Cooperative breeding with Karen Kramer
2025-09-30 12:00:00.000 +00:00

Uh David, uh good to see you. Good to see you too. Uh uh You're the Petrazuwski and I'm the Pen Sof. And what is this? This is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. And some people have noted that they don't like the screw-ups because it comes across as unprofessional. Uh for whatever reason, people who listen on Spotify are saying that. What do you think about that? Hmm. Uh yeah, that's a fair point. Why don't we just uh cut right to it then and say it's uh actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists and uh point taken. Enjoy. David, today we have a wonderful guest, Karen Kramer, who is at the University of Um Utah, and she does incredible work on following actual foragers and finding out how people are spending their time doing

follows of people and then also figuring out sort of who's doing what. And I think one of the most interesting things about this is that it turns out that like kids especially are actually contributing quite a bit um and doing quite a bit of the work um of sort of parenting and co-parenting. Yeah, absolutely. It was a really uh fascinating episode that um shed a lot of light into how work gets done in a small scale uh society, how how fieldwork gets done. Um uh she is a a veteran uh in in the field of uh evolutionary anthropology research giving us some really fascinating stories into what life is like uh in a small scale community. Um so this was this was a really fun episode. Yeah and just sort of the idea that uh how intergenerational, how having multiple

generations in the same area in the same location is really foundational to human nature in that maybe if we're living in these very age stratified places like colleges or like schools, it might be very unnatural for us and might have weird consequences. And I think that's a a really important thing that I'm still thinking about from this episode. Yeah, absolutely. Me too. So without further ado, enjoy Karen Kramer. All right. Um so today uh we're extremely excited to have uh Karen Kramer who is Professor of Anthropology at University of Utah here with us. Karen, I know that you've been giving talks recently about the evolution of human life history and cooperation specifically between parents and

children. And we've had some human behavioral ecologists on or evolutionary anthropologists on talking about human life history. We just had Mike Irvin on. And I think your work is super interesting in the following context of one thing we've talked about is sort of instinct blindness, which is the idea that the things that seem obvious to us as humans, it often takes sort of going to a different culture or going to the zoo and looking at other animals to sort of see what's actually unique and weird and strange about us. And in reading your work, I think a lot about that in the sense of we are really strange in the extent to which we're cooperative and the relationships we have among our family and with our parents and even what childhood is like.

So this is all sort of a long-winded way of saying, um, can you sort of lay out what is the mystery that you're interested in explaining? And that I think for me at least, I didn't even realize was a mystery until I sort of read your work and saw your work on human life history and cooperation among generations. Well, I think the uh the the mystery or the umbrella question that I've always uh that I've centered around is how there got to be so many of us. So we are this really odd life history conundrum where we have both increased over evolutionary time, millions of years, increased both investment in children, which we see in a change in survival rates, not so much of infants but of juveniles, and also in reproduction.

So, you know, most animals specialize in either surviving or reproducing, and we did we did both. And so, you know, how does how does how does that happen? And that is my interest in cooperation, certainly, and how mothers solve the problem of having multiple dependents of different ages at the same time, which, you know, really, well, it's hard to ever say humans are unique in something because there's always an exception, but we are very unusual in that capacity, certainly of supporting five, six, seven, eight dependents of different ages at the same time. Yeah. And both David and I are parents. Mine's five and a half. David, I keep sorry, I'm sorry, three. Three and a half. Yeah. Three and a half.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Two years apart. Yeah. And I think, you know, we we really I I certainly experience the software turning on of parenting, you know, even for fathering. Um, and just there's sort of a lot of we're very altrucial and there's a lot of investment necessary. Yes. Right. And the I I guess the when I was coming through graduate school, the explanations, I mean, you talked about how when people go when people go to the field, yes, your socks get blown off and you are you really have to think about things in other ways. So when I went to the field, the expectation uh, and it's still something I've spent my career kind of um trying to form a new narrative uh about the role of children.

