hippel7:30

      Well, I don't think so. And the, uh, they, they don't, they don't have, they do show... Well, I shouldn't say that. They're showing some very interesting early signs that look a little bit like what I suspect that we did. So for example, they tend to share a little bit better than chimps typically do. They, um, they're the only chimps that we know of that sharpen sticks into spears by biting them and then use those spears to, um, uh, stab and retrieve, um, monkeys that they eat, these bush babies, out of tree hollows.

   6. CWChris Williamson7:59

      Mm-hmm.

   7. WHWilliam Von Hippel8:00

      And, um, and they even sleep in caves. So there's some very interesting things that they do. But I actually think that the, the shift that mattered was one that probably took a few million years.

   8. CWChris Williamson8:09

      Mm-hmm.

5. 8:09 – 13:00

   Bipedality’s hidden payoff: throwing and killing at a distance

   1. WHWilliam Von Hippel8:09

      And that was, um, an animal that was now exclusively living in the savanna and had become bipedal. And bipedality in my mind, um, I, we can talk about where that came from, but in my mind it played a critical role in leading to us because it changed the body of our ancestors from one that was not a very effective body at throwing to one that was now very effective at throwing by virtue of the long- longer waist, by virtue of the muscles no longer being so vertically oriented in the chest and shoulders and being more lateral, and, um, by virtue of greater flexibility in the wrist because they weren't using it, their hands as a platform to climb trees as much. All of those things would have enabled much more effective throwing. And-

   2. CWChris Williamson8:50

      Okay. Wh- why is throwing so important?

   3. WHWilliam Von Hippel8:53

      So throwing is, uh, probably the most important military invention of all time.

   4. CWChris Williamson8:59

      (laughs)

   5. WHWilliam Von Hippel8:59

      Not throwing per se. I know that sounds outlandish, but not throwing per se, but rather the capacity to kill at a distance.

   6. CWChris Williamson9:06

      Right.

   7. WHWilliam Von Hippel9:06

      So no other animal has that capacity, and that capacity is mission critical to enable a larger force of weaker individuals to overcome a smaller force of stronger ones. So if you and I were, and our friends, were on the savanna and a lion came along and we wanted to attack it, imagine we're all armed with knives-

   8. CWChris Williamson9:23

      Yeah.

   9. WHWilliam Von Hippel9:23

      ... and there's enough of us, we could kill the thing, but we know full well that whoever goes in first is going to be lion dinner, right?

   10. CWChris Williamson9:29

       (laughs) Yeah.

   11. WHWilliam Von Hippel9:29

       We'd all be going, "You, I'm after, after you, Chris. You go ahead, and I'm right behind you, buddy."

   12. CWChris Williamson9:32

       Yeah. No, no, no, no. Bill, Bill, you can go first. I mean, it's your turn.

   13. WHWilliam Von Hippel9:34

       Right. Exactly. And so, but once we could throw, now we could attack a lion or defend ourselves from a lion at a safe distance. And especially if there's enough of us all throwing stones at the same time, now we're in a position to actually do great damage to the lion without suffering any damage to ourselves.

   14. CWChris Williamson9:51

       Right. Okay. So that, that sounds a lot to me... Uh, there's a, a show on Netflix in the UK called The Evolution of Us. Have you seen this or heard of this?

   15. WHWilliam Von Hippel10:02

       Uh, I haven't. This sounds very interesting though.

   16. CWChris Williamson10:04

       So it sounds an awful lot like the story that you're going through at the moment. And on it, they had got monkeys. They'd attached-

   17. WHWilliam Von Hippel10:14

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CWChris Williamson10:14

       ... attached different, um, microscopic dots that can be tracked by a computer and then they tracked their walking gait when they walked on a treadmill.

   19. WHWilliam Von Hippel10:24

       Mm-hmm.

   20. CWChris Williamson10:24

       And one of the, one of the big differences that they highlighted between those monkeys and us was the size of our glutes, that the monkeys essentially don't have any glutes in comparison with us. It's the biggest muscle in our body, right? And-

   21. WHWilliam Von Hippel10:36

       Right.

   22. CWChris Williamson10:36

       ... that capacity for us to be able to stand up straight and to be able to run long distances, they, they highlighted this really big difference because when you watch a monkey walk on two legs, it, it's pretty unwieldly, isn't it? It moves, it moves super weird. It doesn't look like it was meant to do that and I guess that's because it's not.

   23. WHWilliam Von Hippel10:55

       Yeah, that's right. So, um, chimps and apes, you know, and monkeys in general can't lock their knees. They have no need to be able to do that. And so their whole body isn't shaped properly for walking on two legs. Of course they can do it, and especially if when you see them in water, they tend to do it, and occasionally they just do it for other reasons. But, um, by the time we get to Australopithecus, we were bipedal. And so there's those famous footprints, I don't quite know how to pronounce it, Laetoli footprints, um, that, uh, Mary Leakey, if I remember right, found, and they, when you computer model those footprints, you can see that the foot strike is of an animal that had locked its knee and therefore its full weight was coming down on its heel, something that a chimpanzee can't do. And so that makes the, the good reason why our ancestors would have become bipedal. It obviously would have taken a while. One of those reasons is probably this notion that you were just discussing, the idea of persistence hunting, that it's, it, it requires fewer calories to run long distances on two legs at a slower pace to chase down antelope and other animals that will sprint as hard as they can and then soon enough become exhausted and can be killed. So s- many people have argued that that's part of the reason why we became bipedal, and I suspect it's true. Any change that's that big is highly likely to have multiple causes. I, I think that that was, um...... an advantage of bipedality. My personal view is that's not what caused it. What caused it was probably psychological factors and, but the outcome of those, of that change, was now an animal is much more effective at throwing and, and of course the key to throwing is, if you imagine one Australopithecus throwing rocks at a lion, well it's gonna end up in the belly of a slightly bruised and annoyed lion.

   24. CWChris Williamson12:35

       (laughs)

   25. WHWilliam Von Hippel12:36

       But if you imagine 50 Australopithecines throwing rocks at lions, now you get a world where you could conceivably drive it away. And so there would have been enormous s- evolutionary pressure on these ancestors to learn to work together in a way that chimpanzees simply can't do. And that increased sociality and cooperativeness then would have kicked into gear all sorts of forces that led to our brain expansion and led to where we are today.

6. 13:00 – 17:08

   Fear, planning limits, and why carrying weapons could select for walking upright

   1. CWChris Williamson13:00

      Okay. So you s- you mentioned psychological factors-

   2. WHWilliam Von Hippel13:04

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson13:04

      ... that you thought was the reason that we moved to bipedality.

   4. WHWilliam Von Hippel13:07

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson13:07

      What, what are those?

   6. WHWilliam Von Hippel13:09

      So, if you look at chimpanzees, they're incapable of planning for unfelt needs. So if, if it's hungry now, it can plan to like maybe grab a branch. It'll go over to a tr- a shrub, it'll grab a branch, it'll strip the leaves off, and then walk over to the termite mound and dip it in and fish out for, out termites. And so in that sense it's planning for a felt need, its hunger and its desire to eat termites. But once it's finished fishing for termites, it can't imagine it'll ever be hungry again.

   7. CWChris Williamson13:38

      (laughs)

   8. WHWilliam Von Hippel13:38

      And so it literally throws the stick away and, and off he goes. And of course there's lots of experiments that do that in a more controlled fashion where you find that exact effect, that it simply is incapable of considering the fact that it might be hungry again or anything else. Now, if you look at our ancestors like Austral- Australopithecines, there's no sign that they either could plan for unfelt needs. Now of course, that's super hard to know, right? They've been gone for millions of years.

   9. CWChris Williamson14:04

      Mm-hmm.

   10. WHWilliam Von Hippel14:04

       But the one thing, th- chimpanzees couldn't do it, and then when, when we get after Australopithecus, we get to Homo habilis and the tools that they made, these Oldowan tools which are very slightly sharpened stones, and some people argue that Australopithecines were sharpening stones as well. There's some controversial evidence about that. But either way, there's the, the tools that either Australopithecus made or that Homo habilis made have never been found at any great distances from where they were acquired and made. And what that suggests is an animal that's making a tool for its immediate use and then literally leaving it behind.

   11. CWChris Williamson14:38

       Mm.

   12. WHWilliam Von Hippel14:39

       Now, it's possible of course that it's easier to make a new one than it is to schlep it with you. We don't know, but by the time we get to Homo erectus, they're making a much nicer tool, it's um, bi-facial, it's really a, their shoeing tools are really quite lovely, and they're carrying them to, uh, great distances. So we know at least by the time we get to the next species down the chain from Homo habilis, we know that we've got an animal that can envision unfelt needs. You know, I've used this tool now, I'm gonna want it again tomorrow. So then the question is, how is that tied to bipedality?

   13. CWChris Williamson15:10

       Yeah.

