Founding Evolutionary Psychology with Leda Cosmides
2026-04-07 12:00:00.000 +00:00

All right, I'm David Pinsoff. I'm David Petrozowski. This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast, which is a podcast about actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. Enjoy. David, today we have uh somebody who needs no introduction, Lita Cosmodes. Yes. Lita Cosmodes uh together with John Tuby invented the field of evolutionary psychology, which is the name of this podcast, in fact, in case you you didn't know that. so it was uh a real treat to talk to Leda. Um we kind of wanted to save her for a while. I mean we we're almost a year now, I think, since we started. Almost a year, yeah. I was gonna cut the number of guests, but yeah, I think we're getting getting up on a year,

yeah. Yeah, but we wanted to like get a lot of practice before we we invited Leda on to like, you know, figure out how to do this podcasting thing. That's right. We wanted to go from JV to V varsity or at least from like kindergarten to elementary school. Um although we're we're probably just not even at the we're just at the crawling to the cruising stage here. Yeah. But anyway, I mean like it was just uh a fantastic conversation, just a total delight talking to Leda and just learning like a really interesting history and sociology of science and like how this thing got off the ground and there are a lot of fun human stories that emerged. Um and uh yeah it was it was a very reflective episode about how evolutionary psychology

got going, uh where it's headed, w whether there are any regrets. Uh we we we talked a bit about economics and rationality and stuff, but mainly it was just kind of um it was kind of a sweeping retrospective of of how we got here. Yeah. I it's an important part of the scientific record. And I think, you know, when you're talking about at the level of Lita or John, we're just sort of part of the messengers of getting this in the scientific record. And I'm I'm happy that we got this a little bit and we'll I'm sure we'll have Lita back on. But yeah, without further ado, here is sort of uh episode one of Lita on Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. Enjoy. Lita, it is um well overdue for us to have you on um uh about

uh a podcast about evolutionary psychology. Um uh I actually on purpose wanted to not have you on right away though, because I also we also wanted to have people who are sort of younger doing the work um uh in uh um in their earlier career stages on. Many of them we asked how they got into it and uh into EpSec or into evolutionary approaches to behavior, and um almost invariably somebody read a book or a paper that inspired them. Uh probably, I don't know, David, you tell me, but like I think 30 to 75 percent of those was a paper by or book by you and John. Um paper or even a conversation or a c class they sat in on a class or whatever. Exactly. Yes. Except for Ed Hagen, who apparently did not like John's class and disagreed with John while

he was sitting in the class, which to me was hilarious. Like I I would have loved to talk to Ed Hagen back then. Um uh but uh but but but but this is all a lead-in to um your story about how you got into evolutionary psychology cannot be I read myself and therefore I was inspired to do it. Um so so this this begs the question of uh how does a uh a younger uh or very young Lita Cosmodes um you know uh start moving towards taking an evolutionary approach to psychology. And that's obviously a big, a big question. Um and we don't have to the whole it's not okay, then if if we please if I remember correctly, Dave, you were one of the people that you found the adapted mind in your college library. Right.

Which makes the uh pain of putting it together worth it. Right. Exactly. It was it was uh human universals, and then human universals led me to the the index of human universals, and then it was to um uh a bunch of your papers and then the adapted mind. Yeah. Um uh well okay well this will sound odd, um, but um I I was uh a child during the late 60s and um everybody everything seemed everybody seemed to be angry at one another and I lived in a suburb of Washington DC and there were protests that was the daily news, which huge protest was happening and it was during the Vietnam era and um just and then there was the youth culture and the generation gap and everybody just seemed angry all the time.

And I kept thinking there has to be a better way for people to live. And then I kept thinking about that through junior high and high school, especially high school. And then I and thinking about that, then I thought, yeah, but how would you know what that was unless you knew something about human nature? So I thought, okay, well then I gotta I I need to understand human nature. And um and it was sort of in a in a vague sense. I mean I I I read in in tenth and eleventh grade, uh read and then reread um uh B. F. Skinner's Walden 2, which is his you it was a very famous book that almost nobody knows anymore. Um it would it's uh it's his utopian uh novel in which a behaviorist, basically him, is uh running society and

running a community. Walden is uh it's it's as a Walden Pun, but this is Walden two. Um and uh he's running it based on uh behaviorist principles and of of positive and negative reinforcement. And it was very clear that he thought that the mind was a blank slate, that everything people do is because of positive and negative reinforcement, which is sometimes called the equipotentiality assumption that any stimulus has an equal potential for reinforcing any response. And I thought that was just wrong. I thought it was really wrong. It made no sense to me because life is too various. Um, so sitting in a boring suburb of Washington, DC, you know, I thought, well, if that if what he's saying was true, you'd see people like swinging from the chandeliers.

I mean, you wouldn't everybody was basically behaving the same way, you know. And I just thought you'd see a hugely more beh variation between people if everything that you did was because of a history of reinforcement. And also, like, how consistent can that history of reinforcement be? It made no sense to me. Plus, it was, you know, he was basically arguing things like, you know, that you could, through the right history of reinforcement, you could make, you know, a mother just as happy to be nursing somebody else's child as her own child, or that you could make somebody deliriously happy to walk in on their spouse having sex with somebody else um, and and just with the right history of reinforcement, they'd be thrilled by that.

Um, and that just didn't seem that didn't make sense to me either. So when I um I mean, it always my dad was a psychopharmacologist, an early psychopharmacologist, and used to pound the table about the importance of interdisciplinary research, which as a child I always thought uh obviously, why why is he why why is he pounding the table? Sometimes it would be about the Freudians because they were very much against psychopharmacology. And but it was he was at NIH and he was always pounding the table. I was like, why do you have to pound the table? I don't understand this table pounding about this because this is obvious. And uh, you know, when I grew up, I realized it it was not obvious to most people.

And I guess also in that environment, the idea of taking a more of a some sort of biological approach to understanding human nature made sense to me. But at the time, by the time I was a senior in college and ready to start uh college, uh the only thing like that that I knew about um was uh was psychobiology. But in my freshman year, I realized I don't like psychobio. I mean, I'm glad people do it. I'm glad people study neurons and hormones. But it wasn't telling me anything even remotely like what I wanted to know. It was not what I wanted to know. And I was by the end of my freshman year, I was having kind of a crisis because I didn't know what to major in. I I hated the process. Like I would have gone nuts doing that research.

I'm glad there's people that do that research, to be clear, but it shouldn't be me. And I thought, how can I do? I still want to understand human nature, but how can I do that if I don't feel like I'm getting any answers and if the process is not something, it is something that I hate, you know. And so that summer I did a lot of things that summer. Among them, among the things that I I read, just because they were on my parents' shelf, uh, I I read Conrad Lorenz's On Aggression and Robert Ardry's territorial imperative. And this is this was basically ethology. Um and if you think about it, ethology kind of is cognitive psychology. Uh um Not with the full trappings of an information processing revolution that happened in the next few years.

But it is, it is trying to understand the design of the mind of non human organisms in their natural environment. And I thought that was very interesting. I wasn't aware of the things about group selection versus not group selection and in in Conrad Lorentz's on aggression and so on. But but I thought those were interesting, but I still had no idea what what I had to declare a major. And um so when I I got back to school like a week early or something, and so I thought freshman week, they had the year before, the a year before, they had they had told us to get two these two books to read before we got there because freshman week there were going to be and it's gonna be these two different lectures for us.

And uh one of them was E.O. Wilson and the book was The Ant Society. And I thought that lecture was really interesting. I thought I thought it was really interesting. So not knowing what to do, I thought, I'll talk to Professor Wilson about this. He seemed like an interesting guy. You know, I'll see see what he says about this. And so I went to um I made an appointment with him and he was important for the rest of my life, five minutes late. And um that was important because on the cork board next to his door, there was the fly leaf of his new book that had just come out. This is this is fall of 1976. Uh, his new book, Sociobiology, which I'd never heard of before. And on the fly leaf, on the back fly leaf, it said, This field is it's not about

how organisms do things. It's about why they do things. You know, why do they behave this way rather than that way? Why why? And it said it applied to humans too. And I thought, why? That's what I that's what I want to know. Why? Why do we behave the way that we do? So uh with the hubris of a 19 year old, um when he he showed up, I said, okay, Professor Wilson, this sociobiology thing that you wrote about. That's what I want to major in. That's what I want to do. I want to understand human nature. I want to do it from this perspective, what should I do? What should I major in? And and he said very sensibly, he said, well you could either major in psychology or in biology. He said, if you later decide to go to graduate school in evolutionary biology, that would

be hard to do if you majored in psychology as an undergraduate. On the other hand, if you've got a good foundation in evolutionary biology, then you would probably still be able to go to graduate school in psychology if you wanted. So I said, okay, I'll do that. And then he said, and then uh, well, this had good and bad consequences. But he says, and um, you should get this uh younger professor, Robert Trivers, to be your advisor. And so I said, okay. And uh so so that that's how, well, but see the thing, I still wanted to understand human nature. And that's more than the questions about ultimate causation. That's more than why. It's it's how, but it's how on a cognitive level. And and and cognitive thinking was it was on the newer side at that time.

And um but um it it w it was clear that that was necessary, that that was a necessary level of explanation is uh and what what information are you processing what do you what's the design of the mind um uh and that wasn't what was happening in so there was a very there was there was Irvine Voer uh who's an anthropologist who was part of several different revolutions was at Harvard and he had um something called the Simeon Seminar. And um the Simeon Seminar met like four or five times a semester, and uh it was in Herb DeVore's living room, and some of those famous people in the field came through and talked at at that, and including um John Maynard Smith, the great evolutionary biologist. Richard Dawkins did, W.

D. Hamilton. Irv had a lot of graduate students who were primatologists and doing field work in primatology. And so it was it it was it was like his lab group in a way. But with the people coming through, just astonishing. Joseph Sheffer, who did the red light of incest, who did the Kabot studies on incest, all these people were coming through living room. Um, and that was phenomenal and a and and and a really good background in evolutionary biology and some thinking and uh by people who were approaching behavior from an evolutionary point of view, but very broadly. So a lot of what they were doing was um Noting correspondences that were kind of loose between selection pressures and social organization.

