Richard Wrangham: Role of Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution
生物与进化音乐与艺术历史与文明政治与社会心理与人性
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violencehumanmalesdongothumansmalehomochimpschimpanzeessapiensanimalsfoodspeciesgroupconflictfirealphaablenature
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🎙️ 完整对话（2843 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with Richard Wrangham,
以下是与理查德·兰厄姆的对话，
Lex Fridman (00:03.240)
a biological anthropologist at Harvard
哈佛大学生物人类学家
Lex Fridman (00:05.720)
specializing in the study of primates
专门研究灵长类动物
Lex Fridman (00:08.160)
and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture,
以及暴力、性、烹饪、文化的演变，
Lex Fridman (00:12.200)
and other aspects of ape and human behavior
以及猿和人类行为的其他方面
Richard Wrangham (00:15.160)
at the individual and societal level.
在个人和社会层面。
Lex Fridman (00:18.360)
He began his career over four decades ago
他在四十多年前就开始了自己的职业生涯
Richard Wrangham (00:20.960)
working with Jane Goodall
与珍·古道尔合作
Lex Fridman (00:22.340)
and studying the behavior of chimps,
并研究黑猩猩的行为，
Lex Fridman (00:24.560)
and since then has done a lot of seminal work
从那时起做了很多开创性的工作
Lex Fridman (00:27.320)
on human evolution and has proposed
并提出了人类进化论
Richard Wrangham (00:29.800)
several theories for the roles of fire and violence
关于火灾和暴力作用的几种理论
Lex Fridman (00:33.380)
in the evolution of us, hairless apes,
在我们无毛猿的进化过程中，
Richard Wrangham (00:36.580)
otherwise known as homo sapiens.
也称为智人。
Lex Fridman (00:39.460)
This is the Lux Friedman podcast.
这是勒克斯·弗里德曼的播客。
Richard Wrangham (00:41.700)
To support it, please check out our sponsors
为了支持它，请查看我们的赞助商
Lex Fridman (00:43.520)
in the description.
在描述中。
Lex Fridman (00:44.880)
And now, here's my conversation with Richard Wrangham.
现在，这是我与理查德·兰厄姆的对话。
Lex Fridman (00:50.000)
You've said that we're much less violent
你说过我们没有那么暴力
Richard Wrangham (00:53.080)
than our close living relatives, the chimps.
比我们现存的近亲黑猩猩还要多。
Lex Fridman (00:57.000)
Can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are
Lex Fridman (01:01.000)
and how violent our evolutionary relatives are?
Lex Fridman (01:04.500)
Well, I haven't said exactly
Richard Wrangham (01:05.960)
that we're less violent than chimps.
Lex Fridman (01:07.940)
What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence.
Richard Wrangham (01:11.260)
One stems from proactive aggression
Lex Fridman (01:13.260)
and the other stems from reactive aggression.
Richard Wrangham (01:15.600)
Proactive aggression is planned aggression.
Lex Fridman (01:17.840)
Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive.
Richard Wrangham (01:20.760)
It's reactive because it takes place
Lex Fridman (01:24.560)
in seconds after the threat.
Lex Fridman (01:27.500)
And the thing that is really striking about humans
Lex Fridman (01:30.840)
compared to our close relatives is the great reduction
Richard Wrangham (01:36.480)
in the degree of reactive aggression.
Lex Fridman (01:40.240)
So we are far less violent than chimps
Richard Wrangham (01:43.160)
when prompted by some relatively minor threat
Lex Fridman (01:46.680)
within our own society.
Lex Fridman (01:48.620)
And the way I judge that is with not super satisfactory data
Lex Fridman (01:53.620)
but the study which is particularly striking
Richard Wrangham (01:59.440)
is one of people living as hunter gatherers
Lex Fridman (02:05.200)
in a really upsetting kind of environment,
Richard Wrangham (02:09.720)
namely people in Australia living in a place
Lex Fridman (02:15.300)
where they got a lot of alcohol abuse.
Richard Wrangham (02:19.180)
There's a lot of domestic violence.
Lex Fridman (02:21.640)
It's all a sort of a society that is as bad
Richard Wrangham (02:29.240)
from the point of view of violence
Lex Fridman (02:30.540)
as an ordinary society can get.
Richard Wrangham (02:34.200)
There's excellent data on the frequency
Lex Fridman (02:36.880)
with which people actually have physical violence
Lex Fridman (02:39.240)
and hit each other.
Lex Fridman (02:40.440)
And we can compare that to data
Richard Wrangham (02:42.680)
from several different sites comparing,
Lex Fridman (02:46.200)
we're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence.
Lex Fridman (02:50.100)
And the difference is between two and three orders
Lex Fridman (02:53.960)
of magnitude.
Richard Wrangham (02:55.420)
The frequency with which chimps and bonobos hit each other,
Lex Fridman (02:58.120)
chase each other, charge each other, physically engage
Richard Wrangham (03:02.120)
is somewhere between 500 and a thousand times
Lex Fridman (03:06.320)
higher than in humans.
Lex Fridman (03:08.360)
So there's something just amazing about us.
Lex Fridman (03:09.900)
And this has been recognized for centuries.
Richard Wrangham (03:13.600)
Aristotle drew attention to the fact that we behave
Lex Fridman (03:17.080)
in many ways like domesticated animals
Richard Wrangham (03:19.000)
because we're so unviolent.
Lex Fridman (03:21.320)
But people say, well, what about the hideous engagements
Lex Fridman (03:26.800)
of this 20th century?
Lex Fridman (03:29.480)
The First and Second World War and much else besides.
Lex Fridman (03:33.640)
And that is all proactive violence.
Lex Fridman (03:37.120)
All of that is gangs of people
Richard Wrangham (03:42.280)
making deliberate decisions to go off and attack
Lex Fridman (03:45.160)
in circumstances which ideally the attackers
Richard Wrangham (03:48.880)
are going to be able to make their kills
Lex Fridman (03:51.360)
and then get out of there.
Richard Wrangham (03:53.320)
In other words, not face confrontation.
Lex Fridman (03:55.920)
That's the ordinary way that armies try and work.
Lex Fridman (03:58.780)
And there it turns out that humans and chimpanzees
Lex Fridman (04:04.880)
are in a very similar kind of state.
Richard Wrangham (04:07.100)
That is to say, if you look at the rate of death
Lex Fridman (04:10.960)
from chimpanzees conducting proactive coalition violence,
Richard Wrangham (04:15.460)
it's very similar in many ways to what you see in humans.
Lex Fridman (04:20.280)
So we're not down regulated with proactive violence.
Richard Wrangham (04:23.580)
It's just this reactive violence
Lex Fridman (04:25.720)
that is strikingly reduced in humans.
Lex Fridman (04:29.160)
So chimpanzees also practiced kind of tribal warfare.
Lex Fridman (04:34.040)
Indeed they do, yeah.
Lex Fridman (04:36.060)
So this was discovered first in 1974.
Lex Fridman (04:38.960)
It was observed first in 1974,
Richard Wrangham (04:40.960)
which was about the time that the first major study
Lex Fridman (04:48.080)
of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall
Richard Wrangham (04:51.200)
had been going for something like five years
Lex Fridman (04:55.480)
during of the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went.
Richard Wrangham (05:02.760)
Until then, they'd been observed at a feeding station
Lex Fridman (05:07.000)
where Jane was luring them in to be observed
Richard Wrangham (05:11.080)
by seeing bananas, which is great.
Lex Fridman (05:12.960)
She learned a lot, but she didn't learn
Lex Fridman (05:15.360)
what was happening at the edges of their ranges.
Lex Fridman (05:17.920)
So five years later, it became very obvious
Richard Wrangham (05:22.520)
that there was hostile relationships between groups.
Lex Fridman (05:25.680)
And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form
Richard Wrangham (05:30.580)
of the kind of hostile relationships
Lex Fridman (05:32.640)
that you see in many animals,
Richard Wrangham (05:33.740)
which is a bunch of chimps in this case
Lex Fridman (05:38.960)
shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders.
Lex Fridman (05:44.960)
But dramatically, in addition to that,
Lex Fridman (05:47.560)
there is a second kind of interaction.
Lex Fridman (05:49.320)
And that is when a party of chimpanzees
Lex Fridman (05:55.980)
makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory,
Richard Wrangham (06:00.980)
silently, and then search for members of neighboring groups.
Lex Fridman (06:08.200)
And what they're searching for is a lone individual.
Lex Fridman (06:11.760)
So I've been with chimps when they've heard
Lex Fridman (06:15.240)
a lone individual under these circumstances,
Richard Wrangham (06:17.960)
or what they think is a lone one,
Lex Fridman (06:19.960)
and they touch each other and look at each other
Lex Fridman (06:23.040)
and then charge forward, very excited.
Lex Fridman (06:26.120)
And then while they're charging,
Richard Wrangham (06:30.880)
all of a sudden, the place where they heard a lone call
Lex Fridman (06:35.520)
erupts with a volley of calls.
Richard Wrangham (06:37.520)
It was just one calling out of a larger party.
Lex Fridman (06:40.860)
And our chimps put on the brakes
Lex Fridman (06:43.480)
and scoot back for safety into their own territory.
Lex Fridman (06:46.680)
But if in fact they do find a lone individual
Lex Fridman (06:49.680)
and they can sneak up to them,
Lex Fridman (06:52.460)
then they make a deliberate attack.
Richard Wrangham (06:55.000)
They're hunting, they're stalking and hunting,
Lex Fridman (06:57.560)
and then they impose terrible damage,
Richard Wrangham (07:00.640)
which typically ends in a kill straight away,
Lex Fridman (07:03.040)
but it might end up with the victim so damaged
Richard Wrangham (07:08.320)
that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later.
Lex Fridman (07:13.520)
So that was a very dramatic discovery
Richard Wrangham (07:15.360)
because it really made people realize for the first time
Lex Fridman (07:20.480)
that Conrad Lorentz had been wrong
Richard Wrangham (07:22.760)
when in the 1960s, in his famous book, On Aggression,
Lex Fridman (07:26.880)
he said, warfare is restricted to humans.
Richard Wrangham (07:30.800)
Animals do not deliberately kill each other.
Lex Fridman (07:33.080)
Well, now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals
Richard Wrangham (07:35.160)
that deliberately kill each other,
Lex Fridman (07:36.420)
and they always do so under essentially
Richard Wrangham (07:38.560)
the same circumstances, which is
Lex Fridman (07:40.680)
when they feel safe doing it.
Lex Fridman (07:44.200)
So humans feel safe doing it when they got a weapon.
Lex Fridman (07:48.040)
Animals feel safe when they have a coalition.
Richard Wrangham (07:52.400)
A coalition that has overwhelming power
Lex Fridman (07:54.800)
compared to the victim.
Lex Fridman (07:56.720)
And so wolves will do that, and lions will do that,
Lex Fridman (07:59.400)
and hyenas will do that, and chimpanzees will do it,
Lex Fridman (08:02.480)
and humans do it too.
Lex Fridman (08:05.340)
Can they pull themselves into something
Richard Wrangham (08:08.480)
that looks more like a symmetric war
Lex Fridman (08:10.600)
as opposed to an asymmetric one?
Lex Fridman (08:12.660)
So accidentally engaging on the lone individual
Lex Fridman (08:15.280)
and then getting themselves into trouble?
Richard Wrangham (08:17.220)
Or are they more aggressive
Lex Fridman (08:19.080)
in avoiding these kinds of battles?
Richard Wrangham (08:21.360)
No, they're very, very keen to avoid those kinds of battles,
Lex Fridman (08:24.040)
but occasionally, they can make a mistake.
Lex Fridman (08:28.800)
But so far, there have been no observations
Lex Fridman (08:32.320)
of anything like a battle
Richard Wrangham (08:33.800)
in which both sides maintain themselves.
Lex Fridman (08:37.240)
And I think you can very confidently say
Richard Wrangham (08:40.240)
that overwhelmingly what happens is
Lex Fridman (08:42.600)
that if they discover that there's several individuals
Richard Wrangham (08:45.060)
on the other side, then both sides retreat.
Lex Fridman (08:48.240)
Nobody wants to get hurt.
Lex Fridman (08:50.280)
What they want to do is to hurt others.
Lex Fridman (08:52.000)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (08:52.840)
So you mentioned Jane Goodall.
Lex Fridman (08:54.440)
You've worked with her.
Lex Fridman (08:56.640)
What was it like working with her?
Lex Fridman (08:58.120)
What have you learned from her?
Richard Wrangham (09:01.080)
Well, she's a wonderfully independent, courageous person
Lex Fridman (09:05.000)
who she famously began her studies
Richard Wrangham (09:09.680)
not as a qualified person in terms of education,
Lex Fridman (09:14.680)
but qualified only by enthusiasm and a considerable
Richard Wrangham (09:19.680)
experience, even in her early 20s, with nature.
Lex Fridman (09:24.600)
So she's courageous in the sense
Richard Wrangham (09:26.440)
of being able to take on challenges.
Lex Fridman (09:30.520)
The thing that is very impressive about her
Richard Wrangham (09:32.720)
is her total fidelity to the observations,
Lex Fridman (09:37.720)
very unwilling to extend beyond the observations,
Richard Wrangham (09:43.800)
waiting until they mount up
Lex Fridman (09:45.440)
and you've really got a confident picture,
Lex Fridman (09:48.960)
and tremendous attention to individuals.
Lex Fridman (09:53.640)
So that was an interesting problem from her point of view
Richard Wrangham (09:57.200)
because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombe,
Lex Fridman (10:02.440)
this particular community of Kazakus,
Richard Wrangham (10:05.280)
this particular community of Kazakela,
Lex Fridman (10:08.040)
about 60 individuals,
Lex Fridman (10:10.880)
so Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika.
Lex Fridman (10:14.680)
She was there initially with her mother
Lex Fridman (10:16.480)
and then alone for two or three years
Lex Fridman (10:20.400)
of really intense observation
Lex Fridman (10:22.600)
and then slowly joined by other people.
Lex Fridman (10:28.120)
What she discovered was that there were obvious differences
Richard Wrangham (10:31.600)
in individual personality
Lex Fridman (10:34.520)
and the difficulty about that was that
Richard Wrangham (10:37.320)
when she reported this to the larger scientific world,
Lex Fridman (10:42.960)
initially her advisors at Cambridge,
Richard Wrangham (10:47.440)
they said, well, we don't know how to handle that
Lex Fridman (10:49.840)
because you've got to treat all these animals
Richard Wrangham (10:52.800)
as the same basically,
Lex Fridman (10:54.360)
because there is no research tradition
Richard Wrangham (11:00.440)
of thinking about personalities.
Lex Fridman (11:03.200)
Well now, whatever it is, 60 years later,
Richard Wrangham (11:07.800)
the study of personalities is a very rich part
Lex Fridman (11:11.520)
of the study of animal behavior.
Richard Wrangham (11:14.680)
At any rate, the important point in terms of
Lex Fridman (11:17.320)
what was she like is that she stuck to her guns
Lex Fridman (11:19.200)
and she absolutely insisted that we have to show,
Lex Fridman (11:23.280)
describe in great detail the differences in personality
Richard Wrangham (11:27.360)
among these individuals
Lex Fridman (11:28.360)
and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologists
Richard Wrangham (11:30.400)
to think about what it means.
Lex Fridman (11:32.600)
So what is the process of observation like this like?
Richard Wrangham (11:37.840)
Observing the personality but also observing in a way
Lex Fridman (11:41.520)
that's not projecting your beliefs about human nature
Richard Wrangham (11:45.480)
or animal nature onto chimps,
Lex Fridman (11:48.760)
which is probably really tempting to project.
Lex Fridman (11:52.520)
So your understanding of the way the human world works,
Lex Fridman (11:55.880)
projecting that onto the chimp world.
Richard Wrangham (11:59.360)
Yes, I mean, it's particularly difficult with chimps
Lex Fridman (12:01.560)
because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior
Richard Wrangham (12:05.200)
that it's very easy to make those projections, as you say.
Lex Fridman (12:10.840)
The process involves making very clear definitions
Richard Wrangham (12:14.840)
of what a behavior is.
Lex Fridman (12:18.440)
Aggression can be defined in terms of a forceful hit,
Richard Wrangham (12:24.240)
a bite, and so on,
Lex Fridman (12:26.720)
and writing down every time these things happen
Lex Fridman (12:30.280)
and then slowly totting up the numbers of times
Lex Fridman (12:32.640)
that they happen from individual A
Richard Wrangham (12:35.720)
towards individuals B, C, D, and E,
Lex Fridman (12:39.040)
so that you build up a very concrete picture
Richard Wrangham (12:41.600)
rather than interpreting at any point
Lex Fridman (12:43.760)
and stopping and saying,
Richard Wrangham (12:44.920)
well, they seem to be rather aggressive.
Lex Fridman (12:48.400)
So the sort of formal system
Richard Wrangham (12:51.760)
is that you build up a pattern of the relationships
Lex Fridman (12:54.480)
based on a description of the different types
Richard Wrangham (12:58.560)
of interactions, the aggressive
Lex Fridman (13:00.440)
and the friendly interactions,
Lex Fridman (13:03.080)
and all of these are defined in concrete.
Lex Fridman (13:07.600)
And so from that, you extract a pattern of relationships.
Lex Fridman (13:12.280)
And the relationships can be defined as
Lex Fridman (13:18.560)
relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive,
Richard Wrangham (13:23.640)
based on the frequency of these types of interactions.
Lex Fridman (13:27.400)
And so one can talk in terms of individuals
Richard Wrangham (13:30.960)
having a relationship which, on the scores of friendliness,
Lex Fridman (13:34.960)
is two standard deviations outside the mean.
Richard Wrangham (13:39.280)
I mean, you know, it's...
Lex Fridman (13:40.960)
In which direction, sorry, both directions?
Richard Wrangham (13:45.640)
Well, I mean, that would be, obviously,
Lex Fridman (13:47.960)
the friendly ones would be the ones
Richard Wrangham (13:49.560)
who have exceptionally high rates
Lex Fridman (13:52.000)
of spending time close to each other,
Richard Wrangham (13:54.400)
of touching each other in a gentle way,
Lex Fridman (13:56.520)
of grooming each other, and, by the way,
Richard Wrangham (14:00.000)
finding that those things are correlated with each other.
Lex Fridman (14:03.320)
So it's possible to define a friendship
Richard Wrangham (14:06.880)
with a capital F in a very systematic way,
Lex Fridman (14:10.040)
and to compare that between individuals,
Lex Fridman (14:14.680)
but also between communities of chimpanzees
Lex Fridman (14:18.680)
and between different species.
Lex Fridman (14:21.000)
So that, you know, we can say that in some species,
Lex Fridman (14:23.360)
individuals have friends, and others, they don't at all.
Lex Fridman (14:26.440)
What about just, because there's different personalities
Lex Fridman (14:29.680)
and because they're so fascinating,
Lex Fridman (14:31.880)
what about sort of falling in love
Lex Fridman (14:33.600)
or forming friendships with chimps, you know?
Lex Fridman (14:37.200)
Like really, you know, connecting with them as an observer?
Lex Fridman (14:43.920)
What role does that play?
Richard Wrangham (14:46.320)
Because you're tracking these individuals
Lex Fridman (14:47.960)
that are full of life and intelligence
Richard Wrangham (14:50.760)
for long periods of time.
Lex Fridman (14:53.560)
Plus, as a human, especially in those days for Jane,
Richard Wrangham (14:58.120)
she's alone, observing it.
Lex Fridman (15:00.280)
It gets lonely as a human.
Richard Wrangham (15:02.080)
I mean, probably deeply lonely as a human being,
Lex Fridman (15:05.000)
observing these other intelligent species.
Richard Wrangham (15:07.720)
It's a very reasonable question,
Lex Fridman (15:08.880)
and of course, Jane, in those early years,
Richard Wrangham (15:11.600)
I think she's willing now to talk about the fact
Lex Fridman (15:15.280)
that she regrets, to some extent, how close she became.
Lex Fridman (15:19.840)
And the problem is not just from the humans.
Lex Fridman (15:23.560)
The problem is from the chimpanzees as well,
Richard Wrangham (15:25.400)
because they do things
Lex Fridman (15:28.040)
that are extremely affectionate, if you like.
Richard Wrangham (15:32.640)
You know, at one point, Jane offered a ripe fruit
Lex Fridman (15:39.640)
to a chimpanzee called David Greybeard.
Richard Wrangham (15:42.240)
David Greybeard took it and squeezed her hand,
Lex Fridman (15:47.640)
as if to say thank you.
Lex Fridman (15:48.760)
And then I think he gave it back, if I remember rightly.
Lex Fridman (15:51.160)
Yeah.
Richard Wrangham (15:52.000)
Um.
Lex Fridman (15:52.840)
No, thank you.
Richard Wrangham (15:55.000)
Right.
Lex Fridman (15:57.320)
Oh, it's almost like thank you
Lex Fridman (15:59.360)
and returning the affection by giving the fruit.
Lex Fridman (16:02.520)
Yeah, exactly.
Richard Wrangham (16:03.360)
If they did something like that.
Lex Fridman (16:04.200)
Yeah, no, it was a gentle squeeze.
Richard Wrangham (16:05.960)
I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard,
Lex Fridman (16:08.080)
as occasionally has happened.
Richard Wrangham (16:11.320)
Some chimps are aggressive to people,
Lex Fridman (16:14.600)
and others are friendly.
Lex Fridman (16:16.360)
And the ones that are friendly tend to be
Lex Fridman (16:18.880)
rather sympathetic characters,
Richard Wrangham (16:20.200)
because they might be ones who are having problems
Lex Fridman (16:24.120)
in their own society.
Richard Wrangham (16:26.080)
You know, so Joe Mio in Gombe used to come
Lex Fridman (16:29.360)
and sit next to me quite often,
Lex Fridman (16:31.640)
and he was having a hard time making it in that society,
Lex Fridman (16:35.720)
which I can describe to you in terms of the number
Richard Wrangham (16:38.080)
of aggressive interactions, if you want, you know,
Lex Fridman (16:39.640)
but just to be informed about it.
Lex Fridman (16:43.240)
So all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted.
Lex Fridman (16:49.080)
And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda
Richard Wrangham (16:52.200)
for the last 30 years, we try extremely hard to impress
Lex Fridman (16:56.000)
on all of the research students who come with us,
Richard Wrangham (16:58.320)
that it is absolutely vital that you do not fall
Lex Fridman (17:01.640)
into that temptation.
Richard Wrangham (17:02.680)
Now, you know, we heard a story of one person
Lex Fridman (17:05.800)
who did reach out and touch one of our chimps.
Richard Wrangham (17:09.040)
It's a very, very bad idea.
Lex Fridman (17:12.120)
Not because the chimp is going to do anything violent
Richard Wrangham (17:16.280)
at the time, but because if they learn that humans
Lex Fridman (17:22.240)
are as weak physically as we are compared to them,
Richard Wrangham (17:25.960)
then they can take advantage of us.
Lex Fridman (17:28.680)
And that's what happened in Gombe.
Lex Fridman (17:30.680)
So after Jane had done the very obvious thing
Lex Fridman (17:35.280)
when you're first engaged in this game
Richard Wrangham (17:38.720)
of allowing the infants to approach her
Lex Fridman (17:41.520)
and then tickling them and playing with them,
Richard Wrangham (17:45.440)
some of those infants had the personality
Lex Fridman (17:49.080)
of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later.
Lex Fridman (17:53.280)
And so, you know, you had an individual, Frodo,
Lex Fridman (17:56.000)
who was violent on a regular basis towards humans
Richard Wrangham (17:59.880)
when he was an adult, and he was quite dangerous.
Lex Fridman (18:01.600)
I mean, he could easily have killed someone.
Richard Wrangham (18:02.840)
In fact, he did kill one person.
Lex Fridman (18:05.040)
He killed a baby that he took from a mother,
Richard Wrangham (18:09.640)
a human baby, that he took off her hip
Lex Fridman (18:11.920)
when he met her on the path.
Lex Fridman (18:15.160)
So it's a reminder that we're dealing with a species
Lex Fridman (18:20.440)
that are rather humanlike in the range of emotions
Richard Wrangham (18:23.840)
they have, in the capacities they have,
Lex Fridman (18:26.320)
and even in the strength they have,
Richard Wrangham (18:28.880)
they are in many ways stronger than humans.
Lex Fridman (18:33.040)
So you've got to be careful.
Lex Fridman (18:37.080)
So in the full range of friendliness and violence,
Lex Fridman (18:39.920)
the capacity for these very human things.
Richard Wrangham (18:44.000)
Yes, I mean, it's very obvious with violence,
Lex Fridman (18:47.280)
as we talked about, that they will kill.
Richard Wrangham (18:50.160)
They will kill not just strangers.
Lex Fridman (18:53.200)
They can kill other adults within their own group.
Richard Wrangham (18:57.600)
They can kill babies that are strangers.
Lex Fridman (18:59.600)
They can kill babies in their own group.
Richard Wrangham (19:01.160)
So, you know, this is a long lived individual.
Lex Fridman (19:04.360)
Obviously, these killings can't have very often
Richard Wrangham (19:06.600)
because otherwise they'd all be dead.
Lex Fridman (19:09.320)
And we're now finding that they can live
Richard Wrangham (19:11.960)
to 50 or 60 years in the wild
Lex Fridman (19:14.160)
at relatively low population density
Richard Wrangham (19:16.160)
because they're big animals eating
Lex Fridman (19:17.640)
a rather specialized kind of food, the ripe fruits.