   14. WHWilliam Von Hippel15:10

       Well, if you're a, um, an Austral- if you're a chimp-like creature in the savanna and you're setting out across the grass for food or for whatever purpose, you, and, and you cannot envision unfelt needs, some people have said, "Well, maybe they developed bipedality in order to carry a weapon or to carry food." Well, that's not super plausible in the sense that they're not trying to prepare for the future. If, if an Australopithecus was hungry, it would eat the food.

   15. CWChris Williamson15:38

       Yeah.

   16. WHWilliam Von Hippel15:38

       If it's not hungry, it would leave it behind because it won't envision being hungry again.

   17. CWChris Williamson15:41

       Mm.

   18. WHWilliam Von Hippel15:42

       So then you have to ask yourself, well, what might an Australopithecus feel? What would be its felt need every time it set out across the savanna? And I think it's super clear that you imagine yourself this, you know, three-and-a-half foot tall guy, um, setting out across the open grass. I think you're gonna feel fear.

   19. CWChris Williamson15:59

       (laughs)

   20. WHWilliam Von Hippel15:59

       Because any, you know, you're just, you're just available for any major predator, any large cat or dog that's out there.

   21. CWChris Williamson16:05

       Yeah.

   22. WHWilliam Von Hippel16:05

       And so if your felt need every time you set out across the savanna was fear, then what you would probably want with you is some sort of weapon. So if chimpanzees today who live on the savanna can chew a stick and make a sharp point, I'm sure our Australopithecus ancestor could do the same thing. They had slightly larger brains than a chimp. And so my guess is that they're fashioning a crude spear or club or even stone and they want to carry it with them every time they set out across the savanna. Now, they may need to make a new one every morning because when they get home they don't think they'll ever need it again.

   23. CWChris Williamson16:37

       Yeah.

   24. WHWilliam Von Hippel16:37

       But every time they set out, they're gonna look for something like that. And that of course will be a psychological pressure toward bipedality because it's much easier to carry a spear or some other sort of weapon if you can walk on two legs.

   25. CWChris Williamson16:49

       I get that. I get that. So why, why go out on the plains at all?

   26. WHWilliam Von Hippel16:54

       Well, because the trees are disappearing. You're in the no choice condition. You've got like five trees that you're sitting in, but there's nothing to eat there.

   27. CWChris Williamson17:00

       Yeah.

   28. WHWilliam Von Hippel17:00

       And so if you want to find food, if you want to f- um, you know, get to another stand of trees where there might be other safety and other things to eat, you gotta move along.

7. 17:08 – 19:23

   Why brains didn’t grow sooner: the caloric cost, cooking, and modern cravings

   1. CWChris Williamson17:08

      Right. Totally. You mentioned, uh, brain size, differences in brain size there.

   2. WHWilliam Von Hippel17:13

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson17:13

      And also obviously there'll be big differences in physiology. What are the differences between the closest relative that we've got and the Australopithecus in terms of brain size and then in terms of structure?

   4. WHWilliam Von Hippel17:25

      So the Australopithecus has about a 450 gram brain and the chimpanzee's about 380. So you've got about three million years on the savanna has given you about 70 grams of brain power.

   5. CWChris Williamson17:36

      (laughs) That's, that's-

   6. WHWilliam Von Hippel17:36

      Not a whole lot.

   7. CWChris Williamson17:37

      ... a big investment-

   8. WHWilliam Von Hippel17:37

      And-

   9. CWChris Williamson17:37

      ... but not a lot of return, isn't it?

   10. WHWilliam Von Hippel17:38

       Right, right. Well, I think that that's, I think there's good reason for that. And I think that good reason is, is that brains are super expensive. You know, we just think of them as an unmitigated good because they can do so much for us, but until we live in a world where you, you have a purpose for your brain, you're paying a big price in calories. Our brain uses 20% of our metabolic energy at all time, so that's a big cost. And what, what return are you getting on that investment? Well, as a chimpanzee, what are you gonna do with a little more brain? Um, it's not, it's not clear when you don't cooperate with each other, when you don't work together well, it's not entirely clear that you're gonna gain something to offset the losses. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that they don't have control of fire and so they can't release nearly as many nutrients from their food as we can.

   11. CWChris Williamson18:22

       Mm.

   12. WHWilliam Von Hippel18:22

       So-... Richard Wrangham talks about that in his wonderful book, Catching Fire, how basically in order to develop the big brain that we have that's supported by such a small gut, you need to be eating a lot of meat and you need to be relea- releasing as many calories from it as possible, as many nutrients as possible, which is achieved, um, by cooking, 'cause raw food simply is... I mean, you can just, you can tell just by the sense of smell, if you, if you sniff a, a steak that's cooking up nicely it smells beautiful, if, assuming you like the taste of meat. If you sniff a raw steak, it just doesn't smell beautiful at all.

   13. CWChris Williamson18:54

       No. (laughs)

   14. WHWilliam Von Hippel18:54

       And, and the same holds for potato. A raw potato is inedible. A cooked potato smells and tastes delicious. And so, that's our, that's our evolved understanding of what's nutritious for us and what's not.

   15. CWChris Williamson19:06

       Yeah. I really wanted to touch upon this. The way that I think, uh, a lot of modern humans, if you don't look into evolutionary biology, sweet things taste sweet because they're sweet is kind of like the- (laughs)

   16. WHWilliam Von Hippel19:20

       Right. (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson19:20

       ... the sentence, right? But that's not the case.

8. 19:23 – 23:25

   Protein satiety, overeating carbs, and why variety keeps us eating

   1. WHWilliam Von Hippel19:23

      Well, no, not... Because our ancestors were constantly in search of salt, sugar, and fat. Those are the three things that allow us to survive and that are in short supply on the savanna, in the jungle, anywhere else. And so, but we lived in a world where there was never enough of those things.

   2. CWChris Williamson19:38

      Yeah.

   3. WHWilliam Von Hippel19:38

      And so we didn't evolve a psychology that says, "Well, I only want a little bit."

   4. CWChris Williamson19:42

      (laughs)

   5. WHWilliam Von Hippel19:42

      We evolved a psychology, "I want to get as much of it as I can."

   6. CWChris Williamson19:45

      Yeah. (laughs)

   7. WHWilliam Von Hippel19:45

      And so it's super hard to stop eating that stuff because our ancestors never worried about eating too much of it.

   8. CWChris Williamson19:52

      So, the McDonald's hacking of sweet food and salty food and all this sort of stuff, the binging, when it, when you're binging away on, on some fast food, it's actually a primitive brain that's kicking in saying, "This is good for you, you should have more of this 'cause there's not gonna be much around."

   9. WHWilliam Von Hippel20:09

      Right, it's, it is that, but I would actually caveat that ever so slightly by saying that we have evolved to get full when we eat a lot of meat, because protein is the one, um, signal that we, it's, it's the one food source that we, the macronutrient that we really search out because we, um, protein, you know, our bodies are built of protein and we need, uh, to get enough protein in our diet in order to survive, and so humans and crickets and all the other animals that have been tested, um, basically use protein as a guide to indicate when they're full. And this is really beginning with wonderful research by Steve Simpson, who's a biologist, uh, who spent much of his career at Oxford and is now at Sydney University, and Simpson has shown... He's got a wonderful book, The Nature of Nutrition. He's shown very clearly that if you vary the protein levels in food, animals will way overeat carbohydrates in order to get enough protein, but they way, they won't way overeat proteins in order to get enough carbs. Protein seems to be the limiting factor. And I do believe that it, the way it works is that it makes you feel full, and so when you eat a, you know, a, a hamburger at McDonald's or a steak or something like that you go, "Oh, I feel so full."

   10. CWChris Williamson21:15

       Mm.

   11. WHWilliam Von Hippel21:15

       Whereas if you sit down with a box of cereal, I mean, I could literally eat a box of cereal while I'm watching television and not even feel it, not even know.

   12. CWChris Williamson21:24

       Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

   13. WHWilliam Von Hippel21:24

       But I'll have, I'll have, and I'll have consumed way more calories than I would get out of a Big Mac or a steak or something like that.

   14. CWChris Williamson21:30

       Why is there this upper ceiling on the protein intake, do you think?

   15. WHWilliam Von Hippel21:34

       Well, so think about our ancestors. They would've, uh, so today they get lucky and they kill a giraffe, well, they're gonna stuff as much giraffe down their pie hole as they can, but they're gonna get to a point where, "All right, I can't eat any more of this. I'm feeling super full." They would've only very rarely been in a situation where there was so much carbohydrate that A, tasted very good, and B, they wanted to eat.

   16. CWChris Williamson21:55

       Mm.

   17. WHWilliam Von Hippel21:55

       And so there's just gonna be little evolutionary pressure on them to detect that they're full from carbs, but a great deal of evolutionary pressure to be able to say, "All right, well now I'm sated. I've had enough protein."

   18. CWChris Williamson22:05

       Amazing.

   19. WHWilliam Von Hippel22:06

       And interesting, interestingly, the data also suggests that part of that is driven by lack of variety, and so if you serve, um... There's some interesting work with amnesics, people who have such dense amnesia they won't even remember five minutes ago.