So, yes, kin selection implies that kinship will be a very important part of uh of of human life and who we help and so on. Um And yes, anthropologically, you see that many societies are organized along kin lines, although in complicated ways. But it was too it was too loose of a correspondence. It was it was really it was there was a missing level. There was selection pressures, and then there was manifest social organization. but the thing that's connecting them is missing because there has to be a mind that of people have to have minds that are making decisions and wanting to do some things and not other things. I mean that's the human nature part. And so in those in the Simeon seminars that that was largely missing.

And um and and people would also engage in fitness teleology, um, including by the way, Trivers. Um what is yeah, go ahead. Yeah, sorry. So fitness teleology is it's it's sort of assuming well, it's assuming that people are doing things to spread their genes, as if they have a motive to spread their genes, as if it's as if it's a depth psychology, and that whatever you may be thinking on the surface, deep down you have you want to spread your genes. And and uh without people really exactly understanding that there were psychological implications to what they were saying. And so they'd say, so they'd say things like, well, these monks, medieval monks who are are being celibate, how are they, they must be doing that to increase their

inclusive fitness. How is that how is that increasing their inclusive fitness? Oh well maybe they're helping their their siblings, you know, maybe it's a helpers at the nest kind of phenomenon. No, you have a psychology, it's leading you in different environments to do certain things. And it's not because deep down you're trying to spread your genes. I don't think it makes any sense to say that a celibate monk is choosing to be a celibate monk instead of having a family to spread his genes. It just that that's that that's not what natural selection is about. Natural selection is a it's it's an account, it's a causal account of how you come to have the phenotype that you have. And in this case, it's a cognitive phenotype.

In this case, it's how do you come to have the psychological mechanisms that you have. Okay. And so when a mother loves her child and is taking care of her child, it's not because deep down she wants to spread her genes. That has nothing to do with it. It's that ma mammal mothers who had psychological mechanisms that caused them to care for their children, to provision their children, to make sure they're safe, had more children. They had more offspring than those that neglected their offspring. And that's why selection favored maternal psychologies that cause you to big take care of your children. Um it's not adept psychology. And um, so a lot of that's what I mean by fitness teleology. People are acting as if you have a deep down motive to spread your genes.

And and that's a forward-looking thing. That's that's it's perspective. It's it's it's assuming that here I am, there are various things I could do right now, and I will choose them based on which one is going to my genes the most. And also, natural selection is not about spreading your genes in general. It's about why one genes underlying one design feature outcompete those underlying another design feature. So this whole level of design was missing in how people were talking about it. Except, of course, from George Williams and adaptation to natural selection, which many of us uh had read. But when people read, it's like a Rorschach test. When people read, anybody watching this, if you haven't read George Williams' 1966

adaptation, natural selection, do it now. It's still it's it's still a it's still a classic. Yes. And and and but but people's reactions to George Williams, it's almost like a workshack test. Um, because it's two components of it. One is the gene is a unit of selection. And he's very clear, and he talks about the subtitle is a critique of some current evolutionary thought. And so he brings up a Scottish biologist named Wynne Edwards, who proposed that the reason why in populations of deer there'll be like the weaker, the 90-pound weaklings will well, and hard winters will not try to reproduce. And he said that's in order for the stronger ones to reproduce, and that's for the good of the group.

And George Williams goes through the logic of that and you know why that's not going to work because what if there's a mutation in one of these deer that makes them want to um try to have have sex if it's safe to do so. Um that that's going to be favored over this restraint and so on. So one part of George Williams is the gene as a unit of selection. And this is actually the first book of evolutionary biology I read, which is because Selfish Gene wasn't out yet. And it's it's it's it's really it's it's it's great, but it was hard going for that to be your first reality. Um but the second half of George Williams was about adaptationism. And then in fact it starts out saying adaptation is an onerous concept for which you have

to have evidence of special design and you have to show that um that the trait you're talking about is not more uh parsimoniously explained as a byproduct of another adaptation or as a byproduct of just physical law. He says, so when a to understand why a fine fish comes out of the ocean, yes, you have to evoke adaptations to understand why it comes out of the ocean, but why it comes back in, that's gravity, right? Um uh you know, you don't even need to Nothing special for it coming back in. Um, although I suppose there could be different ways you could land back in. But anyway, um, so it's funny because some people, when they read George Williams, they get the adaptationism out of it, and other people read it and they get the gene as a unit of

selection out of it, and it's as if they're having seen the adaptation part. So George Williams had both, and his emphasis was on design. That I think he even says, I don't remember if he says this or he quotes somebody else saying he says the question is not reproduction per se, the question is designed for reproduction. And so I I only took two psychology courses as a biology major. I took um I took my first freshman year a social psychology course. It was it was okay. Um it was um uh but then um I took a behaviorist course uh called Motivation in Action that was taught by Richard Hernstein, who was um, you know, uh a complicated person, but a very brilliant but complicated person. And it's from him that I actually learned about the equitentiality assumption.

I learned that there was a name. I learned that there was a name for the thing that I objected to in Skinner's book. The thing to realize is that Hernstein was Skinner's star pupil and basically took over the Skinner labs at Harvard. And um they only had two major disputes in their life. Um one was that Skinner wanted to believe, because he he was very utopian in his thinking, and he wanted to believe that punishment doesn't work, that causing pain uh does not work in terms of operate conditioning, but it c clearly does. And um, I mean, Skinner thought of Mao's China as sort of a large-scale experiment in Weldon II. Um, and at the time that it was a very closed society. And um, so well, you could know that very bad things were happening in Maoist China, but

if you wanted to not know, you could not know. And so one of their big arguments was about that, because Skinner didn't want to acknowledge that that was a thing. But the other one was about the equipotentiality assumption, because Hernstein knew that that was false. And he knew it because there had been a number of different demonstrations that it's false. One of the biggest ones was the experiments by John Garcia, which if you if you had to sometimes people will say, Well, what is the most important experiment of the 20th century in psychology? Um, I would say the Garcia's experiments. This is where about learned taste aversions, and he's um showing that he had rats that are simultaneously, they they they taste an unusual

flavor. And at the same time, a red light goes on and a I think it's a red light, and a sound goes on. Then what happens is one set of the rats, their feet are shocked two seconds later. The other set of rats, they're dosed with um X-rays, or sometimes it was a chemical, that makes them nauseated, that nauseates them. Rats don't actually vomit uh, but they become nauseated. And um then he the question was if they're then if you're if the rats then presented with the option to drink to go to unflavored water with the light and the sound, or flavored water with no light and sound, are they equally likely to go to either one? And the answer is not at all. The ones who were nauseated avoided the flavored water, the

unusually flavored water. And they were fine going to where the light and sound was. They were lapping up the water. His graph is actually laps per minute. They were happy to drink the unflavored water with the light and sound. And the and the ones who had had their feet shocked, they were fine drinking the flavored water. They did not avoid the flavored water. And basically it was showing that it's completely false that it's equally easy to pair any stimulus with any response. You can pair the stimulus of a taste very easily with nausea, but you cannot pair it with the electric shock to the feet. They just don't buy it. And you can very easily pair the electric shock to the feet with the light and

sound, but they they don't they they don't avoid at all the the flavored water. And yet they were exposed to all three at the same time, and then they were subjected to this negative, this negative outcome. There couldn't be a more clear refutation of the equipentiality assumption, and using the same methods that behaviors typically use. And it was so disturbing to the behaviors community that he couldn't get it published for a really long time. Journalists say, well, he must have done something wrong because this violates the other thing. Well, at least they were following their logic, right? If they understood, understood the inhalements. So Hernstein was what there was was a disagreement with Skinner.

Did Skinner or did Hernstein communicate what Skinner thought about this? Oh yeah. So oh yeah. So Hernstein wrote this great paper. It's still a great paper, and it's an American psychologist in 1978. And the title it ended up with is The Evolution of Behaviorism. Okay. But that was not its initial title. It's a paper that's saying why the equal potentiality assumption is false. Okay. And it goes through Garcia and it goes through the Breland and Breland expense, their animal trainers that were trying to they just couldn't get the raccoons in their commercial to do certain things, you know, uh it they it was there they I won't go through it, but yeah, they were finding that it was the the the commercial they were trying to create, it

was eliciting a species typical behavior where raccoons rub something and dip it and anyway, something they were not being reforced reinforced to do. Um and um I can't remember which other things were in it. It also had the observation that when it comes to similarity, psychological similarity, it's not, we don't construe similarity along simple physical dimensions like skinner or thought. If you think about similarity of colors in terms of wavelength, red is the longest wavelength and blue is the shortest wavelength. green is intermediate. If it was simple physical dimensions, we should see green is more similar to red than blue is. But that's not at all true. Through purple, it's like the color circle, it's better, the color spectrum is

electromagnetic spectrum bent like this. And red is seen as much more similar to blue than to green, which is at the other end of the color circle. And so one of the things that her side is pointing out is that from a psychological point of view, the similarity space that we have, it's not simple physical dimensions. The same is true when it comes to, you know, a piano middle C sounds more like the C that comes an octave above than it does to D. Anyway, the the thing was the initial title of the paper was post-scanarian behaviorism. And he said Skinner found it on his desk, saw that on his desk and hit the roof. Um, and uh I was very, very upset. And uh, which is why he changed it to you know, the evolution of behaviorism.

Um that a draft? I mean it was a draft. Okay, because I mean it was Skinner, so who knows? Maybe it could have gotten published and re re uh redacted to the different title. Uh no no no no no no he but okay yeah yeah yeah he he it it just upset skinner so much that he right but it's a bet evolution behavior is a better title anyway. It's pretty good yeah it it's more it it's more indicative of the content of the paper than postgenarian behaviorism. Oh it's not about the person yeah no but that was like a full throated why equipotentiality is wrong. Now it's not that it's not that Hernstein then liked domain specific uh the idea of domain-specific mechanism. He called that botanizing drives. He really didn't like that.