Lex Fridman (19:22.360)
So it doesn't happen all the time.
Lex Fridman (19:23.880)
With friendliness, they are very strong
Richard Wrangham (19:27.760)
to support each other.
Lex Fridman (19:28.760)
They very much depend on their close friendships,
Richard Wrangham (19:33.760)
which they express through physical contact
Lex Fridman (19:38.960)
and particularly through grooming.
Lex Fridman (19:41.640)
So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another.
Lex Fridman (19:45.720)
I might present for grooming,
Richard Wrangham (19:48.280)
a very common way of starting,
Lex Fridman (19:50.800)
turning their back or presenting an arm
Richard Wrangham (19:53.200)
or something like that, and the other
Lex Fridman (19:54.520)
just riffles their fingers through the hair.
Lex Fridman (19:57.840)
And that's partly just soothing
Lex Fridman (1:00:05.000)
to try and have sex with at least one woman,
Lex Fridman (1:00:11.840)
and you know, often lots of women.
Lex Fridman (1:00:14.040)
And so men are constantly putting pressure on women
Richard Wrangham (1:00:17.280)
in ways that women find unpleasant.
Lex Fridman (1:00:19.880)
And if men sit back and reflect about it,
Richard Wrangham (1:00:21.680)
they think, yeah, we shouldn't do this.
Lex Fridman (1:00:22.880)
But actually, it just goes on because of human nature.
Lex Fridman (1:00:26.280)
So maybe looking at particular humans in history,
Lex Fridman (1:00:30.920)
let's talk about Genghis Khan.
Lex Fridman (1:00:32.840)
So is this particular human who was one
Lex Fridman (1:00:37.200)
of the most famous examples of large scale violence,
Richard Wrangham (1:00:42.280)
is he a deep representative of human nature
Lex Fridman (1:00:45.760)
or is he a rare exception?
Richard Wrangham (1:00:47.920)
Well, I think that it's easy to imagine
Lex Fridman (1:00:53.480)
that most men could have become Genghis Khan.
Richard Wrangham (1:00:59.400)
It's possible that he had a particular streak
Lex Fridman (1:01:02.240)
of psychopathy.
Richard Wrangham (1:01:06.400)
You know, it's striking that by the time you become
Lex Fridman (1:01:11.400)
immensely powerful, then your willingness
Richard Wrangham (1:01:19.120)
to do terrible things for the interest of yourself
Lex Fridman (1:01:23.120)
and your group becomes very high.
Richard Wrangham (1:01:31.360)
Stalin, Mao Zedong, these sorts of people have histories
Lex Fridman (1:01:36.360)
in which they do not show obvious psychopathy.
Lex Fridman (1:01:39.360)
But by the time they are big leaders,
Lex Fridman (1:01:41.240)
they are really psychopathic in the sense
Richard Wrangham (1:01:43.160)
that they do not follow the ordinary morality
Lex Fridman (1:01:47.680)
of considering the harm that they are doing
Richard Wrangham (1:01:52.680)
to their victims.
Lex Fridman (1:01:58.040)
What kind of experiment would we need to discover
Lex Fridman (1:02:00.400)
whether or not anybody could fall into this position?
Lex Fridman (1:02:04.120)
I don't know, but Lord Acton's famous dictum
Richard Wrangham (1:02:09.120)
was power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lex Fridman (1:02:14.120)
And then the point that people often forget
Richard Wrangham (1:02:16.360)
is the next sentence that he said,
Lex Fridman (1:02:17.880)
which is, great men are almost always bad men.
Lex Fridman (1:02:22.120)
And that is right.
Lex Fridman (1:02:23.680)
It is very difficult to find a great man in history
Richard Wrangham (1:02:27.160)
who was not responsible for terrible things.
Lex Fridman (1:02:30.440)
I think there's some aspect of it that it's not just power.
Richard Wrangham (1:02:35.440)
I think men who have been the most destructive
Lex Fridman (1:02:40.440)
in human history are not psychopathic completely.
Richard Wrangham (1:02:47.000)
They have convinced themselves of an idea.
Lex Fridman (1:02:49.840)
It's like the idea is psychopathic.
Richard Wrangham (1:02:52.320)
Stalin, for example, Hitler's a complicated one.
Lex Fridman (1:02:55.080)
I think he was legitimately insane.
Lex Fridman (1:02:57.240)
But I think Stalin has convinced himself that he's doing good.
Lex Fridman (1:03:02.920)
So the idea of communism is the thing that's psychopathic
Richard Wrangham (1:03:06.240)
in his mind, like it bred, you construct the worldview
Lex Fridman (1:03:09.880)
in which the violence is justified, the cruelty is justified.
Lex Fridman (1:03:14.360)
So there, in that sense, first of all,
Lex Fridman (1:03:18.320)
you can construct experiments, unethical experiments
Richard Wrangham (1:03:21.320)
that could test this, but in that sense,
Lex Fridman (1:03:25.280)
anybody else could have been in Stalin's position.
Richard Wrangham (1:03:30.800)
It's the idea that could overtake the mind
Lex Fridman (1:03:34.080)
of a human being and in so doing justify cruel acts.
Lex Fridman (1:03:38.320)
And that seems to be, at least in part, unique to humans,
Lex Fridman (1:03:42.080)
is the ability to hold ideas in our minds
Lex Fridman (1:03:45.520)
and share those ideas and use those ideas
Lex Fridman (1:03:49.360)
to convince ourselves that proactive violence
Richard Wrangham (1:03:53.720)
on a large scale is a good idea.
Lex Fridman (1:03:57.440)
So that, I don't know if you have a comment.
Richard Wrangham (1:03:58.920)
I suppose so, I mean, but it seems to me
Lex Fridman (1:04:01.960)
what really motivated Stalin was not so much communism
Richard Wrangham (1:04:08.760)
as the retention of power.
Lex Fridman (1:04:12.720)
So once he became leader and in the process
Richard Wrangham (1:04:17.400)
of becoming leader, he was absolutely desperate
Lex Fridman (1:04:20.920)
to get rid of anybody who was a challenger.
Richard Wrangham (1:04:24.160)
He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody,
Lex Fridman (1:04:28.480)
even on his side, who might possibly be showing
Richard Wrangham (1:04:32.560)
a glimmerings of willingness to challenge him.
Lex Fridman (1:04:36.040)
So when he apparently had Kirov murdered,
Richard Wrangham (1:04:42.960)
Kirov was a great communist, Trotsky was a great communist,
Lex Fridman (1:04:46.920)
all his rivals, and I mean, when he went into the towns
Lex Fridman (1:04:52.360)
and murdered people by the tenths of thousands.
Lex Fridman (1:04:55.240)
They were all communists.
Richard Wrangham (1:04:56.200)
A lot of them were explicit communists, that's right.
Lex Fridman (1:05:00.120)
But what he was worried about was that they were rivals
Richard Wrangham (1:05:02.560)
to him.
Lex Fridman (1:05:05.040)
I suppose the thought is I am the best person
Richard Wrangham (1:05:08.880)
to bring about a global sort of embrace of communism
Lex Fridman (1:05:13.880)
and others are not, and so we have to get rid
Richard Wrangham (1:05:17.640)
of those others.
Lex Fridman (1:05:18.480)
Well, I suspect you're being very charitable here,
Lex Fridman (1:05:20.480)
but I mean, maybe you know enough about Stalin to really.
Lex Fridman (1:05:25.480)
Yes, well, so the point I'm making, I do quite a bit,
Richard Wrangham (1:05:29.760)
is from my understanding and sense, of course,
Lex Fridman (1:05:33.520)
we can't know for sure, is he believed in communism.
Richard Wrangham (1:05:37.520)
This wasn't purely a game of power.
Lex Fridman (1:05:41.600)
Now, he got drunk with power pretty quickly,
Lex Fridman (1:05:45.280)
but he really believed for, I believe his whole life,
Lex Fridman (1:05:49.800)
that communism is good for the world.
Lex Fridman (1:05:53.120)
And that, I don't know what role that belief plays
Lex Fridman (1:05:58.360)
with the more natural human desire for power.
Richard Wrangham (1:06:02.880)
I don't know, but it just seems like.
Lex Fridman (1:06:05.000)
As we agreed, he's killing a lot of communists
Richard Wrangham (1:06:07.320)
on his journey.
Lex Fridman (1:06:09.520)
On his journey.
Richard Wrangham (1:06:11.440)
Hmm, but it's not, that calculus doesn't work that way.
Lex Fridman (1:06:15.520)
There's humans who are communists
Lex Fridman (1:06:18.400)
and then there's the idea of communism.
Lex Fridman (1:06:20.880)
So for him, in his delusional world view,
Richard Wrangham (1:06:25.720)
killing a few people is worth the final result
Lex Fridman (1:06:30.280)
of bringing communism to the whole world.
Lex Fridman (1:06:32.720)
But it was more than that, again, because I mean,
Lex Fridman (1:06:34.320)
he really wanted power for the Soviet Union
Lex Fridman (1:06:37.600)
and so surely the reason that he orchestrated
Lex Fridman (1:06:43.920)
the export of wheat from Ukraine
Lex Fridman (1:06:49.800)
and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation
Lex Fridman (1:06:53.920)
was because he wanted to sell it on the market
Richard Wrangham (1:06:56.040)
in order to be able to build up
Lex Fridman (1:06:57.560)
the power of the Soviet Union.
Richard Wrangham (1:07:01.120)
Alternative view of communism might have been,
Lex Fridman (1:07:03.600)
well, let's just make sure everybody survives
Lex Fridman (1:07:07.160)
and make sure everybody has enough to eat
Lex Fridman (1:07:09.560)
and we'll all be mutually supportive in a communal network.
Lex Fridman (1:07:13.640)
But no, but he wanted the power for the country.
Lex Fridman (1:07:16.160)
Well, I guess exactly, so that it's not even communism,
Richard Wrangham (1:07:19.320)
the set of ideas are like Marxism or something like that,
Lex Fridman (1:07:21.800)
it's the country.
Richard Wrangham (1:07:23.080)
I guess what I'm saying is it's not purely power
Lex Fridman (1:07:27.480)
for the individual, it's power for a vision
Richard Wrangham (1:07:31.280)
for this great nation, the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman (1:07:34.840)
And it's similar with Hitler, the guy believed
Richard Wrangham (1:07:39.320)
that this is a great nation, Germany,
Lex Fridman (1:07:42.320)
and it's a nation that's been wronged throughout history
Lex Fridman (1:07:47.440)
and needs to be righted.
Lex Fridman (1:07:49.960)
And there's some dance between the individual human
Lex Fridman (1:07:54.440)
and the tribe.
Lex Fridman (1:07:55.560)
Yes, absolutely, yes, and so just like chimpanzees,
Richard Wrangham (1:08:00.040)
we are fiercely tribal and the tribalism resides
Lex Fridman (1:08:04.080)
particularly in male psychology and it's very scary
Richard Wrangham (1:08:09.200)
because once you assemble a set of males
Lex Fridman (1:08:14.560)
who share a tribal identity, then they have power
Richard Wrangham (1:08:18.880)
that they can exert with very little concern
Lex Fridman (1:08:25.760)
about what they're doing to damage other people.
Lex Fridman (1:08:29.120)
Do you think this, so Nietzschean will to power,
Lex Fridman (1:08:33.920)
we talked about the corrupting nature of power,
Lex Fridman (1:08:36.120)
do you think that's a manifestation
Lex Fridman (1:08:38.680)
of those early origins of violence?
Richard Wrangham (1:08:42.840)
What's the connection of this desire for power
Lex Fridman (1:08:46.040)
and our proclivity for violence?
Lex Fridman (1:08:50.120)
You know, what we're talking about is tribal power, right?
Lex Fridman (1:08:54.480)
Power on behalf of a group.
Richard Wrangham (1:08:56.920)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:08:57.760)
And yeah, that seems to me to go right back
Richard Wrangham (1:09:00.040)
to a deep evolutionary origin
Lex Fridman (1:09:04.520)
because you see essentially the same thing
Richard Wrangham (1:09:07.200)
in a whole bunch of animals.
Lex Fridman (1:09:10.520)
That most of the sort of cognitively complex animals
Richard Wrangham (1:09:16.720)
live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries.
Lex Fridman (1:09:22.000)
And so what you see in chimpanzees is echoed
Richard Wrangham (1:09:26.280)
in almost all of the primates.
Lex Fridman (1:09:28.800)
The difference between us and, you know,
Richard Wrangham (1:09:32.720)
chimpanzees and humans on the one hand
Lex Fridman (1:09:34.520)
and other primates on the other
Richard Wrangham (1:09:37.560)
is that we kill and they don't.
Lex Fridman (1:09:39.280)
And the reason they don't is because they never meet
Richard Wrangham (1:09:42.880)
in the context where there are massive imbalances of power.
Lex Fridman (1:09:46.880)
So two groups of baboons, you know,
Richard Wrangham (1:09:49.160)
there's 30 on this side and 50 on this side, fine.
Lex Fridman (1:09:52.560)
Nobody's gonna try and kill anybody else
Richard Wrangham (1:09:54.640)
because the serious risks involved.
Lex Fridman (1:09:59.560)
But nevertheless, they are tribal.
Richard Wrangham (1:10:02.160)
So, you know, they will have fairly intense
Lex Fridman (1:10:06.120)
intergroup interactions in which everybody knows
Richard Wrangham (1:10:09.600)
who is on whose side.
Lex Fridman (1:10:12.560)
And the longterm consequences of winning those battles,
Richard Wrangham (1:10:18.760)
nonlethal battles, is that the dominance get access
Lex Fridman (1:10:23.760)
to larger areas of land, more safety and so on,
Richard Wrangham (1:10:28.680)
with chances are better record
Lex Fridman (1:10:35.360)
of reproductive success subsequently.
Lex Fridman (1:10:40.000)
Do you think this, from an evolutionary perspective,
Lex Fridman (1:10:42.520)
is a feature or a bug?
Lex Fridman (1:10:44.040)
Our natural sort of tendency to form tribes?
Lex Fridman (1:10:50.560)
So what's a bug?
Richard Wrangham (1:10:51.800)
Oh, sorry, this is a computer programming analogy,
Lex Fridman (1:10:57.680)
meaning like it would be more beneficial.
Richard Wrangham (1:11:03.240)
Is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes
Lex Fridman (1:11:07.760)
from an evolutionary perspective?
Richard Wrangham (1:11:09.200)
Yeah, yeah, but, but, but.
Lex Fridman (1:11:11.000)
What does it mean?
Lex Fridman (1:11:12.080)
What does a bug mean?
Lex Fridman (1:11:13.200)
Yes, right.
Richard Wrangham (1:11:14.400)
I mean.
Lex Fridman (1:11:15.240)
Well, yeah, like where's evolution going anyway?
Richard Wrangham (1:11:17.520)
It's beneficial from, you know,
Lex Fridman (1:11:19.120)
it's beneficial in the sense that it evolved
Richard Wrangham (1:11:20.880)
by natural selection to benefit the individuals who did it.
Lex Fridman (1:11:25.440)
But if by bug you mean something that,
Richard Wrangham (1:11:28.800)
from the point of view of the species,
Lex Fridman (1:11:30.240)
it would be great if you could just wipe this out
Richard Wrangham (1:11:32.560)
because the species would somehow do better as a result.
Lex Fridman (1:11:36.040)
Then yes, but then, you know, males are a bug.
Richard Wrangham (1:11:41.160)
Come on now, there's some nice things to males,
Lex Fridman (1:11:46.280)
speaking as a male.
Richard Wrangham (1:11:48.120)
The fact that there are some nice things to males
Lex Fridman (1:11:50.160)
doesn't mean that they're not bugs.
Richard Wrangham (1:11:51.960)
You know, maybe they're quite nice bugs,
Lex Fridman (1:11:53.880)
but it would be much better for the species as a whole
Richard Wrangham (1:11:56.400)
not to have to have males who impose this violence
Lex Fridman (1:12:00.400)
on the species as a whole.
Richard Wrangham (1:12:01.840)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:12:03.080)
As somebody who practiced controlled violence
Lex Fridman (1:12:05.160)
and doing a lot of martial arts, yeah, I'm not sure.
Lex Fridman (1:12:10.000)
It does seem kind of fun to have this kind
Richard Wrangham (1:12:12.720)
of controlled violence, also sports.
Lex Fridman (1:12:15.280)
Also, I mean, the question of conflict in general,
Richard Wrangham (1:12:18.440)
I guess that's the deeper question.
Lex Fridman (1:12:20.560)
Don't you think there's some value to conflict
Lex Fridman (1:12:24.200)
for the improvement of society, for progress?
Lex Fridman (1:12:27.720)
That this tension between tribes,
Richard Wrangham (1:12:31.080)
isn't this like a experiment,
Lex Fridman (1:12:35.240)
a continued experiment we conduct with each other
Lex Fridman (1:12:37.680)
to figure out what is a better world to build?
Lex Fridman (1:12:40.200)
Like you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas
Richard Wrangham (1:12:44.960)
to go to war with each other.
Lex Fridman (1:12:47.480)
It's like the United States with the 50 states
Lex Fridman (1:12:50.600)
and it's the laboratory of ideas.
Lex Fridman (1:12:53.620)
Don't you think that is, again, feature versus bug?
Richard Wrangham (1:12:59.420)
This kind of conflict, when it doesn't get out of hand,
Lex Fridman (1:13:02.960)
is actually ultimately progressive,
Richard Wrangham (1:13:05.000)
productive for a better world.
Lex Fridman (1:13:08.100)
Well, what do you mean by conflict?
Richard Wrangham (1:13:10.080)
I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of
Lex Fridman (1:13:12.880)
people have different ideas about the solution to a problem.
Lex Fridman (1:13:16.520)
And so their ideas are in conflict.
Lex Fridman (1:13:18.920)
They can sit down on a log and chat about it
Lex Fridman (1:13:23.480)
and then decide, okay, you're right,
Lex Fridman (1:13:25.640)
or I'm wrong or whatever.
Lex Fridman (1:13:29.000)
But if by conflict, you mean a great idea
Lex Fridman (1:13:33.080)
to build a nuclear bomb and set that off,
Richard Wrangham (1:13:36.440)
then no, I don't see why it's a good idea
Lex Fridman (1:13:39.600)
to have all this violence.
Richard Wrangham (1:13:40.960)
Yeah, there's, I wonder, I mean, it's not a good idea,
Lex Fridman (1:13:49.900)
but I wonder if human history would evolve
Richard Wrangham (1:13:52.260)
the way it did without the violence.
Lex Fridman (1:13:55.100)
Oh, I'm sure you're right.
Richard Wrangham (1:13:56.740)
Probably humans would not have evolved
Lex Fridman (1:13:58.620)
in the sense that we have.
Lex Fridman (1:14:00.700)
But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution
Lex Fridman (1:14:05.700)
will continue in the way it has.
Richard Wrangham (1:14:08.440)
So, there's all sorts of indications
Lex Fridman (1:14:11.760)
that the importance of violence has been reduced over time.
Lex Fridman (1:14:18.960)
And this is made famous in Steven Pinker's book,
Lex Fridman (1:14:22.960)
but others have written about it too,
Richard Wrangham (1:14:26.000)
that the frequency of death from violence
Lex Fridman (1:14:30.520)
in every country you look at,
Richard Wrangham (1:14:32.840)
has been declining, that's just great.
Lex Fridman (1:14:36.160)
And so, you know, the amazing thing about this
Richard Wrangham (1:14:38.040)
is that even when you take the deaths
Lex Fridman (1:14:40.280)
due to the First World War and the Second World War,
Richard Wrangham (1:14:42.960)
the 20th century appears to have been statistically,
Lex Fridman (1:14:47.200)
meaning rates of death per individual,
Richard Wrangham (1:14:50.960)
the least violent in history.
Lex Fridman (1:14:56.560)
So, we haven't got very far down the course
Richard Wrangham (1:14:59.440)
to nonviolence, but we've got a long way to go.
Lex Fridman (1:15:02.680)
But I don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it.
Richard Wrangham (1:15:05.720)
I think it's ridiculous, frankly, excuse my frankness,
Lex Fridman (1:15:10.640)
to say that violence is a good thing.
Richard Wrangham (1:15:14.280)
I think that it would be a wonderful concept
Lex Fridman (1:15:16.820)
if we could evolve somehow to a world
Richard Wrangham (1:15:19.720)
3,000 years from now,
Lex Fridman (1:15:22.040)
where violence is really regarded as simply appalling,
Lex Fridman (1:15:26.780)
and that they look back on our time
Lex Fridman (1:15:29.920)
and can't believe what we were doing.
Richard Wrangham (1:15:32.520)
Yeah, but of course,
Lex Fridman (1:15:33.960)
violence takes a lot of different shapes.
Richard Wrangham (1:15:35.760)
As we start to think deeper and deeper
Lex Fridman (1:15:37.320)
about living beings on Earth,
Richard Wrangham (1:15:40.280)
for example, the violence we commit
Lex Fridman (1:15:41.920)
and the torture we commit to animals,
Lex Fridman (1:15:43.960)
and then perhaps down the line,
Lex Fridman (1:15:45.240)
as we talked offline about with robots,
Lex Fridman (1:15:48.480)
and that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman (1:15:49.360)
So there's just so many ways to commit violence to others.
Lex Fridman (1:15:52.640)
And some people now talk about violence
Lex Fridman (1:15:54.480)
in the space of ideas, which of course, to me at least,
Richard Wrangham (1:15:58.000)
is a bit of a silly notion relative
Lex Fridman (1:16:00.280)
to use that same V word for the space of ideas
Richard Wrangham (1:16:04.020)
versus actual physical violence.
Lex Fridman (1:16:06.420)
But it may be that a long time from now,
Richard Wrangham (1:16:08.920)
we see that even violence in the space of ideas
Lex Fridman (1:16:12.600)
is quite a manifestation of that same kind of violence.
Lex Fridman (1:16:16.680)
And so it is interesting where this is headed.
Lex Fridman (1:16:20.360)
And I think you're absolutely right.
Richard Wrangham (1:16:23.000)
A world, a nonviolent world, does seem like a better world.
Lex Fridman (1:16:27.580)
I wonder if the constraints on resources
Richard Wrangham (1:16:30.640)
somehow make that world more and more difficult,
Lex Fridman (1:16:34.360)
especially as we run out of resources.
Richard Wrangham (1:16:36.120)
Well, it's got to be very, very different
Lex Fridman (1:16:37.460)
from what we're doing nowadays.
Lex Fridman (1:16:38.920)
And it's unimaginably different.
Lex Fridman (1:16:40.880)
If we could imagine it,
Richard Wrangham (1:16:41.800)
then maybe we could work towards it.
Lex Fridman (1:16:43.200)
At the moment, nobody knows how to work towards it.
Richard Wrangham (1:16:45.480)
Well, that's kind of the stories of humans
Lex Fridman (1:16:46.960)
is we don't really know the future.
Richard Wrangham (1:16:48.640)
We're trying to ad hoc kind of develop it as we go
Lex Fridman (1:16:53.200)
and sometimes get into trouble.
Richard Wrangham (1:16:55.440)
That's the violence.
Lex Fridman (1:16:57.040)
But George Orwell's vision in 1984
Richard Wrangham (1:16:59.800)
was of two or three world powers each so powerful
Lex Fridman (1:17:04.760)
that nobody could destroy the other.
Lex Fridman (1:17:11.800)
But the notion of an evolutionarily stable relationship
Lex Fridman (1:17:16.080)
among heavily armed world powers
Richard Wrangham (1:17:20.160)
just does not seem as though it's reasonable at all.
Lex Fridman (1:17:27.320)
That is to say, we've now got 170 or 190 nations in the world
Richard Wrangham (1:17:36.160)
dominated by a few big ones,
Lex Fridman (1:17:39.440)
all with arms pointing at each other.
Lex Fridman (1:17:42.160)
And the notion that we could just carry on
Lex Fridman (1:17:45.280)
having peace talks and making sure that these arms
Richard Wrangham (1:17:49.200)
don't get involved in some kind of massive conflagration
Lex Fridman (1:17:54.080)
seems incredibly optimistic.
Richard Wrangham (1:17:56.960)
Some kind of major change has to happen whereby,
Lex Fridman (1:18:01.880)
and some people would like to see all the weapons go.
Richard Wrangham (1:18:04.080)
That'd be great.
Lex Fridman (1:18:05.080)
I'm a member of that sort of group
Richard Wrangham (1:18:07.840)
that tries to see that happen.
Lex Fridman (1:18:10.600)
It's going to be very difficult to see it happen.
Richard Wrangham (1:18:13.080)
Another kind of concept is the nations themselves
Lex Fridman (1:18:16.040)
will dissolve and will become one government.
Richard Wrangham (1:18:21.840)
That itself is a terrifying vision
Lex Fridman (1:18:23.680)
because the capacity for abuse by a single world power
Richard Wrangham (1:18:28.000)
would be so problematic.
Lex Fridman (1:18:30.760)
And in addition, how do you get there
Lex Fridman (1:18:32.440)
without a war in the first place?
Lex Fridman (1:18:35.240)
So at the moment, we have no reasonable kind of future
Richard Wrangham (1:18:40.040)
in mind, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.
Lex Fridman (1:18:41.960)
It's just that we haven't yet to find it.