   20. CWChris Williamson22:19

       (laughs)

   21. WHWilliam Von Hippel22:20

       And they'll interestingly, they'll eat a second lunch. If you serve them lunch and then leave and come back and say, "Lunchtime," they'll eat it again, and you think, "Why?" (laughs)

   22. CWChris Williamson22:27

       (laughs) That's such a mean, that's such a mean experiment-

   23. WHWilliam Von Hippel22:29

       I know. It-

   24. CWChris Williamson22:30

       ... if someone's trying to lose weight. (laughs)

   25. WHWilliam Von Hippel22:31

       It is, it is a mean experiment. But it's interesting because the, um, what's happening there is that they, part of our sense of being full is actually our knowledge that we ate, and because they don't have that knowledge, they don't have that sense of, as strong of a sense of being full. And, but what's interesting is that if you give them less variety, like you say, "Well, here's the one food that you'll eat for lunch, these sandwiches," they don't want those sandwiches anymore, again suggesting that we've evolved to say, "All right, I've had enough giraffe. I'm not gaining anything from this."

   26. CWChris Williamson23:00

       Yep.

   27. WHWilliam Von Hippel23:00

       "I don't feel like eating it anymore."

   28. CWChris Williamson23:01

       I get that. There's, uh, competitive eaters that are in-

   29. WHWilliam Von Hippel23:05

       (laughs)

   30. CWChris Williamson23:05

       ... i- ice cream competitions. They-
9. 23:25 – 27:50

   From Australopithecus to Homo erectus: cooperation unlocks rapid brain expansion

   1. CWChris Williamson23:25

      ... Australopithecus is now on the edge of the plains, maybe developed some tools and cohes- uh, this level of cohesion within the group and they can, I guess, really rudimentary tactics to take down prey. What, where do we move from there? What do we roll forwards onto from there?

   2. WHWilliam Von Hippel23:43

      Great question. So now here we are with this animal that's barely gaining any brain power but is bipedal and has the capacity to throw and probably has the psychological understanding that we need to work together and a tendency, uh, you know, a preference to cooperate, because of course evolution works by what you want to do more so than by acknowledge, "Gee, I ought to do this," and that knowledge would've been hard for such an animal anyway. So you've now got a more cooperative animal that, uh, is sort of working together on the savanna, and that actually opens up all sorts of potential benefits to get smarter, because once we're working together, well, we could i- we can imagine division of labor. Now we, we can be a much more effective squad. If you go left, I go right, and someone else attacks down the middle, we could bring down this animal and we could have it for dinner. And so all sorts of emergent properties come from groups that can envision what each other are thinking, that can find a way to work together, that can, um, plan for the future, that can do all these sorts of things. So-... and whereas in the past, getting smarter would've been very little use, now getting smarter is of great benefit. So, there's some really interesting work that came out recently on, uh, NOTCH2NL gene, which is a, uh, gene for brain expansion. And what the, what the data, it's new data, but what they suggest is that this gene likely appeared in our line maybe 12 million years ago, and the way it did is that it accidentally duplicated itself, but then this new version was turned off, so to speak. Now, evolution often works this way because if you've duplicated a gene unintentionally, you know, in some, i- in some, in the, in, in the process of meiosis or wherever, if there's an actual accidental duplicate copy, now you can do things with that duplicate without disrupting the function that the original did because it's an extra, so you can just play around with it, so to speak.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:28

      Mm-hmm.

   4. WHWilliam Von Hippel25:28

      And so this, this extra, um, gene seems to have emerged 12 million years ago or so in our line, and about three million years ago, around the time of Australopithecus, it seems to have duplicated itself again and turned back on. Now, my guess is that it turned back on many times randomly between 12 million years ago and three million years ago, but whoever got that extra gene turned back on didn't gain much from it. The cost of the, of the extra brain wasn't outweighed by the benefits. But now you get to these social animals, these Australopithecines, who are working together, and now the benefits of being smarter can outweigh the costs because we can gain emergent properties from our group if we can work together better. And so, you see rapid brain expansion. So, remember, the first three million years gained us maybe 70 grams of brain. Now you go from Australopithecus to Homo erectus, you're moving about one million years, and you go from about, um, 450 to about 960 grams.

   5. CWChris Williamson26:25

      Wow.

   6. WHWilliam Von Hippel26:25

      So, more than doubling of brain size. Now, admittedly, Homo erectus is bigger, so it's, it's g- it's more of a relative issue, but it's still a big change. And then you go from Homo erectus to us, and you, we're now at about 1350. So, they've essentially added an entire chimp brain onto Homo erectus in the last million and a half years or so. So, massive brain expansion that accompanied the greater, the sociality that we gained on the savanna and that enabled us to suddenly become much more effective than we had been before.

   7. CWChris Williamson26:54

      So, is brain size equal to power? Is that the way that it works?

   8. WHWilliam Von Hippel26:58

      Yeah, basically. I mean, the, you know, the, it's complicated of course because elephants have ginormous brains and to the best of our knowledge, they haven't built great cities or done any of those things.

   9. CWChris Williamson27:06

      (laughs)

   10. WHWilliam Von Hippel27:07

       Of course, they don't have hands either, but they do have a fabulous trunk.

   11. CWChris Williamson27:10

       Yeah.

   12. WHWilliam Von Hippel27:10

       Um, but so it's, it's, it's an issue, it's a, it's an issue we don't fully understand, but there's no question that the larger brain gives you much more computing power.

   13. CWChris Williamson27:19

       Right. And then you've said, as you've mentioned, a really clever giraffe, or a-

   14. WHWilliam Von Hippel27:24

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson27:24

       ... really clever zebra has an upper limit on what the use is, and it's actually a very expensive cost to have that brain-

   16. WHWilliam Von Hippel27:30

       That's right.

   17. CWChris Williamson27:30

       ... and to have to consume all of those extra calories. But you, you are given more capacity to utilize that brain when you are able to work together in a group. And you said Homo erectus, two million years ago, is that right?

   18. WHWilliam Von Hippel27:43

       Yeah, a little less. That's right.

   19. CWChris Williamson27:44

       Okay. Um, and then where did they go from there? How, how do we think that they moved forward?

10. 27:50 – 31:37

    Homo erectus as top predator: tool ‘factories,’ megafauna, and coordinated action

    1. WHWilliam Von Hippel27:50

       Well, so Homo erectus, we can see signs that they actually can plan for the future. So remember, I talked about how they carried their tools around. We also see some really interesting evidence that they worked together really well, uh, with division of labor. So for example, in making those tools, there's a, a site in India that's 1.2 million years ago that Kerry Shipton has written about. And he talks about how as you look at the site, you can see that the original pieces of rock that they want to fashion into a tool are knocked loose in one location, and then maybe 10 meters over to the right, they're originally worked on for a little bit to get them into the right basic form. And then maybe 10 more meters over, they're now b- doing the final sharpening. Well, if one a- if one Homo erectus is making the tool, why would it break it loose here, walk 10 meters, work on it a little bit more, systematically walk another 10 meters, and work on it more?

    2. CWChris Williamson28:40

       Mm-hmm.

    3. WHWilliam Von Hippel28:40

       It, it probably wouldn't break it loose and sit down. But if, but if people are working together, if the Homo erectus knocks it loose, hands it to his mate who's better at the, at the second stage and he hands it to a friend who's better at that final stage, well, it would make sense that it's systematically being done at certain spatial locations around the site. So, it's pretty good evidence for division of labor. We-

    4. CWChris Williamson29:01

       It's a primitive, primitive Henry Ford. (laughs)

    5. WHWilliam Von Hippel29:03

       Yeah, that's exactly right. It's like a little factory, right? And, and then we've s- we see evidence that, so for example, um, up by the Sea of Galilee, there's a wonderful, just an anecdote, but it's an interesting one, where, um, an elephant has, has either been killed or scavenged, and the Homo erectus who are working there, we see a bunch of hand axes, there are Acheulean tools lying around, and w- we see the head has been broken loose from the, um, neck and turned over. Now, brains are a wonderful source of fat because the myelin sheath around the neurons, you know, that's, so brains are very, very high in fat and cholesterol, but remember, that's what everybody's seeking all the time. And of course, it'd be a lot easier to get into a mammoth's brains through the base of its skull than trying to break the skull through the top.

    6. CWChris Williamson29:46

       Yeah.

    7. WHWilliam Von Hippel29:47

       'Cause they're such massive item. Well, you could imagine 1,000 chimpanzees crawling all over a mammoth's skull. It's, they're never gonna effectively turn it over 'cause they can't work together. But Homo erectus, you know, everybody heave on three kind of thing.

    8. CWChris Williamson30:00

       (laughs)

    9. WHWilliam Von Hippel30:00

       Um, you could imagine that's working together effectively to achieve something that they couldn't do individually. And so examples like these suggest that by the time we're at Homo erectus, we're now super effective. We're using our brain power to accomplish things that we could never accomplish individually because we can work together as a group, we can divide up tasks, and we can even plan for these future activities like a hunt. You know, you guys come over here, we'll, we'll try to get the horses to run down this, this way here and we'll dig a trap and we'll capture and kill them. And there's evidence that they were eating horses and elephants even, massive elephants, much bigger than t- today's, um, throughout Europe.