Um, he continued to not like that. It was so funny, he had the same conversation, had had the same conversation with John five years earlier that he had with me about this kind of thing. Um, but anyway, uh so I was very I I I I was in in additionally, even though I wasn't a psychology major, I was in the environment of a psychologist because I was doing my I was such an idiot. Um I was doing my research like uh uh what like um uh senior thesis research, but I I started it earlier um on um with pigeons on mental rotation in pigeons and and the reason that I I had been talking with her site was one of the people that was interesting to go to his office hours. There were certain professors that I uh were very interesting to go to office hours and

talk to. And so I would I was a big office hour grower. And in fact that's actually partly because of Hernstein, because he had said in in the class that I took my sophomore year, he'd said, um, you know, I have to have two hours of office hours every week and nobody ever comes. And I'm just sitting there bored. And so I thought, I'll come. So I sort of I st that's how I became an office hour goer. But um uh he um And what in talking to him, one of the things, one thing he's he he brought up, Roger Shepard had done the mental rotation studies that came out, the Shepherd and Metzler studies in 1971. And actually that was one of the things that made a big impression on Hernstein and why he put himself, they had there were research and training groups in the psychology department,

um, and uh Rather than areas, so that a person could be on several research and training groups. And, you know, Kernstein had always been on the behaviorist one, but it was the Roger Shepherd's mental rotation experiments that caused him to put himself on the cognitive one as well. Because it was very clear that the most parsimonious explanation for those results was that there's that there's mental representations and that that people are imagining with these blocks that you can't tell by their features. They're imagining that they're a rotation to see whether they're both left handed or one's left handed, one's right handed, and so on. Um, that's where I learned about Roger Shepherd's research, which is funny because I ended

up doing a postdoc with Roger Shepherd later. But the reason I end up doing this thing with pigeons is because Hernstein in in in the hole at some point uh was passing by. He he's very mysteriously said that this would be an interesting topic, mental rotations in pigeons, because he's he said very mysteriously, because it would show whether pigeons have a mind. And I thought, oh it doesn't in any way. I mean actually like my senior year, I went to talk to Steve Cosslin, who had done a lot of research on mental imagery. And um I I said to to I I said, Professor Cosslin, you know, I'm doing this thing on mental rotation because in does it if does the how if they if they can if they can do this mental rotation thing, does that mean that they have a mind?

And he's he said sort of in disgust, he says, it has nothing to do with it. Nothing. And then he took a paper he had on imagery and and and mine and he threw it at me and he said, read this. And it's like a it sounds like a cartoon, but it's real, right? Like it's the parody of academia, right? I read it and he was right. It had nothing to do with it. So I mean, you know, just because somebody's grumpy uh doesn't mean that they're not worth talking to. It was less with people who are kind of grumpy and but still very worth talking to. Um that's just how they are. Some professors are grumpy because they figure you're only gonna come back and talk to them if you really, really want to know stuff.

I mean, I get grumpy when people are wrong and they won't admit that they're wrong. And so I get it. So the heuristic is the grumpier the person, the more likely they are to be right. That's no, some people I I've known people who I in fact I think Steve Cousin later told me because he he was at he became for a brief period my advisor in graduate school that that was kind of a strategy of his. People really wanted to know something and were really interested, they he'd weed out the ones that didn't care by being grumpy at first. Yes. Anyway, anyway and and and and so anyway, at the Simeon seminar, people were thinking in this way, and it just seemed to be missing a major thing, which is a psychological level of explanation.

I'm saying all this much more clearly than I would have at the time. Sure. And I but also it was clear to me from what little I knew about cognitive psychology, Which included Dave, this will be relevant to you, ties to you, which included this is the time when the um Who Said What paradigm, uh, when the uh the that great paper that Shelly Taylor, Susan Fisk, I thought Van Rutterman paper came out, that came out in 1978. And it had this really cool method where you could see how people were categorizing things, which you know, and somehow I heard about that and I thought that's really neat. You get you can do experiments that are gonna reveal something about how the mind works. And I thought, okay, these cognitive psychologists, um, because they were doing they were

early social cognition people, these cognitive psychologists, they've got methods, no, they know how to ask questions about how the mind works. So I should go to graduate school and cognitive psychology. Um uh so uh but anyway, in the course of these semi-seminars, there would be this um these discussions and they were sort of off from the point of view, they're really interesting, but off from this point of view. And then there was this uh undergraduates never uh are shy to raise their hands because this is a graduate seminar, and I would go to this and I would be this polite undergraduate raising my hand. But of course when there's a bunch of graduate students there you you can't get a word in

end wise because they they don't raise hands they just jump in right they're they're the worst graduate students yeah yeah no it's like but it's it's wonderful we were all graduate students what you need is undergraduates to jump in too no exactly yes yes but um um I there would be some debate going on and I think no no this is just completely wrong they're missing the like an really important point Sometimes it was about the philosophy of science, lots of different things. And I'd be there and then there would be this one graduate student that would suddenly say exactly what I was thinking. Exactly. And I was like, who is this person? Like this is really weird. Why is this one person saying exact I was a little bit hurt?

Like, because this is a pattern that kept happening. And that was John to be um that's how I met that's how I met John. That's how I became aware of John's existence. Um I mean, I think he had been at these things, and I I just like I I didn't know everybody that was at these things, but I became aware of John's existence when he was this person saying things that were exactly what I wanted to what I was about to say, and that were not even close to what other people were saying. Um and that's how I ended up talking to John about things. John all he came to this in a from a different path. He was actually originally planning to be a physics, a physicist. And um he his he had as as a as a teenager read a lot of Poole Anderson books, a science fiction writer who often imagined

other worlds, other planets, and where evolution had gone differently and the the the intelligent beings from these other planets thought and felt very differently than humans. But he was going to be a physicist. And then his freshman year, he took a class by Eric Warner, who was a psycholinguist. And Eric Warner was showing how these experiments and they can use reaction time and you can find out where phrase boundaries are in a person's head. And John was like, oh my God, you could actually have a science of the mind. And so he thought, this is thing go, that that that they're okay without me. Um, but this, this where you could actually find out how the mind works, this is this is really this is really important and interesting.

And and he all he he thought evolutionarily because of all the in part, in part because of, I don't know if it was entirely, but in part because of the poole Anderson books, also because of the Schrdinger, what is life and about life being the only anti-antropic, you know, process. And so John signed up to be a psychology major. But then all the cognitive psychologists in the Harvard Department of Psychology and Social Relations, which is what it was called at the time, they all were kind of squeezed out by the behaviorists and psychophysicists. So John was left in the midst of um behaviorism and uh and uh he he john's five years older than me so this was happening before uh before I was there.

Um so he he wrote he was writing a senior thesis um but it it it was basically uh the senior thesis i've never seen it but it would be interesting if i could ever find it in the millions of papers um it was a brief for why why behaviorism was just wrong and why you had to take an evolutionary approach to psychology um and skinner had a famous book called the behavior of the the behavior of organisms And uh and John's thesis, I don't remember what he told me that he called it, but it started out saying because most of the behaviors work was with rats and pigeons, right? And it started out saying organisms applies to more than rats and pigeons. It includes orchids and you know and a list of other kinds

of of uh animals etc. Um, and he wrote 300 pages apparently. Um and whoever was giving it a look before uh he turned it in. I I'm not sure if he finished it at 300 pages, told him to not bother to turn it in because um it it just wouldn't fly. Uh this this is why it at at Harvard you have to turn in you have to do a senior thesis in a topic to it for your for your diploma to say that your degree is in, you know, in this case in psychology. And otherwise your your bachelor's degree is in general studies. So John's technically in general studies because after writing 300 pages of this dissertation, he took the guy's advice and didn't turn it in. So it's not technically in psychology. It's really hard for people to realize now, but everything was in the in the behaviorism

had like a death grip on the field of psychology and it had for many many years um uh so um it's not some antique yeah view from the point of view of from my point of view yeah um it's the view that was dominating yeah Almost all the thinking at the time. Enough so that, you know, they made Jerome Bruner left. He had been doing cognitive development. And just they they they just made it uncomfortable for uh anybody who was doing cognitive stuff. Um so so anyway, that's that's and then I I started talking to John sometime in the middle of my senior year. We started talking and discovered that we were thinking about things in the same way. in many domains of life, but including about psychology.

Yeah. Where do the thinking does thinking at that sort of computational middle level, is that something you just felt like was the way you always thought? Or was that? I I I don't know how to answer the question. Yeah, it's fair. Yeah, yeah. If you know that the equipotentiality assumption is wrong, then you know that there's such a thing as a mind, whether you use the term mind or not, because you know that there's something there's some cognitive mechanism that is making it the that that is making it more likely that you think that the nausea was caused by what you ate than something else. And I I do believe I I thought about it. Yeah, no, I I did think about it. I did think about it as a cognitive level of of explanation.

Um because I was kind of obsessed with certain topics. I was a bit obsessed with Quine. And uh uh Kline had arguments that that I took to be why um equipotentiality is wrong. Although I don't think that Klein meant them that way. No, he was because he was like a pretty rabid behaviorist. I think I mean that that was the ex I mean it it is weird because yeah if you read I've I also per your recommendations I've looked at that. And so what he explicitly will say, but then what like yeah the Gabagai problem, you know, being a great Gabagai problem is really, really important. And I teach that to all of my students always. Yeah. Um the the the indet indeterminacy problem that that that without some structure to

the mind you're never going to learn anything. Yeah. If a rabbit runs across the road and you're in some other country or civilization and they yell get a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of where you don't even where you where you cannot assume that they have the same cognition as you do. Yeah. And and which is why you know uh he he he shows that there's an infinite number of things that Gabagae could refer to. Right. And uh if if so if the if you manage to know what the the alien w yes and no in the alien language, um and you point it he points this as Gabagai, then you can you have to ask, Well, is this Gabagai pointing to fur? No. Is this God guy? But then there's an infinite number of these things.