Uh I I think I still have a long ways to go uh in terms of convincing people. But the idea was that you know human children are these sort of little pariahs that just need, need, need, need and suck, suck, suck, and and all we can do is kind of, you know, they're this empty vessel that gets filled up. And um that was the theoretic model that I had in mind. That was the analytic model that I had in mind when I went to the field for the first time. And when you do go to the field for the first time, one of the things you do, because you can't just march into a community and start asking about reproduction and can I sit in your house and watch what you're doing all day long? You have to you have to create a relationship and you have to create loyalty and trust and

uh etc. And so one way at least we used to do it um is that well you would map your community physically draw a map of your community because you learn then where everyone's learning and what where kinship relationships are. You can ask along the way, age and sex of individuals living in different households. You get a sense of the community, and people love, well, one, they love looking at maps and how you draw a map. And two, you collect, as I said, along the way, kind of the reproductive histories about what's going on. And one of the questions I asked, because I was interested basically in divisions of labor, was, do you spend any time in the fields? These were Maya agriculturalists, and most of their diet comes from corn, and an

awful lot of their time supposedly was would be spent in the fields. And I would ask men, women, and children this question. And it was always, you know, women spend no time, children spend no time, and the dads all spent the time. And yet every morning I would get up and in front of my little hut, there would walk by the women to the field, and tracing behind them were all the children walking behind in the field. And so one of my first eureka moments was that what people say and what people do are very different, which is why I guess I'm I'm committed to observational sorts of research because that deception was very clear to me right off the bat. So, you know, my par my paradigm kind of really had to shift.

And when I started analyzing my data, you know, what I was observing and my hunches certainly manifested. And kids were doing an awful lot to support themselves and their siblings. And as I guess it's kind of evolved in my thinking over time, in the vernacular, I guess I would say all those kids are, in a sense, the very engine that supports high fertility. And, you know, it's it's a perpetuating, interactive, uh, finely tuned piece of life history and economic uh machinery. I'm very curious about that piece you mentioned, that uh there was a disconnect between what people were saying and what people were doing. Um so why do you think that is? Why was there that disconnect between the narrative of how much time women

and children spend in the fields and how much time they were actually spending in the fields? What do you think was behind that? Well, I think in that case there must be um there must be a strong norm that it's you know men are doing the work in the fields and uh I mean I even if they're objectively not even if they're objective even if they're objectively not I mean another good example is um I I had spent a a day uh sitting in a house doing taking time allocation observations and it was the end of the day and there's a woman, she's got eight kids, and she's kind of she's tending the fire and she's nursing a baby. And she says to me, You know, you know, it's getting dark, it's the end of the day.

I've done my work for the day. Would you like to go home? And I knew she was gonna she was heating up water to bathe her children, her eight children. Well, she probably wasn't bathing the older ones, but the younger ones. She still had to feed them all. And yet, from her point of view, that wasn't, she didn't consider that work. She she knew I was there to record what people did in terms of productive sort of economic activities. But she didn't consider all of that childcare or mother's work or cooking to be work. So I guess you know, those are two kind of different examples. One is that you know, we just have different uh it's difficult when you work in a I didn't uh probably speak Maya at that time.

It's different when you're speaking through a the our common language of Spanish. Uh it's you know different when you're dealing with language. It's different when you're just dealing with how people perceive certain kinds of words, you know, even. Do you do you think this was just a a linguistic uh misunderstanding or was there a a social reason that they felt the need to cover up how much they were working in the fields for I don't know, some social or normative reason. I think in the in the first case that I gave of why in an interview format, you know, do you work in the field? Um, you know, that was probably for some kind of normative reason. I I can't really explain why that why that would be.