    10. CWChris Williamson30:38

        So, megafauna elephants were being felled by humans who had a brain that was two thirds the size of ours, but they were so much-

    11. WHWilliam Von Hippel30:45

        Basically.

    12. CWChris Williamson30:45

        ... they were so much more capable of working together.... that- (laughs)

    13. WHWilliam Von Hippel30:48

        That's right. We don't know for sure that they're bringing them down, right? The, all we can see is maybe they were scavenging them.

    14. CWChris Williamson30:54

        Mm-hmm.

    15. WHWilliam Von Hippel30:54

        But I think the data suggests that they were hunting them. The, if you look at, at the, uh, marks of the tools on the bones, you can see lots of marks where, if they were scavenging, like the, up high on the leg near the torso, when, when animals, uh, hunt other animals, they always eat that region first. And yet we see lots of marks on the bones up in the h- upper thigh bone, where, where you wouldn't be working with your stone tools if you were scavenging someone else's kill, because there'd be-

    16. CWChris Williamson31:21

        That's already gone.

    17. WHWilliam Von Hippel31:21

        ... nothing up there to eat. Yeah. So, I, I think the data suggests pretty strongly, and I know this is controversial so not everybody would agree, but I think they suggest pretty strongly that Homo erectus is now moving back to the top of the food chain, and they're doing that via their capacity to cooperate and work together.

11. 31:37 – 34:28

    Optimal group size, fission–fusion living, and early communication differences

    1. CWChris Williamson31:37

       Fascinating. That's so, so interesting. What are the, what are the tribe sizes that we think at this sort of stage?

    2. WHWilliam Von Hippel31:44

       Oh, that's a great question. I don't know. Um, the, they're, they're probably much smaller than what we see today. You know, there's a lot of argument about what's the optimal tribe size in humans even today, and people have given numbers like 150, and, and it is the case that humans are quite capable of processing the interrelationships of 150 other humans.

    3. CWChris Williamson32:06

       Yep.

    4. WHWilliam Von Hippel32:07

       Um, and, and Robin Dunbar has lots of nice evidence showing that. But in actuality, when you look at hunter-gatherer groups, they very rarely are, are in, anywhere near that size. The preferred size is much closer to 20 or 30, because when you get groups too large, everybody starts to bicker. You know, we've got a world with all sorts of laws and rules and, and all sorts of expectations that are formally laid down that, that prevent that kind of arguing and bickering, and we're less interdependent. So, you know, if I don't get along with my neighbor, it's not ideal, but I don't have to interact with him all the time. Whereas if we're hunter-gatherers and we're actually working together every day on the hunt, I don't want to be with someone I don't get along with. And so groups tend to splinter and break off into smaller groups when that happens.

    5. CWChris Williamson32:48

       You'll need-

    6. WHWilliam Von Hippel32:48

       And I suspect-

    7. CWChris Williamson32:49

       You'll, you'll need one bad apple, I suppose, don't you?

    8. WHWilliam Von Hippel32:51

       Exactly. Well, you know, they have good ways of getting rid of one bad apple, right? 'Cause there's no laws against it.

    9. CWChris Williamson32:57

       Yeah.

    10. WHWilliam Von Hippel32:57

        And so, you know, bad apples don't wake up one morning, or they-

    11. CWChris Williamson33:00

        (laughs)

    12. WHWilliam Von Hippel33:00

        ... when they do wake up, everyone's gone.

    13. CWChris Williamson33:02

        (laughs)

    14. WHWilliam Von Hippel33:02

        But, you know, if, if they're a bad enough apple, right? But, um, but, but it is the case that, uh, Homo erectus probably had the exact same issues, and so they're probably traveling around in small, um, groups that are a combination of family and close friends, and they're probably doing, you know, chimps and humans, both are what they call these sort of fission-fusion groups where larger groups come together and then they break off and go their separate ways and they re-come together, so long as they're members of the same overarching group. And so, I don't know what Homo erectus's, uh, language capabilities were, if they had any.

    15. CWChris Williamson33:35

        Mm.

    16. WHWilliam Von Hippel33:35

        It may have been all gestural, it may have been spoken, we don't, we don't yet know. But, um, there would've been, even if it's gestural, there'll be meanings in some places that aren't quite the same as others, and so there's probably in-groups and out-groups among Homo erectus just like there are in chimpanzees and just like there are in humans.

    17. CWChris Williamson33:52

        That's fascinating that there would be, uh, essentially different languages and dialects of these gestural, uh, communication tools. You could potentially have someone from another tribe that's really, really far away that comes in and you essentially can't communicate. I know that sounds stupid considering-

    18. WHWilliam Von Hippel34:09

        Right.

    19. CWChris Williamson34:09

        ... we're next to, I'm next to France and I can't speak to a French person.

    20. WHWilliam Von Hippel34:12

        (laughs)

    21. CWChris Williamson34:12

        But ...

    22. WHWilliam Von Hippel34:13

        Right. But it could be very similar. I mean, there's gonna be some basic gestures that everyone understands, but, you know, it's always the case that when you travel in a foreign country, people will say, "Don't use that gesture. That's a rude one here, even though it's a positive one where you're from."

    23. CWChris Williamson34:25

        Yeah.

    24. WHWilliam Von Hippel34:25

        And I see no reason why that hasn't always been the case.

12. 34:28 – 37:47

    Gossip, indirect speech, and the rise of reputation management

    1. CWChris Williamson34:28

       That's fascinating. Um, I recently did a podcast with Professor Robin Hanson who wrote The Elephant in the Brain.

    2. WHWilliam Von Hippel34:34

       Uh-huh. Yeah. It was a great podcast. I enjoyed that.

    3. CWChris Williamson34:36

       Thank you. Well, yeah, it was, um, I, I found that so fascinating. What I, what I really loved, I wanted to dip in there if any of the listeners haven't heard, that he had a, an evolutionary justification for gossip, and you mentioned about the one bad apple that gets left every evening, and I, I found it completely fascinating that he spoke about the, that bad apple that has the social norms of the group and the fair play gets, uh, it's enforced via the fear that the gossip is going to oust you as being the bad apple, so you want to adhere to what the rules and the, the norms are, because if you don't, you know everyone's gonna find out about it. I fou- I thought it was so interesting to, to hear that there was a (laughs) an evolutionary justification for the water cooler.

    4. WHWilliam Von Hippel35:22

       Sure. And, and, you know, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense, because we all gossip. We kind of look down on it when other people do it, but we are so happy to engage in it ourselves. "Oh, really? Did you hear about so-and-so?" And why is it so universally beloved to do it?

    5. CWChris Williamson35:36

       (laughs) It's good to pull.

    6. WHWilliam Von Hippel35:36

       Bec-

    7. CWChris Williamson35:37

       Yeah.

    8. WHWilliam Von Hippel35:37

       ... because it, it, because it plays such an important role, it's a way of managing reputations. And so if, if I live in a very small group where everybody is in everybody's business and I start misbehaving, well the group can bring me in line via gossip. And, and importantly, they can do it in a way that's very safe. So imagine that I'm the big tough guy in our group and you and someone else are worried about me and the way I'm throwing my weight around, you know, you can bring it up in a very offhand way, you know, sort of along the lines of, "What do you think of Bill?" Or not, that would be too direct. You'd say, "Oh, boy, boy oh boy, did you hear what Bill did yesterday?"

    9. CWChris Williamson36:09

       Yeah.

    10. WHWilliam Von Hippel36:09

        And if the other person then responds with, "It must've been a wonderful thing, he's a great guy," you know, you shut your mouth.

    11. CWChris Williamson36:15

        Yeah.

    12. WHWilliam Von Hippel36:15

        But if he says, "Oh, what was Bill up to?" You'd say, "Well, I'm not totally sure what he meant but he did this." And then you can see if the other person ratchets it up and says, "Oh, what a jerk."

    13. CWChris Williamson36:22

        Yeah.

    14. WHWilliam Von Hippel36:23

        Or if he says-

    15. CWChris Williamson36:23

        Yeah, never liked him. (laughs)

    16. WHWilliam Von Hippel36:24

        "Ah, ah, I'm sure he meant no harm." Yeah. And so Steve Pinker has this wonderful, um, talk where he, he talks about our indirect uses of language where, for example, when a, um, police officer stops you and you want to bribe him, you don't say, "Hey, can I bribe you?" You say, "You know, is there any way we could solve this here and now?" And you hope he'll say, "Well, if you give me the 50 bucks, I'll take care of it for you."

    17. CWChris Williamson36:42

        (laughs)

    18. WHWilliam Von Hippel36:43

        And you give him the 50 and drive off. But of course if he says, "No, you have to pay the ticket," uh, you go, "Okay, sorry, thought maybe that we could deal with it here."... now, you can— that kind of indirect language could be used very easily in gossip if you're unsure about the feelings of the person you're talking to, and unsure whether they're going to join your coalition. And so gossip is super important for managing reputations, and it's a much safer way of doing so than if you couldn't communicate with the kind of complexity that we're capable of.