Lex Fridman (1:18:43.600)
And a lot of people like in the cryptocurrency space
Lex Fridman (1:18:46.040)
argue that you can create decentralized societies
Richard Wrangham (1:18:49.640)
if you take away the power from states
Lex Fridman (1:18:52.280)
to define the monetary system.
Lex Fridman (1:18:54.080)
So they argue like if you make the monetary system
Lex Fridman (1:18:58.680)
such that it's disjoint from the control
Richard Wrangham (1:19:01.240)
of any one individual, any one government,
Lex Fridman (1:19:03.960)
then that might be a way to form
Richard Wrangham (1:19:05.720)
sort of ad hoc decentralized societies.
Lex Fridman (1:19:08.000)
They just pop up all over the place.
Richard Wrangham (1:19:10.800)
That's a really interesting technological solution
Lex Fridman (1:19:13.880)
to how to remove the overreach of power from governments.
Richard Wrangham (1:19:17.960)
Yes, right.
Lex Fridman (1:19:19.040)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (1:19:20.000)
And it may well be that the future will emerge
Lex Fridman (1:19:24.520)
out of some sort of quite surprising direction like that.
Richard Wrangham (1:19:28.640)
Is it nevertheless surprising to you
Lex Fridman (1:19:31.160)
that we have not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons?
Lex Fridman (1:19:34.240)
So the mutually assured destruction
Lex Fridman (1:19:36.480)
that we've had for many decades
Richard Wrangham (1:19:38.440)
from somebody who studies violence,
Lex Fridman (1:19:41.880)
how does that make sense to you?
Richard Wrangham (1:19:43.240)
Well, I mean, I'm surprised only in the sense
Lex Fridman (1:19:45.440)
that accidental, the fact that we have not had an accident
Richard Wrangham (1:19:51.040)
yet has been quite remarkable.
Lex Fridman (1:19:54.280)
Yeah, because all the accounts are
Richard Wrangham (1:19:56.040)
that we've come very close to having very serious accidents
Lex Fridman (1:19:59.280)
where people on either side have misread intentions
Richard Wrangham (1:20:03.120)
or apparent launches and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:20:05.280)
So yes, I think it is remarkable.
Richard Wrangham (1:20:08.200)
There is a nasty generalization that can be made
Lex Fridman (1:20:14.080)
that the longer that powerful states go without having wars
Richard Wrangham (1:20:20.640)
than the worst the war is afterwards.
Lex Fridman (1:20:23.360)
And you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense
Richard Wrangham (1:20:28.400)
because basically what's happening with these tribal groups
Lex Fridman (1:20:32.000)
that the nations are at the moment
Richard Wrangham (1:20:33.680)
is that after a big war like the Second World War,
Lex Fridman (1:20:38.120)
they establish new kinds of dominance relationships.
Lex Fridman (1:20:41.160)
And then during the periods of peace,
Lex Fridman (1:20:45.000)
what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships
Richard Wrangham (1:20:50.960)
change because some nations become poorer,
Lex Fridman (1:20:53.920)
some become richer,
Richard Wrangham (1:20:55.320)
some become more militarily powerful and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:20:57.840)
Generally, economy and military goes hand in hand.
Lex Fridman (1:21:01.600)
So right now, China emerged from the war
Lex Fridman (1:21:05.480)
as a relatively low status state and is now high status.
Lex Fridman (1:21:09.520)
So if this were chimpanzees, what would happen
Lex Fridman (1:21:11.600)
is that you would predict a conflict
Richard Wrangham (1:21:13.120)
because you need to have a readjustment
Lex Fridman (1:21:16.120)
of the formal dominance relationships
Richard Wrangham (1:21:18.240)
to recognize the new in practice dominance relationships
Lex Fridman (1:21:22.280)
recognized by the economy and the military.
Lex Fridman (1:21:26.000)
So the longer that you have of a period of peace
Lex Fridman (1:21:29.240)
following a war, then the more these tensions
Richard Wrangham (1:21:32.360)
of unresolved changed dominance relationships build up.
Lex Fridman (1:21:37.200)
And the longer they take to occur,
Richard Wrangham (1:21:39.560)
then the more challenging are gonna be the conflicts.
Lex Fridman (1:21:46.280)
That's a terrifying view
Richard Wrangham (1:21:47.440)
because we've been out of conflict for quite a bit.
Lex Fridman (1:21:50.520)
That's right. Maybe it's building up.
Lex Fridman (1:21:52.720)
So it's a scary view.
Lex Fridman (1:21:53.560)
But on the other hand, things have changed hugely
Richard Wrangham (1:21:56.640)
with the advent of nuclear weapons
Lex Fridman (1:21:59.720)
because at least that conforms to this psychology
Richard Wrangham (1:22:05.040)
that is very clear in other animals,
Lex Fridman (1:22:06.720)
which is you don't want to get into a fight
Richard Wrangham (1:22:08.840)
if you are going to get hurt.
Lex Fridman (1:22:11.080)
So that's the whole principle of MAD,
Richard Wrangham (1:22:13.480)
Mutual Assured Destruction.
Lex Fridman (1:22:15.680)
And it's doubtless been why powerful nations
Richard Wrangham (1:22:18.640)
like America and Russia have not used their nuclear weapons
Lex Fridman (1:22:23.880)
since 1945.
Lex Fridman (1:22:25.520)
So if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches,
Lex Fridman (1:22:32.160)
then maybe the fact of MAD does fit into human psychology
Richard Wrangham (1:22:36.160)
in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions
Lex Fridman (1:22:40.200)
without using them.
Lex Fridman (1:22:41.440)
But we haven't yet really faced that challenge.
Lex Fridman (1:22:46.440)
I mean, the Soviet Union collapsed
Richard Wrangham (1:22:48.560)
because of the poor economy,
Lex Fridman (1:22:50.960)
but with China desperate to take back Taiwan
Lex Fridman (1:22:57.360)
and America shifting its focus on the Pacific,
Lex Fridman (1:23:03.040)
the potential for something going wrong
Richard Wrangham (1:23:04.960)
is clearly very high.
Lex Fridman (1:23:07.080)
So what's the hopeful case that you can make
Richard Wrangham (1:23:10.400)
for a long term surviving and thriving human civilization
Lex Fridman (1:23:14.840)
given all the dangers that we face?
Richard Wrangham (1:23:17.080)
Well, I can't really exactly make one.
Lex Fridman (1:23:19.520)
I would just say that,
Richard Wrangham (1:23:20.840)
we're talking about the dangers,
Lex Fridman (1:23:24.840)
obviously the dangers are there.
Lex Fridman (1:23:27.040)
But what I would sort of think about
Lex Fridman (1:23:29.560)
is the notion that surprises come from all sorts
Richard Wrangham (1:23:36.000)
of different directions.
Lex Fridman (1:23:37.520)
And I mean, you work in robotics
Lex Fridman (1:23:42.280)
and I can well imagine that you have a lot of experience
Lex Fridman (1:23:46.280)
and imagine that there will be advances in robotics
Richard Wrangham (1:23:50.280)
that in some way I can't even conceive
Lex Fridman (1:23:52.880)
will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict.
Richard Wrangham (1:23:58.040)
Something about by the time chips have been planted
Lex Fridman (1:24:01.720)
in human brains and we're all instantly sharing information
Richard Wrangham (1:24:05.560)
in a way that we never did before,
Lex Fridman (1:24:08.400)
will this change the nature of human existence
Lex Fridman (1:24:12.040)
in such a way that these conflicts get resolved?
Lex Fridman (1:24:15.120)
So remove the conflicts, but keep some of the magic,
Richard Wrangham (1:24:17.760)
the beauty of what it means to be human.
Lex Fridman (1:24:19.600)
So like still be able to enjoy life, the richness of life,
Richard Wrangham (1:24:22.760)
the full complexity of life.
Lex Fridman (1:24:24.680)
Cause you can remove conflict by giving everybody a pill
Lex Fridman (1:24:28.320)
and then they go to sleep, right?
Lex Fridman (1:24:30.440)
You still want life to be amazing, exciting, interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:24:37.160)
And so that's where you have to find the balance.
Lex Fridman (1:24:39.900)
Well, it's, yes, I mean, it's all science fiction stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:24:42.960)
And so how it's gonna work out, totally unclear.
Lex Fridman (1:24:51.040)
I don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing.
Richard Wrangham (1:24:55.040)
I mean, first of all, you somehow get rid of males.
Lex Fridman (1:24:57.880)
I think you really need to get rid of males
Richard Wrangham (1:25:00.040)
cause males are the source of a major problem,
Lex Fridman (1:25:05.640)
which is the lust for power and the resulting conflict.
Lex Fridman (1:25:10.640)
But you don't think the males are also source of beauty
Lex Fridman (1:25:14.360)
and creation?
Richard Wrangham (1:25:15.200)
No, I mean, I don't have anything against males
Lex Fridman (1:25:18.120)
as individuals and that sort of thing.
Lex Fridman (1:25:20.400)
And males have clearly done a lot.
Lex Fridman (1:25:22.820)
I mean, they've been incredibly exploratory and creative
Lex Fridman (1:25:27.040)
and what they've done in art and music has been wonderful
Lex Fridman (1:25:30.920)
and that sort of thing.
Richard Wrangham (1:25:32.120)
On the other hand,
Lex Fridman (1:25:34.440)
I'm not sure there's anything particularly special.
Lex Fridman (1:25:36.160)
And I think that probably females could do the same thing
Lex Fridman (1:25:39.160)
just as well when given the chance.
Richard Wrangham (1:25:42.200)
Yes, including the dark stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:25:44.320)
I mean, a partial part of me is not understanding the,
Lex Fridman (1:25:47.980)
so there is evolutionary distinction between men and women,
Lex Fridman (1:25:52.620)
but I tend to believe both men and women,
Richard Wrangham (1:25:55.720)
if you look out into the future, can be destructive,
Lex Fridman (1:25:58.640)
can be evil, can be greedy, can be corrupted by power.
Lex Fridman (1:26:02.000)
So if you move males from the picture,
Lex Fridman (1:26:03.640)
which are historically connected to this evolution
Richard Wrangham (1:26:07.160)
that we've been talking about, that women are gonna fill
Lex Fridman (1:26:09.760)
that role quite nicely.
Lex Fridman (1:26:11.920)
And then it'll be just the same kind of process.
Lex Fridman (1:26:15.080)
Not the same, but it'll be new and interesting.
Richard Wrangham (1:26:21.080)
There's a sense that the will to power, craving power,
Lex Fridman (1:26:25.400)
committing violence is somehow coupled
Richard Wrangham (1:26:28.200)
with all of the things that are beautiful about life.
Lex Fridman (1:26:32.560)
That if you remove conflict completely,
Richard Wrangham (1:26:35.080)
if you remove all of the evil in the world,
Lex Fridman (1:26:38.720)
it seems like you're going to,
Richard Wrangham (1:26:45.280)
you're not going to have a stable place
Lex Fridman (1:26:47.540)
for the beauty, for the goodness.
Richard Wrangham (1:26:49.440)
Like there's always has to be a dragon to fight for the way.
Lex Fridman (1:26:54.940)
If you look at human history, now you can say,
Richard Wrangham (1:26:57.440)
the reason I'm nervous about a sort of utopia
Lex Fridman (1:27:00.360)
where everything is great is every time you look
Richard Wrangham (1:27:03.620)
through human history when utopia has been chased,
Lex Fridman (1:27:06.720)
you run into a lot of trouble or again,
Richard Wrangham (1:27:09.840)
sneaks into this evil, this craving for power.
Lex Fridman (1:27:13.680)
Now you could say that's a male problem,
Lex Fridman (1:27:16.640)
but I just think it's a human problem.
Lex Fridman (1:27:18.920)
And it's not even a human problem, it's a chimp problem too.
Richard Wrangham (1:27:22.120)
It's life on earth problem,
Lex Fridman (1:27:23.680)
intelligent life on earth problem.
Lex Fridman (1:27:25.560)
So like it's better to not necessarily get rid
Lex Fridman (1:27:30.560)
of the sources of the darker sides of human nature,
Lex Fridman (1:27:34.560)
but more create mechanisms that the kindness,
Lex Fridman (1:27:38.080)
the goodness as the goodness paradox, your book,
Richard Wrangham (1:27:41.760)
that that is incentivized and encouraged, empowered.
Lex Fridman (1:27:50.120)
Well, look, I don't think it would be utopia
Richard Wrangham (1:27:54.240)
if you got rid of the males.
Lex Fridman (1:27:56.440)
Right.
Lex Fridman (1:27:57.280)
And certainly females are capable of conflict.
Lex Fridman (1:28:01.600)
I just think it's a gamble worth taking
Richard Wrangham (1:28:03.260)
if you could actually do it.
Lex Fridman (1:28:04.880)
You can certainly find females in history
Richard Wrangham (1:28:07.120)
who've done unpleasant things, but nevertheless,
Lex Fridman (1:28:11.280)
we have a very strong evolutionary theory
Richard Wrangham (1:28:13.480)
which explains why males benefit more
Lex Fridman (1:28:16.980)
by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do.
Lex Fridman (1:28:21.540)
And so if we want to talk about reducing conflict,
Lex Fridman (1:28:28.780)
then it would reduce it to get rid of males.
Richard Wrangham (1:28:31.920)
Now I understand this is a fantasy,
Lex Fridman (1:28:34.100)
and I think it's a fantasy that people would be able
Richard Wrangham (1:28:37.100)
to talk about fairly soon because reproductive technology
Lex Fridman (1:28:40.540)
is getting to the point where it's quite likely
Richard Wrangham (1:28:44.300)
that human females could breed without the use of males.
Lex Fridman (1:28:49.220)
Mm hmm.
Lex Fridman (1:28:50.540)
And so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic
Lex Fridman (1:28:55.660)
if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies.
Richard Wrangham (1:29:01.780)
It's a really interesting thought experiment.
Lex Fridman (1:29:03.740)
I will agree with you that if given two buttons,
Richard Wrangham (1:29:07.380)
one is get rid of all women,
Lex Fridman (1:29:09.620)
and the other button is get rid of all men,
Richard Wrangham (1:29:13.960)
realizing that I have a stake in this choice,
Lex Fridman (1:29:18.960)
you're probably getting rid of all men
Richard Wrangham (1:29:20.800)
if I wanted to preserve earth
Lex Fridman (1:29:25.680)
and the richness of life on earth,
Richard Wrangham (1:29:28.460)
I would probably get rid of all men.
Lex Fridman (1:29:30.300)
I don't know.
Richard Wrangham (1:29:31.140)
I don't think you have a stake in it.
Lex Fridman (1:29:32.360)
You know, I mean, you're saying that because you're a man.
Richard Wrangham (1:29:35.320)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:29:36.160)
But I don't see why being a man should make you
Richard Wrangham (1:29:39.560)
any more interested in having a male future for the world
Lex Fridman (1:29:42.640)
than a female future.
Richard Wrangham (1:29:43.640)
You know, you've got just as many ancestors
Lex Fridman (1:29:46.020)
who were male as were female.
Richard Wrangham (1:29:48.400)
Well, my problem is I'll have to die.
Lex Fridman (1:29:51.440)
Well, that's gonna happen anyway.
Richard Wrangham (1:29:53.760)
I know, but like, I prefer to die tomorrow, not today.
Lex Fridman (1:29:56.920)
You know, I prefer to hit the snooze button
Richard Wrangham (1:30:00.520)
on the whole mortality thing, but it's interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:30:03.720)
But this is not suggesting that males have to die
Richard Wrangham (1:30:05.560)
in order to make room for females.
Lex Fridman (1:30:06.800)
It's just, you know, all you have to do is just say,
Richard Wrangham (1:30:11.480)
don't let's have any more males born.
Lex Fridman (1:30:13.920)
Interesting.
Richard Wrangham (1:30:14.760)
Of course, you know, the difficulty is that
Lex Fridman (1:30:16.600)
because we're tribal, you know, some country somewhere
Richard Wrangham (1:30:19.840)
would say, well, we're not gonna do that.
Lex Fridman (1:30:21.360)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:30:22.180)
And then guess what?
Lex Fridman (1:30:23.020)
They'd take over, you know, because they're male.
Lex Fridman (1:30:24.760)
So that's why it's impossible to imagine actually happening.
Lex Fridman (1:30:28.720)
You know what, I'm gonna take that
Lex Fridman (1:30:31.040)
and actually think about it.
Lex Fridman (1:30:32.200)
I don't know, I'm uncomfortable.
Richard Wrangham (1:30:34.900)
There's a certain kind of woke culture
Lex Fridman (1:30:39.280)
that I've been kind of uncomfortable with
Richard Wrangham (1:30:41.600)
because it's not women necessarily.
Lex Fridman (1:30:44.520)
It's more just, there's a lot of bullying I see.
Richard Wrangham (1:30:47.880)
There's a lack of empathy and a lack of kindness
Lex Fridman (1:30:50.880)
towards others that's created by that culture.
Richard Wrangham (1:30:53.440)
So, but you're speaking about something else.
Lex Fridman (1:30:55.200)
You're speaking about reducing conflict in this world
Lex Fridman (1:31:00.240)
and looking at the basics of our human nature
Lex Fridman (1:31:04.440)
and its origins in the evolution of Homo sapiens
Lex Fridman (1:31:10.040)
and thinking about which kind of aspects of human nature
Lex Fridman (1:31:14.480)
if we get rid of them will make for a better world.
Richard Wrangham (1:31:18.200)
It's an interesting thought experiment worth thinking about.
Lex Fridman (1:31:20.240)
But it is only a thought experiment.
Richard Wrangham (1:31:21.680)
I mean, you know, it's got no practical meaning right now.
Lex Fridman (1:31:24.840)
And I take your point that, you know,
Richard Wrangham (1:31:28.320)
males get a hard rap nowadays in some ways
Lex Fridman (1:31:32.480)
because the balance of social power
Richard Wrangham (1:31:38.680)
is moving against,
Lex Fridman (1:31:42.580)
I mean, you know, quite rightly
Lex Fridman (1:31:45.580)
and in a strong sense, of course,
Lex Fridman (1:31:47.140)
against all the nasty things that males do.
Lex Fridman (1:31:51.600)
But what people sometimes fail to remember
Lex Fridman (1:31:55.740)
is that life is very hard for males
Richard Wrangham (1:32:00.660)
who don't have the power,
Lex Fridman (1:32:03.660)
who don't have money,
Richard Wrangham (1:32:06.300)
who don't have access to women.
Lex Fridman (1:32:08.920)
And, you know, I'm sympathetic to incels.
Richard Wrangham (1:32:15.040)
I'm not sympathetic to them using violence
Lex Fridman (1:32:18.400)
to solve their problems.
Lex Fridman (1:32:20.200)
But I am very sympathetic to the fact that
Lex Fridman (1:32:24.200)
it's not easy simply to be told by
Richard Wrangham (1:32:29.700)
well off, feminist, middle class people
Lex Fridman (1:32:36.500)
that you shouldn't behave like this
Richard Wrangham (1:32:38.080)
or you shouldn't feel like this because you do.
Lex Fridman (1:32:40.360)
Yes, it's who you are.
Richard Wrangham (1:32:42.400)
I mean, in general, just empathy and kindness,
Lex Fridman (1:32:46.960)
male or female,
Richard Wrangham (1:32:51.080)
I believe will be the thing that builds a better world.
Lex Fridman (1:32:54.400)
And that's practiced in different ways
Richard Wrangham (1:32:57.360)
from different backgrounds.
Lex Fridman (1:32:58.680)
But ultimately, you should listen to others
Lex Fridman (1:33:01.600)
and empathize with the experience of others
Lex Fridman (1:33:04.120)
and put more love out there in the world.
Richard Wrangham (1:33:06.480)
Now, that hopefully is the way to reduce conflict,
Lex Fridman (1:33:10.280)
reduce violence,
Lex Fridman (1:33:12.320)
and reduce that whole psychological experience
Lex Fridman (1:33:18.200)
of being powerless in this world,
Richard Wrangham (1:33:19.800)
powerless to become the best version of yourself.
Lex Fridman (1:33:22.520)
And that, you know.
Richard Wrangham (1:33:23.360)
Well, no one's gonna disagree
Lex Fridman (1:33:24.440)
with all those fine sentiments, right?
Lex Fridman (1:33:27.160)
But that, yes.
Lex Fridman (1:33:29.680)
But that's an actionable thing
Lex Fridman (1:33:32.000)
is actually practice empathy, right?
Lex Fridman (1:33:35.120)
Like saying that somebody should be silenced
Richard Wrangham (1:33:40.080)
or just like this group is bad and this group is good.
Lex Fridman (1:33:43.780)
I just feel like that's not empathy.
Richard Wrangham (1:33:45.360)
Empathy is understanding the experience of others
Lex Fridman (1:33:50.960)
and like respecting it.
Richard Wrangham (1:33:52.960)
Like, I mean, that's what a better world looks like.
Lex Fridman (1:33:57.240)
That's what the reduction of conflict looks like.
Richard Wrangham (1:33:59.720)
It's like, as opposed to saying my tribe is right,
Lex Fridman (1:34:03.680)
your tribe is wrong.
Richard Wrangham (1:34:06.360)
Forget the violence and nonviolence part.
Lex Fridman (1:34:08.720)
That's just that act of saying my tribe is right,
Richard Wrangham (1:34:11.160)
that tribe is wrong.
Lex Fridman (1:34:12.220)
Removing that from the picture,
Richard Wrangham (1:34:13.600)
that's the way to make a better world.
Lex Fridman (1:34:15.720)
Like that's the way to reduce the violence, I think.
Richard Wrangham (1:34:19.840)
Not necessarily removing the people
Lex Fridman (1:34:21.720)
who are causing the violence.
Richard Wrangham (1:34:24.160)
You have to get to the source of the problem.
Lex Fridman (1:34:25.960)
I don't mean the evolutionary source,
Lex Fridman (1:34:27.240)
but just the mindset that creates the violence
Lex Fridman (1:34:32.240)
is usually just the lack of empathy for others.
Richard Wrangham (1:34:37.800)
Yeah, but you know, I mean, you can't just teach that
Lex Fridman (1:34:40.480)
because our evolutionary psychology
Richard Wrangham (1:34:43.560)
puts us in particular directions.
Lex Fridman (1:34:45.520)
So you don't think, do you think it's possible
Richard Wrangham (1:34:48.640)
to learn through practice to resist the basics
Lex Fridman (1:34:54.000)
of our evolutionary psychology, the basic forces?
Richard Wrangham (1:34:58.560)
Yeah, I mean, lots and lots of training.
Lex Fridman (1:35:01.880)
Lots and lots of education can do it.
Richard Wrangham (1:35:04.920)
The famously most peaceful society
Lex Fridman (1:35:09.200)
that anthropologists have recorded
Richard Wrangham (1:35:11.840)
involves tremendous amount of teaching,
Lex Fridman (1:35:16.840)
including some punishment.
Richard Wrangham (1:35:18.880)
You know, it's a society in Thailand.
Lex Fridman (1:35:21.920)
You have to beat it out of children to make them nice.
Richard Wrangham (1:35:25.920)
There's carrot and steak.
Lex Fridman (1:35:27.760)
You know, the point is that you do not find societies
Richard Wrangham (1:35:31.280)
in which people are spontaneously
Lex Fridman (1:35:36.120)
showing the kinds of behaviors
Richard Wrangham (1:35:39.200)
that we would all love them to show.
Lex Fridman (1:35:42.040)
It requires work.
Richard Wrangham (1:35:43.320)
It requires work.
Lex Fridman (1:35:45.160)
What is your book titled, Goodness Paradox?
Lex Fridman (1:35:48.000)
What are the main ideas in this book?
Lex Fridman (1:35:50.360)
Well, the paradox is the fact that humans show extremes
Richard Wrangham (1:35:56.720)
in relationship to both violence and nonviolence.
Lex Fridman (1:36:00.480)
And the violence is that we are one of these few animals
Richard Wrangham (1:36:04.240)
in which we use coalitionary proactive violence
Lex Fridman (1:36:08.920)
to kill members of our own species.
Lex Fridman (1:36:10.720)
And we do it in large numbers,
Lex Fridman (1:36:12.240)
just like a few other species.
Lex Fridman (1:36:14.760)
And the nonviolence is we're particularly extreme
Lex Fridman (1:36:18.960)
in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence.
Lex Fridman (1:36:23.920)
And I told you the story of how we get there.
Lex Fridman (1:36:26.960)
So what's so extraordinary about it is that
Richard Wrangham (1:36:29.120)
most animals are either high on both
Lex Fridman (1:36:32.960)
or relatively low on both.
Lex Fridman (1:36:35.440)
So chimpanzees are high on proactive violence
Lex Fridman (1:36:38.360)
and reactive violence.
Richard Wrangham (1:36:40.040)
Bonobos are less than chimpanzees on both of those,
Lex Fridman (1:36:44.240)
but still hundreds of times more
Richard Wrangham (1:36:47.640)
reactively aggressive than humans are.
Lex Fridman (1:36:50.960)
What we've done is retain proactive violence being high
Lex Fridman (1:36:54.960)
and got reactive violence really being low.
Lex Fridman (1:36:59.240)
And so we have these wonderful societies
Richard Wrangham (1:37:01.200)
in which we're all so incredibly nice to each other
Lex Fridman (1:37:03.800)
and tolerant and calm and can meet strangers
Lex Fridman (1:37:07.080)
and have no problem about
Lex Fridman (1:37:11.440)
leading to any kind of conflict
Richard Wrangham (1:37:14.760)
at the same time as we are one of the worst
Lex Fridman (1:37:18.240)
killing machine species that's ever existed.