They're not a particularly machismo culture. Women are valued for their for their contributions. But it just was kind of remarkable that and it's also the danger of just asking one simple question. I mean, the, you know, the fault, the onus was probably on me for not parsing. I mean, I just was trying, as I say, that's how you kind of get entree into a community is you sit down with families and talk to them as a way to humanize us all and make us, you know, on friendly terms. And it probably in while I was going to study that, it wasn't my main objective. It was just to kind of talk to them. So anyway, I think that was, you know, part of it was was the onus is on me. If I'm going to rely on interview, my onus on is on me to be able to parse the question in

a way that you're going to get actually the answer that you want. So part of it may be their norms about their own behavior, and part of it may be that I was just asking this one simple question to move on to all the other questions so that I can move on to my own research that I really wanted to do. So it's funny. Yeah. And I mean, maybe this is the next question that is sort of you have this thing where you're like, whoa, this is really different. Everyone's saying this one thing, but I go out and look and they're actually going in the fields. And now you you mentioned that experience. And then you you talked about earlier that you're you're you now have a very different view. Can you sort of walk us through how that experience now leads to this new view where you

talked about sort of this um the engine of high fertility being being children and thinking about children in that lifespan and thinking about them as you're saying, as agents and having agency and not just being empty vessels? Can you kind of walk us through from that moment that you had that field experience to sort of what was the next step for you in your thinking or how are you thinking now about that? Well, so you you're in the field for a year, you're collecting all these observations, you're you have hunches about you know what you're seeing, um, repetitive patterns, and then you come back and you analyze your data. And it was um, it was very clear, you know, the the analysis um was very

clear. One difference is most of the arguments up until then were spurred mostly by demographers, and they there was this whole cost of children, literature, and interest. So, how much does a kid cost? And you can either sum the calories or demographers sum the dollars, and then you look at what they put in, and you know, it doesn't match. You know, kids look really expensive, and they do. Maya kids, Pume kids, the hunters and gatherers that I work with in Venezuela, you know, they look really expensive when you look at one kid. But my argument all along was humans have this really odd life history where we started where women, mothers, have multiple dependents of different ages. And so, even as an economic question, we have to look at it not as one kid going through,

but what does it look like as economically from the passel of kids going through? So any one kid, the five-year-old, the three-year-old, the five-year-old are going to take out of the basket more than they put in, but the 12, 13, you know, 15, 17-year-old are going to put more into the basket than they take out. And so you get from the mother's point of view, she's just thinking about how am I going to raise my kids? Um, Is, you know, her calculus is not each, you know, I'm gonna each kid is too expensive, but you know, how can I manage the whole? And that's one thing I really tried to bring to the analysis of how we think about kids is thinking about this kind of this whole this whole product moving

forward as women decide to or not to have additional children. Right. And what is it that, I mean, you know, we we are psychologists, but one of the reasons to have an integrated, you know, evolutionary behavioral science is that anthropologists seeing, you know, ways of living that are on the ground keep us lab psychologists honest. So what was it that you were seeing in terms of um the expression of sort of care at different ages? Was the idea that sort of you're seeing that there's clearly evolved design in kids for taking care of siblings or like kind of doing alloparenting as well? Or what was it that you were seeing? Well, it it changes, it certainly changes with age, but well, I guess some of the

arguments that I've made is that that kids have a low opportunity cost in terms of health. Uh and so this is unlike other, you know, humans, this is all in the kind of the rubric of cooperative breeding, but in other species, it's really not until um the problem about cooperative breeding is why sexually mature individuals stick around home or the nest or the den or whatever longer after they're they can reproduce themselves, why they stick around longer and help out help raise their siblings. And the situation is very different for humans because, yes, by the time boys and girls are 16, 17, or 18, yes, you get to be that rub and and they and they do leave home. But it's those, it's those juveniles, like maybe even three to twelve, thirteen,

fourteen, who um these aren't this this well, Maya then didn't have um formal education. The Pune, the hunters and gatherers I work with don't have formal any formal education. So, in a sense, that is their school. That is how they're learning their adult skills, is by helping. And there's no real opportunity cost because they aren't, they aren't um, you know, they aren't looking around for mates and trying to start a family themselves or too young. So they're kind of a beholden audience, you know, for that reason. You know, that that that is their school, and there are they learn by doing. That's how they, you know, I think think that that's one place that anthropology and and psychology really overlap is in learning and like how we think about learning.