It could be rabbit or light bulb. It could be, you know, and Klein goes through all this, which I took it as an argument that there has to be, you know, that there has to be a structure to the mind to solve this problem because it's a combinatorial explosion problem. Yeah. And I think Hume actually did uh land there. Like as much as he was an empiricist he did he? Yeah. When I because I remember I would I would read uh Hume being the empiricist, and he was to some degree, and he obviously had a big influence on Skinner, but reading Hume again, um, I think he was a fellow traveler. Like he definitely has there's human nature in there. So yeah. There it's it's really funny. John thinks that I have a very peculiar sense of humor because uh uh

As a joke in my, I think it was my dissertation, I have a little quote from Hume at the beginning of one of the chapters. And it's a quote uh where he's saying it it's not from any uh I'll just put it in my terms, it's it's not from any sense sensory sensorally detectable quality of bread that you know that it's it it can nurture your body. It's not detectable. He's basically saying there's there's something else that's like leading you to to um assume that that you can live by eating bread. And the reason it was a little joke for me because I thought of Hume as a huge blank slate empiricist. Yeah. Yet here he was saying that there's something the mind is predisposed to to know. I mean I I understand it's a joke to me.

Yeah. But because I think I think it was at the I think it was at the beginning of a chapter of my dissertation on why there have to be domain-specific mechanisms. Yeah. Um uh yeah, I think Hume got uh re-revised uh by the behaviorists. I actually think that there's a place to re-write or set the record straight uh for Hume, I I would argue. Yeah. Well apparently he was Well, I'm not even gonna say I'm gonna get it wrong, but there was people that he was arguing with where the the argument had to do with the church and the Yeah. It's the Don Sim. You have to know who somebody's arguing with, right? Exactly. Yes. Even Descartes. Yeah, yeah. Same thing. Yeah, yeah. My daughter has told me this and I keep forgetting who it was he was arguing with.

I apologize. Um so yeah, I think I was unfair to Hume. It's okay. He's dead. He'll for he'll forget. But also Quine made it very clear that you had to at least have uh it had to be a property of the mind sensory dimensions what what dimensions of the world that you're even capable of perceiving had to be something that was part of human nature and so yeah I actually was guided to Quine by Hernstein. Um yeah so I got to meet Quine before I left graduate school. That's cool. It was it was very cool. I was telling him about uh he used to teach the logic course. The only time he didn't teach the logic course was the one year that I took it unfortunately. Because I would have I really wanted to take it something from him.

But I I did get to meet him before I left and I told him about the experiments on uh social change and cheetah detection and how people weren't using logical reasoning to do it. He thought that was very cool. I thought it was very cool that Klein thought it was cool. Yeah. But it's very cool. Another version of this question, because I mean, independent of how you think you you got to this point, is there's also this sort of like elephant in the room of that both the evolutionary and the cognitive people or the psychologists are being sort of blind to this level of description. And that sounds like I mean really that it what I'm hearing you say is, and I read this in your the writings Oh the evolutionary people were definitely blind to this level of

description. Yeah. And so not not not all of them. So not not Martin Daly and Margot Wilson for example they were always yeah we just had Martin on actually so oh great great they were always you know they were trained as comparative psychologists so they were studying the psychology of non human animals yeah um they were never blind to it there was people and then other people would be sometimes blind to it and sometimes not blind to it you know it they were there were like funny people are often funny amalgams of of things Yeah. So when you so when you're talking to John about this, and then you're seeing this uh this um landscape of missing this, the a lot of the papers were about making this argument was the idea that it was when you guys were having this, did you land

on that people just aren't applying the they're not thinking the right way, and it just wasn't they're missing the entire level of explanation. Yeah. So you have to understand something. In the sociobiology community at Harvard and elsewhere, what was valorized was ultimate level explanations, theories about selection pressures. You know, of course, Trivers valorized whatever Trivers did, and that was theories about selection pressures. That was social theory. And um and then theories about like psychology, for example, that was mere proximate mechanisms. It wasn't like that's important, proximate mechanisms are actually that which Darwinism was designed to explain. that. Right, the phenotype.

The phenotype of organism. It's so little, it's just the phenotype. That's the explanandum. That's what natural selection's trying to explain how you get complex functional design in organisms without there being a creator. Um but at the time it was being treated as something trivial because what what the people with vision wanted to understand was the selection pressures. And I love selection pressures. But because that was being valorized at the expense of the approximate mechanisms. And and and in fairness, people like a lot of research on approximate mechanisms wasn't necessarily that interesting at the time. Because it was before the cognitive revolution was just sort of starting. It wasn't in full it wasn't in full bloom.

So a whole cognitive level explanation was not known to most people. Yeah. Um I mean it was obvious to John because he when he was in high school, he he programmed in Fortran and he knew how to program and so forth. Um uh but yeah, I guess I did yes, I I I did because I wrote to myself a lot of times things about why the mind cannot be a blank slate and things like this. I I didn't one thing that I didn't fully realize um Is I I thought that there could be some domain. This is just as an undergraduate, this is not after. I thought that there were surely had to be lots of domain-specific psychological mechanisms, or else. But I thought that it was not impossible that there could be such a thing as a

domain-specific mechanism that tracked fitness. And I hadn't fully realized that that's computationally impossible. And part of my realizing that that's that's because I was thinking that this is something to be empirically adjudicated. Right. Right. And it was in talking, John invited me my last semester of uh of college. He invited me to sit in on a seminar he was taking, teaching rather, um, which was very, very interesting. Um But so I it it it that was it was I don't know it was then or later that I realized that this the the computational impossibility of a completely domain general system causing behavior that would have tracked fitness ancestrally. Um so I was on all on board about the importance of domain-specific mechanisms.

Um but yeah, the so my uh my attribution as a student of yours and John's was that it was a timing issue, and that you you guys were there, could see that the computational level was uh there enough that if we connect up psychology with evolution, that that's um uh fireworks happen in a way that is kind of rare scientifically. Like it was sort of a unique time and a unique place where these things could come together. Yes. It's not that people hadn't previously thought that evolution could illuminate psychology. Darwin thought that. Right. I mean, and um Darwin thought that there had been various attempts uh to take on psychology with an evolutionary lens. I mean, William James thought that. Um Sean Bowlby certainly thought that.

I mean, John Bowlby was, I consider him an early evolutionary psychologist with attachment theory. He he started with like primate behavior and he thought that that clearly there were mechanisms that kept an infant monkey staying within range of his mother and uh going back to her when uh frightened and using her as a base of exploration. He thought he thought that was an evolved mechanism. Um but there wasn't uh um there wasn't a language and even when you look at the early ethologists who I do think of as cognitive psychologists, they were still doing things before cognitive psychology was really much of a thing. And so they're they're grasping towards um explanations. Um and that's why they talk about things like fixed action patterns and so forth, because I

I think I think it's because they lack a more of fuller throated language of information processing. Yeah. And so yes, the this this this cognitive revolution was happening around the same time. It was full of revolution. And but people, this is why like that there's an 87 paper that we wrote. It's actually based on the fourth chapter of my dissertation because I I had to I have a very too long dissertation um because part of what I had to do is explain why you would take an evolutionary perspective to cognition in the first place. And what what would that lead you to think differently? And so there's a whole chapter about why you would expect domain-specific mechanisms, since the empirical work was about a domain-specific reasoning mechanism for detecting cheaters,

right? And um so we worked that chapter into this 1987 paper. And the title of it is From Evolution to Behavior, Evolutionary Psychology as the Missing Link. And the audience we had in mind actually when we wrote that paper was sort of the sociobiology community, because this was a missing link in their thinking. Um so yeah, that wasn't that that paper wasn't even aimed particularly at psychologists. It was aimed at the people who were just going straight from selection pressures to behavior without a pit stop on how the wine works. Yeah. Yeah. Uh I mean, David, uh jump, feel free to jump in. Um, fast forwarding. Um, so there there's people are missing this cognitive or computational level. Um, what is your opinion now?

So we were doing history and we can kind of go back and forth. Um, what is your take on to the extent to which people uh do understand that level, or the extent to which it's still not adequately understood, either in psychology or even in evolutionary psychology? Um not adequately understood. A little understood, but um less supplied than than it could be. Um and and and a lot of people, even in evolutionary psychology, are not fully adaptationist in the sense of looking for evidence of special design. But it's all so much better than what came before that you can't even believe it. I mean, there was just nothing in psychology. Nothing. You wouldn't even come across the word natural selection or evolution in a psychology

article ever, let alone have any, let alone have hypotheses that were derived from evolutionary principles. Um your cognition, you you told me, I alluded to this earlier on an earlier episode of your uh just trying to get your Wayson uh stuff published just because of the source of the hypothesis. It was because of the source of the hypothesis. It was literally I could have been playing pinball and had the idea, and that would have been okay. Yeah, but the the fact that it was sort of logically derived from uh you know Trevor's evolution of reciprocal altruism uh selection pressures was what was making it not okay. Um uh yeah no it was yeah Lita some future historian of science will use that uh for for having a logger narrative of the theory crisis in psychology and early 20th and

21st century psychology theory I'm sure It could be. I think it's not the easiest thing in the world to think computationally. No. Uh I could just work on it myself. Um Yeah. And and and this is another question is like I think, yeah, because I mean, even even among the all levels of evolutionary psychologists, or even just getting students, I do sometimes wonder that if the psychology part of evolutionary psychology is the harder one than the evolutionary part. Yeah. Oh, I think it absolutely is. Yeah. Yeah. I I do think it is. Yes. Yes, absolutely. I mean in part because we have such a rich folk psychology system that we lean on for explaining people. Uh and it's it's very hard to jettison that, to let that go, to put it aside.

Right. And take a to t to activate a different module in the mind to think about the mind. Um, to use your sort of um folk mechanics mechanism to think about minds. That's it's really tricky for people to do. Um I think it's your artifact. Yeah, uh I think it's yeah, yeah. Um yeah, whatever you want to call it, it's a different way of of looking at minds than we are intuitively accustomed to. Uh and and and it comes more naturally to some people than others, for sure. But yeah, I I sometimes have a hard time doing that. It's it's it's like it's hard to to let go of the fact that I'm a little homunculous that's seeking, you know, mental substances of good vibes and bad vibes, you know. Yes, yes, uh yes.