Lex Fridman (1:37:21.840)
So what's so extraordinary about this is that
Lex Fridman (1:37:24.240)
if you look at the political philosophers
Richard Wrangham (1:37:26.880)
of the last few hundred years,
Lex Fridman (1:37:29.800)
you've got this fight famously between Thomas Hobbes
Lex Fridman (1:37:33.880)
and Jean Jacques Rousseau,
Lex Fridman (1:37:35.240)
or literally you've got the fight between their followers.
Lex Fridman (1:37:38.400)
So the followers of Hobbes say,
Lex Fridman (1:37:40.720)
well, Hobbes was right,
Richard Wrangham (1:37:41.960)
because he says that we are naturally violent
Lex Fridman (1:37:44.200)
and you need a Leviathan,
Richard Wrangham (1:37:46.360)
a sort of central government or a king
Lex Fridman (1:37:49.280)
to be able to suppress the violence.
Lex Fridman (1:37:51.640)
So we're naturally horrid
Lex Fridman (1:37:53.560)
and we can learn to be good.
Richard Wrangham (1:37:55.800)
Whereas Jean Jacques Rousseau is interpreted
Lex Fridman (1:37:58.200)
as saying the opposite,
Richard Wrangham (1:37:59.760)
that we are naturally good
Lex Fridman (1:38:01.320)
and it's only when culture intervenes
Lex Fridman (1:38:03.360)
and horrid ideologies come in
Lex Fridman (1:38:05.960)
that we become uncivilized.
Lex Fridman (1:38:08.280)
And so people have had this endless fight
Lex Fridman (1:38:10.840)
between are we naturally corrupt
Lex Fridman (1:38:13.680)
or are we naturally kind?
Lex Fridman (1:38:17.280)
And that has gone on for years
Lex Fridman (1:38:19.640)
and it's only in the last two or three decades
Lex Fridman (1:38:22.960)
that anthropologists like Christopher Boehm
Lex Fridman (1:38:25.160)
and Bruce Naft have said,
Lex Fridman (1:38:26.520)
look, it's obvious what the answer is,
Richard Wrangham (1:38:28.600)
we are both of these things.
Lex Fridman (1:38:30.320)
And what is so exciting now
Richard Wrangham (1:38:32.120)
is I think we can understand why we are both.
Lex Fridman (1:38:34.840)
And the answer is we come from ancestors
Richard Wrangham (1:38:38.160)
that were elevated on proactive aggression,
Lex Fridman (1:38:40.680)
that were hunters and killers,
Richard Wrangham (1:38:43.680)
both of animals and of each other.
Lex Fridman (1:38:47.320)
And you've got to include that
Richard Wrangham (1:38:49.080)
as almost certain from the past.
Lex Fridman (1:38:52.840)
And then now we've taken our reactive aggression
Lex Fridman (1:38:57.880)
and we've down regulated it
Lex Fridman (1:39:00.480)
and that's given us power.
Richard Wrangham (1:39:02.480)
It's given us power because
Lex Fridman (1:39:04.520)
once you get rid of the alpha male,
Richard Wrangham (1:39:06.640)
once the beta males take over
Lex Fridman (1:39:08.520)
and force selection in favor of a more tolerant,
Richard Wrangham (1:39:13.320)
less reactively aggressive individual,
Lex Fridman (1:39:17.040)
the effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable
Richard Wrangham (1:39:21.960)
of focusing on things other than conflict.
Lex Fridman (1:39:24.880)
And so we have social groups
Richard Wrangham (1:39:27.680)
in which individuals, instead of constantly being on edge
Lex Fridman (1:39:30.920)
in the way that chimpanzees are with each other,
Richard Wrangham (1:39:34.440)
are able to interact in ways that enable them to share
Lex Fridman (1:39:39.720)
looking at a tool together or share their food together
Richard Wrangham (1:39:44.000)
or pass ideas from one to the other
Lex Fridman (1:39:47.200)
or support each other when they're ill
Richard Wrangham (1:39:49.520)
or whatever the issue is.
Lex Fridman (1:39:51.600)
Cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective.
Lex Fridman (1:39:56.080)
So you asked earlier, what did I think about
Lex Fridman (1:39:58.360)
why sapiens were able to expand
Richard Wrangham (1:40:01.640)
at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically
Lex Fridman (1:40:04.200)
around 40,000 years ago?
Lex Fridman (1:40:06.640)
And the answer is that whatever it was,
Lex Fridman (1:40:11.240)
it had something to do
Richard Wrangham (1:40:12.680)
with the sapiens ability to cooperate.
Lex Fridman (1:40:16.040)
That was what gave them bigger groups.
Richard Wrangham (1:40:18.200)
That's what enabled them to have
Lex Fridman (1:40:21.640)
a far more effective way of living.
Lex Fridman (1:40:23.800)
And I suspect it was to do with the weapons
Lex Fridman (1:40:26.160)
and military aspects.
Lex Fridman (1:40:28.200)
But even if it wasn't that,
Lex Fridman (1:40:30.200)
the greater cooperation that sapiens were showing
Richard Wrangham (1:40:35.080)
would have been hugely important.
Lex Fridman (1:40:36.840)
So sapiens then had groups of,
Richard Wrangham (1:40:40.360)
who knows exactly how big they were,
Lex Fridman (1:40:42.040)
but scores of people to judge from their remains.
Richard Wrangham (1:40:48.360)
Whereas Neanderthals were living in widely separated,
Lex Fridman (1:40:52.800)
small groups of maybe as many as 15 or 20 people sometimes,
Richard Wrangham (1:40:58.760)
where they saw others so rarely
Lex Fridman (1:41:00.760)
that they were inbreeding at high levels.
Richard Wrangham (1:41:03.880)
Fathers having babies with their daughters.
Lex Fridman (1:41:08.240)
Very different world.
Richard Wrangham (1:41:09.720)
Very different world.
Lex Fridman (1:41:10.680)
And that's probably what our world was like
Richard Wrangham (1:41:12.280)
before we got sapiens.
Lex Fridman (1:41:13.640)
Before we got sapiens.
Lex Fridman (1:41:14.920)
And it's fascinating that there was that kind of violence
Lex Fridman (1:41:18.320)
against, once you get rid of the alpha males,
Richard Wrangham (1:41:24.400)
you have now the freedom to have kindness amongst the beta.
Lex Fridman (1:41:29.880)
The beta males.
Richard Wrangham (1:41:31.360)
Not kindness, but collaboration, that's the better word.
Lex Fridman (1:41:34.480)
Yes, right, much more corruption.
Richard Wrangham (1:41:36.520)
Not just among the males, among the beta males,
Lex Fridman (1:41:38.920)
but also among the gamma males and the females.
Richard Wrangham (1:41:42.760)
Yeah, I don't know what a gamma male is,
Lex Fridman (1:41:44.880)
but I imagine there's a whole alphabet.
Richard Wrangham (1:41:47.560)
Well, I don't know about a whole alphabet,
Lex Fridman (1:41:48.760)
but I think the big layers are the married men
Lex Fridman (1:41:52.400)
and the unmarried men.
Lex Fridman (1:41:55.040)
Because the married men had a problem
Lex Fridman (1:41:57.280)
with the unmarried men, right?
Lex Fridman (1:41:59.200)
I mean, you see it in ethnographies
Richard Wrangham (1:42:01.200)
of hunters and gatherers recently,
Lex Fridman (1:42:03.240)
where the unmarried men would be given rules,
Richard Wrangham (1:42:06.360)
such as, I mean, a very extreme rule in Northern Australia
Lex Fridman (1:42:09.720)
was you cannot come to the camp for months.
Richard Wrangham (1:42:13.680)
You have to go away and live somewhere out in the bush.
Lex Fridman (1:42:17.280)
Because we don't want you anywhere near our wives.
Lex Fridman (1:42:20.000)
And then another kind of rule is,
Lex Fridman (1:42:23.840)
if you are in the camp,
Richard Wrangham (1:42:25.000)
you must be in the firelight all the time.
Lex Fridman (1:42:27.680)
Otherwise, we don't know what you're doing out in the dark.
Richard Wrangham (1:42:31.720)
You really have to control them
Lex Fridman (1:42:33.880)
because the men who had lots of wives
Richard Wrangham (1:42:36.920)
did not want those horrid bachelors
Lex Fridman (1:42:38.640)
sneaking around the place.
Richard Wrangham (1:42:40.280)
I love this.
Lex Fridman (1:42:42.200)
You also wrote the book titled Catching Fire,
Lex Fridman (1:42:45.000)
How Cooking Made Us Human.
Lex Fridman (1:42:47.800)
What's the central idea in this book?
Richard Wrangham (1:42:50.640)
The subtitle How Cooking Made Us Human
Lex Fridman (1:42:52.480)
refers not to Homo sapiens, but to Homo erectus.
Lex Fridman (1:42:56.320)
So human there means the genus Homo.
Lex Fridman (1:42:59.960)
And Homo erectus is the first full member
Richard Wrangham (1:43:03.720)
of the genus Homo in the sense that it looked like us,
Lex Fridman (1:43:08.720)
just with a sort of slightly more robust build
Lex Fridman (1:43:12.160)
and a smaller brain.
Lex Fridman (1:43:15.160)
And the central idea of Catching Fire
Richard Wrangham (1:43:17.360)
is that it was the control of fire
Lex Fridman (1:43:22.040)
that was responsible for the emergence of Homo erectus
Lex Fridman (1:43:27.200)
and therefore the genus Homo,
Lex Fridman (1:43:30.760)
which happened two million years ago.
Lex Fridman (1:43:33.000)
And it was an evolution from a line of Australopithecines.
Lex Fridman (1:43:42.680)
And Australopithecines are the creatures
Richard Wrangham (1:43:46.360)
from whom we evolved.
Lex Fridman (1:43:49.360)
They were present in Africa
Richard Wrangham (1:43:52.840)
from something like six or seven million years ago,
Lex Fridman (1:43:57.080)
up to actually up to one million years ago.
Lex Fridman (1:44:00.720)
And then a branch led off to Homo
Lex Fridman (1:44:04.080)
around two million years ago.
Lex Fridman (1:44:06.760)
And the way to think of Australopithecines
Lex Fridman (1:44:09.400)
is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright.
Lex Fridman (1:44:13.360)
So they were erect bipedal walkers.
Lex Fridman (1:44:17.960)
They were like chimpanzees in the sense
Richard Wrangham (1:44:20.400)
that they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee.
Lex Fridman (1:44:24.600)
They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee,
Richard Wrangham (1:44:27.360)
a little bit smaller actually.
Lex Fridman (1:44:29.760)
And they had big jaws
Richard Wrangham (1:44:32.320)
because they were still eating raw food.
Lex Fridman (1:44:36.640)
They had big teeth and big jaws.
Lex Fridman (1:44:39.400)
And then around two million years ago,
Lex Fridman (1:44:42.520)
the line of Australopithecines,
Richard Wrangham (1:44:44.080)
which ended with an intermediate species,
Lex Fridman (1:44:46.920)
a kind of missing link area,
Richard Wrangham (1:44:48.240)
because it is not missing, called habilis,
Lex Fridman (1:44:52.840)
sometimes called Homo habilis,
Lex Fridman (1:44:54.360)
but more properly, in my view,
Lex Fridman (1:44:55.920)
called Australopithecus habilis.
Richard Wrangham (1:44:57.720)
That gave rise to Homo erectus.
Lex Fridman (1:45:00.840)
And Homo erectus, here's how different it was.
Richard Wrangham (1:45:04.480)
It had a smaller mouth,
Lex Fridman (1:45:08.240)
a smaller jaw, smaller teeth,
Lex Fridman (1:45:11.600)
and to judge from its ribs and pelvis, smaller gut.
Lex Fridman (1:45:17.840)
In addition, it had lost what Australopithecines all had,
Richard Wrangham (1:45:21.800)
which was adaptations for climbing in the trees.
Lex Fridman (1:45:24.800)
And that meant that Homo erectus must have slept
Richard Wrangham (1:45:26.920)
on the ground.
Lex Fridman (1:45:28.920)
And since it slept on the ground,
Richard Wrangham (1:45:31.320)
it should have been able to defend itself somehow
Lex Fridman (1:45:33.400)
against predators.
Lex Fridman (1:45:34.720)
And I can't think of any way they could have done that
Lex Fridman (1:45:36.840)
unless they had fire.
Lex Fridman (1:45:40.040)
So there are two major clues to why it was
Lex Fridman (1:45:46.040)
with Homo erectus that our ancestors
Richard Wrangham (1:45:49.160)
first acquired the control of fire.
Lex Fridman (1:45:52.280)
One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees
Richard Wrangham (1:45:55.720)
in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos
Lex Fridman (1:45:58.720)
and all the other primates do.
Lex Fridman (1:46:02.400)
And the other is that there was this striking reduction
Lex Fridman (1:46:08.120)
throughout the gut,
Richard Wrangham (1:46:10.160)
reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus
Lex Fridman (1:46:14.440)
and in the gut itself.
Lex Fridman (1:46:16.400)
And that conforms to what we have today,
Lex Fridman (1:46:20.320)
that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans,
Richard Wrangham (1:46:24.880)
which is that our guts are about two thirds of the size
Lex Fridman (1:46:28.640)
of what they would be if we ate raw food
Richard Wrangham (1:46:32.040)
to judge by the great apes.
Lex Fridman (1:46:35.400)
So at some point in our evolution,
Richard Wrangham (1:46:39.600)
we acquired the skill of cooking
Lex Fridman (1:46:43.160)
and skill of controlling fire.
Richard Wrangham (1:46:44.880)
At no time between two million years ago and the present,
Lex Fridman (1:46:49.560)
do we see any changes in our anatomy
Richard Wrangham (1:46:52.840)
that can, as it were, justify the enormous change
Lex Fridman (1:46:58.440)
that happens when you are an animal
Richard Wrangham (1:47:01.280)
that learns to control fire.
Lex Fridman (1:47:03.200)
But at two million years ago,
Richard Wrangham (1:47:04.360)
we have exactly what you'd expect,
Lex Fridman (1:47:06.280)
namely the guts becoming smaller
Richard Wrangham (1:47:08.880)
because the food is becoming softer
Lex Fridman (1:47:11.000)
and much more easy to digest
Lex Fridman (1:47:12.680)
so you don't have to work so hard in the kitchen
Lex Fridman (1:47:14.720)
or so hard in your body to digest it.
Lex Fridman (1:47:17.560)
And as I say, a commitment to sleeping on the ground,
Lex Fridman (1:47:22.640)
which I think you'd be absolutely crazy to do nowadays
Richard Wrangham (1:47:26.000)
on a moonless night in the middle of Serengeti
Lex Fridman (1:47:30.200)
unless you had fire.
Richard Wrangham (1:47:31.680)
I've slept out quite a lot in various parts of Africa
Lex Fridman (1:47:34.840)
in the bush and you will not catch me
Richard Wrangham (1:47:38.320)
just lying on the ground in an area with lots of predators
Lex Fridman (1:47:42.880)
unless I got a fire with me.
Richard Wrangham (1:47:44.320)
I'm going to get eaten.
Lex Fridman (1:47:46.160)
You're gonna get terrified and you're gonna get eaten.
Richard Wrangham (1:47:49.120)
Okay, so there's a million questions I wanna ask.
Lex Fridman (1:47:51.960)
So one, is it very naturally coupled,
Lex Fridman (1:47:55.840)
the discovery of controlled fire and cooking with fire?
Lex Fridman (1:47:59.500)
Is that an obvious leap?
Richard Wrangham (1:48:01.440)
Well, here's what we know.
Lex Fridman (1:48:03.280)
We know that all the animals that we've tested
Richard Wrangham (1:48:06.800)
like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw.
Lex Fridman (1:48:10.640)
So this is true for all the great apes.
Richard Wrangham (1:48:13.120)
We've tested them.
Lex Fridman (1:48:15.320)
That's fascinating, by the way.
Lex Fridman (1:48:17.320)
Why is that?
Lex Fridman (1:48:18.440)
That's just like a property of food, I suppose.
Richard Wrangham (1:48:21.000)
Yes, I think what it is is that animals are always looking
Lex Fridman (1:48:25.880)
for any kind of way to get food that is easier to digest.
Lex Fridman (1:48:31.680)
And there are various signals in the food
Lex Fridman (1:48:33.760)
such as the amount of sugar there,
Richard Wrangham (1:48:35.760)
the amount of free amino acids
Lex Fridman (1:48:37.920)
because the amino acids can be tasted.
Lex Fridman (1:48:40.740)
And the physical qualities of the food
Lex Fridman (1:48:44.660)
be particularly important, how tough the food is.
Richard Wrangham (1:48:47.460)
Always prefer softer food, provided it feels safe,
Lex Fridman (1:48:52.140)
tastes safe.
Lex Fridman (1:48:53.860)
And these kinds of sensory cues
Lex Fridman (1:48:57.780)
are all there in cooked food.
Richard Wrangham (1:49:01.140)
It's soft, it doesn't have so many toxins.
Lex Fridman (1:49:04.900)
It's not so noxious to taste, easier to chew.
Lex Fridman (1:49:08.480)
So everyone loves it spontaneously.
Lex Fridman (1:49:11.940)
Your dogs and your cats prefer cooked food to raw food.
Richard Wrangham (1:49:14.500)
Well, maybe you can say that's a consequence
Lex Fridman (1:49:16.580)
of domestication, but even, as I say,
Richard Wrangham (1:49:19.020)
all of the great apes, you test naive ones
Lex Fridman (1:49:23.060)
and they prefer it cooked if they can.
Lex Fridman (1:49:25.300)
So then obvious, once you have fire,
Lex Fridman (1:49:28.020)
you're going to accidentally discover
Richard Wrangham (1:49:29.620)
that food changes when you apply fire to it
Lex Fridman (1:49:32.540)
and then it's going to be the big, crazy new fad.
Richard Wrangham (1:49:37.260)
You took the words out of my mouth.
Lex Fridman (1:49:38.980)
I mean, if they have fire at all
Lex Fridman (1:49:41.180)
and their food rolls into it,
Lex Fridman (1:49:43.580)
five minutes later it tastes better than it did before.
Lex Fridman (1:49:46.860)
How big of an invention from an engineering perspective
Lex Fridman (1:49:50.380)
do you think is the discovery of fire?
Lex Fridman (1:49:53.060)
Do you think for homo erectus, homo sapiens,
Lex Fridman (1:50:00.300)
do you think it's the greatest invention ever?
Richard Wrangham (1:50:02.700)
Yeah, I think that the control of fire
Lex Fridman (1:50:09.820)
has been ultimately responsible for essentially
Lex Fridman (1:50:15.780)
how grandiose do I want to be here,
Lex Fridman (1:50:17.900)
the entire human story, going back to homo.
Richard Wrangham (1:50:21.820)
It is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal.
Lex Fridman (1:50:26.320)
And perhaps the biggest way in which it is likely
Richard Wrangham (1:50:30.400)
to have changed us is it reduced the difficulty
Lex Fridman (1:50:35.140)
of making a large brain.
Lex Fridman (1:50:38.180)
So the story here is that the constraints
Lex Fridman (1:50:43.260)
on brain size are energetic.
Richard Wrangham (1:50:47.820)
You and I have brains that are something
Lex Fridman (1:50:51.500)
like 2.5% of our body weight.
Richard Wrangham (1:50:55.860)
It consumes around 25% of all of our calories.
Lex Fridman (1:51:03.540)
So it's disproportionate.
Richard Wrangham (1:51:05.500)
There are other expensive organs in our body as well,
Lex Fridman (1:51:08.620)
such as the heart.
Lex Fridman (1:51:11.580)
And what's different about the brain is that in addition
Lex Fridman (1:51:16.700)
to us being able to fuel it in a way
Richard Wrangham (1:51:19.100)
that other animals can't, we also have reasons
Lex Fridman (1:51:22.820)
for wanting to have an even bigger brain,
Richard Wrangham (1:51:24.980)
whereas we don't want an even bigger heart.
Lex Fridman (1:51:29.020)
So what those reasons are is unclear.
Lex Fridman (1:51:31.020)
But with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain,
Lex Fridman (1:51:36.760)
cooking makes it possible
Richard Wrangham (1:51:38.580)
because it's supplying more calories
Lex Fridman (1:51:42.600)
and it is enormously reducing the amount of time
Richard Wrangham (1:51:46.020)
that it takes to chew your food.
Lex Fridman (1:51:48.500)
So if you were a gorilla and you wanted
Richard Wrangham (1:51:51.820)
to have a bigger brain, you might say, okay,
Lex Fridman (1:51:54.220)
well, let's just eat some more.
Lex Fridman (1:51:56.860)
But gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day
Lex Fridman (1:52:02.660)
in the sense that they are eating
Richard Wrangham (1:52:04.740)
for maybe seven or eight hours a day in some seasons.
Lex Fridman (1:52:10.460)
That's just chewing.
Lex Fridman (1:52:11.300)
And then they've got to sit around and digest their food
Lex Fridman (1:52:13.660)
because they can't just eat all the time.
Richard Wrangham (1:52:15.620)
They've got to take a break while the food is digested
Lex Fridman (1:52:20.660)
in the stomach and then passed into the gut.
Lex Fridman (1:52:23.780)
So the stomach is already full.
Lex Fridman (1:52:26.900)
So basically gorillas are eating
Richard Wrangham (1:52:29.060)
about the maximum rate already.
Lex Fridman (1:52:31.220)
So how does a gorilla get a bigger brain?
Richard Wrangham (1:52:33.500)
It doesn't, it's actually got a smaller brain
Lex Fridman (1:52:36.060)
relative to its body size than a chimpanzee does.
Lex Fridman (1:52:39.100)
And that's the basic problem for our ancestors.
Lex Fridman (1:52:44.320)
Then you come along and cook and all of a sudden
Richard Wrangham (1:52:47.200)
you can get an increased amount of energy from your food.
Lex Fridman (1:52:50.900)
You are spending much less energy on digesting your food.
Richard Wrangham (1:52:56.260)
You know, there are 25 bodily processes or more
Lex Fridman (1:53:00.300)
that are involved in digesting your food,
Richard Wrangham (1:53:03.220)
making the acid that takes the proteins apart,
Lex Fridman (1:53:07.980)
maintaining the brush border where the molecules
Richard Wrangham (1:53:12.020)
are taken across the gut wall and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:53:15.020)
That all costs.
Richard Wrangham (1:53:16.300)
It costs you to digest your food.
Lex Fridman (1:53:17.900)
It costs less if you cook your food.
Lex Fridman (1:53:19.580)
So you get a net gain in the amount of energy
Lex Fridman (1:53:22.780)
and you are reducing the amount of time
Richard Wrangham (1:53:25.700)
from in our case, our ancestors,
Lex Fridman (1:53:29.100)
probably around 50% of the day chewing
Richard Wrangham (1:53:32.940)
to nowadays one hour a day chewing.
Lex Fridman (1:53:36.460)
So all of a sudden you've got hours a day
Richard Wrangham (1:53:38.260)
in which to do other things and to use those brains
Lex Fridman (1:53:41.660)
that you've now enabled to grow.
Lex Fridman (1:53:44.220)
So with Homo erectus, you start the process
Lex Fridman (1:53:46.980)
of getting a bigger brain and famously,
Richard Wrangham (1:53:49.260)
throughout the whole period of the evolution
Lex Fridman (1:53:51.180)
of the genus Homo, you have a steadily increasing
Richard Wrangham (1:53:54.460)
size of brain until right at the end
Lex Fridman (1:53:59.220)
when it actually gets smaller, but that's a different story.
Lex Fridman (1:54:02.340)
Which end is this?
Lex Fridman (1:54:03.940)
Which, are we talking about Homo sapiens?
Richard Wrangham (1:54:06.140)
Yeah, with Homo sapiens, you've got a smaller brain
Lex Fridman (1:54:09.620)
from, people haven't got it exactly down,
Lex Fridman (1:54:13.100)
but at least 30,000 years ago, it starts declining.
Lex Fridman (1:54:17.140)
And so the fascinating thing about that
Richard Wrangham (1:54:20.300)
is that all domesticated animals have smaller brains
Lex Fridman (1:54:23.300)
than their wild ancestors.
Lex Fridman (1:54:25.340)
And I.
Lex Fridman (1:54:30.620)
The domestication is intricately connected
Lex Fridman (1:54:32.700)
to this brain size, you think?
Lex Fridman (1:54:34.140)
And exactly, so I think what we're seeing in humans
Richard Wrangham (1:54:37.020)
is that same manifestation.
Lex Fridman (1:54:39.700)
And then the fascinating question is why?
Lex Fridman (1:54:43.260)
And the only point I would want to make about this
Lex Fridman (1:54:45.540)
is that there's no evidence that in the small brain
Richard Wrangham (1:54:50.740)
domesticates, they're losing say an average
Lex Fridman (1:54:53.100)
about 15% of brain size.
Richard Wrangham (1:54:55.460)
In the small brain domesticates compared
Lex Fridman (1:54:57.260)
to their wild ancestors, there's no indication
Richard Wrangham (1:54:59.420)
of a loss of cognitive ability.
Lex Fridman (1:55:03.500)
So I think what's going on is that it's a younger brain.
Richard Wrangham (1:55:08.380)
It's a more pedomorphic brain,
Lex Fridman (1:55:10.540)
looking like the juveniles of the ancestor.