There's several of us now that are like looking at learning in traditional societies, and it just does seem to be very different in terms of learning from each other and learning while doing. And so again, just back to the idea that there's a low opportunity cost. That that's interesting that a lot of the childcare is is being done by older kids who haven't yet left to go look for a mate or or start a family. And a lot of that work is is being done by these kids and they're all learning by doing and working with each other. Um that's very different from the way things work in a modern society where uh kids aren't really playing that kind of teaching or pedagogical or child rearing role, we farm that out to daycare or to uh formal education systems.

Do you think that could be playing a role in why we see fertility levels being so uh uh low uh in in Western cultures? Um, and that the cause kids literally are more expensive in Western cultures because uh uh they don't help each other the way they do um in the in the in the communities you're studying. Is this do you think that might play a role? Well certainly that is a one of the classic um arguments for the demographic transition is is about the cost of children. Those were very popular arguments in the 70s and 80s. And you know I think we've tried to make it more we've tried to make it more nuanced, more sophisticated, but I think kind of economically it does come back to that, that you just uh

yes, that that that transition makes it again, that engine breaks down. It doesn't, those all those kids no longer really uh pay for themselves. I mean, and in essence, what we see is in traditional societies when you spin it out, these are pretty much paying for themselves, that group of kids within a family. Right. And that's no longer the case. So that's certainly been uh it's certainly a considerable uh I think part of why you get that um that demographic transition. I think there's lots of there's lots of other reasons now and it's perpetuated for lots of other reasons now. But what do you think some of those reasons are? I mean we we got into this uh briefly with Michael Gervin um sort of getting his take on on

uh what's going on with this drop in fertility that we see in the Western world uh as uh countries economically develop you you know you would think from a Darwinian perspective that greater prosperity would lead to greater fertility but what we see is the opposite um You mentioned one possible factor where in Western cultures kids don't take care of themselves to the same extent that they do in other societies. So that might be one reason why fertility has gone down, is that they're just more uh expensive. Um what what do you think are some of the other factors that you think are playing a key role here? Well, this is not a place that I am an am an expert, is thinking about modern demographic

transition. Um uh so there are many factors, and I think all many different disciplines weigh in, you know, both about uh cognitive, you know, economic reasons uh that we just you know talked about, cost of children. You know, there certainly are um, you know, probably cultural evolution, you know, the cultural evolutionists would have a set of explanations for that. I think psychologists would have an explanation for that. You know, I think one obvious thing is is when we've got seven billion people on the planet, um, you know, that's gone up many fold since you know you and I were born, that it's uh you know, it's just a super competitive world, and and you you have to, you know, you have to you have to think about um you know that aspect of it.

I was gonna say that demographers, uh well, to focus on a mean change, an average change in fertility is one question. But I guess what I've really learned watching this Maya community, the uptake of family planning or contraception is something very different that we have to really actually keep our eye on the variation and what's going on there. So, in that Maya community, as in much of Mesoamerica and Latin America, family planning is introduced with tubal ligation. So, this is a real serious decision, you know, on-off decision about whether you curtail your fertility or not. And it was, you know, I trained as a demographer. I was looking at averages, averages, averages, and you know, nothing was if nothing was

really changing, but I knew things were changing. And I mean, I've worked in this community for 33 years. And so if you take a look at the variation, that's what was moving around, which was so interesting. So what parents were doing is some were just as as life got more economically as they started going through market integration, and there started to be some wealth. I wouldn't say there's even hardly wealth disparities yet, but now that's coming down the track. Some people were you were putting that into somatic reproductive effort, some people were having much larger families, and others were having smaller families. And so but you would miss all of that if you were just were looking at the average.

You would you'd have to look at the distribution. And what was interesting is that women were, you know, tubal ligation again, really serious form of family planning. They were uptaking it at the end of their reproductive careers. So they would get a tubal ligation after they had six or seven children. So it was curtailing them from having seven, eight, or nine children, but they weren't, they weren't yet making the decision, I just want to have two children or one children, one child, until they understood the implications of this new world. I mean, so you've got this, you've got this rapidly changing world economically, you've got these new market opportunities, and along with that comes the the option to

limit families size. And so what do you do? And what was so cool about that is that they had far more agency than we give most people, that they were making their own decisions and they were basically making the most cautious decision they could. They were doing the new behavior. If if I'm making, if if you're following what I'm saying, they were doing the new behavior, they were uptaking family planning, but they were doing so at a time that really wouldn't have late in their reproductive career when it really wouldn't affect their fertility. Then, 20 years later, when they start to understand the risks and opportunities, they start to then have it, have those tube ligations earlier in their reproductive career.