Yeah. Well, I that's why when I teach undergraduates, I teach it completely from the artifact module point of view, the design stance that we're looking for machines that are designed to perform functions. Yeah, and I know yeah and I and I I teach that a good way to think about genes from this perspective is to think about them as particles of design. Yeah. That they're the means by which a design replicates itself through generations. It's sort of like in in the extended phenotype, which is actually my favorite Dawkins book is the extended phenotype. Yeah. And he's got these necker cubes on the front of it. And the point that he's making in is you can ship do you can do a gestalt switch on the on

the necker cube about the perspective you're taking, that talking about individual reproduction versus inclusive fitness is a Neckercube shift. And so if you think about um Hamilton and Ken selection uh theory, that's actually starting from the that's seeing it from the perspective of the reproduction of an individual, right? That the individual is trading off some of the individual's own reproduction to help um increase the reproduction of say a sibling. But if you're thinking about it from the point gene side point of view, um genes that code for designs that promote their own product reproduction are going to be selected for uh regardless of who they're in, right? I mean, um and so part of the point of the extended phenotype is he was

gently saying, you know, you can do this gestalt switch uh to a gene's eye view, in which case things look kind of different. Um so yeah, no, I I I teach entirely from it. When we were in graduate school, John used to say, you know, when we understand enough about the mind, we'll understand more about how to explain this. Yeah, exactly. And and so I was really it was really useful uh learning about you know research on um the idea that we have mechanisms that are for understanding tools and that tools have functions or design for functions and so forth. Um I found that helpful. But yeah no I think it's really it's really um not not easy to do. And I think there's probably things that we miss.

I shouldn't say we. People like me who did not have uh training in you know computer programming. I think there's things that we miss about how how psychological mechanisms need to be designed, or what are good ways to design them. And I I that's sort of you know distressing sometimes. I feel like I have to go back to school. There's lots of things I have to go back to school to learn. Um well, but I think that's to your credit though. I think that you when you're confident that you know everything is the that's when you should hang your spurs up, right? I think that's the um uh that engineering approach to things and um that you know there are people like Don Simons or Martin and Margot. Um when you when you encountered people like that Um, and maybe this comes back to the

original question. I'm always just m mystified like where people like that come from who are just design-minded, um, and and they're sort of fellow travelers. Um the the can you continue the story then? If so, you you and John, uh, how did you discover uh Don Simons and how did that? Well, first we discovered Daly and Wilson. And that was simple because uh Martinal Daly Margot Wilson uh spent a sabbatical year at Harvard when we were graduate students and they were at the Simeon seminar um the whole time. Well even before that it it there was a psychology um wide seminar that people actually came to um um but the speakers were actually chosen by graduate students and so um I was on that committee I think my freshman year and and um Martin was one of the people that

that I suggested and so Martin spoke but then they came they came I can't I can't remember which year it was I think that might have been eighty eighty three eighty four 82, 83, around that time. Um, they spent the whole year there. It was great. We talked many times. Um, and then Don um Don came to all of this in a different way, Don Simons. Um he he was doing, I think he was a psychology major as an undergraduate. But then he went to graduate school in biological anthropology. Well, I'm not sure what the formal division was, but he was a student of Sherry Washburn's at Berkeley. And Don's dissertation was on um uh aggression and play in Rhesus monkeys. And it was an adaptationist analysis where he was saying, look, if you look carefully at

how Rhesus monkeys play, it has features a special design for calibrating your ability to fight. There's a there's turn taking one the one will be like on top, and and and then the up they'll switch and the other one will be on top. There's a play face that signals this isn't true aggression. This is we're just practicing. Um, he went through various features of design from his watching the in the field watching um the Rhesus monkeys and so he was Don I don't know Don was always an adaptationist and I don't know how that came to be yeah yeah I'm not sure I mean Don would have of course read a lot of ethology for sure yeah um and he wasn't in the middle of this sociobiology thing because he's um

I think he's 15 years older than me. Yeah. And and uh but when it came to the evolution of human sexuality, his book that came out in 1979, um he he just thought and thought and thought and thought about about this for a very, very long time. And from an evolutionary point of view And and um I don't know how he came to study that. Don always said that he liked to study things that he liked. And sex was one of those things he liked. Totally straightforward, yeah. He said he liked he liked to sleep. He wrote a very cool uh paper about dreaming called The Stuff Dreams Are Not Made of. That's correct. Um that was published in Cognition. He thought about he loved e eating in interesting things and he would have blind

blind taste tests of different things. That's great. And so he th he thought about doing uh food, but then he decided that there was too much literature on that already and he didn't want to go through all that. Yeah. Um very reasonable. He thought he thought about doing uh uh laughter and humor but then when he started reading about humor he found all everything he found about humor was so humor humorless he couldn't stand it. Yes, exactly. Although he did get his float article, right? It's if anybody nobody's had the float article, it's uh it's a it's a parody. Yeah. Didn't he always say there wasn't enough? I think even in that, I think he said there's not enough humor in in psychology. Uh probably.

I don't know. Um but so he he he well since Don can't speak for himself since he uh died in in 2024. Um the people watching this might might or might not know about the famous bet that was made between Don Simons and Don Brown. Um Don Brown, who later wrote Human Universals. Yeah, which was the book that got me. Yeah, the book that got me. Yeah. So Don Simons told Brown that he said that I'm gonna write a book about the evolution of human sexuality. And he said, I think there's gonna be some universals of human sexuality. And I'm gonna go through all the ethnographic record and I'm gonna look at this from an evolutionary point of view, etc. And Don Brown, who was uh trained as a political anthropologist, uh, Don Brown

says, Any universal you think you find, I'm going to be able to find an exception. And Simon says, I don't think so. And Brown says, I'm sure I will be able to. So they made a bet about that. And they bet a pitcher of beer. Um and um after Simons wrote what he wrote and did his research, Brown couldn't find any exceptions to the things that Simons said. And so acknowledged that Simons clearly had won the bet. And then Brown started asking himself, why was I so sure? Why was I so sure? Because there had been a tradition in anthropology of looking both at universals and at things that varied from culture to culture, but the field had sort of changed more into being interested only in variation.

And so he started, I said, Why was I so sure that there would be no universals? And he um in the course that I started reading more of the history of anthropology, and that's where why he wrote Human Universals, which he dedicated to Simus. Um, so that's where the book that got you into this field came from. It was his thinking about the bet, yeah and and the fact that he made the bet in the first place. And and and and actually they hadn't done the official um uh picture of beer um thing yet and and so in uh in our first or second year uh here at UCSB um there was an anthrotic picnic party at um in the hills where Don Brown and Don Simons lived. And there was a ceremonial uh giving of the pitcher of beer from Brown to

Sassman. So I got to I got to see that. That's fantastic. It was historically. Yeah. Such a lovely story. I feel like um you know it's it's an example of like of science working how it should be. Like making making a bet about something that you think is true and then changing your mind when the data come in and and you're wrong. And admitting that and you know it it it just it's it's an inspiring story. I wish that you know we had more of that kind of thing happening. I think we should bet more pictures of beer on various pictures of beer. Yeah no I know I know. Yeah. Actually care about what's true. And I'm not always clear that people do. I I've had a an informal bet like that that I've completely lost.

Um uh this has to do with work that I uh uh uh recent work that I I did and and am continuing with uh Ricardo Guzman in in Chile, um, I had been too influenced by Tversky and Kahneman. I mean, even though I thought that they were wrong about lots of things, and you know, I and John and Garrett Renzer had done research showing that when you put the same um probability problems, when you express them in frequencies and absolute frequencies, natural frequencies, that people do very well. So I knew that Tversky and Kahneman were they're not wrong about the phenomena. If you don't do that, people will be bad at conditional probabilities. But it doesn't mean that the mind doesn't have mechanisms that are well designed for

statistical reasoning. You just have to give it information in the right format. But still, they had made other claims as well, like that people violate the principles of rational choice all the time, and that people wouldn't possibly be able to that they they're not capable of of being transitive uh like having transitive preferences which which people always explain as if you like a better than b and b better than c then you'll like a better than c although that's a terrible way of putting it because a b and c are not things like John's taller than Nike and Nike's taller than Lita. So John's they're bundles of goods. Like you know, five avocados and three tomatoes and twenty tomatoes and five avocados.

A, B, and C are bundle of goods. So it's very not communicated well to people who are not in economists. But anyway. Right. And the alternatives also give you information about the nature of the sample that it that is being drawn from. And you're going to make different inferences if the alternatives are different, right? Yes. Yes. You know that guy at at at uh UC San Diego that um did research on that. Oh interesting. Yeah. I I I'm I'm blanking on his name right. He's at at he's at the business school at at the at um UCSD. And I came across his pay this guy's paper in a in a journal that had economics in the title. And I'm reading it and he starts out talking about well, that's a little bit off topic.

Anyway, I'll find it and send it to you. But he he he not only makes that argument, he demonstrates it. So anyway, I I I had I but I had believed them about that people would you know, not be able to have transitive reasoning. I thought that their prospect theory and other things were, I thought that had been shown. And Ricardo was one, my my colleague said, no, no, no. I I think that people will be rational in the sense of rational choice. And I think we should do this with uh moral trade-offs because people keep saying things like that, you know, either you're being utilitarian and using your domain general reasoning, deliberative reasoning system, or you have these crude uh emotions that will make you s not push the guy off of the footbridge in the trolley

problem and that they're fighting and that's how moral we and so Ricardo said that that's that's that that's not gonna be true. People are gonna be able to make trade offs between different kinds of uh moral values. And but you need to have a different kind of uh moral dilemma in order to even test that because nobody even gives you the opportunity to, because you only have either push the guy off the bridge in front of the trolley to save the five people, or don't push the guy and let the five people die. There's only two options there. And anyway, he said, I'm I he said, I'm sure it's going to work out that people will not only be able to make trade-offs, but they'll make rational trade-offs.

And I said, but there's all this stuff in psychology. He says, no, no, that's what's going to happen. And he he he was completely right. He was gloriously right, to my surprise. So, you know, people behaved exactly as if they're doing what economists talk about when they talk about generating a utility function and then using whatever options are available to you, the costs and benefits of the options available to you to choose which is the best option. The economists are not psychological about it though. The economists they they they say that they are agnostic about the mind. So when they give theories like this about utility maximization, it's not about what's going on in an individual's mind, which is very interesting.