Lex Fridman (1:55:13.780)
But just as our kids are very smart
Lex Fridman (1:55:17.340)
and can learn amazing things compared to adults,
Richard Wrangham (1:55:19.780)
all they lack is wisdom and maturity,
Lex Fridman (1:55:21.700)
but in terms of sheer cognitive ability, they got it.
Lex Fridman (1:55:25.420)
And I think that's the same with domesticated animals
Lex Fridman (1:55:27.460)
compared to their wild ancestors,
Lex Fridman (1:55:28.700)
and probably therefore with Homo sapiens,
Lex Fridman (1:55:32.500)
say 30,000 years ago, compared to their ancestors.
Lex Fridman (1:55:36.700)
So we have smaller brains than Neanderthals.
Lex Fridman (1:55:38.860)
Size, Richard, isn't everything.
Richard Wrangham (1:55:43.340)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:55:45.180)
What's the connection between fire, cooking,
Lex Fridman (1:55:47.820)
and the eating of meat?
Lex Fridman (1:55:50.460)
Which came first, do you think?
Richard Wrangham (1:55:53.140)
Humans starting to enjoy the eating of meat
Lex Fridman (1:55:56.900)
or the invention of fire and the use of fire for cooking?
Richard Wrangham (1:56:01.420)
I think that fire increased the using of meat.
Lex Fridman (1:56:04.340)
But the fact that chimpanzees really like to hunt
Lex Fridman (1:56:09.700)
and kill meat, as do bonobos, certainly puts us in,
Lex Fridman (1:56:14.460)
so those two species have a common ancestor with us
Richard Wrangham (1:56:18.580)
going six, seven million years ago,
Lex Fridman (1:56:20.500)
and it was from that common ancestor
Richard Wrangham (1:56:22.180)
that you get the Australopithecine line.
Lex Fridman (1:56:24.100)
It's very likely therefore Australopithecines
Richard Wrangham (1:56:26.300)
were eating meat when they could get it,
Lex Fridman (1:56:28.260)
which wouldn't be very often
Richard Wrangham (1:56:29.300)
because they wouldn't be very good sprinters.
Lex Fridman (1:56:31.940)
But nevertheless, they would occasionally be able
Richard Wrangham (1:56:33.460)
to get some meat, and I bet they loved it all the time,
Lex Fridman (1:56:36.540)
and basically all primates like meat
Richard Wrangham (1:56:38.260)
if they can get it, almost all of them.
Lex Fridman (1:56:41.580)
But I think fire would have been very important
Richard Wrangham (1:56:45.580)
for a couple of reasons.
Lex Fridman (1:56:47.980)
One is that once you eat your food cooked,
Richard Wrangham (1:56:52.980)
then you're saving yourself time.
Lex Fridman (1:56:55.540)
By saving yourself time, you can free up
Richard Wrangham (1:57:00.660)
the opportunity to go and hunt more.
Lex Fridman (1:57:03.420)
Because hunting is a high risk, high gain activity.
Richard Wrangham (1:57:07.580)
There's every risk that you will get nothing
Lex Fridman (1:57:10.580)
on one particular afternoon that you go off
Richard Wrangham (1:57:13.740)
looking for opportunities to kill.
Lex Fridman (1:57:16.460)
But it's high gain because when you do get something,
Richard Wrangham (1:57:20.020)
you bring down a kudu,
Lex Fridman (1:57:21.740)
then you've got a serious amount of meat.
Lex Fridman (1:57:26.340)
What did males and females do
Lex Fridman (1:57:28.500)
with the time they were saving
Lex Fridman (1:57:29.820)
from not having to chew their food?
Lex Fridman (1:57:32.620)
I think that in the case of males,
Richard Wrangham (1:57:35.220)
it's very reasonable to think they spent
Lex Fridman (1:57:36.620)
a greatly increased amount of time hunting.
Lex Fridman (1:57:39.460)
So chimpanzees, they hunt maybe two or three times a month,
Lex Fridman (1:57:44.180)
and the average hunt length is 20 minutes.
Richard Wrangham (1:57:47.460)
With humans, they're hunting maybe 20 times a month,
Lex Fridman (1:57:53.020)
and the average hunt length is six hours.
Richard Wrangham (1:57:55.700)
It's a huge difference.
Lex Fridman (1:57:57.700)
So, and that's possible because the time was available,
Richard Wrangham (1:58:00.340)
because they were cooking.
Lex Fridman (1:58:01.700)
Less chewing, more hunting.
Richard Wrangham (1:58:03.340)
You got it.
Lex Fridman (1:58:05.020)
The other thing is that the meat is so much nicer.
Lex Fridman (1:58:11.260)
So when a chimpanzee kills a monkey,
Lex Fridman (1:58:14.060)
and I mean, they are so excited about killing a monkey.
Richard Wrangham (1:58:17.500)
They're so excited about going into the hunt,
Lex Fridman (1:58:19.380)
and when they make the kill,
Richard Wrangham (1:58:21.940)
then there's screams everywhere,
Lex Fridman (1:58:23.820)
and some don't like to seize it and capture it
Lex Fridman (1:58:27.380)
and take it away from the others,
Lex Fridman (1:58:28.740)
and eventually the strongest one has it,
Lex Fridman (1:58:31.980)
and the others sit around begging
Lex Fridman (1:58:33.980)
and trying to get some and tear it off,
Lex Fridman (1:58:35.700)
and so they all love it.
Lex Fridman (1:58:37.540)
There are others who, he often goes to the top of a tree
Richard Wrangham (1:58:41.420)
in order to be able to get away
Lex Fridman (1:58:42.500)
from all of these beggars and scavengers,
Lex Fridman (1:58:44.540)
and while he's there, drops of blood
Lex Fridman (1:58:47.940)
or little scraps will fall down to the bottom,
Lex Fridman (1:58:50.260)
and the junior members of society,
Lex Fridman (1:58:52.580)
you know, the females and young and that sort of thing,
Richard Wrangham (1:58:55.300)
they are racing through to find a particular leaf
Lex Fridman (1:58:58.660)
that's got a drop of blood on it so they can lick it.
Richard Wrangham (1:59:00.620)
I mean, they love it, but it takes them a lot of time
Lex Fridman (1:59:07.500)
to chew it.
Richard Wrangham (1:59:08.340)
I mean, it's the same thing as for cooked food in general.
Lex Fridman (1:59:11.380)
So they are getting meat very slowly into their bodies,
Lex Fridman (1:59:16.820)
and there sometimes comes a time when they just say,
Lex Fridman (1:59:19.500)
I've had enough of this, I need real food,
Lex Fridman (1:59:21.940)
and they'll drop the meat and go off and eat fruit again
Lex Fridman (1:59:25.820)
because they can get fruit into their bodies
Lex Fridman (1:59:27.900)
so much faster than they can get meat.
Lex Fridman (1:59:32.260)
So once they're cooking, that problem is solved,
Lex Fridman (1:59:34.780)
and they can eat the meat much more readily.
Lex Fridman (1:59:37.260)
So I think that meat eating would become important
Richard Wrangham (1:59:40.180)
for two reasons with cooking.
Lex Fridman (1:59:42.340)
So the key, not to oversimplify,
Lex Fridman (1:59:45.820)
but the key moments in human history
Lex Fridman (1:59:48.500)
are with Homo erectus, the discovery of fire
Lex Fridman (1:59:52.740)
and the use of fire for cooking,
Lex Fridman (1:59:55.180)
and then with Homo sapiens, the beta males
Lex Fridman (20:00.480)
and it's partly looking for parasites,
Lex Fridman (20:04.360)
but mostly it's just soothing.
Lex Fridman (20:06.400)
And the point about this is it can go on
Lex Fridman (20:09.240)
for half an hour, it can go on for sometimes even an hour.
Lex Fridman (20:15.440)
So this is a major expression of interest in somebody else.
Lex Fridman (20:21.280)
When did your interest in this one particular aspect
Lex Fridman (20:25.720)
of Chim come to be, which is violence?
Lex Fridman (20:28.920)
When did the study of violence in chimps
Lex Fridman (20:32.240)
become something you're deeply interested in?
Lex Fridman (20:35.760)
Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s,
Richard Wrangham (20:41.480)
I was in Gombe with Jane Goodall
Lex Fridman (20:43.000)
and was studying feeding behavior.
Lex Fridman (20:46.160)
But during that time, we were seeing,
Lex Fridman (20:49.040)
and I say we because there were half a dozen
Richard Wrangham (20:52.400)
research students all in her camp,
Lex Fridman (20:55.800)
we were discovering that chimps
Richard Wrangham (20:58.800)
had this capacity for violence.
Lex Fridman (21:02.440)
The first kill happened during that time,
Richard Wrangham (21:05.000)
which was of an infant in a neighboring group.
Lex Fridman (21:09.200)
And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions.
Lex Fridman (21:13.760)
And this was the start of my interest
Lex Fridman (21:16.360)
because it was such chilling evidence
Richard Wrangham (21:19.280)
of an extraordinary similarity between chimps
Lex Fridman (21:23.320)
and humans. Now, at that time,
Richard Wrangham (21:27.680)
we didn't know very much about how chimpanzees
Lex Fridman (21:31.280)
and humans were related.
Richard Wrangham (21:33.320)
Chimps, gorillas, bonobos are all three
Lex Fridman (21:37.520)
big black hairy things that live in the African forests
Lex Fridman (21:40.840)
and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits
Lex Fridman (21:46.080)
and walk on their knuckles.
Lex Fridman (21:47.440)
And they all look rather similar to each other.
Lex Fridman (21:49.040)
So they seem as though they're very similar
Lex Fridman (21:51.760)
so they seem as though those three species,
Lex Fridman (21:54.800)
chimps and gorillas and bonobos,
Richard Wrangham (21:56.680)
should all be each other's closest relatives
Lex Fridman (21:59.360)
and humans are something rather separate.
Lex Fridman (22:01.480)
And so any of them would be of interest to us.
Lex Fridman (22:04.640)
Subsequently, we learn that actually that's not true
Lex Fridman (22:08.520)
and that there's a special relationship
Lex Fridman (22:10.400)
between humans and chimpanzees.
Lex Fridman (22:13.360)
But at the time, even without knowing that,
Lex Fridman (22:15.920)
it was obvious that there was something very odd
Richard Wrangham (22:18.440)
about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered
Lex Fridman (22:22.760)
they were making tools.
Richard Wrangham (22:25.360)
She had seen that they were hunting meat.
Lex Fridman (22:29.040)
She had seen that they were sharing the meat
Richard Wrangham (22:31.720)
among each other.
Lex Fridman (22:33.160)
She had seen that the societies were dominated politically
Richard Wrangham (22:36.440)
by males, coalitions of males.
Lex Fridman (22:38.600)
All of these things, of course,
Richard Wrangham (22:39.760)
resonate so closely with humans.
Lex Fridman (22:43.120)
And then it turns out that in contrast
Richard Wrangham (22:47.400)
to conventional wisdom at the time,
Lex Fridman (22:50.080)
the chimpanzees were capable of hunting
Lex Fridman (22:53.200)
and killing members of neighboring groups.
Lex Fridman (22:56.640)
Well, at that point, the similarities
Richard Wrangham (23:00.400)
between chimps and humans become less a matter
Lex Fridman (23:04.600)
of sort of sheer intellectual fascination
Richard Wrangham (23:09.160)
than something that has a really deep meaning
Lex Fridman (23:11.520)
about our understanding of ourselves.
Richard Wrangham (23:14.600)
I mean, until then, you can cheerfully think of humans
Lex Fridman (23:18.720)
as a species apart from the rest of nature
Richard Wrangham (23:21.840)
because we are so peculiar.
Lex Fridman (23:23.680)
But when it turns out that, as it turns out,
Richard Wrangham (23:27.400)
one of our two closest relatives
Lex Fridman (23:30.840)
has got these features that we share
Lex Fridman (23:33.840)
and that one of the features is something
Lex Fridman (23:36.680)
that is the most horrendous,
Richard Wrangham (23:39.960)
as well as fascinating, aspect of human behavior,
Lex Fridman (23:43.600)
then how can you resist just trying
Lex Fridman (23:47.040)
to find out what's going on?
Lex Fridman (23:49.080)
So I have to say this.
Richard Wrangham (23:50.760)
I'm not sure if you're familiar with a man,
Lex Fridman (23:53.600)
but fans of this podcast are.
Lex Fridman (23:55.520)
So we're talking about chimps, we're talking about violence.
Lex Fridman (23:59.200)
My now friend, Mr. Joe Rogan,
Richard Wrangham (24:02.120)
is a big fan of those things.
Lex Fridman (24:03.560)
I'm a big fan of these topics.
Richard Wrangham (24:05.440)
I think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics.
Lex Fridman (24:09.400)
So as you're saying, why do we find
Richard Wrangham (24:15.200)
the exploration of violence
Lex Fridman (24:17.560)
and the relations between chimps so interesting?
Lex Fridman (24:20.880)
What can they teach us about ourselves?
Lex Fridman (24:26.160)
Until we had this information about chimpanzees,
Richard Wrangham (24:29.760)
it was possible to believe that the psychology
Lex Fridman (24:34.760)
behind warfare was totally the result
Richard Wrangham (24:43.640)
of some kind of recent cultural innovation.
Lex Fridman (24:49.520)
It had nothing to do with our biology.
Richard Wrangham (24:52.560)
Or if you like, that it's got something to do
Lex Fridman (24:54.240)
with sin and God and the devil and that sort of thing.
Lex Fridman (24:59.240)
But what the chimps tell us after we think carefully
Lex Fridman (25:07.120)
about it is that it seems undoubtedly the case
Richard Wrangham (25:11.720)
that our evolutionary psychology has given us
Lex Fridman (25:18.480)
the same kind of attitude towards violence
Richard Wrangham (25:22.680)
as has occurred in chimpanzees and in both species.
Lex Fridman (25:27.680)
It has evolved because of its evolutionary significance.
Richard Wrangham (25:32.080)
In other words, because it's been helpful
Lex Fridman (25:34.600)
to the individuals who have practiced it.
Lex Fridman (25:37.920)
And now we know that, as I mentioned,
Lex Fridman (25:41.880)
other species do this as well.
Richard Wrangham (25:44.120)
In fact, wolves, which this is a really kind of
Lex Fridman (25:50.160)
ironical observation, Conrad Lorentz, who I mentioned
Richard Wrangham (25:54.960)
had been the person who thought that human aggression
Lex Fridman (25:59.640)
in the form of killing members of our own species
Richard Wrangham (26:02.000)
was unique to our species, he was a great fan of wolves.
Lex Fridman (26:05.600)
He studied wolves.
Lex Fridman (26:07.000)
And in captivity, he noted that wolves are very unlikely
Lex Fridman (26:11.000)
to harm each other in spats among members of the same group.
Lex Fridman (26:17.440)
What happens is that one of them will roll over
Lex Fridman (26:19.160)
and present their neck, much as you see in a dog park
Richard Wrangham (26:21.400)
nowadays, and the other might put their jaws on the neck
Lex Fridman (26:25.680)
but will not bite.
Richard Wrangham (26:27.800)
Okay, so now it turns out that if you study wolves
Lex Fridman (26:30.280)
in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting
Richard Wrangham (26:35.240)
for each other, they are in fierce competition,
Lex Fridman (26:39.320)
and as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves
Richard Wrangham (26:43.680)
is due to being killed by other wolves, adult mortality.
Lex Fridman (26:47.520)
Wow.
Lex Fridman (26:48.360)
So it's a really serious business.
Lex Fridman (26:50.200)
The chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern
Richard Wrangham (26:54.440)
of understanding animals in which you don't have
Lex Fridman (26:59.440)
an instinct for violence, what you have is an instinct,
Richard Wrangham (27:03.400)
if you like, to use violence adaptively.
Lex Fridman (27:06.840)
And if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive,
Richard Wrangham (27:10.760)
if the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be.
Lex Fridman (27:13.880)
So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent
Richard Wrangham (27:17.440)
than others because of things like the frequency
Lex Fridman (27:21.280)
with which a large party of males is likely to meet
Richard Wrangham (27:25.400)
a lone victim, and that's going to depend
Lex Fridman (27:28.000)
on the local ecology.
Richard Wrangham (27:31.040)
But, you know, so the overall answer to the question
Lex Fridman (27:34.880)
of what do chimps teach us is that we have to take
Richard Wrangham (27:38.400)
very seriously the notion that in humans,
Lex Fridman (27:42.400)
the tendency to make war is a consequence
Richard Wrangham (27:47.080)
of a long term evolutionary adaptation
Lex Fridman (27:50.480)
and not just a military ideology
Richard Wrangham (27:53.040)
or some sort of local patriarchal phenomenon.
Lex Fridman (27:58.320)
And of course, you know, a reading of history,
Richard Wrangham (28:01.000)
a judicious reading of history fits that very easily
Lex Fridman (28:05.120)
because war is so commonplace.
Richard Wrangham (28:08.760)
It's not an accident, so it's not a constraint.
Lex Fridman (28:11.080)
It's not an accident, so it's not a construction
Richard Wrangham (28:12.720)
of human civilization.
Lex Fridman (28:14.560)
It's deeply within us, violence.
Lex Fridman (28:17.520)
So what's the difference between violence
Lex Fridman (28:20.440)
on the individual level versus group is,
Richard Wrangham (28:24.640)
it seems like with chimps and with wolves,
Lex Fridman (28:26.880)
there's something about the dynamic of multiple
Richard Wrangham (28:32.280)
chimps together that increase the chance of violence.
Lex Fridman (28:36.280)
Or is violence still fundamentally part of the individual?
Richard Wrangham (28:41.000)
Like would an individual be as violent
Lex Fridman (28:45.000)
as they might be as part of a group?
Richard Wrangham (28:47.960)
If we're talking about killing,
Lex Fridman (28:51.200)
then violence in the sense of killing
Richard Wrangham (28:54.200)
is very much associated with a group.
Lex Fridman (28:59.000)
And the reason is that individuals don't benefit
Richard Wrangham (29:03.920)
by getting into a fight
Lex Fridman (29:05.560)
in which they risk being hurt themselves.
Lex Fridman (29:08.680)
So it's only when you have overwhelming power
Lex Fridman (29:12.640)
that the temptation to try and kill another victim
Richard Wrangham (29:16.760)
rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it.
Lex Fridman (29:23.360)
The average number of chimpanzee males
Richard Wrangham (29:27.840)
that attack a single male
Lex Fridman (29:30.480)
in something like 50 observations
Richard Wrangham (29:33.160)
that have accumulated in the last 50 years
Lex Fridman (29:36.000)
from various different study sites
Richard Wrangham (29:38.400)
is eight, eight to one.
Lex Fridman (29:41.920)
Now, sometimes it can go as low as three to one,
Lex Fridman (29:46.800)
but that's getting risky.
Lex Fridman (29:49.440)
But if you have eight, you can see what can happen.
Richard Wrangham (29:51.640)
I mean, basically you have one male on one foot,
Lex Fridman (29:55.880)
another male on another foot, another male on an arm,
Richard Wrangham (29:58.080)
another male on another arm.
Lex Fridman (29:59.640)
Now you have an immobilized victim
Richard Wrangham (2:00:00.500)
killing off the alpha males so that the cooperation
Lex Fridman (2:00:03.180)
can exist, and cooperation leads to communication
Lex Fridman (2:00:06.940)
and language and ideas, the sharing of ideas,
Lex Fridman (2:00:09.380)
that kind of thing.
Richard Wrangham (2:00:10.700)
Well, yes, the only thing I would modify on that
Lex Fridman (2:00:13.660)
is that you have to ask, how is it that the beta males
Lex Fridman (2:00:17.420)
were able to kill the alpha male?
Lex Fridman (2:00:20.380)
Right.
Lex Fridman (2:00:21.220)
And we now know that although chimpanzees do kill males
Lex Fridman (2:00:25.580)
within their own group sometimes,
Richard Wrangham (2:00:27.700)
it's not a process of killing the alpha male.
Lex Fridman (2:00:31.180)
It's taking advantage of opportunity
Richard Wrangham (2:00:32.980)
when some male gets into a bad position,
Lex Fridman (2:00:36.180)
but it's not a systematic ability to kill the alpha male.
Lex Fridman (2:00:39.300)
And you can see why, because they don't have language,
Lex Fridman (2:00:42.780)
and without language, it's very difficult to know
Lex Fridman (2:00:46.380)
how confident you can be of the support of others
Lex Fridman (2:00:50.020)
against a particular individual within your own group.
Richard Wrangham (2:00:52.900)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (2:00:53.780)
When you're attacking someone from another group,
Richard Wrangham (2:00:55.540)
that problem is solved.
Lex Fridman (2:00:57.060)
We all hate those guys, but the alpha male
Richard Wrangham (2:01:03.820)
has got alliances within his group.
Lex Fridman (2:01:06.580)
Some of those allies might be willing to turn against him.
Richard Wrangham (2:01:11.340)
Some of them might be harboring deep feelings
Lex Fridman (2:01:13.340)
of resentment, but how does anyone else know that?
Lex Fridman (2:01:17.740)
So in other words, I think that you have to have
Lex Fridman (2:01:20.100)
some kind of language that is pretty good
Richard Wrangham (2:01:23.700)
to solve the problems of gaining confidence
Lex Fridman (2:01:27.700)
that five of you say, or some number,
Richard Wrangham (2:01:33.940)
can trust each other in this final attack.
Lex Fridman (2:01:38.420)
And even nowadays, it's difficult.
Richard Wrangham (2:01:42.100)
I mean, you mentioned Stalin.
Lex Fridman (2:01:44.260)
It's like, why was everybody terrified?
Richard Wrangham (2:01:48.460)
Any dictator that takes control.
Lex Fridman (2:01:50.260)
Why is all of us as individuals terrified
Lex Fridman (2:01:53.260)
when you know there's millions of us?
Lex Fridman (2:01:56.060)
That's right.
Lex Fridman (2:01:57.060)
And so like that, we lack the language,
Lex Fridman (2:02:00.060)
because our basic psychology of fear overtakes us.
Lex Fridman (2:02:04.460)
Like, who can we talk to?
Lex Fridman (2:02:06.220)
Who can we talk to and not get killed ourselves?
Richard Wrangham (2:02:08.660)
Exactly, that's right.
Lex Fridman (2:02:10.460)
But do you have this intuition that some kind of language
Richard Wrangham (2:02:14.180)
was developing along with this process
Lex Fridman (2:02:18.660)
of beta males taking over?
Richard Wrangham (2:02:20.180)
Yes, yes, I mean, once you have sufficient language
Lex Fridman (2:02:23.740)
to be able to have the beta males conspiring
Richard Wrangham (2:02:25.820)
to kill the alpha male, then you have selection
Lex Fridman (2:02:30.100)
in favor of cooperation and tolerance, as we spoke about.
Lex Fridman (2:02:33.940)
And at that point, there will be increased ability
Lex Fridman (2:02:38.220)
to communicate and the language will get richer
Lex Fridman (2:02:40.020)
and better and better.
Lex Fridman (2:02:41.660)
So yes, absolutely, positive feedback loop
Richard Wrangham (2:02:44.380)
once you get the situation started.
Lex Fridman (2:02:48.300)
Can you maybe comment on the full complexity
Lex Fridman (2:02:53.060)
and richness of the human mind through this process?
Lex Fridman (2:02:55.720)
We've been casually saying cooking, fire,
Lex Fridman (2:03:00.580)
and beta males leading to cooperation.
Lex Fridman (2:03:06.420)
But how does the beauty of the human mind
Lex Fridman (2:03:09.540)
emerge from all of this?
Lex Fridman (2:03:10.660)
Is there other further steps we need to understand?
Richard Wrangham (2:03:13.060)
Or is it as simple as this language emerging
Lex Fridman (2:03:16.500)
from taking over the alpha male and the cooperation?
Richard Wrangham (2:03:21.260)
Or am I also over romanticizing
Lex Fridman (2:03:23.840)
how amazing the human mind is?
Richard Wrangham (2:03:25.780)
Is it just like one small step
Lex Fridman (2:03:27.680)
in a long journey of evolution?
Richard Wrangham (2:03:33.020)
Well, if the beauty of the human mind
Lex Fridman (2:03:34.600)
is the ability of us all to be creative, to explore,
Richard Wrangham (2:03:48.180)
that's one kind of beauty.
Lex Fridman (2:03:49.900)
Another kind of beauty is the empathy that we can show.
Lex Fridman (2:03:56.540)
And we think of that as beautiful
Lex Fridman (2:03:58.020)
because it is a kind of rare and special ability
Richard Wrangham (2:04:03.020)
compared to the sort of ordinary selfishness
Lex Fridman (2:04:09.260)
that can commonly predominate.
Richard Wrangham (2:04:14.600)
I suppose we have to think of different sources
Lex Fridman (2:04:17.260)
for those two types.
Richard Wrangham (2:04:22.140)
I suppose a general answer is that
Lex Fridman (2:04:25.800)
there has been selection in favor of bigger brains,
Richard Wrangham (2:04:29.220)
which probably in general has been associated
Lex Fridman (2:04:31.960)
with increasing cognitive ability.
Lex Fridman (2:04:33.900)
And as that has happened,
Lex Fridman (2:04:37.040)
the complexity of life has increased
Richard Wrangham (2:04:41.140)
because people have more and more complex,
Lex Fridman (2:04:45.900)
highly differentiated strategies
Richard Wrangham (2:04:48.460)
in response to each other's more complex,
Lex Fridman (2:04:51.340)
highly differentiated strategies.