    19. CWChris Williamson37:09

        There's only two forms, broadly, two real forms of communication, isn't there? There's, uh, words or, I guess, written communication or, or body language, and there's violence. That's it. (laughs)

    20. WHWilliam Von Hippel37:19

        That's right. That's right, and of course, you've got-

    21. CWChris Williamson37:21

        If you d- if one fails, you got to do the other.

    22. WHWilliam Von Hippel37:23

        Yeah. We've got this amazing communication system that the other animals just don't have, and so, you know, we know that all animals can communicate, but if you look at, for example, when chimps try to communicate what's going wrong or what's going right, they're very limited in what they're able to get across to each other. And there's interesting cases of female chimps trying to communicate, um, the danger they're in to their male friends or partners, and they just look and they're like, "What are you talking about?"

    23. CWChris Williamson37:47

        (laughs)

13. 37:47 – 42:30

    Theory of mind: communication, teaching, and the invention of intentional lying

    1. WHWilliam Von Hippel37:47

       Whereas human beings, you know, our— one of the most amazing things about being human is the cumulative nature of our knowledge. And so, because we can talk to each other, I can tell you about what happened when that lion nearly ate me out by the water hole, and now you know how to handle it without ever going there yourself.

    2. CWChris Williamson38:03

       Yeah.

    3. WHWilliam Von Hippel38:03

       And that— and every generation, we can build on the knowledge of the past, w- which enables, you know, we don't have to reinvent the wheel, and, you know, children can learn what only geniuses knew just a few generations ago because it becomes part of our lore, part of our way of doing things.

    4. CWChris Williamson38:17

       Totally right. I guess that combined with the, uh, ability to anticipate felt needs is a-

    5. WHWilliam Von Hippel38:22

       That's right. Unfelt needs.

    6. CWChris Williamson38:23

       ... a super, super power- uh, u- unfelt needs, yeah, sorry, is a, um, a super powerful combination.

    7. WHWilliam Von Hippel38:29

       That's absolutely right. And so, our extraordinary communicative abilities facilitate our groups and their capacity to work together. Our th- our capacity we call theory of mind, which is our understanding that the contents of your mind are not equivalent to the contents of my own. So chimpanzees can't do that. They're not f- they're partially aware, but not fully aware of the fact that what you know is different from what I know, because it requires this ability to put myself in your shoes, that kind of perspective-taking, which is actually very difficult. Humans don't even get it till they're about four years old. But once you get that, now not only, um, can you work together more effectively because I know what you know, but you can communicate much more effectively as well. If you look at the language of small children, even when they have the words, sometimes they're very hard to follow because they don't know what you know and don't know, and they start a story in the middle.

    8. CWChris Williamson39:19

       (laughs)

    9. WHWilliam Von Hippel39:20

       But once, you know, once you've got theory of mind, once I know what you know and don't know as a function of what you saw and what you heard and all the rest, I can much more effectively communicate with you. I can— we can divide up our tasks much more effectively, and I can also teach you much better because I know what you know and what you don't know, so I know where to start when I'm trying to teach you that which our group does, you know, to kill the elephant or whatever it is.

    10. CWChris Williamson39:41

        The- that must also tie into lying then, I'm gonna guess, and deceit, that, um-

    11. WHWilliam Von Hippel39:45

        Absolutely.

    12. CWChris Williamson39:46

        ... theory of mind. Can you explain how that works together?

    13. WHWilliam Von Hippel39:49

        Yes, absolutely. So if- so other animals are deceptive, you know, a- all across the animal kingdom and even the plant kingdom. An- animals and plants deceive each other by trying to look like poisonous ones when they're not, by trying to disguise themselves, et cetera. But when I say trying, I don't mean intentionally. I just mean that's what they evolved to do. Humans are the only ones who can lie in the sense of g- uh, intentionally planting falsehoods in someone else's mind. And so you can imagine that when you got theory of mind, you're the first organism to get it, nobody else has it, you suddenly realize, "Well, gee, this is what everybody else knows, and here's what I know. I can benefit myself if I try to plant some falsehoods in your mind that make me look better than I really am." And, you know, when no one else knows that, the- and no one else has that capacity, it would give you an enormous advantage. So, of course, everybody else evolves that capacity because it's so effective, and now what we see is children start to lie as soon as they get to the point where they have proper theory of mind. Now, they'll tell some very simple lies prior, like you say, "Did you do this?" and they know there's trouble. They'll go, "No." But that's just- that's a very simple kind of lie that doesn't really require me to know the contents of your mind. It's just me trying to get out of trouble.

    14. CWChris Williamson40:59

        It's more reactionary, isn't it?

    15. WHWilliam Von Hippel41:00

        Yeah, exactly. And, and, and even- and famously, um, Coco the gorilla, who, um, Penny worked with, with s- via sign language, famously told her once when she came into their trailer or whatever, wherever he was living, and he had torn- Coco, I guess she, had torn the, the, um, sink right off the wall a- and, and then claimed the kitten did it.

    16. CWChris Williamson41:20

        (laughs)

    17. WHWilliam Von Hippel41:21

        And so, um, and so it's a great example of, you know, very simple lie. "No, I didn't do that." You know, and they'll see- you see a cat. "He did it." Which is- but wildly implausible, right?

    18. CWChris Williamson41:29

        Yeah.

    19. WHWilliam Von Hippel41:30

        And so the little kids can do that, but once you get theory of mind, now you can start to plant some very impressive lies. And so the, um, you know, the small children, there's some wonderful experiments where they'll teach them theory of mind, and then the kids start to lie if it- if it benefits them, to their advantage. And so until you get there, you can't effectively lie because you don't realize that what I know is different from what you know, so why would you try to plant something in my mind if you assume that our minds are completely identical?

    20. CWChris Williamson42:02

        Yeah. Lying is a very complicated... When you, when you break it down, the fact that we do it so naturally on a daily basis (laughs) is, uh, is more a byproduct of the way that we operate as opposed to the fact that it's simple. It's an incredibly-

    21. WHWilliam Von Hippel42:14

        Yeah.

    22. CWChris Williamson42:14

        ... incredibly complicated task to achieve. So we're Homo erectus. We've moved onto the plains where maybe you think tribes 20 to 30, something like that, with some primitive-

    23. WHWilliam Von Hippel42:24

        Total guess-

    24. CWChris Williamson42:25

        Primitive-

    25. WHWilliam Von Hippel42:25

        ... but I think so.

    26. CWChris Williamson42:26

        ... primitive communication tools. Where are we going from there? What's next?

14. 42:30 – 45:45

    From predators to people: tribalism, out-group threat, and pathogen avoidance

    1. WHWilliam Von Hippel42:30

       Yeah, so now the, the question is, um, what happens now, and then how does it lead to where we are today? And one of the important things that would have happened with Homo erectus is now they've moved to the- back to the top of the food chain, and so no longer is it the case that saber-toothed tigers or lions or even mammoths are important predators of theirs anymore, because as a- as a group, they're so effective that although occasionally individuals will be killed by these, um, large animals, they're not really a threat to the group writ large.... but there is an important threat to the group at large, and that is other groups of Homo erectus.

    2. CWChris Williamson43:05

       Mm.

    3. WHWilliam Von Hippel43:05

       And so, once you've got division of labor and all these capacities, really the only threat to you is other groups who have the same capacity and who might be competing for the same resources. And so what that suggests is that we would evolve then a psychology where we cooperate really well with each other, right? Because that's what enabled us to start defending ourselves in the savanna, but we would not extend that cooperative nature to other groups. And so I sus-... But we certainly know this holds for Homo sapiens, and I suspect it goes back to Homo erectus, that they've now evolved the tendency to be very cooperative within their group, but a group from the outside may or may not be friendly. It may or may not be on their side or against them, and so they withhold judgment and they don't necessarily cooperate with them, certainly not automatically. And so that-

    4. CWChris Williamson43:48

       It's a potential existential threat, right?

    5. WHWilliam Von Hippel43:51

       That's right. And so that would have led to tribalism, ethnocentrism, and all the kind of genocidal tendencies that we see in people today. And th- the important thing to remember is that the savanna made us cooperative and friendly to each other, but it did that in order to make us more effective killers. So it's not a lovely, friendly thing without a negative side, at least from a moral standpoint. What it is, is by bec- becoming cooperative and kind to each other, our group works better and can more effectively kill other animals and potentially other members of our own species as well.

    6. CWChris Williamson44:23

       That's so fascinating that the, the basis for tribalism... I- you know, everyone, everyone talks about tribalism and this bipartisan politics and, uh, and this group versus that group and, you know, but to, to actually find a justification for why we are the way we are, um, that's the, you know, it makes so much sense. You wouldn't want-

    7. WHWilliam Von Hippel44:42

       Absolutely.