Um it took me years to figure out what the hell they they were talking about. I would go to these um these behavioral economics workshops here that would happen once every every two years that Gary Charnes uh would would put on, who also died recently. Um everybody's dying all around me. It's really frustrating um and upsetting. But I would go to these and when I could and people would there would be these 40-minute talks, the first 20 minutes would be a beautiful experiment, like some sort of behavioral economics experiment. It might be in the lab, it might be in the field with gorgeous results. And anybody I know in psychology would have been thrilled to have done these experiments themselves.

Very interpretable results. And then the second 20 minutes, they'd be writing some full utility function on a board. And and like I'd be zoning out during and so I would I asked people afterwards, I said, what is this utility function? What is it? Is this a theory of the computation? Is this a like a David Maher kind of I explained that is this a a theory of what problem the mind is trying to solve? And the economists and this was the economist, it's not somebody you know, uh Dave, but this economist who is friendly to psychology, and so was he said, no, it has nothing to do with the human mind. And I said, But you do think that individuals are making the decisions in these experiments? He said, Yes, of course.

And I said, You do think it has something to do with their brains? And he said, Yes, of course. And he said, But the utility function has nothing to do with that. Yeah. I was like, what is it? And actually, it turns out he's right. And that is the traditional view. And it has nothing to do with what's going on in the mind. In the way economists think about it. The way economists think about it, their problem is different. Their problem is usually understanding a market. and markets have millions of anonymous people trading in them and the utility function is an input output device um where that takes quantities like uh like price and and and income and it outputs what's likely demand or what's the likely supply

and so they're asking questions like if the if the if the price of of of corn goes up if there's if if there's a drought and the price of corn goes up what'll happen to demand for corn chips that's the kind of question they're asking and that isn't about a mind it's like it's a it's a a piece of technology for predicting what'll happen in a market. Now it's it happens that some behavioral economists um have made it almost uh a theory of the mind without really saying that but they they they're the economists are usually very careful to say that people are behaving as if they're maximizing utility function and they'll and and then when they're being very and then the even more precisely there are theorems that show um uh there are theorems

that show that in this measure of GARP that we use. It doesn't matter. It's a measure of whether people are making transitive choices. That if people's responses respect GARP, then there exists at least one utility function that, if rationalized, could explain the data. Right. That's the way they say qualified, yes. Because then they they can prove that. They they they can prove and so we were saying, you know, it's not we're we were saying, look, the most parsimonious explanation for our results is that people are behaving as if they're maximizing this function because that is what their mind is doing. It's maximize, it's it's it's built a function. We called it a right dysfunction because it was about moral rightness.

It's built dysfunction, and then it's it's it's making choosing from the set the one that has the maximum brightness and it and it has machinery for doing that. And so it's not just that they're behaving as if they are, they are. Because that that really is the simplest explanation for for our our moral trade off data. Um yeah. So anyway it would be quite a coincidence that they just happen to behave as if their minds are performing these computations. Like why don't you just say that they're actually doing the computations? Like that's a much simpler I I I know. I know. But see, but but everybody's interested in different questions and the economists are not interested in individual minds, right?

Yeah. Except there's this like this this group of like the judgment decision making Yeah, I sat in on that community for nine and a half years. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And and and they're very like, you know heuristics and biases oriented a lot of them but that's sort of funny because like even the term behavioral economics versus experimental economics they have different flavors to them because the person who who who really invented behavioral experimental economics where you have people bring people an experiment and you put them in a you know it can be a prisoner's dilemma or a trust game or all these different games that was Vernon Smith and his colleagues He did it with Charlie Plott and various other people.

He had a very uh great group around him, you know, uh Kevin McCabe, Elizabeth Hoffman, um uh I think Bart Wilson was part of that group. And Vernon Smith, when he learned about evolutionary psychology, he he he and Elizabeth Hoffman, etc., they they realized that a lot of the they were finding in their lab that people did not behave as if their preferences were homo economicus preferences. Rational choice doesn't mean that you're always choosing the thing that has the highest monetary payoff. It means that whatever your preferences are, you're choosing the one that's that's best of your given how you weight various things. The idea that you're always going to choose the highest paying option is a theory about

preferences and people call that homo economicus economic man. And and Vernon Smith was, you know, had shown very shown very uh early, he and his group very early, that if you have 27 people in a lab and they're interacting with one another in these games, um, they do not behave as if they're maximizing short-term profits. They behave as if they're in a small hunter-gatherer group where there's going to be repeated interactions, whether, you know, even if you no matter what you tell them. And so he he they wrote, there's a Hoffman McCabe and Smith paper from 1998 that's great, where they were reinterpreting all of their results in light of, you know, evolutionary psychology and theory of mind and things like this, and saying, look, there's something

different that's going on in small groups than what you see in mass markets. So the experimental economics people kind of went, at least some of them, in more of an F-Sype direction. Whereas the people influenced more by Tversky and Kahneman went into this heuristics and prices direction. And that really, when people say behavioral economics, now they use it to refer to all of it, right? But initially it was sort of a difference in the use of the term where the behavioral economics community was more the heuristics and biases, um uh decision-making, cognition, decision-making people and the experimental economic and experimental economics had more to do with these. Um had it's a it's too bad that the larger community didn't take the turns that Vernon

Smith and his colleagues took. Because that's the more interesting turn turn where you're asking, well, how does a mind work and how looking at these games as having to do with interactions of people and you know as being produced by programs that evolved for a different kind of social world where people did know each other and there were repeated interactions. So I I always find the history of these different disciplines really interesting. Yeah. Because it's part of the Simons principle that you can't understand something unless you know who they're arguing with. And unless you know what kind of question they're trying to answer. I mean, once I realized how they thought about how the economists thought about utility

functions, I realized that's completely sane. If you want to know what's happening in a large market to supply and demand, this is this is completely sane. So they they have utility functions that represent, you know, a household, what they think of as a consumption bundle for a typical household. and then they use it and it's very useful for the making predictions and so forth. But you got to know what they're trying to do because they're not always trying to do what you're trying to do. Yeah. Sometimes they have a completely different question in mind. Um this this reminds me a little bit of the David Hume point, which is in some sense, Lita, I think one way to describe what you and John do did so well and do so well is you're a

contemporary historian of science. Which is you're not looking in deep history, you're looking around what is the scientific landscape and the ability to sort of articulate, well, here is this group of people, and here's what the assumptions they're making, here's what their goal is. Uh that is surprisingly rare, you know, to do it at any time and especially concurrently because there are status games And it takes courage to sort of speak up when when the real flesh and blood stuff is happening. And I think that, you know, I hadn't really thought of that this till this conversation, but I think that that very much describes one of the things that you you guys do and did so well. Um is just our You have to be willing to

listen to people. Yeah. And you have to be like you may think that people are on the wrong path about something. And that's fine. But you're going to be better off if you assume that they're intelligent human beings. And if they're making assumptions that are different than the ones that you're making, they probably have reasons why they're doing that. And it would be good to know what those reasons are. So in psychological foundations of culture, in the beginning of it about the standard social science model, that is um uh that that deconstruction of that is John's trying to say, um, what are the good reasons why people adopted this notion of the standard social science model? And um, if you don't know what you so it's always better to assume that people aren't

idiots, uh, to assume that they're they're smart people and they're coming from different assumptions, and you got to know what those assumptions are. And you have to know what kind of problem they're trying to solve, what kind of question they're trying to answer. And you have to not get frustrated. This is really hard. Um, you can't get super frustrated when they're not using terms the way that you're using them, or when they're using them in a way that you find to be fuzzy. Um you have to be because sometimes you're using ways not that other you're using terms that ways that other people think are fuzzy and you don't realize it too. Um but it can take a lot of time and patience sometimes. Uh me being able to get into an economist's head uh was a long

process and it was helped by conversations with both Ricardo and Ryan Opria, my colleague here at UCSV who just left for Berkeley, abandoned us for Berkeley to my distress. I would ask them these different questions. And Ryan actually had he had been the second to last student of Vernon Smith's. And he actually shared an office with Rob Kurzman at one point chat at at Chapman I think uh anyway um so he knew he knew he knew some he had known some evolutionary psychology um since he was a graduate student so Ryan is is good at translating between disciplines and Ricardo had this background in computer science and economics and so for for Ricardo the computational part's easy right that that was that's

the part that most people have trouble with with evolutionary psychology but for him that was like obvious um and so i would ask them questions separately and i get i get an answer in one way from i get an i get this exact same answer from them both but from very different perspectives ricardo would tell me in the for the technical reasons why you have to why this why you do these this way and why people make these assumptions and then ryan would give me the the historical background of why but they would always have the exact same it was funny because their their conclusion about what it is that economists think and why they think it would be exactly the same which gave me some confidence in what they were both uh that I wasn't

hearing an um uh an an outlandish uh view. Um So, but it takes a long, it can take a long time. People you people use the term rationality differently. Yeah. Right? I mean, the term rationality is used in completely different ways in different fields. In psychology, you know, starting with um, well, especially with diversity and economy, but not just them. Yeah, Peter Wyson was interested in logical reasoning, right? And he's he's the father of the study of reasoning and psychology, a wonderful psychologist. Um, and Versky and Kahneman, they they use rationality to mean judgments that conform to principles to either uh principles of logic or um mathematical theorems about probability, or the savage axioms, you know, which is about

which is relevant to that. And that that's sort of where they get the economic stuff, although it seems to me that they kind of there are aspects that of their writing that misinterpret the economic perspective because for example when you're doing prospect theory that people think of as showing that people have preference reversals it's different groups of subjects you you can't actually test whether somebody is violating principles of rational choice unless you test the same person in different with different prices and different situations. You can't you can't have one group of subjects hearing about like in that disease problem that 600 people will die if you do nothing. And there's these two plans.