Richard Wrangham (2:04:53.580)
We get to a point where there is deception
Lex Fridman (2:04:55.820)
and self deception.
Richard Wrangham (2:04:57.980)
There is a manipulation of ideas
Lex Fridman (2:05:02.820)
through stories that we invent and stories that we pass on.
Richard Wrangham (2:05:09.700)
I guess all I'm wanting to say is that
Lex Fridman (2:05:13.660)
there is a world of the mind that evolves in response
Richard Wrangham (2:05:22.660)
to these platforms that are put there.
Lex Fridman (2:05:25.940)
The platform of increasing brain size
Lex Fridman (2:05:28.780)
and therefore cognitive ability
Lex Fridman (2:05:30.140)
made possible by increased energy supply.
Richard Wrangham (2:05:34.140)
The platform of cooperation and tolerance
Lex Fridman (2:05:38.980)
in a world in which there remains a lot of conflict
Lex Fridman (2:05:42.940)
and therefore a need to respond to the conflict
Lex Fridman (2:05:46.500)
and manipulate your allies appropriately.
Richard Wrangham (2:05:50.380)
I don't see beauty as coming,
Lex Fridman (2:05:52.540)
either kind of beauty as coming
Richard Wrangham (2:05:53.820)
sort of totally independently of these things.
Lex Fridman (2:05:56.780)
You know, I don't think there's a selection
Richard Wrangham (2:05:58.780)
for staring into the sunset and creating poetry.
Lex Fridman (2:06:02.660)
Yes.
Richard Wrangham (2:06:03.500)
You know, but I guess sexual selection,
Lex Fridman (2:06:06.020)
you know, males wanting to impress females
Richard Wrangham (2:06:09.580)
in different ways will lead to them wanting to.
Lex Fridman (2:06:13.700)
Write poetry?
Richard Wrangham (2:06:15.180)
Well, yes, you know, show off.
Lex Fridman (2:06:16.740)
Yeah, in all the different ways.
Lex Fridman (2:06:18.500)
So all of these are natural consequences
Lex Fridman (2:06:20.620)
of just coming up with strategies of how to cooperate
Lex Fridman (2:06:24.780)
and how to achieve certain ends.
Lex Fridman (2:06:27.240)
So that's just like a natural.
Richard Wrangham (2:06:29.820)
Yeah, I mean, we haven't spoken about sexual selection,
Lex Fridman (2:06:31.980)
but that is a really important part of it.
Richard Wrangham (2:06:34.020)
You know, they try to out compete each other
Lex Fridman (2:06:37.340)
in, you know, normally without any physical conflict,
Richard Wrangham (2:06:43.100)
just in order to be able to be chosen
Lex Fridman (2:06:45.100)
by mates of the opposite sex.
Lex Fridman (2:06:46.900)
And that is certainly a major source of creativity.
Lex Fridman (2:06:53.280)
So you've studied chimps.
Richard Wrangham (2:06:56.220)
You also, all the other relatives, gorillas.
Lex Fridman (2:06:59.340)
What do you find beautiful and fascinating about chimps,
Lex Fridman (2:07:01.940)
about gorillas, about humans?
Lex Fridman (2:07:03.780)
Maybe you can paint the whole picture of that evolutionary,
Richard Wrangham (2:07:07.140)
that little local pocket of the evolutionary tree.
Lex Fridman (2:07:10.760)
How are we related?
Lex Fridman (2:07:12.260)
What is the common ancestor?
Lex Fridman (2:07:14.180)
What are the interesting differences?
Richard Wrangham (2:07:15.740)
I know I'm asking a million questions,
Lex Fridman (2:07:17.300)
but can you paint a map of what are chimps, gorillas,
Lex Fridman (2:07:22.940)
and humans, like how we're related,
Lex Fridman (2:07:25.060)
and what you find fascinating about each?
Richard Wrangham (2:07:29.340)
In Africa, straddling the equator,
Lex Fridman (2:07:33.700)
there is a strip of rainforest
Richard Wrangham (2:07:37.300)
that relies on the combination of high temperatures
Lex Fridman (2:07:42.300)
and rainfall that you get around the equator.
Richard Wrangham (2:07:45.660)
That rainforest goes into about 22 countries.
Lex Fridman (2:07:51.760)
And throughout those countries, you have chimpanzees,
Richard Wrangham (2:07:54.920)
although they've gone extinct in two of them.
Lex Fridman (2:07:58.800)
In just a fraction of them,
Lex Fridman (2:08:02.600)
but it was five countries,
Lex Fridman (2:08:04.720)
you've got gorillas, where there are mountains.
Lex Fridman (2:08:09.720)
And in one country, on the left bank
Lex Fridman (2:08:12.880)
of the Great Congo River, you have bonobos.
Lex Fridman (2:08:17.640)
So in the African forest,
Lex Fridman (2:08:19.020)
you've got these three African apes, the only African apes,
Richard Wrangham (2:08:23.160)
all of which are very similar in much of their way of life.
Lex Fridman (2:08:30.400)
They walk on their knuckles through the forest,
Richard Wrangham (2:08:33.000)
looking for fruit trees,
Lex Fridman (2:08:34.660)
and eating herbs when they can't find fruits.
Richard Wrangham (2:08:41.320)
Gorillas represent the oldest chain.
Lex Fridman (2:08:46.040)
So about 10 million years ago,
Richard Wrangham (2:08:49.000)
maybe as recently as eight million years ago,
Lex Fridman (2:08:51.800)
the ancestor of gorillas broke off
Richard Wrangham (2:08:54.040)
from the ancestor leading to chimps and bonobos and humans.
Lex Fridman (2:08:58.360)
So they've probably remained very similar now
Richard Wrangham (2:09:00.800)
to what, very similar to what they were then.
Lex Fridman (2:09:04.680)
They were probably the largest apes,
Richard Wrangham (2:09:08.960)
living in montane areas and spending more time
Lex Fridman (2:09:13.840)
eating just herbs, stems,
Richard Wrangham (2:09:19.140)
not so vitally dependent on fruit.
Lex Fridman (2:09:22.200)
And living in, if it was like the present,
Richard Wrangham (2:09:27.760)
groups up to about 50 stable groups,
Lex Fridman (2:09:30.620)
with one alpha male who was in charge.
Richard Wrangham (2:09:37.000)
Gorillas are wonderfully slow and inquisitive
Lex Fridman (2:09:44.600)
compared to chimps and bonobos.
Lex Fridman (2:09:46.360)
And I had the privilege of spending a week or two
Lex Fridman (2:09:53.000)
with gorillas at Dian Fossey's camp before she was murdered.
Lex Fridman (2:09:58.000)
And I went out with two women,
Lex Fridman (2:10:03.440)
Kelly and Barb, to a particular group.
Lex Fridman (2:10:07.200)
And there was a young female in the group called Simba.
Lex Fridman (2:10:12.200)
And Simba approached us and stared at the two women.
Lex Fridman (2:10:16.240)
And then she came towards me
Lex Fridman (2:10:18.840)
and she very deliberately reached out her knuckles
Lex Fridman (2:10:24.800)
and touched me on the forehead.
Lex Fridman (2:10:26.680)
She was watched in doing this by a young male
Richard Wrangham (2:10:32.200)
who was quite keen on her.
Lex Fridman (2:10:34.000)
And he was called Digit.
Lex Fridman (2:10:35.800)
And about five minutes later,
Lex Fridman (2:10:38.200)
Digit stood in front of us on the path.
Lex Fridman (2:10:42.080)
And Kelly was in front of me,
Lex Fridman (2:10:44.760)
and then there was Barb, and then there was me.
Lex Fridman (2:10:48.160)
And he came charging down the path
Lex Fridman (2:10:49.920)
and he sidestepped around Kelly,
Lex Fridman (2:10:51.840)
and he sidestepped around Barb,
Lex Fridman (2:10:53.960)
and me, he just knocked with his arm
Lex Fridman (2:10:57.640)
and sent me flying about five yards into the bushes.
Lex Fridman (2:11:00.640)
And I love the way that that was a very deliberate response.
Lex Fridman (2:11:06.840)
And I love the way that Simba had been so interested in me
Lex Fridman (2:11:10.080)
and held my eye.
Richard Wrangham (2:11:12.280)
Chimps and bonobos never hold your eye,
Lex Fridman (2:11:15.040)
but gorillas really look as though
Richard Wrangham (2:11:16.680)
they're trying to sort of figure out
Lex Fridman (2:11:18.000)
what are you thinking about?
Richard Wrangham (2:11:19.200)
That was a species that has, goes back
Lex Fridman (2:11:24.200)
for something like 10 million years.
Lex Fridman (2:11:26.480)
In that situation, was there a game being played?
Lex Fridman (2:11:31.840)
Well, I mean, I felt that Digit was telling me,
Richard Wrangham (2:11:35.000)
I don't want you messing with Simba.
Lex Fridman (2:11:37.240)
But was Simba using you?
Richard Wrangham (2:11:40.280)
Oh, I see.
Lex Fridman (2:11:41.520)
Well, that's a fun idea.
Richard Wrangham (2:11:43.040)
I don't see why she should be using me,
Lex Fridman (2:11:45.040)
but you mean to use me?
Richard Wrangham (2:11:46.960)
I see why she should be using me, but you mean testing
Lex Fridman (2:11:49.800)
how strongly Digit was prepared to intervene to?
Richard Wrangham (2:11:53.240)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (2:11:54.080)
Oh, that's come straight out of a sort of adolescent
Richard Wrangham (2:11:57.400)
high school playbook.
Lex Fridman (2:11:58.320)
All right, well, that's all.
Richard Wrangham (2:11:59.960)
No, no, no, there's nothing wrong with it for that.
Lex Fridman (2:12:02.720)
Yeah, I don't know.
Richard Wrangham (2:12:04.080)
I never thought of that, and you never know.
Lex Fridman (2:12:08.200)
It's possible.
Richard Wrangham (2:12:09.800)
So, yeah, so, okay, so this is an ancient branch
Lex Fridman (2:12:14.160)
of the evolutionary tree, this gorilla
Richard Wrangham (2:12:16.800)
that led to gorillas.
Lex Fridman (2:12:17.800)
Gorillas.
Lex Fridman (2:12:19.200)
So then the next thing that happened
Lex Fridman (2:12:20.720)
on the evolutionary tree was six or seven million years ago
Richard Wrangham (2:12:23.760)
when you have the line between chimps and bonobos
Lex Fridman (2:12:30.040)
on the one hand and humans on the other splitting.
Lex Fridman (2:12:34.200)
And basically what happened is that at that point,
Lex Fridman (2:12:36.880)
a chimp like ancestor leaves the forest,
Richard Wrangham (2:12:41.920)
gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts,
Lex Fridman (2:12:45.240)
and that becomes the Australopithecines
Lex Fridman (2:12:46.720)
and meanwhile, the chimpanzees and bonobo ancestor
Lex Fridman (2:12:50.920)
continues in the forest.
Lex Fridman (2:12:53.520)
And later what happens is that one branch of that
Lex Fridman (2:12:57.720)
crosses the Congo River and becomes the bonobos.
Richard Wrangham (2:13:01.280)
That was only about two million years ago,
Lex Fridman (2:13:02.840)
maybe one million years ago.
Richard Wrangham (2:13:05.360)
Now the chimps that remained in the forest
Lex Fridman (2:13:07.520)
throughout this time and occupied all the countries
Richard Wrangham (2:13:09.760)
across from west to east Africa now,
Lex Fridman (2:13:13.840)
again, we assume that they're pretty similar
Richard Wrangham (2:13:16.000)
to the ones that live nowadays,
Lex Fridman (2:13:18.560)
where there's some variation from west to east.
Lex Fridman (2:13:21.840)
And these are animals that live in social communities
Lex Fridman (2:13:25.840)
of between say 20 and 200.
Richard Wrangham (2:13:29.920)
They have a lot of them in one group,
Lex Fridman (2:13:32.360)
but they never come together in a single unit.
Richard Wrangham (2:13:35.240)
These are, they share an area, a community territory,
Lex Fridman (2:13:39.960)
and that area is defended by males
Lex Fridman (2:13:41.800)
and within it, females wander
Lex Fridman (2:13:43.800)
and bring up their young independently.
Lex Fridman (2:13:46.120)
And the females are very scared
Lex Fridman (2:13:49.880)
about the possibility that males
Richard Wrangham (2:13:53.800)
will be mean to their infants.
Lex Fridman (2:13:55.840)
And in order to avoid them doing that,
Richard Wrangham (2:13:58.640)
they do their best to mate with every single male
Lex Fridman (2:14:02.760)
in the group multiple times,
Richard Wrangham (2:14:04.720)
as if to give a memory in that male of,
Lex Fridman (2:14:07.520)
yeah, yeah, I reminded you,
Lex Fridman (2:14:09.000)
so I'm not gonna be mean to your baby.
Lex Fridman (2:14:11.600)
So what's wonderful about chimps?
Richard Wrangham (2:14:12.960)
Well, you know, as we've spoken about them,
Lex Fridman (2:14:15.200)
they are creative and sort of amazingly humanlike,
Lex Fridman (2:14:20.120)
but I love the sort of, you know, the quiet moments.
Lex Fridman (2:14:22.800)
And here's one.
Richard Wrangham (2:14:25.760)
I've got two chimps who are grooming each other
Lex Fridman (2:14:30.760)
on a day when they are utterly exhausted.
Richard Wrangham (2:14:33.680)
They've walked 11 kilometers the day before,
Lex Fridman (2:14:37.760)
up and down hills.
Lex Fridman (2:14:39.840)
And on this particular day,
Lex Fridman (2:14:42.200)
all they do is they get to one tree
Lex Fridman (2:14:44.360)
and they eat from that tree.
Lex Fridman (2:14:45.800)
And other than that, they only walk about 100 yards
Lex Fridman (2:14:48.480)
and they go back to sleep in the nest in which they woke up.
Lex Fridman (2:14:52.480)
So they're utterly exhausted
Lex Fridman (2:14:55.000)
and they're just eating nonstop
Lex Fridman (2:14:56.680)
because they're trying to recover their energy.
Lex Fridman (2:14:59.880)
And this is Hugh and Charlie.
Lex Fridman (2:15:02.840)
And we think they were probably brothers.
Richard Wrangham (2:15:04.400)
They've never actually got the genetic evidence to prove it.
Lex Fridman (2:15:08.520)
Well, I never remember now who it is,
Lex Fridman (2:15:11.640)
but let's say that they both come down from the tree
Lex Fridman (2:15:17.040)
and they're both carrying branches of the food.
Richard Wrangham (2:15:22.600)
They're actually seeds from these branches.
Lex Fridman (2:15:25.080)
They're both engaged, even in the midday sun
Richard Wrangham (2:15:28.240)
when they want to come down and unshade themselves
Lex Fridman (2:15:31.880)
for a bit on the ground, they're still eating.
Lex Fridman (2:15:34.880)
But then Charlie finishes his branch
Lex Fridman (2:15:38.160)
and he starts grooming Hugh.
Lex Fridman (2:15:42.120)
And Hugh continues eating from his branch.
Lex Fridman (2:15:48.880)
Charlie eventually gets bored of this after a few minutes
Lex Fridman (2:15:53.240)
and he reaches out and he lifts the branch
Lex Fridman (2:15:57.800)
from which Hugh is still taking seeds
Lex Fridman (2:16:01.280)
and puts it over his head and puts it behind his back
Lex Fridman (2:16:05.080)
as far as possible away from Hugh.
Richard Wrangham (2:16:08.720)
Hugh doesn't do anything.
Lex Fridman (2:16:10.680)
He just finishes his mouthful
Lex Fridman (2:16:12.360)
and then he turns to Charlie and grooms him.
Lex Fridman (2:16:15.000)
So this very polite way of saying,
Richard Wrangham (2:16:16.760)
will you groom me please has worked.
Lex Fridman (2:16:19.800)
Then Hugh grooms around Charlie's back
Lex Fridman (2:16:25.480)
and around to the right side and then down his arm
Lex Fridman (2:16:29.440)
to what point where he can reach the branch again.
Lex Fridman (2:16:33.040)
And then he picks up the branch
Lex Fridman (2:16:34.720)
and continues nonchalantly.
Richard Wrangham (2:16:37.200)
Right.
Lex Fridman (2:16:38.040)
So in other words, a very sort of simple little strategy
Lex Fridman (2:16:42.000)
but it just shows the courtesy
Lex Fridman (2:16:43.880)
with which they can treat each other.
Lex Fridman (2:16:47.080)
And the days I love with chimps
Lex Fridman (2:16:49.320)
are when you see that sort of thing
Richard Wrangham (2:16:50.440)
or when you see mothers just lying
Lex Fridman (2:16:52.640)
in a sunlit patch in the forest
Richard Wrangham (2:16:55.240)
with their babies bouncing on top of them,
Lex Fridman (2:16:58.160)
just having a wonderful peaceful time.
Lex Fridman (2:17:01.480)
And that's what most of their lives are like.
Lex Fridman (2:17:06.080)
So chimpanzees are the species
Richard Wrangham (2:17:09.680)
that kind of unites the rest of the apes
Lex Fridman (2:17:11.920)
because a gorilla is in many ways
Richard Wrangham (2:17:14.800)
just a big version of a chimpanzee.
Lex Fridman (2:17:16.520)
If you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee in your mind
Richard Wrangham (2:17:19.640)
to be bigger, it basically turns into a gorilla.
Lex Fridman (2:17:22.560)
And then bonobos on the left bank of the Congo River
Richard Wrangham (2:17:26.480)
are like a domesticated form of a chimpanzee
Lex Fridman (2:17:31.960)
but obviously humans didn't domesticate them.
Lex Fridman (2:17:33.560)
So they're self domesticated.
Lex Fridman (2:17:35.240)
They are less aggressive
Lex Fridman (2:17:36.960)
and they show all the marks of domestication
Lex Fridman (2:17:39.760)
that domestication animals do
Richard Wrangham (2:17:41.680)
compared to wild animals in their bones.
Lex Fridman (2:17:44.640)
So they have reduced differences between males and females
Richard Wrangham (2:17:47.520)
in which the males are more like females.
Lex Fridman (2:17:49.080)
They have smaller brains, they have shorter faces,
Richard Wrangham (2:17:53.000)
smaller teeth and smaller bodies.
Lex Fridman (2:17:55.600)
All the things that domesticated animals show.
Lex Fridman (2:17:57.720)
And bonobos live in this environment
Lex Fridman (2:18:01.280)
in a strikingly peaceful way compared to the chimpanzees.
Richard Wrangham (2:18:05.480)
There's no indication that they will have
Lex Fridman (2:18:08.720)
these aggressive kills and enough data now to show
Richard Wrangham (2:18:12.480)
that there's a statistical difference
Lex Fridman (2:18:13.960)
in the frequency of which it would happen.
Lex Fridman (2:18:16.440)
And bonobos are famously erotic.
Lex Fridman (2:18:21.640)
The females have enlarged sexual parts
Richard Wrangham (2:18:27.480)
which swell to particularly large size
Lex Fridman (2:18:30.320)
compared to the female chimpanzees.
Lex Fridman (2:18:33.720)
And the females have a lot of interactions with each other
Lex Fridman (2:18:38.200)
in which they excitedly rub their clitorises together
Lex Fridman (2:18:42.040)
and appear to have orgasms.
Lex Fridman (2:18:45.320)
And these occur in the context
Richard Wrangham (2:18:47.560)
of some kind of social tension.
Lex Fridman (2:18:52.400)
And they sometimes happen before,
Richard Wrangham (2:18:53.880)
they sometimes happen after the social tension,
Lex Fridman (2:18:55.760)
and they seem to be devices, these interactions,
Richard Wrangham (2:18:59.440)
for ensuring that everyone's friends
Lex Fridman (2:19:02.280)
and reducing the chances
Richard Wrangham (2:19:03.920)
that they're actually gonna get into a fight.
Lex Fridman (2:19:05.560)
So it's a kind of conflict resolution through sex
Richard Wrangham (2:19:10.880)
or some kind of pleasurable sexual experience.
Lex Fridman (2:19:13.120)
Well, it's often characterized as make love, not war.
Richard Wrangham (2:19:15.800)
Make love, not war.
Lex Fridman (2:19:18.280)
Okay, you mentioned to me offline
Richard Wrangham (2:19:22.960)
that you have a deep love for nature.
Lex Fridman (2:19:26.720)
If we look at the world today,
Lex Fridman (2:19:29.680)
how can we ensure that the beautiful parts of nature
Lex Fridman (2:19:35.720)
remain a big part of our lives as human beings
Richard Wrangham (2:19:39.600)
in the way we think about it,
Lex Fridman (2:19:41.040)
in the way we also keep it around, preserve it?
Richard Wrangham (2:19:46.280)
You know, we keep it part of our minds
Lex Fridman (2:19:47.960)
and part of our world.
Richard Wrangham (2:19:51.720)
It's a very difficult question
Lex Fridman (2:19:55.120)
because every time there was a conflict
Richard Wrangham (2:19:58.200)
between conservation of a natural habitat
Lex Fridman (2:20:02.200)
and allowing people to get that little bit of extra food
Richard Wrangham (2:20:07.080)
for their babies,
Lex Fridman (2:20:08.400)
then naturally the tendency is for the humans to win.
Lex Fridman (2:20:13.960)
And so we have this steady erosion
Lex Fridman (2:20:17.640)
in the face of tremendous efforts to conserve nature.
Richard Wrangham (2:20:22.200)
We have a continuing steady erosion of habitats
Lex Fridman (2:20:25.960)
and all the species,
Lex Fridman (2:20:27.960)
and the numbers are always in the wrong direction.
Lex Fridman (2:20:31.720)
Occasionally you get sort of wonderful little examples
Richard Wrangham (2:20:34.600)
of something being saved,
Lex Fridman (2:20:36.480)
but the overall trend is clear.
Lex Fridman (2:20:40.320)
And it's very difficult to see how one can ever escape that
Lex Fridman (2:20:43.000)
because it's not human.
Richard Wrangham (2:20:46.520)
Now that we are essentially a single tribe,
Lex Fridman (2:20:50.280)
to want to save an elephant if it means killing 20 humans.
Lex Fridman (2:20:57.600)
So I think the only way in which we can really conserve
Lex Fridman (2:21:02.200)
is if we put tremendous effort
Richard Wrangham (2:21:06.520)
into conserving the very best representative areas of nature.
Lex Fridman (2:21:15.360)
Often this will be the national parks that already exist.
Lex Fridman (2:21:18.840)
And what we have to do is to make them so valuable
Lex Fridman (2:21:22.680)
that actually it is worth it in terms of human survival
Richard Wrangham (2:21:26.560)
to be able to keep those sorts of places.
Lex Fridman (2:21:29.040)
And that's the attitude that my colleagues and I
Richard Wrangham (2:21:32.720)
have taken in Uganda,
Lex Fridman (2:21:33.680)
where we want to keep the Kibale National Park alive,
Richard Wrangham (2:21:39.440)
which has got the largest population chimpanzees
Lex Fridman (2:21:41.280)
in Uganda,
Lex Fridman (2:21:42.120)
and it's got elephants and wonderful birds
Lex Fridman (2:21:44.200)
and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on,
Lex Fridman (2:21:46.720)
and visitors, and lots and lots of visitors.
Lex Fridman (2:21:51.160)
It may be that we're going to have to have huge increases
Richard Wrangham (2:21:54.520)
in the amount of charges that you pay for ecotourism.
Lex Fridman (2:21:58.800)
And you need to make sure that ecotourism is done right.
Richard Wrangham (2:22:02.600)
In other places, you will keep nature there
Lex Fridman (2:22:06.480)
because it's useful for maintaining the climate,
Richard Wrangham (2:22:12.600)
bringing rain.
Lex Fridman (2:22:15.120)
Maybe you can in some places convince people
Richard Wrangham (2:22:20.600)
of the sheer sort of aesthetics of keeping nature
Lex Fridman (2:22:25.600)
that even over the long term,
Richard Wrangham (2:22:28.920)
presidents whose job it is to look for the future
Lex Fridman (2:22:34.280)
of the country will be persuaded
Richard Wrangham (2:22:36.840)
that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons.
Lex Fridman (2:22:39.960)
But overall, what is required is for people
Richard Wrangham (2:22:47.080)
in the rich countries to do much more investment
Lex Fridman (2:22:50.920)
than they have so far in maintaining both the natural places
Richard Wrangham (2:22:56.920)
in their own countries and in the tropics.
Lex Fridman (2:23:01.160)
And if you look at Africa,
Richard Wrangham (2:23:02.680)
I mean, the population trends are that Nigeria
Lex Fridman (2:23:08.720)
may become the most populous country in the world, I think,
Richard Wrangham (2:23:12.920)
or within a century.
Lex Fridman (2:23:16.160)
The future of African habitats,
Richard Wrangham (2:23:19.320)
you know, it's clear what's gonna happen in general.
Lex Fridman (2:23:21.880)
There's gonna be a huge conversion
Richard Wrangham (2:23:23.920)
towards agricultural land.
Lex Fridman (2:23:28.040)
I heard Ed Wilson speak years ago
Richard Wrangham (2:23:32.040)
about the prospect of the entire globe
Lex Fridman (2:23:36.480)
being turned into a single human feedlot.
Richard Wrangham (2:23:42.040)
It's gonna take a lot to avoid that.