    8. CWChris Williamson44:43

       What about the, the tribe from the other valley? What if they're, what if they're ill? What if they carry some, some disease-

    9. WHWilliam Von Hippel44:49

       That's right.

    10. CWChris Williamson44:50

        ... or some pathogen or what if they, you know... I guess that's, yeah, there's so many reasons as to why we would be wary.

    11. WHWilliam Von Hippel44:58

        Right. Exactly right. And in fact, you, the pathogen example is a great one. That's separate from our c- possibility of competing over resources and wanting to kill each other. That's where we're accidentally ch- killing each other.

    12. CWChris Williamson45:09

        (laughs)

    13. WHWilliam Von Hippel45:09

        And as you get closer to the equator, there are more pathogens, and tribes tend to stay apart more for that very reason because, you know, if you live in Sweden and I've never s-... You live 1,000 mile, 100 miles away, chances are you and I have been exposed to the same very few pathogens that can survive in that environment. But if you and I live near the equator, well, even if you're only a quarter mile away, you may well have encountered pathogens and have a resistance to them that I've never seen. And so if you and I mingle, you could make me sick and kill me without ever meaning to do so. And as a consequence, I'm going to evolve a tendency to stay away from you. And of course, that's exactly what we see.

15. 45:45 – 50:03

    Migration out of Africa, Neanderthals/Denisovans, and local adaptation

    1. CWChris Williamson45:45

       That's so fascinating. So what, um, what areas are we talking about that are mostly occupied by Homo erectus at this time? I think you said 1.2 million, one million years ago, something like that. Where, where are we on the planet at the moment?

    2. WHWilliam Von Hippel45:58

       Okay, so probably by 1.7 million years ago, Homo erectus have both stayed in Africa and left. And so you see, um, Ho- Homo erectus moving out of, you know, through Arabia into Asia and into Europe, and they basically occupied beginning around then and then extending until Neanderthals, who are their offspring. They've occupied, um, the lower half of Asia and they've occupied almost all of Europe. And of course, they also have, uh, colonized all of Africa. And so those Homo erectus who stayed in Africa are the, are the ancestors of Homo sapiens. Those Homo erectus who moved out of Africa are the eventual ancestors of Neanderthals. And so when Homo sapiens leaves Africa, we encounter Neanderthals. And as we now know, um, we interbred with them a few times and so, uh, we carry a fair few Neand- Neanderthal genes, as well as some of the genes of other offshoots of Homo erectus who had left Africa and lived in, um, Asia at least.

    3. CWChris Williamson46:55

       It's like 2 to 5%, right, of our genes are from-

    4. WHWilliam Von Hippel46:57

       That's right.

    5. CWChris Williamson46:58

       ... Neanderthal.

    6. WHWilliam Von Hippel46:58

       That's right.

    7. CWChris Williamson46:59

       And it's actually higher, it's higher in white populations, I think. Is that right as well?

    8. WHWilliam Von Hippel47:04

       Right, well, there's no evidence that, um, Africans interbred with, um, Neanderthals because, of course, Neanderthals didn't live there.

    9. CWChris Williamson47:11

       Yes.

    10. WHWilliam Von Hippel47:11

        And so everyone who left, you know, we're as Caucasians and Asians, the, um, every non-African in today's world is a small subset of the group that left Africa beginning maybe 80, 85,000 years ago. And so those people appear to have left and some took a right turn and, and worked their way toward East Asia. Some took a left turn and worked their way toward Europe, and all of those people seemed to have interbred with Neanderthals. Some of them also seemed to have interbred with other, um, subpopulations that came from Homo erectus, like the Denisovans from that cave in, um, Siberia. We know that some humans, um, have some of their genes, and so, but we don't, we haven't tested so many Africans yet to say with any confidence that they don't have Neanderthal genes, but so far, there doesn't seem to be any, and of course, it would make perfect sense that they don't because they didn't leave Africa.

    11. CWChris Williamson48:05

        Well, the Neanderthals as well would be very unsuited to being in that environment, right?

    12. WHWilliam Von Hippel48:09

        That's right. That's right. And given that we wiped them out or killed them via disease or whatever when we encountered them, one can imagine that those who did work their way toward Africa didn't meet a friendly reception and that didn't work out very well, if it ever happened.

    13. CWChris Williamson48:22

        Absolutely. Uh, in the, uh, the Netflix series that I was discussing earlier on, I found it really fascinating where they explained why we have different colored skin. They were talking about the melanin that protects from the sun and that when you're closer to the equator, that's more important, but as you get further north, that actually doesn't keep you as warm. And, uh, it was, it seemed so bizarre that I'd never thought about it, but the distribution of body shapes and of, um, physiological makeup, you know, the Inuit, um, tribes and the people that are in the north, they tend to be smaller with higher levels of fat, and then you've got, you know, the best runners from the world all come from Kenya. Like what, you know-

    14. WHWilliam Von Hippel49:03

        Yeah.

    15. CWChris Williamson49:04

        This isn't, this isn't a surprise, right?

    16. WHWilliam Von Hippel49:06

        Right. I mean, local ethnic groups adapt to the place they live. It's, it's not a very sensible thing to think about race, which is such a broad category that it covers too many ethnic groups. But if you think about different ethnicities, they make perfect sense that they have to find a way to make a living where they are. So, my younger brother is a biologist who works up in the Bering Sea with a bunch of Inuit groups trying to help them, um, study the, uh, the consequences of these, um, perchlorates and stuff that have been left by the military that might be cancer causing. And so he was up there one summer in, way up in northern Alaska off the Bering Sea, and the water is like, you know, one or two degrees Celsius in the ocean, and the local kids are running in it and playing.

    17. CWChris Williamson49:48

        Oh my gosh.

    18. WHWilliam Von Hippel49:48

        And you know, if you, if you went up to your ankles, you'd nearly have a cardiac arrest-

    19. CWChris Williamson49:52

        (laughs)

    20. WHWilliam Von Hippel49:52

        ... because it, it's just so cold, it's unbelievable. But they, they've got this sort of thin layer of subcutaneous fat that protects them in a way that people who aren't Inuit just don't have.

16. 50:03 – 56:44

    Sexual selection, comparison psychology, and the happiness ‘treadmill’

    1. CWChris Williamson50:03

       Yeah. That's so interesting. So, when we're talking about these tribes and stuff, I really wanted to get onto discussing sexual relationships and how, how partners and child rearing worked throughout the, the timeline that we're talking here. Would you be able to explain some, uh, theories behind that to us?

    2. WHWilliam Von Hippel50:21

       Sure. So, the, the child rearing and partnering is complicated because human beings are so behaviorally flexible that we've got lots of ways that we do it. But there are some simple, not simple, there are some underlying rules that apply to all of us. And, and basically the underlying rules stem from sexual selection, the notion that, you know, that Darwin proposed that ther- you both have to s- find a way to survive, which is kind of what we think of with natural selection, you know, uh, not dying when you get attacked by a predator, finding enough to eat, but you also have to find a way to mate. And if you don't find a way to mate, it doesn't matter how fabulous you are, those, whatever traits you have are not gonna exist in the next generation. And so sexual selection is that process of, um, evolution that is dependent on both our ability to attract a member of the opposite sex and our ability to compete with members of our own sex in, in order to do so. So, that applies across the board. And all humans have been shaped by sexual selection because we all have these traits that, or we try hard to have these traits that others, opposite sex finds desirable and that we, that facilitate competition with our own sex. One of the interesting psychological consequences of that is that we end up with this really unfortunate circumstance whereby everything is relative. And what I mean by that is that it doesn't really matter how good of a guy I am. What matters is, how do I compare to the other guys in my group? So if, if all the men in my group are sort of worthless, lazy, stupid, and mean, well, it'll be pretty easy for me to get a girl because I don't have to be very special. I can be pretty awful, but I'm still the best choice she has.

    3. CWChris Williamson51:57

       Right.

    4. WHWilliam Von Hippel51:57

       Whereas if, if all the guys in my group are really fabulous, I'm stuffed because she's never gonna choose me.

    5. CWChris Williamson52:03

       (laughs)

    6. WHWilliam Von Hippel52:03

       And so in the end, what people really care about, they're constantly looking around and asking how they stack up compared to others. And the reason they do that is it's super important for me not to fall behind everybody else, because if everybody else in my group is better, doesn't matter how good I am, I'm gonna get left out of the mating game. And that's an unfortunate part of our psychology because it virtually guarantees in the modern world that it's harder to be happy. You know, I can work really hard and make a lotta money, and now I got more money than my this neighbor, but I then turn on the telly or I meet somebody who's got more money than I do and I'm all, upset all over again.

    7. CWChris Williamson52:37

       Yeah, totally.

    8. WHWilliam Von Hippel52:38

       It puts us, it puts us on this hedonic treadmill to be constantly comparing ourselves to others rather than just having a set standard of what we want to achieve.

    9. CWChris Williamson52:45

       Yeah. Alain de Botton from The School of Life talks about confidence in people being, uh, the highest, uh, identifier of confidence in someone based on their profession is the income and profession of their same-sex parent.