One plan will definitely save 200 people, and the other plan will m has a one-third chance of saving 600 and a two-thirds chance of everybody dying, which these T have the same expected value of 200 lives. Um, you know, which plan do you prefer? And if you put it in terms of lives saved, uh people all else people prefer the two, definitely 200. If you put it in terms of lives lost, people will, they're not the same people, they're different people that they'll say um they want the the riskier option that has a chance of saving everybody. And um that doesn't show anything about preference reversals because you can't show anything about preference reversals unless you're doing that the same situation in the same

person. It might arguably be testing some auxiliary auxiliary assumptions, but then you know Larry Fitch and Sandy Mishra did these beautiful experiments on that exact problem, showing that if you if if you know what the person feels that their need level is, their preferences, like do I feel like I need to save at least 200 people? Or do I feel that I need to save at least 300 people. If you need to save at least 300 people, you have to pick the risky option because you'll have zero chance of saving 300 people. You will save fewer than that. You must. So when you either set any need level or you ask somebody what their need level is, the framing doesn't make any difference. It doesn't matter what you put in lives lost, lives saves, it makes zero difference.

and people do exactly the rational thing they they they will choose the option that's most likely to achieve their their need level and if you don't ask them a need level in advance and but you ask they you have them make a choice and you do the risk the loss versus gain frame um and you ask them afterwards um what was the minimum number of people you felt you had to save, it turns out that when you put it in terms of saving lives, that number is lower that that people felt that they needed to save than when you put it in terms of people dying, they they set a higher need level. And so all the all the all the phrasing in terms of lives saved and lives lost was doing was changing what people decided their need level was.

theory, which came out of game theory and math and economics, has nothing to do with either logic or mathematics. Yeah. Nothing to do with either one. Yeah. And also and it also has to do with like the social dimension of it. Like when you describe a certain uh problem, like a disease is gonna kill X number of people or whatever, like that's a linguistic phenomenon, and you have to draw inferences about what my intentions are based on that communicative act. And you're going to draw different inferences if I frame the situation differently. You're going to have different inferences about like what the social expectations are. And you're going to have different, and those expectations could be correct.

You could be judged differently if you respond to the utterance framed in one way versus another way. And there's actually research showing that that if when people make the quote unquote irrational uh decision in those types of disease situations, people actually judge them uh morally as better uh if they make the irrational decision, quote unquote, than if they make the rational one. Because there's a social dimension to it where people are making inferences about your character and your priorities and what you're setting the need level uh it as when you're given a certain uh type of information. So uh that is another dimension that is often ignored in these in these problems. Just how fluid and and uh language is and how uh we have to infer

so much about the informative intention of of of of the situation about the the person giving you the information and the likely social expectations about responding to that utterance. So anyway, that's another also an another thing like all this stuff about deliberative reasoning and so forth it might be that when you're in conversation with somebody, they're pointing out some aspect of the problem that you weren't thinking about. Yeah. So, you know, if somebody's talking about saving lives, um, it might not just be that you're just going with their expectations, but you're not you're not really you're not really thinking as much about the number of people that will die. I mean, so I think that most times when people are having um

moral arguments or political arguments and so forth, one of the things that that is happening is you can change your mind because you're seeing that there's a part of the problem of the issue that you just had not considered before. And so so So, like for example, I actually think this fits with even though Jonathan Haidt doesn't talk much about this, it is actually in in in part of his work. Um, because you know he talks about the moral dumbfounding and how people will have a reaction like that incest is gross. And then you challenge all the reasons that they give, and the reasons you could challenge them all and that has nothing to do with it. Um but and I and I I think that absolutely happens.

But I think that one of the things that happens when when people talk is issues are brought out that you didn't think about before. Like, you know, if you're thinking about I uh an issue with um soldiers in war, won't it matter to you whether they were drafted against their will and miserable and want to return to their families as opposed to whether they were volunteers who were happy to fight for their country? Wouldn't that and and if you're talking about like some particular war, mightn't it not make a difference to your judgment about it if somebody points out that these are people that are being, you know, asked that if they're being drafted, they're being asked to kill people and with no consent, and it it it it it can bring out so a soldier

is not just a soldier, right? There's a difference in how you might think about it depending on whether they volunteered or they were drafted. And it's this is not something specific to soldiers, it's about anything you can think about. One of the things that happens when people discuss issues is you see that there's aspects of the problem you didn't think about before. And that's usually not how people talk about what when they talk about the effects of reasoning. And whether you want to call it reasoning or not, I think it's what it's doing is it's changing the way you frame the problem. Right? And I and I think David's right that that part of how you frame the problem, it can also involve what these people expect from me and how they'll judge me.

That can absolutely be part of the framing of the problem. But all these things, they're gonna affect what if I was being an economist, they might defect affect what utility function I create. Because I think that the economists are wrong when they think you have a gigantic utility function that applies to all space and time. I think they generated on the fly in response to situations. I think that's more cognitively reasonable. And that we also showed it in in our in our moral trade-off uh studies. But but yeah, no, it's hard, it's it's really, really worthwhile to do things across disciplines and and um but it's not simple right yeah it also goes in the category I mean I think the the the lesson of sort of

treating things that you might easily poo-poo or think are stupid with respect. I think it goes in this category of like there's a million ways to be wrong and only a few ways to be right, which I think it hurts yourself as a scientist if you um I mean this advice from you and John is something that many of your students took of just and anecdotally, like people I've heard people say they would see you and John uh being very happy about a talk that some of the early graduate students thought was quote unquote dumb. And it was because you were learning something that the graduate students were missing. And I think this is sort of being a more mature person, which is that, and it goes back to there's lots of ways to be wrong and only a couple of ways to be right, is if you at the

moment you think something's dumb, it stops you thinking about, well, in what way is it right? Or like in what respect could it be correct and what insight is there? And that's where I think, like, even to this day, like I think one of the things, and this is kind of implicit, but Dave and I have talked about it, like in evolutionary psychology, because it selects for people who say, look, I don't like the way mainstream psychology is happening. I like evolutionary approaches. It's easy. And I mean, I did this myself, where it'd be sort of like, well, this is dumb. And there was a sense in which it was. Like the things I I didn't like were wrong. I mean, this is, you know, what attracted me to Evpsych.

But at the same time, the more mature evolutionary psychologist that I am now, it's making this point of there was a sense in which all of that was right, but I can understand the way it was right, even though I didn't agree with it at the time. And I think that's an important mature way to approach science. Yeah. When you when you're hearing a talk, even if you think all of the person's conclusions are wrong, even if you think that their approach is wrong, it's really hard to find a talk where there's nothing interesting in their data because you have your own mind and you have your own questions in mind. And sometimes their data is is telling you something or suggesting something very interesting with respect to your own what you're thinking.

I mean, it's not that there's never a talk that I but I'd say like 90% of the time, there's something interesting I'm I'm I'm learning or thinking about from the talk that I'm that I'm hearing. I like hearing talks because I I I read really slowly. And so it's it's it's it's good for me to be able to hear somebody speaking out loud and explaining what it what they're thinking and why they're doing what they're doing. I I I like that. Um and also people don't always explain that when they write a paper. Yes. Right? People don't always explain why they're asking the question that they are asking. And in a talk usually they do. Yeah. Papers are weird uh artifacts. Oh my god. To put it smiling. We should be submitting, you know, uh recorded monologues to journals and it should be

audio journals. You know, I just learned that there's this thing called um it's It's not open to us because we don't have a research grant from the right European entity, but it's called uh Open Research Europe. Have you heard about this? It's doing things the way that John always had this notion about how publishing should work. And uh in many ways it's doing that. So what you do is if you if you've got a grant from this, from whatever foundation or it this it is in Europe. They want the data to be openly available. So when you write up the paper, it's it's it's published immediately. Then the editors ask people to be peer reviewers and and and signed peer reviewers. And so so often people are more careful when and how they say things.

And those reviews will be posted. And then I I believe other people can submit commentaries and so forth so that there can be like the sharing of ideas in general without it taking like you know three years for the paper to see the light of day. I thought that was really interesting that somebody figured out a way of doing that. Unfortunately, it's not something that the three of us can submit anything to because we don't have the grant from the right agencies, or I assume not um in Europe. But I thought that was interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Insert joke about Elsevier here, but yeah, uh, that's that's another issue. Um yeah, um uh Lita, we're coming towards the end of our time. I'm sure we'll have you back on.

Is there something that we should have asked you? No I'm sure there's like 40 things, but yeah. Um I I I don't know. I'm I'm getting kind of old and so if there's anything you want to know about uh deep time, um I'm one of the oldest people left. Well I mean uh a a question I wanted to ask you, you know, you you put forward with John uh this new way of thinking about human nature and human condition. And you've had a few decades now to observe the results, the impact it has had on the world uh and on intellectual life. Um are there any regrets you have about the way that you put those ideas forward, the way you framed them? Is there anything you would go back and change if you could do it all over again?

Um nope. Nope. And and also I'm I'm I'm I'm really okay. So I I'm usually the cheerier view and John's the darker view. Um uh but I'm amazed that how this kind of thinking has taken off. It's really it's hard to find in almost any domain that I'm interested in, um where people aren't now considering, well, what so you in if you're watching even if you're watching podcasts about health, you know, people in terms of diet will be saying, well, what would it we've been eating ancestrally? What would that have been like? Maybe we're adapted to some of that. Or you you you will hear it when you're listening to like medical researchers talking uh podcast by medical researchers, they'll be actually considering some something that they

were never considering before. That doesn't mean that they're full-blown adaptationists, but they're they're I actually years ago, I was I was sitting, Dave, you remember Tupelo Junction? It used to be a lovely restaurant in Santa Barbara that I wish still existed. Yes. Yes. Well, it apparently it exists um down near where Aaron Lukashewski lives. Okay, so more towards LA, yeah. Yes. I was sitting there years ago and I could hear at the next table some undergraduate talking to his parents and and and saying, But you see, when we would have been hunter-gatherers, you know, I would have been hunting, and I I can't remember what the he was it I I think he was talking about, like the uh it might have had to do with maybe his parents thought he

was doing too much sports and not enough s I don't remember what the context was. I just remember laughing to myself because that is not something you would have heard, you know, five years before. And I now I hear this all over the place. It's it's a it's a thought in people's minds that they bring up all the time. And the idea that there are that we have a psychology that that is shaped by those past circumstances is now part of how people think. And I think that that's the most important thing, like that it be something that people have in mind and that they're considering. Do I wish that people were more cognitive or more computational in their thinking? Yes. But I mean, at least in psychology.