So that's not super answering your question because I'm looking at it, I'm looking at the demographic transition played out like literally in a 20-year period. And that's all I can say about that is that that women have um, I guess, you know, their parents make decisions and they make conscious decisions about what they what they want to do, what they can afford to do, and how it might impact. You know, if if you only have two kids, you're not going to be growing crops much longer. You can't really afford to grow crops. Um, so it's a you know, it's a pretty major decision. So I think those decisions, the demographic transition, we can see a mean change in family size, gotten much smaller, got much smaller, you know, over a couple hundred years pretty

quickly, I guess, but there's also a lot of variation around that. And that's maybe where we can learn actually more about why people, why parents make those decisions. Yeah. But I'm hearing you say too is also, I think from a very naive evolutionary perspective, and maybe one that, you know, I'm certainly guilty of promulgating would be one of there's evolved design for obviously like mating and for parenting. But the idea that sort of thinking about well, how are my children going to succeed in this social ecology? And what can I do now to ensure their success in the future? which, you know, even if it wouldn't have included, you know, birth control or it might have over evolutionary time, you know, but that's a little bit uncertain.

I mean, we we certainly have lots of cross-cultural ethnographic evidence of birth control and ways to sort of limit fertility. But to me, this sort of expresses a much richer psychology of sort of family plan planning. and and even for the evolved psychology to sort of be aware of on the ground what is the social landscape, what is the ecology, and how can I as a parent, you know, it's not like we're just, you know, a species where we just sort of drop our eggs and say, good luck, everybody. You know, like we're really thinking about how can we smooth out the wrinkles? what how should we invest? I mean, I realize it's not helicopter parenting, like it may be in some places, but it seems to me to reflect still a design for thinking about um being responsible and thinking

about the consequences of sort of like what what what is the landscape that these children are going to be in, which is what I think you would expect. Do you think that's fair or is that um well I think I think all parents you know think think about that. I mean, even natural fertility parents who, you know, there's other ways that you can alter your fertility than to then to take, you know, birth control or have a tubal ligation. And I think all parents, I think all parents think about uh what are the implications if I I mean I've certainly overheard those dialogues in those conversations both among the Kume, among the Maya, certainly among friends and colleagues and students that um you know we think about the futures of our children and what that's gonna what's that

that's gonna do. I mean there's a lot of built-in biological mechanisms in humans so that we it's difficult well there's few few benefits and a lot of costs to have kids too closely together. So there are some some limits that are just kind of imposed, so to speak, biologically. But um, I do think there's uh well thought out conversations about about that. Yeah. David asked about the demographic transition. Are there other consequences as you see it to this idea that in a more quote unquote sort of natural ecology, children are having the experience of raising their siblings or close relatives or or in multi-age um cohorts. And we don't do that in in certain cultures and ours. Are there other consequences or or what are those consequences?

And what are the ones that you are thinking about or worrying about or yeah. I I think I think there I think there are. I'm actually just starting to write a book on kind of the evolution of childhood. And while I'm again not an expert because I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a developmental psychologist or a cognitive psychologist, but certainly I I no I've got the other perspective of how kids organize themselves when they're children versus what you know is very apparent in our own world. And that's one of the biggest, I think, aspects is that kids in traditional societies hang out in mixed age groups. So there's very little, even I'm not sure if I think Mike was on that study, even among the