    10. WHWilliam Von Hippel53:03

        Ah, interesting.

    11. CWChris Williamson53:03

        And, and that level of, that level of comparison. But it, it's a, it's so, it's so well-known, it's cliché, right? Keeping up with the Joneses. What is that?

    12. WHWilliam Von Hippel53:11

        Exactly. Exactly. And so the thing is that if I, you know, imagine that I invented a new pill and it made you twice as smart and I gave it to you. Well, instantly you'd feel like you're some kinda genius, right? Because stuff you used to struggle with would be easy for you now.

    13. CWChris Williamson53:24

        Mm-hmm.

    14. WHWilliam Von Hippel53:24

        But imagine that you then left your office and you found out that I gave everybody two of 'em, and so you only had one, everybody else had two, and now you'd feel like an idiot literally seconds later-

    15. CWChris Williamson53:33

        (laughs)

    16. WHWilliam Von Hippel53:33

        ... because everybody else is discussing things you can't understand.

    17. CWChris Williamson53:36

        Yeah.

    18. WHWilliam Von Hippel53:36

        And so sometimes comparisons make perfect sense. You need to be at the same level everybody else is. But ironically, the same thing also happens because of sexual selection in domains that don't really matter. So, imagine I told you, "Look, um, today is, uh, is your lucky day. I'm gonna give you, just for being you, $100,000." Well, you'd be totally chuffed until you left your office to brag about it and you found out I'd given everybody else a million.

    19. CWChris Williamson54:01

        Yeah.

    20. WHWilliam Von Hippel54:01

        And then suddenly you'd be pissed off. "Why did he only give me 100 grand?" Well, it's, it's ridiculous to feel that way because your $100,000 still buys you whatever 100,000 can buy no matter what everybody else has.

    21. CWChris Williamson54:12

        Yeah.

    22. WHWilliam Von Hippel54:13

        But the logic of sexual selection now makes you think, "Oh, well if everybody else got a million, I'm gonna be left behind and, and the girl's not gonna choose me."

    23. CWChris Williamson54:21

        Is that...

    24. WHWilliam Von Hippel54:21

        And so it's-

    25. CWChris Williamson54:22

        It's, that's, that's an artifact of our sexual selection processing that's hacking our psychology for a whole lot of unrelated other, other processes, right?

    26. WHWilliam Von Hippel54:31

        Well, it is. It's an artifact that, that has both these unfortunate consequences and also a kernel of truth. Because if I, if I do give you $100,000, you are more attractive, but you're not more attractive if everybody else got a million.

    27. CWChris Williamson54:43

        Yeah. That's totally right. Is this unique to humans?

    28. WHWilliam Von Hippel54:46

        That's a great question. I mean, the thing is that animal fairness is something that cuts across all the animals that actually have a social system that can track these sorts of things. So, the most famous example is, um, a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, and what they did is they trained these, um, capuchin monkeys to, um, play this game where they would give the monkey a pebble, it would return the pebble, and they would give it a slice of cucumber. And so we know that the monkey regarded...... payment of a cucumber slice as fair because it actually learned the behavior in return for a cucumber. But now what they do in the critical point in the experiment is they have another monkey in the cage next to them, and when that monkey returns the pebble, instead of giving it a cucumber like they were, like the first monkey got, they reward it with a grape. Well, monkeys, they far prefer grapes over cucumbers, and so then the question is, what does our original monkey do now that it sees another one getting a grape for the very same behavior in which it's being paid in cucumbers? Well, when they then try to reward that animal with cucumbers, it gets really upset-

    29. CWChris Williamson55:47

        (laughs)

    30. WHWilliam Von Hippel55:47

        ... and often rejects the cucumber, refuses to take it. And there is a great video that de Waal has where he's giving a TED Talk and you can see the monkey literally throw the cucumber at the experimenter-
17. 56:44 – 1:02:17

    Monogamy (mostly), sperm competition clues, and pair-bonding adaptations

    1. CWChris Williamson56:44

       Yeah, absolutely. So, I know that, I, I, I discussed this with Robin Hanson and, and he had, he knows that this is such a contested area about how monogamous the, um, the particular individuals were around about this sort of time. Where does your current opinion lie with regards to monogamy within these, these developmental tribes?

    2. WHWilliam Von Hippel57:07

       So if you... There's lots of variability. You've got, um, tri- you've got groups of people who clearly, um, show very little signs of monogamy, and then you've got groups of people where you've got basically just monogamy. And of course, you've got polygyny as well. My intuition, I don't know this but I believe it, is that basically our ancestors were on average serially monogamous with a little bit of shenanigans along the way. And so, what we see quite commonly in hunter-gatherers is, uh, monogamous pairing that lasts for anywhere from, you know, very briefly to seven, eight years even, or sometimes even for life, but usually not forever. And they sort of eventually go their own ways and then re-pair up with somebody else. I think that system was super common because it gains you advantage of not putting all your genetic eggs in one basket. And, you know, when times change, maybe somebody else's genes would be a better fit for the new world.

    3. CWChris Williamson58:01

       Mm.

    4. WHWilliam Von Hippel58:02

       And, um, it, it's consistent with our modern psychology that it's, it's easier to maintain passion for somebody when they're new than, than when you've been with them for a long time. But I don't think that polygyny was a super common system or any kind of polyamorous system. And the best evidence for that, I think, is, is literally the size of our testicles. If you, if you look at the testicles of all the great apes, you know, gorillas have very small testicles because they maintain a harem physically with their, their body strength. They don't compete with... No other male is having sex with their females, so. And it doesn't actually take that much sperm to inseminate a female, so they can have small testicles. Chimpanzees have enormous testicles because-

    5. CWChris Williamson58:41

       (laughs)

    6. WHWilliam Von Hippel58:41

       ... everybody's having sex with her when she, when she becomes fertile.

    7. CWChris Williamson58:44

       Yeah.

    8. WHWilliam Von Hippel58:44

       And so they basically need to wash out the guy before them and have sperm competition-

    9. CWChris Williamson58:49

       Yeah.

    10. WHWilliam Von Hippel58:49

        ... where their sperm, um, gets there first. And then human beings, our testicles are closer to a gorilla than a chimp, but they're way larger than a gorilla.

    11. CWChris Williamson58:57

        Okay.

    12. WHWilliam Von Hippel58:57

        And that tells me that, that we're, we're using, where there is some sperm competition in our ancestral history, but nothing like the level that we see in chimpanzees.

    13. CWChris Williamson59:06

        There's an argument to be made as well about, uh, penis shape, right? That it creates a vacuum?

    14. WHWilliam Von Hippel59:11

        Mm-hmm.

    15. CWChris Williamson59:11

        Is that correct?

    16. WHWilliam Von Hippel59:12

        Yeah. I, I, that's a great question. I don't totally know. I've seen the ex- the experiment and I've seen this sort of, uh, uh, penis plunger system.

    17. CWChris Williamson59:20

        (laughs) Yeah.

    18. WHWilliam Von Hippel59:21

        It, it's, it's super possible, right? It, it's, it's all these things evolve and, and in our case, our penises are way larger than the other great apes. And of course, we copulate wh- for much longer than the o- than most of the primates do. You know, there's exceptions with bonobos who have these constant orgies, but human beings when they copulate do so for a long period of time. They do so when the female is not currently fertile because of course she's hidden her fertility signals. Ovulation is cryptic in humans. We can't tell. And so, and that gets human males to be interested in human females across the cycle because otherwise they might be left out. And of course, that makes both sides engage in greater pair bonding which makes good sense when you look at the difficulty of raising human babies, um, to adulthood. They take a lot of work by both parents.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:00:06

        Yeah.

    20. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:00:07

        And so, I suspect that the penis may well be designed to try to help suction out the guy ahead of them, but, but probably the primary purpose is for bonding so that they have a good time together and copulation can take quite a while. And so, I think the reason our penis is so large is sexual selection. That that's what human females prefer and so that's what human males are like. And that's why of course we're so obsessed with it.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:00:30

        And the ideal outcome or the outcome that evolution was wanting us to arrive at was greater pair bonding here, right? It was a, a high level of investment between each other. Is that correct?

    22. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:00:43

        Yeah. So the, when you have a system like ours where, um, it takes so much effort to raise a, a human to, you know, a dozen years minimally to get them to be a reasonably effective unit who can forage for itself, that takes a lot of care and, and takes two parents to achieve that. And it is the case that relatives also often work together, um, so particularly her, her family will play a big role in helping raise the kids. And we see this in all sorts of places. But I do believe that part of what also underlies that is pair bonding and his willingness to look out for her and help her in return for her fidelity. And so, I think that's a deal that, that humans made somewhere along the way. It's not-... it's not a mission-critical deal for our intelligence or our social intelligence, um, because I do think that's more happening at the group level, but I, but it does appear to me to be the deal that we did strike.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:01:34

        Well, it makes the most sense, that the man cannot raise the- the child. The man- the man can't get pregnant, so they have to focus on-

    24. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:01:41

        Right.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:01:41

        ... what they can do. And-

    26. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:01:43

        Right. Every- both sides, what can you, what can you bring to the table? And you have to remember that females, the obligatory investment of a male, the minimal investment he can put into a child is, you know, a teaspoon of sperm. The minimal investment she can put into a child is, you know, nine months of- of, um, gestation and- and ancestral societies, two years of lactation. Well, that's a huge investment compared to his. And as Trivers has shown us s- in the early 1970s, in his parental investment model, that means that on average men will compete very fiercely for females because, of course, they're competing for her investment.