Lex Fridman (2:23:44.560)
He is out there calling for half the earth
Richard Wrangham (2:23:50.960)
to be devoted to nature.
Lex Fridman (2:23:53.040)
It's incredibly ambitious and incredibly optimistic.
Lex Fridman (2:23:56.360)
But unless you have really exciting goals,
Lex Fridman (2:24:00.240)
probably nothing will be achieved.
Richard Wrangham (2:24:02.760)
Yeah, I mean, there's something to me,
Lex Fridman (2:24:06.040)
like when I visit New York and I see Central Park
Lex Fridman (2:24:08.480)
and then somehow constructed a situation
Lex Fridman (2:24:10.560)
where you preserve this park in the middle of the park,
Richard Wrangham (2:24:14.160)
probably some of the most expensive land in the world.
Lex Fridman (2:24:17.600)
The fact that that's possible gives me hope
Richard Wrangham (2:24:19.600)
that you can do this kind of preservation at a global scale,
Lex Fridman (2:24:23.720)
perhaps for just the aesthetic reasons
Richard Wrangham (2:24:25.720)
of just valuing the beauty
Lex Fridman (2:24:28.840)
and just respecting our origins
Richard Wrangham (2:24:33.200)
of having come from the earth.
Lex Fridman (2:24:35.200)
We are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees,
Richard Wrangham (2:24:39.280)
bonobos and gorillas as our close relatives
Lex Fridman (2:24:43.240)
still living on the earth.
Richard Wrangham (2:24:44.480)
We're unlucky that we don't have Australopithecines
Lex Fridman (2:24:46.600)
and other species of homo,
Lex Fridman (2:24:48.080)
but we're still lucky to have those
Lex Fridman (2:24:49.640)
because they are incredibly closely related to us
Richard Wrangham (2:24:51.920)
compared to what most animals have.
Lex Fridman (2:24:54.440)
There are many animals that don't have any close relatives
Richard Wrangham (2:24:56.880)
to them on the earth.
Lex Fridman (2:24:58.760)
But not only are they relatively close,
Lex Fridman (2:25:01.040)
but they teach us so much about ourselves.
Lex Fridman (2:25:04.600)
The similarities between them and ourselves
Richard Wrangham (2:25:06.920)
raise questions that we can then test
Lex Fridman (2:25:09.480)
about the extent to which our own behavioral propensities
Richard Wrangham (2:25:13.880)
are derived from the same evolutionary stock
Lex Fridman (2:25:16.760)
as in those great apes.
Lex Fridman (2:25:18.960)
Well, how much is that worth?
Lex Fridman (2:25:21.160)
I mean, we could spend billions going to the Mars
Richard Wrangham (2:25:24.600)
to find evidence of bacteria there,
Lex Fridman (2:25:28.440)
and that's fascinating too.
Lex Fridman (2:25:30.400)
But we should be spending billions on this earth
Lex Fridman (2:25:33.160)
in order to make sure that we have,
Richard Wrangham (2:25:36.640)
I don't know how to say it,
Lex Fridman (2:25:40.200)
substantial representative populations
Richard Wrangham (2:25:43.640)
of these close relatives.
Lex Fridman (2:25:45.440)
Yeah, that we can meet.
Richard Wrangham (2:25:47.000)
There's something like space tourism
Lex Fridman (2:25:49.400)
when you go out into space and you look back down on earth.
Richard Wrangham (2:25:53.360)
That's to a lot of people, including myself,
Lex Fridman (2:25:56.260)
is worth a lot.
Lex Fridman (2:25:58.120)
But why is that worth a lot?
Lex Fridman (2:25:59.640)
Is because it's humbling and beautiful
Richard Wrangham (2:26:04.640)
in the same way that meeting
Lex Fridman (2:26:07.800)
our close evolutionary relatives is humbling and beautiful.
Richard Wrangham (2:26:13.280)
Just to know that this is what we come from.
Lex Fridman (2:26:17.840)
This is who we are.
Richard Wrangham (2:26:19.340)
Not just for the understanding or the science of it,
Lex Fridman (2:26:21.600)
but just something about just the beauty of witnessing this.
Lex Fridman (2:26:26.400)
And again, it's both humbling and empowering
Lex Fridman (2:26:30.960)
that this place is fragile and we're damn lucky to be here.
Richard Wrangham (2:26:36.160)
Yes, and unfortunately,
Lex Fridman (2:26:37.720)
the problems are incredibly difficult to solve
Lex Fridman (2:26:40.400)
and there is no one solver.
Lex Fridman (2:26:42.400)
It has to happen from a network
Richard Wrangham (2:26:44.680)
of potentially cooperating people.
Lex Fridman (2:26:47.800)
But I mean, you're so right about it being daunting
Richard Wrangham (2:26:49.800)
to think about what it looks like from space.
Lex Fridman (2:26:52.420)
And I love the view that Herman Muller expressed
Richard Wrangham (2:26:56.240)
of being able to go out from space.
Lex Fridman (2:26:59.040)
And he said the whole of life
Richard Wrangham (2:27:01.680)
would look like a kind of rust on the planet.
Lex Fridman (2:27:06.440)
Yeah, so the aliens were to visit.
Richard Wrangham (2:27:08.480)
I'm not sure they would notice the life.
Lex Fridman (2:27:10.280)
They would probably notice the trees or ocean.
Richard Wrangham (2:27:15.520)
It's a kind of rust.
Lex Fridman (2:27:17.520)
But let me ask the big ridiculous philosophical question.
Lex Fridman (2:27:21.480)
What is the meaning of this rust?
Lex Fridman (2:27:23.760)
What do you think is the meaning of life on Earth?
Lex Fridman (2:27:26.280)
What is the meaning of our human intelligent life?
Lex Fridman (2:27:31.220)
Well, I think it's very clear
Richard Wrangham (2:27:32.140)
that we have an evolutionary story
Lex Fridman (2:27:35.840)
that is only getting challenged around the edges.
Richard Wrangham (2:27:41.280)
We have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life.
Lex Fridman (2:27:44.800)
And the meaning is we are here
Richard Wrangham (2:27:48.780)
as a consequence of materialistic processes that began,
Lex Fridman (2:27:58.080)
in our sense, with the establishment of the Earth
Richard Wrangham (2:28:03.080)
four and a half billion years ago, whatever it was,
Lex Fridman (2:28:04.920)
and then water and oxygen and so on.
Lex Fridman (2:28:09.840)
And we are the astonishing consequence
Lex Fridman (2:28:12.840)
of the evolution of cells and multicellular organisms.
Richard Wrangham (2:28:18.840)
The word random is the wrong word to use
Lex Fridman (2:28:22.840)
unless you understand what it means.
Richard Wrangham (2:28:24.840)
You know, it didn't happen by chance,
Lex Fridman (2:28:28.840)
but a lot of random events had to happen
Richard Wrangham (2:28:30.840)
to make this possible.
Lex Fridman (2:28:32.840)
And those random events, of course,
Richard Wrangham (2:28:33.840)
are the production of appropriate mutations.
Lex Fridman (2:28:37.840)
But the meaning of life is there is no meaning.
Lex Fridman (2:28:43.840)
The really big mystery of life is why is there a universe?
Lex Fridman (2:28:49.840)
And that same why propagates itself through the whole of it,
Richard Wrangham (2:28:53.840)
through the whole process of it,
Lex Fridman (2:28:55.840)
for the emergence of planets, the emergence,
Richard Wrangham (2:28:58.840)
first of all, of galaxies, of star systems.
Lex Fridman (2:29:02.840)
Of planets, of the proteins required
Richard Wrangham (2:29:09.840)
to construct the single cell organisms
Lex Fridman (2:29:11.840)
and the single cell organism becoming complex organisms
Lex Fridman (2:29:14.840)
and some of the clever fish crawling out onto the land
Lex Fridman (2:29:19.840)
and the whole of it.
Lex Fridman (2:29:20.840)
And then there's fire,
Lex Fridman (2:29:21.840)
some clever guy or lady invented fire,
Lex Fridman (2:29:25.840)
and then now here we are.
Lex Fridman (2:29:28.840)
It just does seem, speaking as a human,
Richard Wrangham (2:29:32.840)
kind of special that we're able to reflect on the whole thing
Lex Fridman (2:29:35.840)
or the whole...
Richard Wrangham (2:29:36.840)
Wonderful story.
Lex Fridman (2:29:37.840)
So much more interesting than the stories produced by religion.
Richard Wrangham (2:29:40.840)
Yeah, it is beautiful,
Lex Fridman (2:29:42.840)
but it just seems special that us humans
Richard Wrangham (2:29:44.840)
are able to write religions and construct stories
Lex Fridman (2:29:49.840)
and also do science.
Richard Wrangham (2:29:51.840)
That seems kind of amazing.
Lex Fridman (2:29:56.840)
It seems like the universe is such that it creates beings like us
Richard Wrangham (2:30:06.840)
that are able to investigate it.
Lex Fridman (2:30:10.840)
And that's why there's this longing for why.
Richard Wrangham (2:30:14.840)
That's just such a beautiful little pocket of complexity
Lex Fridman (2:30:20.840)
created by the universe.
Richard Wrangham (2:30:21.840)
It seems like there should be a why,
Lex Fridman (2:30:26.840)
but maybe there's just an infinite number of universes
Lex Fridman (2:30:28.840)
and this is the one that led to this particular set of humans.
Lex Fridman (2:30:33.840)
Even without an infinite number of universes,
Richard Wrangham (2:30:35.840)
I bet there's an infinite number of intelligent beings.
Lex Fridman (2:30:37.840)
Throughout this universe.
Richard Wrangham (2:30:39.840)
Yeah, now that we know how many planets
Lex Fridman (2:30:41.840)
have the right sort of conditions,
Richard Wrangham (2:30:43.840)
which is what, I can't remember, a lot.
Lex Fridman (2:30:46.840)
It's some significant percentage of all planets.
Richard Wrangham (2:30:49.840)
Then there are apparently billions of planets.
Lex Fridman (2:30:54.840)
Things happen so quickly on Earth.
Richard Wrangham (2:30:59.840)
Once you've got water, then you've got life.
Lex Fridman (2:31:02.840)
It did not take long for life to evolve
Richard Wrangham (2:31:07.840)
in the big scheme of things.
Lex Fridman (2:31:09.840)
And if you think, you look out there,
Richard Wrangham (2:31:11.840)
say there's a nearly infinite number of intelligent civilizations,
Lex Fridman (2:31:15.840)
one dimension you can look at is the proclivity to violence they have.
Richard Wrangham (2:31:21.840)
It's interesting to think what level of violence is useful
Lex Fridman (2:31:26.840)
for extending the life of a civilization.
Lex Fridman (2:31:30.840)
So we have a particular set of violence in our history.
Lex Fridman (2:31:33.840)
Maybe being too peaceful is a problem in the early days.
Richard Wrangham (2:31:37.840)
Maybe being too violent, quite obviously, is a problem.
Lex Fridman (2:31:41.840)
So you look at viruses.
Lex Fridman (2:31:42.840)
What kind of viruses on Earth propagate and succeed?
Lex Fridman (2:31:46.840)
If you're too deadly, that's a big problem.
Richard Wrangham (2:31:49.840)
If you're not deadly enough, that's also a problem.
Lex Fridman (2:31:52.840)
So that is a fascinating exploration of...
Richard Wrangham (2:31:55.840)
I don't see any evidence.
Lex Fridman (2:31:57.840)
I don't see where you're coming from
Richard Wrangham (2:31:58.840)
when you say that being too peaceful is a problem.
Lex Fridman (2:32:01.840)
Well, because, I'll say it this way,
Richard Wrangham (2:32:05.840)
death is a way to get rid of suboptimal solutions.
Lex Fridman (2:32:11.840)
So violence...
Lex Fridman (2:32:13.840)
But there's lots of ways to die without violence.
Lex Fridman (2:32:15.840)
Right. To me, death in itself is violence.
Lex Fridman (2:32:18.840)
And you can...
Lex Fridman (2:32:21.840)
I mean, a lot of people that talk about, for example,
Richard Wrangham (2:32:23.840)
longevity and disease and all that kind of stuff,
Lex Fridman (2:32:26.840)
they see death as a...
Richard Wrangham (2:32:28.840)
This is the way they talk about it.
Lex Fridman (2:32:30.840)
And it's interesting to philosophically think of it that way.
Richard Wrangham (2:32:33.840)
Death is like mass murder that's happening.
Lex Fridman (2:32:37.840)
People that try to, from a biological perspective, help extend life,
Richard Wrangham (2:32:42.840)
they see that you're helping...
Lex Fridman (2:32:46.840)
The biggest atrocity in the history of human civilization,
Richard Wrangham (2:32:50.840)
from their perspective,
Lex Fridman (2:32:52.840)
is not allocating all our resources to solving death.
Richard Wrangham (2:32:58.840)
Right. Because death is a kind of violence.
Lex Fridman (2:33:01.840)
It is the kind of murder that we're allowing
Richard Wrangham (2:33:04.840)
to be committed on us by nature.
Lex Fridman (2:33:06.840)
And so the flip side of that is death makes way for new life,
Richard Wrangham (2:33:11.840)
for new ideas.
Lex Fridman (2:33:14.840)
Yes. But that's got nothing to do with peace versus war.
Richard Wrangham (2:33:18.840)
You have animals that are very, very peaceful,
Lex Fridman (2:33:21.840)
but they evolve just in the same way as other animals do.
Richard Wrangham (2:33:24.840)
They just don't do it with death caused by violence.
Lex Fridman (2:33:28.840)
And violent death is premature death, surely.
Richard Wrangham (2:33:31.840)
I don't mind about people dying.
Lex Fridman (2:33:34.840)
What I mind about is people dying in their youth, middle age.
Richard Wrangham (2:33:40.840)
Prematurely.
Lex Fridman (2:33:41.840)
But some people would say all death is premature.
Richard Wrangham (2:33:44.840)
It certainly feels that way.
Lex Fridman (2:33:46.840)
It's died too soon.
Richard Wrangham (2:33:49.840)
Anyone who's ever died, died too soon.
Lex Fridman (2:33:51.840)
Yeah. Well, I mean, if we can become like sequoias
Lex Fridman (2:33:54.840)
and live for hundreds of years or thousands of years,
Lex Fridman (2:33:57.840)
that would be great.
Lex Fridman (2:33:59.840)
Do you ponder your own mortality?
Lex Fridman (2:34:01.840)
Are you afraid of death?
Richard Wrangham (2:34:03.840)
I don't think I'm afraid of it.
Lex Fridman (2:34:05.840)
I'm reconciled to the fact it's going to happen.
Richard Wrangham (2:34:09.840)
I just feel frustrated because I enjoy life,
Lex Fridman (2:34:13.840)
and I don't want to leave the party.
Richard Wrangham (2:34:18.840)
Yeah. It's kind of a fun party.
Lex Fridman (2:34:22.840)
I don't want to leave the party either.
Lex Fridman (2:34:24.840)
So however we got here, we made one heck of an awesome party.
Lex Fridman (2:34:27.840)
And you're right.
Richard Wrangham (2:34:30.840)
Having a party with a little bit less violence in it
Lex Fridman (2:34:33.840)
is an even more fun party.
Richard Wrangham (2:34:35.840)
Richard, I'm deeply honored that you spent time with me today.
Lex Fridman (2:34:38.840)
Your work is amazing.
Richard Wrangham (2:34:40.840)
It includes some of the deepest thinking about our human history
Lex Fridman (2:34:45.840)
and the nature of human civilization.
Lex Fridman (2:34:47.840)
So again, thank you so much for talking today.
Lex Fridman (2:34:50.840)
It's an honor.
Richard Wrangham (2:34:51.840)
Well, thanks for your great questions.
Lex Fridman (2:34:52.840)
It was a fun conversation.
Richard Wrangham (30:02.480)
with four individuals capable of just doing the damage.
Lex Fridman (30:06.320)
And so they can then move in and tear out his thorax
Lex Fridman (30:08.680)
and tear off his testicles
Lex Fridman (30:10.160)
and twist an arm until it breaks
Lex Fridman (30:12.560)
and do this appalling damage with no weapons.
Lex Fridman (30:18.440)
What is the way in which they prefer to commit the violence?
Richard Wrangham (30:23.640)
Is there something to be said
Lex Fridman (30:24.880)
about the actual process of it?
Lex Fridman (30:27.800)
Is there an artistry to it?
Lex Fridman (30:29.360)
So if you look at human warfare,
Richard Wrangham (30:32.400)
there's different parts in history
Lex Fridman (30:34.200)
prefer different kind of approaches to violence.
Richard Wrangham (30:37.800)
It had more to do with tools, I think, on the human side.
Lex Fridman (30:41.240)
But just the nature of violence itself,
Richard Wrangham (30:44.760)
sorry, the practice, the strategy of violence,
Lex Fridman (30:47.520)
is it basically the same?
Richard Wrangham (30:49.080)
You improvise, you immobilize the victim,
Lex Fridman (30:53.400)
and they just rip off different parts
Lex Fridman (30:54.960)
of their body kind of thing?
Lex Fridman (30:56.760)
Yeah, you have to understand
Richard Wrangham (30:58.200)
that these things are happening at high speed
Lex Fridman (31:01.640)
in thick vegetation, mostly,
Lex Fridman (31:04.640)
so that they have not been filmed carefully.
Lex Fridman (31:08.640)
We have a few little glimpses of them
Richard Wrangham (31:12.320)
from one or two people like David Watts,
Lex Fridman (31:15.200)
who's got some great video,
Lex Fridman (31:16.400)
but we don't know enough to be able to say that.
Lex Fridman (31:19.840)
It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles
Richard Wrangham (31:22.320)
that vary between communities, cultural styles,
Lex Fridman (31:26.880)
but it is possible.
Richard Wrangham (31:28.920)
It is possible, and one thing that is striking
Lex Fridman (31:32.720)
is that the number of times that an individual victim
Richard Wrangham (31:37.000)
has been killed immediately has been higher
Lex Fridman (31:41.200)
in Kibale forest in Uganda
Richard Wrangham (31:45.040)
than in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
Lex Fridman (31:48.480)
It's conceivable that's just chance.
Lex Fridman (31:50.000)
We don't have real numbers now, but what is this?
Lex Fridman (31:54.160)
I can't remember the exact numbers,
Lex Fridman (31:55.240)
but 10 versus 15 or something.
Lex Fridman (32:00.240)
So maybe they damaged to the point
Richard Wrangham (32:04.240)
of expecting a death in one place
Lex Fridman (32:07.080)
and they just finished it off in the other,
Lex Fridman (32:08.960)
but most likely that sort of difference
Lex Fridman (32:11.920)
will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.
Richard Wrangham (32:16.960)
You know, human beings are able to conceive
Lex Fridman (32:19.720)
of the philosophical notion of death, of mortality.
Richard Wrangham (32:23.200)
Is there any of that for chimps
Lex Fridman (32:28.360)
when they're thinking about violence?
Richard Wrangham (32:30.320)
Is violence, like what is the nature
Lex Fridman (32:33.360)
of their conception of violence, do you think?
Richard Wrangham (32:36.360)
Do they realize they're taking another conscious being's life
Lex Fridman (32:41.440)
or is it some kind of like optimization
Lex Fridman (32:45.760)
over the use of resources or something like that?
Lex Fridman (32:48.360)
I don't think it's, I can't think of any way
Richard Wrangham (32:53.280)
to get an answer to the question
Lex Fridman (32:55.120)
of what they know about that.
Richard Wrangham (32:58.080)
I think that the way to think about the motivation
Lex Fridman (33:03.240)
is rather like the motivation in sex.
Lex Fridman (33:09.800)
So when males are interested in having sex with a female,
Lex Fridman (33:14.560)
whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans,
Richard Wrangham (33:18.800)
they don't think about the fact
Lex Fridman (33:20.240)
that what this is going to do is to lead to a baby, mostly.
Richard Wrangham (33:25.200)
You're right.
Lex Fridman (33:26.040)
Mostly what they're thinking about is,
Richard Wrangham (33:27.520)
I wanna get my end away.
Lex Fridman (33:29.840)
And I think that it's a similar kind of process
Richard Wrangham (33:34.440)
with the chimps.
Lex Fridman (33:35.720)
What they are thinking about is,
Richard Wrangham (33:38.640)
I wanna kill this individual.
Lex Fridman (33:41.600)
And it's hard to imagine that taking
Richard Wrangham (33:45.520)
the other individual's perspective
Lex Fridman (33:47.560)
and thinking about what it means for them to die
Richard Wrangham (33:50.160)
is gonna be an important part of that.
Lex Fridman (33:51.720)
In fact, there's reasons to think
Richard Wrangham (33:53.720)
it should not be an important part of it
Lex Fridman (33:55.080)
because it might inhibit them
Lex Fridman (33:56.040)
and they don't want to be inhibited.
Lex Fridman (33:57.920)
The more efficient they are in doing this, the better.
Lex Fridman (34:01.640)
But I think it's interesting to think about
Lex Fridman (34:03.440)
this whole motivational question
Richard Wrangham (34:04.680)
because it does produce this rather haunting thought
Lex Fridman (34:09.680)
that there has been selection
Richard Wrangham (34:11.640)
in favor of enthusiasm about killing.
Lex Fridman (34:16.920)
And in our relatively gentle
Lex Fridman (34:21.920)
and deliberately moral society that we have today,
Lex Fridman (34:26.480)
it's very difficult for us to face the thought
Richard Wrangham (34:28.920)
that in all of us,
Lex Fridman (34:32.400)
there might've been residue
Lex Fridman (34:37.160)
and more than that, sort of an active potential
Lex Fridman (34:42.160)
for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else.
Lex Fridman (34:47.520)
But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously
Lex Fridman (34:52.520)
by thinking of circumstances in which it would be true
Richard Wrangham (34:57.840)
that the ordinary human male would be delighted
Lex Fridman (35:03.480)
to be part of a group that was killing someone.
Lex Fridman (35:06.520)
What you've got to do is to be in a position
Lex Fridman (35:10.360)
where you're regarding the victim
Richard Wrangham (35:12.520)
as dangerous and thoroughly hostile.
Lex Fridman (35:17.560)
But the pure enjoyment of violence.
Richard Wrangham (35:21.000)
There's, I don't know if you know this historian,
Lex Fridman (35:23.880)
Dan Carlin, he has a podcast.
Richard Wrangham (35:25.920)
He has an episode, three, four hour episode
Lex Fridman (35:32.040)
that I recommend to others.
Richard Wrangham (35:33.200)
It's quite haunting.
Lex Fridman (35:34.880)
But he takes us through an entire history.
Richard Wrangham (35:38.280)
It's called painfotainment.
Lex Fridman (35:40.720)
The history of humans
Richard Wrangham (35:45.360)
enjoying the murder of others in a large group.
Lex Fridman (35:48.840)
So like public executions were long part of human history.
Lex Fridman (35:53.560)
And there's something that for some reason,
Lex Fridman (35:58.200)
humans seem to have been drawn to just watching others die.
Lex Fridman (36:03.200)
And he ventures to say that that may still be part of us.
Lex Fridman (36:06.640)
For example, he said if it was possible to televise,
Richard Wrangham (36:11.240)
to stream online for example,
Lex Fridman (36:13.120)
the execution and the murder of somebody
Richard Wrangham (36:15.800)
or even the torture of somebody,
Lex Fridman (36:17.840)
that a very large fraction of the population on earth
Richard Wrangham (36:23.080)
would not be able to look away.
Lex Fridman (36:24.840)
They'd be drawn to that somehow.
Richard Wrangham (36:26.600)
As a very dark thought that we were drawn to that.
Lex Fridman (36:31.560)
So you think that's part of us in there somewhere.
Richard Wrangham (36:33.840)
That selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing
Lex Fridman (36:39.160)
and the enjoyment of observing
Richard Wrangham (36:44.120)
those in our tribe doing the killing.
Lex Fridman (36:48.120)
Yes, I mean, and that word you produced at the end
Richard Wrangham (36:51.000)
is critical I think.
Lex Fridman (36:52.520)
Because it would be a little bit weird I think
Richard Wrangham (36:57.320)
to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people
Lex Fridman (37:01.920)
in your own tribe being killed.
Richard Wrangham (37:04.240)
I don't think we're interested in violence
Lex Fridman (37:06.240)
for violence's sake that much.
Richard Wrangham (37:09.640)
It's when you get these social boundaries set up.
Lex Fridman (37:15.200)
And in today's world, happily,
Richard Wrangham (37:20.640)
we kind of are already one world.
Lex Fridman (37:23.800)
You have to dehumanize someone to get to the point
Richard Wrangham (37:29.160)
where they are really outside our recognition of a tribe
Lex Fridman (37:34.160)
at some level, which is the whole human species.
Lex Fridman (37:37.360)
But in ancient times, that would not have been true.
Lex Fridman (37:41.120)
Because in ancient times,
Richard Wrangham (37:43.880)
there are lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers
Lex Fridman (37:47.240)
in which the appearance of a stranger
Richard Wrangham (37:50.360)
would lead to an immediate response of shooting on sight.
Lex Fridman (37:56.280)
Because what was human was the people
Richard Wrangham (37:59.240)
that were in your society.
Lex Fridman (38:01.960)
And the other things that actually looked like us
Lex Fridman (38:04.840)
and were human in that sense, were not regarded as human.