Chamani, they looked at language learning and they found there was incredibly low child-directed uh adult talk. Very low. And I found that not in terms of language, but just in terms of learning, that kids spend almost no time being taught by uh adults. Now, that's very culturally specific. I'm sure, you know, in some cases, in some traditional cultures around the world, absolutely, you know, there's hands-on parent parental teaching. I just don't observe it in the with the people that I work with. There's much more uh kids learning, kids learning on their own. So, for example, the Pume, the hunters and gatherers that I work with, a lot of their technology is woven technology. and little girls, so they use you know baskets uh of every shape and

size to do everything, you know, that's their those are their containers, those are their bowls, those are how they carry things around. I mean, they're really woven technology is really critical. They weave mats to sit on, so they don't have to sit on the dirt. And kids don't learn how they learn to do that is not by mom showing them. They will take a they'll go to the garbage, you know, the trash dump, they'll pick up a discarded basket or bat mat or something, they'll take it apart. I guess, you know, lots of kids learn basic mechanics this way. They'll take it apart and they'll learn how to put it back together again. And you know, maybe when they're a little bit older, they'll ask you know, mom a question

about something sophisticated, or the mother will correct them about something. But that's how they learn. They're not they're not formally taught. And part of it, they're, I mean, they're just they're hanging out in mixed age and mixed sex groups, and they're learning an awful lot from each other. And I think there is probably a big price to pay for the fact that we have these age-regulated groupings, you know, in terms of after-school sports, in terms of schooling, uh, lots of expectation about age. And I think we've we've eliminated, I mean, at least this what I'm writing so far about that, you know, I certainly wouldn't recommend that we don't send our kids to school, but I think in terms of social learning, that's really critical is that you learn

you learn from the older kids. Um you learn from the older kids how to socially regulate. And I think we miss out on that. I have a good example where um uh a male uh a postdoc uh he brought down um his uh kids to the field and the Maya were so excited to see like what you know what what would it be what what the little ones would be like and um they were the the kids were sh were just kind of jaw-droppingly astonished that there was a two-year-old and the two-year-old just threw fits, you know, as as our kids do through through tantrums all the time. And they were just like dumbfounded, like how in the like how do you like, why would you do that? And how do you get away with that? Or like sharing, it would be like they they just easily, they easily share.

I mean they're self-interested. There's no you know essential difference. But they're they easily share. And you know, it's like, you know, that two-year-old old sort of behavior that that's mine and you can't have me. And and yet, and yet, and yet the little the the kid could recite their numbers and their letters in a way that the Maya kids could not. So there's just, you know, there's real differences in terms of kind of cognitive skills and social skills. And you know, we can't we need the social we need the cognitive skills obviously to succeed in our own world. But I I worry about the the social skills, I guess, and and and maybe what we're compromising. Yeah. Do you think those social skills, I mean, and maybe maybe I'm just saying the obvious

inference is that the reason why the the the postdoc children got away with that was because there weren't just younger kids around who when there was a fit were just sort of like walked away. Cause right, they're just not, they are they're not, they didn't buy into like I'm gonna like go the full the full way and dealing with a meltdown. I'm still a kid, and you know what, kid, have a meltdown, I'm not gonna deal with this. And that just changes then the reward structure of the two-year-old of just like if I if I have a meltdown, yep, doesn't do anything, I'm not I'm gonna, you know, I'm just gonna do it less. Is that you know right, right? Yeah, certainly there would be synergy for that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, I'm wondering if it if it has to do with the abstractness of the information that has to be transmitted in modern societies compared to forging societies. And that, you know, a physical skill can easily be acquired by you know actually practicing it actually doing it, you know, being around other kids who are doing it. Whereas learning how to read or write uh is not really the type of skill that you can learn by doing. And that's it's it's kind of an alien way of learning that kids aren't really um good at at doing. I mean the kids like to you know move move their bodies to manipulate things. They like to play around and experiment and you know try things out and see what happens.