But the situation is so much better than it ever was before. It's so much it's so much better than it ever was before. That I I think it's great. You have to have the idea in people's heads before they can you know take off with it. Yeah. Um so no no I I I stand I stand by it. I the one thing that I I I wish we could change was um uh when we wrote the journal personality article, the one about on the uh universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual. That and maybe also in 89, we used the term innate. And the year that we were at the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences with um Martin Daly and Marco Wilson and David Buss. Martin would yell at yell at us for using the term innate.

And and and he was right. He said he's he's he said, look, the question is whether some some aspect of the phenotype was the target of selection. Innate means a million things to a million people. Do you mean that it doesn't develop? No, you don't mean it doesn't develop. Do you mean that its development is not influenced by any environmental contingencies? No, you don't mean that. And he was completely right. I mean, I I usually it's longer, but I usually say reliably developing species typical mechanism, or I say an adaptation, by which I mean a reliably developing species typical mechanism that was designed by natural selection. Um uh Martin was completely, completely right about that. And um, I think the term innate does take people down the wrong paths.

Like they'll start to think, oh, well, something must be present in a newborn, or it's not innate, or you know, I have to show that it's there before they're, you know, a year old. Or there are lots of of of things that make no sense. I mean, I see David has a beard here, and I'm guessing that he wasn't born with that beard. Um, you know, lots of things that are reliably developing features of phenotype were not present at birth. So that, but but no, sometimes people thought we were too harsh. I don't actually think we were ever too harsh. I think in in in psychological foundations of culture and talking about the standards social science model, I think it was a very sympathetic rendering of why people would go in

that direction. A desire to not be racist, to not be sexist, to it's just that they were they were wrong that the alternative implies that you will be racist. The alternative does not mean that you are racist or sexist. The people were not understanding the difference between causes of individual differences and um universal aspects of human nature. So I don't think we were the least bit harsh. I think we were really sympathetic. We didn't say you're a bunch of bozos. We were saying here are the really good reasons why somebody would take this point of view. You take somebody from one continent, you raise them on another continent, they are, they behave like the people on the new continent. And we're we were, I think it was very sympathetic.

People always think that you're like trying to take their tribe to task. and you know the universality of human nature and uniqueness of the individual paper. Like a lot of behavior geneticists were angry because they said we're that we're saying they're just studying noise, which is a genetic noise, which is not exactly what we were saying. We're I think of it as more we were saying what are the criteria for saying that individual differences are the products of adaptations. But but no, I don't I don't know. Yeah. No, it's easy to fall into the trap, I think, of regretting a framing or a term uh based on the way in which it is misunderstood by people. I remember, you know, Richard Dawkins had regrets that he titled his book The Selfish Gene,

because so many people misinterpreted it as implying that we're genetically selfish, right? When and you know he re he he wishes he would have called it the immort the immortal gene, right? Um but I actually think he's wrong. I think it's it's correct to call it the self machine. I think that is the best way to scribe to describe it and the most insightful way to describe it. Yes, some people have misunderstood it, but you cannot judge the utility of a metaphor or or framing based on the misunderstandings of people. You have to judge it by its its clarity and its insight among the people who do understand it. Um and you know, you're you're making me think that like, yeah, uh you know I I sometimes

regret using uh the term propaganda or propagandistic bias in in my paper on political belief systems. Yeah I disagree with that David. I think you should I think it's great. I think propaganda should be call that when it is yeah. Yeah. And and you're making me think that maybe I shouldn't like regret that. Like yeah it's it some pe it it's it's kind of a harsh way of putting it but um I also think it it's an insightful way of putting it. And I think that's the the best way to to judge something so yeah uh you're never going to please everybody there's no thing you can write that will please everybody my whenever I get really frustrated uh and and and and feel attacked um my dad uh my dad said

what are you talking about? Jesus Christ was crucified. You know, there's not if you're not gonna do anything, say anything where nobody's going to object, right? um uh yeah you're never gonna you're never gonna make everybody happy there's nothing you can do that's gonna make everybody even if you try to make everybody happy you won't make everybody happy right yeah you'll either do something super bland and then people who don't want to read something super bland will not be happy. This is just not possible. You it it it's it's one of these things that one shouldn't even aspire to because it's not possible. What you should aspire to is being clear. Yeah. Clear and also respectful. Yeah. And I I don't ever I don't think I don't think we were ever disrespectful.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think um uh uh uh respecting the intelligence of things you disagree with I think has been um really a north star of of that work yes this is also why um when you ask questions in a talk of somebody, it should never be hostile. I mean it should never be asked in an angry way. Yes. It it because you you you or when or when you're writing a review, it should it's just no call for being angry. Just explain what you think is if it's a review, explain what you think is is wrong and what's right and what's wrong. And when you're asking it in the in a talk in a question, it's important to be polite is important for science to be polite because in science people have to be willing

to acknowledge when they were wrong about something. And if you make this about them as a human being, that you're destroying them as a person, they will never admit when they were they're wrong about something and and it's mean. It's mean, but but more than that, it's bad for science. You just want to ask the question as clearly as as you can. And and and and not build a bad as censoring yourself. That's not censoring yourself. It's being clear and respecting the human being. You know, you want to be like the British where they'll be tearing themselves each other apart in a seminar and then they'll be at the pub drinking beer together afterwards and laughing um together. Uh that's a better way I I asked I asked once, you know, how is this the how is this

happening? And they go, well, you know, we're just all unstuck on this island, so we have to get along. You know, bet the pitcher of beer. Yeah. Bet the pitcher of beer. Yeah. You know, it's the beer pitcher litmus test. If you can't, if it's not that level of civility, maybe don't yeah. That's right. Or specificity where you have a specific claim that you could learn from with an empirical test. Like that's also part of the beauty of that. It's not only the the amicability and and the friendliness of we're gonna have a beer over this, but it's also like you're actually testing your idea against reality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's standing side by side doing science. Uh and yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's lovely.

Um, yeah, Lita, I mean, I think we know we'll definitely have you back on, but thank you for being here. Um, and on that last note, you know, I think uh I we often get to sort of like, you know, on the way out of our episodes, we get to say something about people's influence. And I think I don't even have to say your influence and John's influence on the field. Um, but what I've I've come to love about uh what you and John embodied is that you guys truly are scientists in this way of just respecting what's true and trying to be respectful of people. Um, and I didn't realize how rare that was until I continued in the academy. Um, and there really is a difference between uh academics and scientists, and not

every academic even aspires to be a scientist, so that's fine, and not everyone should be. But there are many academics that purport to be scientists who are not um in this sort of definition. And um, you you and John um are very much scientists in ways that um I still work hard to be like. So well, that human nature thing, you know. That human nature thing sometimes gets in the way. Yeah, there's a lot of strong selection pressures to not be a scientist. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for for having me on. I I appreciate it. And I I think what you're doing is great. I know a lot of people who listen to your podcasts. Um That's great. Uh you'll have to um uh um tell us who they are.

Probably know who they are. But uh but thank you, Lita. It was it was absolutely lovely. And um yeah, I'm sure we'll um have have you on again. Yeah. All right. Thanks so much. Well, here you are, uh still listening. You just listened to an episode with Leda Cosmodes, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology. So if you like that episode and you like what we're doing here on Evolutionary Psychology the podcast, you can support us. And how can people support us, Dave? Uh read the 1987 um Missing Link paper by John and Alita. Yep. And uh read the Evpsych Primer on the CP website. And um leave some reviews. Send David a pan a fanny pack. Yeah. You still haven't gotten the fanny pack, I assume.

No, I'm still I'm really miffed about this. No, no one's sending me a fanny pack. I'm fanny packless. Yeah. Uh we haven't gotten any emails about t-shirts. Uh if you run a t-shirt concern, please send us uh that we should start getting um gear. Yeah. Some gear? Yeah, maybe. At least well I mean if you want gear then uh support us because that's the only way we're going to be able to pay for the gear. So yeah. What gear? Uh I mean T shirts and fanny packs for sure, maybe a hat. Um might be cool to have evolutionary psychology shoes. That's not what I was expecting. What kind of shoes? Like shoes with like, you know, kind of like brains on them. I don't know. Yeah, but uh no, well, yes, that part.

But I mean like what um uh if they aside from the logo, like what's genre of shoes? Uh just like you know, sneakers. okay I was thinking okay yeah so I'm imagining like you see you got a baseball cap a fanny pack t-shirt and like kind of like um like 1950s gym shoes basically chock I was thinking I was thinking more like air tubi okay all right like like air jordans okay yeah air air cosmedies I don't know uh it's very like uh nineties um in a in a nice like kind of throwback way yeah yeah so if you want any of that cool gear, you gotta you gotta pony up on Patreon. Okay. Because uh this stuff ain't free. Is this all black? I'm imagining Yeah. Yeah, it's black. It's very it has a very cards against humanity aesthetic, actually.

I wasn't it wasn't what I was going for, but yeah. That's true, it does, coincidentally. I mean it's the ultimate aesthetic, really. Do you guys ever uh uh the joke around about changing that to like a color? Or is that locked in? That's part of the brain. Oh, it's it's locked in. Yeah. I mean it's it's kind of crazy that we were able to lock in, you know, black and white Helvetica. Like the two the the like the two most different possible colors in the most widespread possible font to like we somehow own that now. That's awesome. Good for you guys. Yeah. Hey, that's that's that's when you yeah. Um anyway, on that note, yeah, please uh support the podcast and also just you know leave some positive reviews.

I can't tell you how wonderful it is to read um the comments and um and I'm really enjoying the occasional offbeat criticism too, I have to say. Um keep those coming as well. Yeah, you know, we we love criticism just as much as praise, as long as it's given in a respectful way, honestly. Yeah, and if it isn't respect, and if it isn't, it's uh it's interesting and sometimes funny. That's true. Yeah. Either way, we're gonna be happy. So uh yeah, please dish it out. Everybody, thanks for listening, David. Uh have a good week and I'll see you next week. All right, see ya.