Lex Fridman (38:09.400)
So there was a kind of automatic dehumanization
Richard Wrangham (38:12.360)
of everybody that didn't speak our language
Lex Fridman (38:14.920)
or hadn't already somehow become recognized
Richard Wrangham (38:19.200)
as sufficiently like us to escape
Lex Fridman (38:25.280)
the dehumanization contact.
Lex Fridman (38:27.760)
And so hopefully the story of human history
Lex Fridman (38:29.960)
is that tribalism fades away,
Richard Wrangham (38:35.240)
that our dehumanization, the natural desire to dehumanize
Lex Fridman (38:39.120)
or tendency to dehumanize groups
Richard Wrangham (38:42.280)
that are not within this tribe, decreases over time.
Lex Fridman (38:45.800)
And so then the desire for violence decreases over time.
Richard Wrangham (38:49.760)
Yeah, I mean, that's the optimistic perspective.
Lex Fridman (38:52.520)
And the great sort of concern, of course,
Richard Wrangham (38:56.240)
is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts
Lex Fridman (39:00.360)
and then dehumanization happens
Lex Fridman (39:02.120)
and then violence is released.
Lex Fridman (39:04.760)
As Hannah Arendt says,
Richard Wrangham (39:06.280)
there currently is no known alternative to war
Lex Fridman (39:10.120)
as a means of settling really important conflicts.
Lex Fridman (39:16.520)
So if we look at the big picture,
Lex Fridman (39:18.720)
what role has violence or do you think violence
Lex Fridman (39:21.960)
has played in the evolution of Homo sapiens?
Lex Fridman (39:24.960)
So we are quite an intelligent, quite a beautiful,
Richard Wrangham (39:29.640)
particular little branch on the evolutionary tree.
Lex Fridman (39:32.920)
What part of that was played by our tendency to be violent?
Richard Wrangham (39:41.760)
Well, I think that violence was responsible
Lex Fridman (39:43.880)
for creating your Homo sapiens.
Lex Fridman (39:49.280)
And that raises the question of what Homo sapiens is.
Lex Fridman (39:55.160)
Yes.
Richard Wrangham (39:57.240)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (39:58.720)
So nowadays people begin the concept
Richard Wrangham (40:06.640)
of what Homo sapiens is by thinking about features
Lex Fridman (40:10.800)
that are very obviously different
Richard Wrangham (40:12.360)
from all of the other species of Homo.
Lex Fridman (40:15.720)
And our large brain, our very rounded cranium,
Richard Wrangham (40:21.160)
our relatively small face, these are characteristics
Lex Fridman (40:24.240)
which are developed in a relatively modern way
Richard Wrangham (40:27.720)
by about 170,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman (40:31.120)
So that's one of the earliest skulls in Africa
Richard Wrangham (40:33.960)
that really captures that.
Lex Fridman (40:36.560)
But it has been argued that that is an episode
Richard Wrangham (40:44.280)
in a process that has been started substantially earlier.
Lex Fridman (40:50.240)
And there's no doubt that that's true.
Richard Wrangham (40:52.200)
Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing
Lex Fridman (40:55.080)
pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there.
Lex Fridman (41:00.280)
And it goes back to 300,000 years ago,
Lex Fridman (41:03.360)
315 literally is the time, the best estimate of a date
Richard Wrangham (41:08.560)
for a series of bones from Morocco
Lex Fridman (41:13.120)
that have been dated three or four years ago at that time
Lex Fridman (41:16.880)
and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens.
Lex Fridman (41:21.400)
Now at that point, they are only beginning
Richard Wrangham (41:25.600)
the trend of sapionization.
Lex Fridman (41:27.760)
And that trend consists basically of gracilization
Richard Wrangham (41:31.760)
of making our ancestors less robust,
Lex Fridman (41:36.960)
shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller brow ridge,
Richard Wrangham (41:40.680)
narrower face, thinner cranium,
Lex Fridman (41:45.440)
all these things that are associated with reduced violence.
Richard Wrangham (41:51.840)
Okay, so that's saying what,
Lex Fridman (41:54.240)
that's Homo sapiens beginning.
Lex Fridman (41:56.120)
So it began sometime three to 400,000 years ago
Lex Fridman (41:59.600)
because by 315,000 years ago,
Richard Wrangham (42:01.560)
you've already got something recognizable.
Lex Fridman (42:03.320)
So you're more on that side of things
Richard Wrangham (42:05.160)
that those are this gradual process.
Lex Fridman (42:06.680)
It's not 150, 170,000 years ago.
Richard Wrangham (42:09.200)
It started like 400,000 years ago and it's just.
Lex Fridman (42:14.200)
It started three to 400,000 years ago
Lex Fridman (42:16.160)
and if you look at 170, it's got even more like us.
Lex Fridman (42:19.680)
And then if you look at 100, it's got more like us again.
Lex Fridman (42:23.320)
And if you look at 50, it's more like us again.
Lex Fridman (42:25.160)
It's all the way, it's just getting
Richard Wrangham (42:26.720)
more and more like the moderns.
Lex Fridman (42:28.880)
So the question is what happened
Richard Wrangham (42:30.520)
between three and 400,000 years ago
Lex Fridman (42:32.320)
to produce Homo sapiens?
Lex Fridman (42:34.440)
And I think we have a pretty good answer now.
Lex Fridman (42:37.840)
And the answer comes from violence.
Lex Fridman (42:39.880)
And the story begins by focusing on this question.
Lex Fridman (42:43.840)
Why is it that in the human species,
Richard Wrangham (42:48.880)
we are unique among all primates
Lex Fridman (42:51.320)
in not having an alpha male in any group
Richard Wrangham (42:56.760)
in the sense that what we don't have
Lex Fridman (42:59.400)
is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male?
Lex Fridman (43:05.040)
And the answer that has been portrayed most richly
Lex Fridman (43:10.040)
by Christopher Boehm and whose work I've elaborated on
Richard Wrangham (43:15.040)
is that only in humans do you have a system
Lex Fridman (43:21.080)
by which any male who tries to bully others
Lex Fridman (43:26.320)
and become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla
Lex Fridman (43:29.720)
or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha bonobo
Richard Wrangham (43:31.720)
or an alpha baboon or anything like that,
Lex Fridman (43:33.960)
any male who tries to do that in humans
Richard Wrangham (43:36.600)
gets taken down by a coalition of beta males.
Lex Fridman (43:40.920)
That coalition.
Richard Wrangham (43:43.920)
That's a really good picture of human society, yes.
Lex Fridman (43:46.920)
I like it.
Richard Wrangham (43:47.760)
Okay, and that's the way all our societies work now.
Lex Fridman (43:50.760)
Yes.
Richard Wrangham (43:51.600)
Because individuals try and be alpha
Lex Fridman (43:53.680)
and then they get taken out.
Richard Wrangham (43:55.040)
Yeah, I mean, we don't usually think of ourselves
Lex Fridman (43:57.080)
as beta males, but yes, I suppose that's what democracy is.
Richard Wrangham (44:01.360)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (44:02.200)
And that's the way we think of ourselves.
Richard Wrangham (44:04.120)
I suppose that's what democracy is.
Lex Fridman (44:06.600)
Exactly.
Richard Wrangham (44:07.440)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (44:08.280)
Exactly.
Richard Wrangham (44:09.120)
Okay, so at some point alpha males get taken out.
Lex Fridman (44:14.680)
Well, what alpha males are are males
Richard Wrangham (44:16.920)
who respond with high reactive violence
Lex Fridman (44:20.720)
to any challenge to their status.
Richard Wrangham (44:22.840)
You see it all the time in primates.
Lex Fridman (44:25.160)
Some beta male thinks he's getting strong
Lex Fridman (44:28.120)
and maturing in wisdom and so on,
Lex Fridman (44:31.800)
and he refuses to kowtow to the alpha male.
Lex Fridman (44:35.960)
And the alpha male comes straight in and charges at him.
Lex Fridman (44:39.440)
Or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes
Lex Fridman (44:42.240)
and then take an opportunity to attack him.
Lex Fridman (44:48.720)
All of these primates have got a high tendency
Richard Wrangham (44:51.440)
for reactive aggression,
Lex Fridman (44:53.320)
and that enables the possibility of alpha males.
Richard Wrangham (44:56.520)
We don't.
Lex Fridman (44:57.360)
We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier.
Lex Fridman (45:00.520)
And the question is, when did that reduction happen?
Lex Fridman (45:04.040)
Well, cut to the famous experiments
Richard Wrangham (45:08.560)
by the Russian biologist Dmitry Belyaev,
Lex Fridman (45:12.320)
who tried domesticating wild animals.
Richard Wrangham (45:17.600)
When you domesticate wild animals,
Lex Fridman (45:19.960)
what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression.
Richard Wrangham (45:24.680)
You are selecting those individuals to breed
Lex Fridman (45:28.280)
who are most willing to be approached by a human
Richard Wrangham (45:32.000)
or by another member of their own species
Lex Fridman (45:34.400)
and are least likely to erupt in reactive aggression.
Lex Fridman (45:40.040)
And you only have to do that for a few generations
Lex Fridman (45:42.960)
to discover that there are changes in the skull.
Lex Fridman (45:47.120)
And those changes consist of shorter face, smaller teeth,
Lex Fridman (45:52.120)
reduced maleness,
Richard Wrangham (45:54.200)
the males become increasingly female like,
Lex Fridman (45:58.120)
and reduced brain size.
Richard Wrangham (46:01.320)
Well, the changes that are characteristic
Lex Fridman (46:03.320)
of domesticated animals in general
Richard Wrangham (46:05.240)
compared to wild animals are all found in Homo sapiens
Lex Fridman (46:08.760)
compared to our early ancestors.
Lex Fridman (46:11.520)
So it's a very strong signal
Lex Fridman (46:13.240)
that when we first see Homo sapiens,
Lex Fridman (46:15.920)
what we're seeing is that there's a lot of change
Lex Fridman (46:18.520)
in the shape of the animal.
Lex Fridman (46:20.560)
What we're seeing is evidence
Lex Fridman (46:22.920)
of a reduction in reactive aggression.
Lex Fridman (46:26.200)
And that suggests that what's happening with Homo sapiens
Lex Fridman (46:29.320)
is that that is the point
Richard Wrangham (46:32.040)
at which there is selection against the alpha males.
Lex Fridman (46:35.440)
And therefore, the way in which the selection happened
Richard Wrangham (46:39.280)
would have been the way it happens today.
Lex Fridman (46:41.440)
The beta males take them out.
Lex Fridman (46:44.160)
So I think that Homo sapiens is a species
Lex Fridman (46:47.480)
characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression
Richard Wrangham (46:53.280)
as a kind of incidental consequence
Lex Fridman (46:55.320)
of the suppression of the alpha male.
Lex Fridman (46:58.480)
And the story of our species
Lex Fridman (47:00.760)
is the story of how the beta males took charge
Lex Fridman (47:05.720)
and have been responsible for the generation
Lex Fridman (47:10.200)
of a new kind of human.
Lex Fridman (47:11.960)
And incidentally, for imposing on the society
Lex Fridman (47:20.120)
a new set of values.
Richard Wrangham (47:23.160)
Because when those beta males discovered
Lex Fridman (47:25.640)
that they could take out the previous alpha male
Lex Fridman (47:28.760)
and continue to do so,
Lex Fridman (47:29.880)
because in every generation there'll always be some male
Richard Wrangham (47:32.080)
who says, maybe I'll become the alpha male.
Lex Fridman (47:35.200)
So they just keep chopping them down.
Richard Wrangham (47:38.560)
In discovering that, they also obviously discovered
Lex Fridman (47:41.400)
that they could kill anybody in the group.
Richard Wrangham (47:43.400)
Mm hmm.
Lex Fridman (47:44.240)
Females, young males, anybody who didn't follow their values.
Lex Fridman (47:51.960)
And so this story is one in which the males of our species,
Lex Fridman (47:58.560)
and these would be the breeding males,
Richard Wrangham (48:01.920)
have been able to impose their values on everybody else.
Lex Fridman (48:05.800)
And there is two kind of values.
Richard Wrangham (48:07.000)
There's one kind of value is things
Lex Fridman (48:08.560)
that are good for the group.
Richard Wrangham (48:09.560)
Like, thou shalt not murder.
Lex Fridman (48:11.480)
Mm hmm.
Lex Fridman (48:12.920)
And the other kind of value is things
Lex Fridman (48:15.080)
that are good for the males.
Lex Fridman (48:18.480)
Such as, hey, guess what?
Lex Fridman (48:20.240)
When good food comes in, males get it first.
Richard Wrangham (48:22.480)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (48:24.520)
I mean, it's fascinating that that kind of set of ideals
Richard Wrangham (48:27.520)
could outcompete the others.
Lex Fridman (48:32.040)
Do you have a sense of why,
Richard Wrangham (48:34.400)
or maybe you can comment on Neanderthals
Lex Fridman (48:36.400)
and all the other early humans.
Lex Fridman (48:38.240)
Why did Homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish
Lex Fridman (48:43.240)
and all the other ones,
Lex Fridman (48:44.680)
all the other branches of evolution died out?
Lex Fridman (48:49.600)
Or got murdered out.
Richard Wrangham (48:50.440)
I mean, nowadays, when Homo sapiens meets Homo sapiens,
Lex Fridman (48:55.040)
and we don't know each other initially,
Richard Wrangham (48:58.120)
then conflict breaks out
Lex Fridman (48:59.640)
and the more militarily able group wins.
Richard Wrangham (49:04.640)
We've seen that everywhere throughout the age
Lex Fridman (49:07.720)
of exploration and throughout history.
Lex Fridman (49:12.160)
So I'm rather surprised.
Lex Fridman (49:13.880)
The conventional wisdom that you see nowadays
Richard Wrangham (49:18.280)
in contemporary anthropology is very reluctant
Lex Fridman (49:22.200)
to point to success in warfare
Richard Wrangham (49:25.840)
as the reason why sapiens wiped out Neanderthals
Lex Fridman (49:30.280)
within about 3000 years of the sapiens.
Richard Wrangham (49:33.560)
Coming into Europe 43,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman (49:37.920)
And people are much more inclined to say,
Richard Wrangham (49:40.440)
well, the Neanderthals were at low population density,
Lex Fridman (49:43.440)
so they just couldn't survive the demographic sort of sweep
Richard Wrangham (49:49.800)
or the disease came in.
Lex Fridman (49:52.160)
And maybe those things might've been important,
Lex Fridman (49:54.680)
but far and away, the most obvious possibility
Lex Fridman (49:58.200)
is that sapiens were just,
Richard Wrangham (50:02.120)
sapiens were just powerful.
Lex Fridman (50:06.720)
They had, everyone agrees they had larger groups.
Richard Wrangham (50:10.360)
They had better weapons.
Lex Fridman (50:12.560)
They had projectile weapons, bows and arrows,
Richard Wrangham (50:15.840)
to judge from the little microlith bits of flake,
Lex Fridman (50:22.000)
which the Neanderthals didn't.
Richard Wrangham (50:25.160)
Nowadays, there's evidence of interbreeding,
Lex Fridman (50:29.000)
quite extensive interbreeding
Richard Wrangham (50:30.400)
between sapiens and Neanderthals,
Lex Fridman (50:33.120)
as well as with some other groups.
Lex Fridman (50:35.160)
And sometimes people say, well, you know,
Lex Fridman (50:37.280)
so they loved each other.
Richard Wrangham (50:38.560)
They made love, not war.
Lex Fridman (50:40.440)
I think they made love and war.
Lex Fridman (50:42.760)
And it wouldn't necessarily mean too loving.
Lex Fridman (50:46.520)
I mean, if you just follow through
Richard Wrangham (50:49.280)
from typical ethnographies nowadays
Lex Fridman (50:51.720)
of when dominant groups meet subordinate groups,
Richard Wrangham (50:55.440)
they didn't know each other,
Lex Fridman (50:56.880)
then you can imagine that Neanderthal females
Richard Wrangham (51:00.520)
would essentially be captured
Lex Fridman (51:02.400)
and taken into sapiens groups.
Richard Wrangham (51:07.080)
Maybe you can comment on this cautiously and eloquently.
Lex Fridman (51:13.840)
What's the role of sexual violence in human evolution?
Richard Wrangham (51:18.200)
Because you mentioned taking Neanderthal females.
Lex Fridman (51:21.480)
You've also mentioned that some of these rules
Richard Wrangham (51:23.920)
are defined by the male side of the society.
Lex Fridman (51:28.760)
What's the role of sexual violence in this story?
Richard Wrangham (51:33.080)
I think you've got to distinguish
Lex Fridman (51:34.080)
between groups and within groups.
Lex Fridman (51:37.600)
And I think the world has been slowly waking up
Lex Fridman (51:43.200)
over the last several decades
Richard Wrangham (51:46.000)
to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war.
Lex Fridman (51:51.000)
And that to me says that it's just another example
Richard Wrangham (51:58.680)
of power corrupts because when frustrated,
Lex Fridman (52:04.800)
scared, elated soldiers come upon females
Richard Wrangham (52:11.400)
in a group that has been essential dehumanization of,
Lex Fridman (52:16.400)
then they get carried away by opportunity.
Richard Wrangham (52:21.680)
It is not always possible to argue
Lex Fridman (52:25.080)
that this is adaptive nowadays
Richard Wrangham (52:28.480)
because you get lots and lots of stories
Lex Fridman (52:31.120)
of women being abused to the point of being killed.
Richard Wrangham (52:38.640)
She'll be gang raped and then killed.
Lex Fridman (52:41.200)
There's lots of terrible cases of that reported
Richard Wrangham (52:46.120)
from all sorts of different wars.
Lex Fridman (52:49.560)
But you can see that that could build on a pattern
Richard Wrangham (52:54.840)
that would have been adaptive
Lex Fridman (52:57.360)
if happening under so much less extreme circumstances.
Richard Wrangham (53:02.880)
The war is very extreme nowadays
Lex Fridman (53:05.160)
in the sense that you get battles
Richard Wrangham (53:07.440)
in which people are sent by a military hierarchy
Lex Fridman (53:11.240)
into a war situation in which they do not feel
Lex Fridman (53:14.120)
what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt,
Lex Fridman (53:16.440)
which would have been that if we attack,
Richard Wrangham (53:18.600)
we have an excellent chance of getting away with it.
Lex Fridman (53:21.920)
Nowadays, you're sent in across the Somme or whatever it is
Lex Fridman (53:25.840)
and there's a very high chance you will be killed.
Lex Fridman (53:28.640)
And that's totally unnatural
Lex Fridman (53:30.280)
and a novel evolutionary experience, I think.
Lex Fridman (53:34.760)
Then there's sexual coercion within groups.
Lex Fridman (53:37.480)
And so that takes various kinds of forms.
Lex Fridman (53:42.120)
But nowadays, of course,
Richard Wrangham (53:44.720)
I think people recognize increasingly
Lex Fridman (53:46.960)
that the principle form of sexual intimidation
Lex Fridman (53:53.440)
and rape occurs within relationships.
Lex Fridman (53:58.400)
It's not stranger rape
Richard Wrangham (53:59.840)
that is really statistically important.
Lex Fridman (54:03.400)
There's much more what happens behind the walls
Richard Wrangham (54:08.400)
of a bedroom where people have been living for some time.
Lex Fridman (54:14.400)
And just two sort of thoughts and observations about this.
Richard Wrangham (54:20.400)
One is that it may seem odd
Lex Fridman (54:25.320)
that males should think it a good idea, as it were,
Richard Wrangham (54:34.360)
to impose themselves sexually on someone
Lex Fridman (54:37.800)
with whom they have a relationship.
Lex Fridman (54:40.960)
But what they're doing is intimidating someone
Lex Fridman (54:45.480)
in a relationship in which the relative power
Richard Wrangham (54:48.840)
in the relationship has continuing significance
Lex Fridman (54:52.280)
for a long time.
Lex Fridman (54:53.800)
And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual.
Lex Fridman (54:58.320)
It's to do with domestic relationships,
Richard Wrangham (55:01.360)
it's to do with the man getting his own way all the way.
Lex Fridman (55:05.680)
It's power dynamics and the sexual aggression
Richard Wrangham (55:09.800)
is one of the tools to regain power,
Lex Fridman (55:12.480)
gain power, gain more power and that kind of thing.
Richard Wrangham (55:14.880)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (55:16.680)
And in that respect, it's worth noting
Richard Wrangham (55:21.320)
that although this wasn't appreciated for some time,
Lex Fridman (55:25.680)
it's emerging that in a bunch of primates
Richard Wrangham (55:28.320)
you have somewhat similar, somewhat parallel
Lex Fridman (55:32.160)
kinds of sexual intimidation
Richard Wrangham (55:35.000)
where males will target particular females,
Lex Fridman (55:37.800)
even in a group in which the norm is for females
Richard Wrangham (55:41.280)
to mate with multiple males.
Lex Fridman (55:43.480)
But each male will target a particular female
Lex Fridman (55:45.920)
and the more he is aggressive towards her,
Lex Fridman (55:49.560)
then the more she conforms to his wishes
Richard Wrangham (55:53.160)
when he wants to mate.
Lex Fridman (55:55.240)
So a long term pattern of sexual intimidation.
Lex Fridman (55:58.840)
So there's that aspect.
Lex Fridman (56:00.320)
The other aspect I would just note is that
Richard Wrangham (56:02.680)
males get away with a lot compared to females
Lex Fridman (56:10.240)
in any kind of intersexual conflict.
Lex Fridman (56:16.160)
So the punishment, here's one example of this,
Lex Fridman (56:19.960)
the punishment for a husband killing a wife
Richard Wrangham (56:23.520)
has always been much less than the punishment
Lex Fridman (56:25.640)
for a wife killing a husband.
Lex Fridman (56:29.960)
And you see similar sorts of things
Lex Fridman (56:32.200)
in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on.
Richard Wrangham (56:38.680)
I bring this up in the context of males
Lex Fridman (56:42.960)
sexually intimidating their partners,
Richard Wrangham (56:47.200)
be it wives or whoever,
Lex Fridman (56:50.680)
because it's a reminder that
Richard Wrangham (56:53.560)
it's basically a patriarchal world that we have come from.
Lex Fridman (56:57.800)
A patriarchal world in which male alliances
Richard Wrangham (57:02.080)
tend to support males and take advantage of the fact
Lex Fridman (57:06.280)
that they have political power at the expense of females.
Lex Fridman (57:09.760)
And I would say that that all goes back
Lex Fridman (57:12.000)
to what happened three to 400,000 years ago
Richard Wrangham (57:14.800)
when the beta males took charge
Lex Fridman (57:16.680)
and they started imposing their own norms
Richard Wrangham (57:19.160)
on society as a whole and they've continued to do so.
Lex Fridman (57:22.520)
And we now look at ourselves and Jordan Peterson says,
Richard Wrangham (57:26.200)
we are not a patriarchal society.
Lex Fridman (57:28.800)
Well, it's true that the laws try and make it even handed
Richard Wrangham (57:33.000)
nowadays between males and females,
Lex Fridman (57:35.440)
but obviously we are patriarchal de facto
Richard Wrangham (57:38.840)
because society still in many ways supports men
Lex Fridman (57:45.360)
better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.
Lex Fridman (57:48.040)
So beta male patriarchal.
Lex Fridman (57:51.880)
If we're looking at the evolutionary history.
Richard Wrangham (57:55.320)
Okay, is there, maybe sticking on Jordan for a second,
Lex Fridman (57:58.880)
is there, so he's a psychologist, right?
Lex Fridman (58:04.440)
And what part of the picture do you think he's missing
Lex Fridman (58:09.960)
in analyzing the human relations?
Richard Wrangham (58:16.120)
Like what does he need to understand
Lex Fridman (58:20.120)
about our origins in violence
Lex Fridman (58:22.400)
and the way that society has been constructed?
Lex Fridman (58:24.960)
Or I don't want to go deep into his missing perspectives,
Lex Fridman (58:30.320)
but I just think that what he's doing
Lex Fridman (58:34.520)
in that particular example is focusing
Richard Wrangham (58:37.800)
on the legalistic position.
Lex Fridman (58:41.080)
And that's great that you do not find formal patriarchy
Richard Wrangham (58:47.480)
in the law, anything like to the extent
Lex Fridman (58:49.720)
that you could find it 100 years ago and so on.
Richard Wrangham (58:53.800)
Women have got the vote now, hooray.
Lex Fridman (58:56.080)
But it took a long time for women to get the vote.
Lex Fridman (58:58.640)
And it remains the case that women suffer
Lex Fridman (59:06.320)
in various kinds of ways.
Richard Wrangham (59:08.560)
I mean, a woman who has lots of sexual partners
Lex Fridman (59:15.480)
is treated much more rudely than a male
Richard Wrangham (59:18.560)
who has lots of sexual partners.
Lex Fridman (59:21.240)
There are all sorts of informal ways
Richard Wrangham (59:23.120)
in which it's rougher being a woman than it is a man.
Lex Fridman (59:27.200)
And if we look at the surface layer of the law,
Richard Wrangham (59:32.560)
we may miss the deeper human nature,
Lex Fridman (59:38.000)
like the origins of our human nature that still operates
Richard Wrangham (59:41.200)
no matter what the law says.
Lex Fridman (59:42.600)
Yeah, which is, you know, human nature is awkward
Richard Wrangham (59:47.120)
because it includes some unpleasant features
Lex Fridman (59:50.960)
that when we sit back and reflect about them,
Richard Wrangham (59:54.200)
we would like them to go away.
Lex Fridman (59:57.920)
But it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned
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