18. 1:02:17 – 1:12:46

    Modern implications and the next evolutionary chapter: AI, cyborgs, or extinction

    1. CWChris Williamson1:02:17

       Yes. Yeah. I totally get that. So, were there any other, uh, any other discoveries that you came across while you were writing the book and researching it that you found that were really surprising?

    2. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:02:30

       Well, uh, what's surprising about it to me is how many implications it has. So, I'd be working on the book and then I would get a- a friend or a colleague who would say, "Hey, can you come give a talk about leadership or about happiness or about innovation?" And I would say, "Well, I don't work on that." And they would say, "Well, but surely what you're doing must have implications for it." And so I'd say, "Huh, let me think about it," and it always did. Every time somebody came w- with one of those requests, I would give it a little bit of thought and I'd say, "Well, boy, it really does have implications for when and why we innovate, for how we lead, for what makes us happy." And so for me, the surprise was just how socially psychologically rich it is to understand and to think a lot about where we came from, because it tells us a fair bit about w- why we are the way we are today.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:03:16

       Yeah. I- I- I think, uh, one of the, one of the definite conclusions that I drew from my conversation with, uh, Professor Robin Hanson was that the world around us has moved an awful lot quicker than our evolution can catch up with.

    4. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:03:28

       Mm-hmm.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:03:29

       And I think we kid ourselves into believing that we're a lot more sophisticated and a lot more in control-

    6. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:03:35

       (laughs) Yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:03:35

       ... a lot more in control of our, uh, unconscious mind than we would care to believe. Um, and, you know, when you- you're talking about- you say 80,000 years ago was when there was a- a- a- a fairly big split off, and there was only 10,000 years ago, I think, in, uh, in and around, uh, the Philippines and stuff where there was the final last non-sapiens homo species. Is that right? The miniature, uh, diminutive size-

    8. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:04:03

       Yeah, I- I- ... In Flores. Ha- yeah, I don't know exactly when they were, um, when they- their last stand was. I have to admit, I'm not sure about that. But I'm- I suspect you're right. I suspect that number's correct. Certainly, we were interacting with Neanderthals 20 and 30,000 years ago-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:04:16

       Wow.

    10. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:04:17

        ... um, and probably for quite a long time, right? Given that we- so for example, the first Australians arrived 65,000 years ago. Well, by the- if we got to Australia 65,000 years ago, we'd covered a fair bit of Asia and Europe by then, too. We'd had a lot of interaction with Neanderthals by then, and presumably with Denisovans and others. And what- what those others might be, of course, we don't know, but there probably was a lot of intermixing and a lot of interesting blending because really, we're interacting with cousins, so to speak. You know, our ancestors, some of them left, some stayed. Sapiens happens to be a product of those who stayed, but we're an interblended product with those who left.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:04:56

        Yeah. Do you ever imagine what it would be like if we'd- I- if there was still megafauna around, megafauna animals, or if the- if Neanderthals had managed to hold on or if there was multiple different, um, h- homo, uh, subspecies floating around now? Do you ever sort of fantasize about that or think about-

    12. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:05:13

        (laughs) Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:05:14

        ... what it would be like in the modern world?

    14. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:05:16

        I do, and I- I worry that the story would not be a positive one because we're so tribal already when it's just other groups of humans who basically are the same as us but with some very slight appearance differences. It's easy for me to imagine we could be really awful with people who really are distinctly different species. And it's easy, you know, given that- that there aren't any left, I suspect we were awful with them, that we're super effective and when we're not positively disposed toward others, we don't use that super effectiveness for good, right? We use it to exterminate them. We're genocidal toward each other. And so if- maybe if- if there were still all sorts of cousin species in the world, it would be a- an easier, pleasant, lovely place, but I ha- I have the bad feeling it wouldn't.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:06:02

        Yeah. I'm tempted to agree, but I do think, oddly enough, the two conversations I've had with yourself and- and Professor Hanson, very strangely I feel liberated when I hear them. I- I- I, I think a lot of the time we beat ourselves up about being, uh, m- less in control of our unconscious mind and our actions and our motivations than we wish that we were. We get frustrated when we're in traffic and we get scared when we hear loud noises, and, you know, like w- all of the emotions that we feel, loneliness and depression and anxiety and everything, both positive and negative, a- are just artifact of- of a- a time that we evolved in that no longer exists, and we're kind of trying to make this primitive brain fit a modern world.

    16. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:06:45

        No, that's absolutely right because the greatest invention that we ever had was this idea of cumulative culture, of learning from each other, of communicating that information over great times and distances, and that moves so quickly and we're such generalists that we have the capacity to do that. But as you point out-... that doesn't mean that our brain changes at anywhere near that speed, it just doesn't. And so the things that make us happy, the things that scare us, um, those, those early things are still in there. And I guess what I would argue is, the important thing to remember is that w- we're not totally at their mercy, right? They don't control us, but they're an important nudge that pushes us to feel jealous sometimes, to misbehave other times, and the key is to stop and ask yourself, "Well, why am I feeling this way? And why am I being so aggressive towards so-and-so? And why am I not happy with what I've got here when I used to be?" And ask yourself those questions. And I do think that we can retake some of that control simply by virtue of the power of our frontal cortex, so to speak, and, and, and trying to say, "Well, I, I can't let myself just be buffeted around by my unconscious mind, which really evolved a long time ago, and is much better suited to a world that doesn't exist anymore."

    17. CWChris Williamson1:07:56

        I totally get that. The race to the bottom of the brain stem, so to speak, needs-

    18. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:08:00

        (laughs)

    19. CWChris Williamson1:08:00

        ... needs, needs to be counteracted. I did a, I did a podcast-

    20. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:08:03

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:08:03

        ... with meditation expert Cory Allen, and he's got this wonderful term that I, I, I love using called the mindfulness gap. And he talks about in between the action occurring, which you need to react to, and your reaction is this mindfulness gap. And that one breath, that two breaths in between, it can make such a profound change. And, you know, uh, that probably wouldn't be that useful if you're out in the plains. You want to be like a boxer, you want to react before you even think, whereas now obviously being able to step in between ourselves and our reactions is actually quite a useful skill.

    22. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:08:36

        No, that's absolutely right, because, of course, we no longer solve our problems physically where speed is of the essence. We now solve our problems much more by negotiation and verbally. And so, if given that, you're better off not necessarily flying (laughs) off the handle right away and giving your immediate response, but saying, "Well hold on." And I love that term mindfulness gap. I've not heard that, but yeah, Cory's super smart, so I'm not surprised.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:08:59

        It's, it's absolutely perfect, I think. So, the final question that I wanted to ask, I'm aware that you're unable to answer this with any real certainty, but at the moment, we're moving forward towards a, a world of AI development and, uh, you know, the, the world is changing so quickly that I suppose any genetic mutations which were, uh, which did provide any particular advantages would have to be so generally applicable that they're probably not gonna stick because of how fast the environment's moving. The environment now is different to it was 150 years ago and so on and so forth. So, if you were to, if you were to put your money where your mouth is, have you got any idea about whether we're going to see a, a different homo species before, you know, i- is it gonna be 500,000 years? Is it gonna be a million years? C- can you predict what would happen-

    24. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:09:46

        Yeah.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:09:46

        ... if you were to put your money, money down?

    26. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:09:49

        Well, that's a great question, and I'd be happy to predict it, because I know neither of us will be here to find out if I'm wrong.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:09:54

        (laughs)

    28. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:09:54

        And so I'll be able to state it with great confidence. But in truth, you know, our species is a new one. Homo erectus lasted for almost two million years, and, uh, w- we've only been around for 200,000 or 300,000. You know, it's hard to make an exact beginning point, because, of course, it was a continuous process. And then the, the question is, is our incredible effectiveness going to be our undoing, or is it going to make us a huge success? And literally you can't tell right now, right? It could easily blow us all up, we could develop a wonderful AI system that some random psychopath reprograms to kill us all.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:10:29

        (laughs)

    30. WHWilliam Von Hippel1:10:29

        There's a, there's a million ways it could go wrong, and only a few ways that it could go right. And we're trying to trick this sort of, um, as you call it, this, this, this primitive brain of ours into living in this super complicated, super diverse modern world. So, my, my suspicion is that if you fast-forwarded a few hundred thousand years, we've got a 50% chance of having been really lucky, and we're now basically biologically the same that we are now, although we've done all sorts of tweaks to make ourselves live longer and we're probably a little cyborg-like, machine-enhanced and all that kind of stuff.

Episode duration: 1:16:51