That's much more the the natural way that kids like to learn. But unfortunately, that's just not the way that that you can learn how to read and write and do math. It's just it's a very different mode of information. Do you think there's something about the different the the nature of the information that needs to be learned to to flourish in a in a modern society compared to a forging society. Do you think that is is one of the differences perhaps that that leads to these cultural differences? I mean I think in the from the surface of it, it would seem like you know, the information that we need to learn is is certainly additive, and and adults have kind of the end game picture in mind, and so um they can transmit that

information. I mean, I would say you know, lots of um technologies in traditional societies is pretty sophisticated. Um but uh I would say that's yeah that's probably tr true. I'm not like I'm saying I wouldn't advocate that cognitive learning should um perhaps you know there it that's all very understandable but I think it's just appreciating I think what we what we what we always thought what we tend to do is look at look look at um you know look at where we're at today and then kind of project backwards as opposed to sort of thinking about you know evolution that happens from the past forward and you know what some of those pressures uh and changes would have been. But just you know, I mean, I guess just mostly appreciating that it's not a top-down,

We maybe aren't adapted to a top-down process. Um it pr maybe is more challenging. Maybe that's why we have such trouble with retention, you know, in schools and stuff like that. I don't, I don't, I've I don't have any idea. Those aren't, those aren't things I really contemplate, but um it it you know, it could be that we are really well adapted in to something different, but true in this world, in this age, that's not what's going, you know, we need these other skills to succeed. Yeah, you use the word agency. Um, and I think like one of the things I'm hearing is that there was sort of a lack of appreciation for for many of the things you mentioned already of people having agency, including women, including children, who maybe weren't

appreciated for the agency they actually had, either in the evolutionary models or maybe by ethnographers in the past, or by scientists, or just by social world. Is that, you know, can you speak a little bit to that? Is that a fair characterization? Do you think that that's um one of the themes of the work that you've seen? Is that it's sort of one way to be scientific is to sort of appreciate the the agency of folks who have otherwise been sort of overlooked. I I think it certainly in terms of kids, that's true. I mean, I you know, there are, you know, tons of books on child development and um, you know, how to how to raise the best children that we can. And they really do always seem to be kind of top-down perspectives.

You know, one of the best a couple of couple of examples of that are uh, you know, if you if you, I'm sure any kind of research that you do, you know, we have to go through all of these um gyrations with with with human subjects to get to get approvals. And so the same thing is true when we go into the field and I don't know, it was a number of years ago, and I had to get permission in this case from adults if a child could participate in something. And so I asked the mother, I said, you know, could you sign this paper for your kid? And the kid was pretty little, probably five years old or so. And she just looked at me just kind of really quizzically and said, Why are you asking me? Ask the kid.

It was just classy examples. Like, I don't need to make this decision. If my child wants to participate, they'll make their own decision. Yeah, so I think that's um I think that's really true. In terms of why you know kids have, you know, I think really been under the radar in uh anthropology and archaeology is there's I also have a great story um about out from Alison Brooks, who is a famous archaeologist uh working in sub-Saharan Africa, and she was living with um like in a in a kung in a juanse community and every day as a dutiful you know mother from america she made her kids peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she'd go off to her excavation and give her kids the food and she'd come back at the end of the day and and their the lunch sack would still be full and and

she would say what were what were you you know what were you doing all day long and like how did you eat and it's like oh yeah you know we're out we're out with the other kids we're killing little birds little lizards you know we're eating this we're grabbing that And all of that, yeah, I think for decades and decades go went completely unnoticed. They're just not watching what kids are doing. And because they're not bringing back, maybe the little ones aren't bringing back huge returns. Um, but they are actually really able, even among the Juansi, who are, you know, kids aren't known to really work that hard in that particular group of hunters and gatherers were were taking care of themselves, just going very unnoticed.

So yes, I think they do have, uh I do think they have a lot of agency in their own uh society. And I think they do take care of themselves in ways that we just weren't paying attention to. Yeah. And I don't want to get too sidetracked, but David, I just have a quick aside, which is you know, I also think like just institutionally, I think like there can also be institutional selection pressures of like or even a fear of like kids' agency, right? Like because it can be contrary to the goals of the adults, right? Or, you know, or you just if you don't appreciate what it is the kids are designed to do, status schemes, you know, do things that are different than like, you know, you're going to be working in the workshop, you know, in five years and you need to know learn how to make

a widget and you better be a good worker, like that kind of thing. Yeah. And then there's the issue of parent-offspring conflict where you know parents have have different genetic interests than than their offspring and often will will want them to be more altruistic toward their siblings than than the kids themselves would would want to from a Darwinian perspective. And so there's the need to mold kids uh in a in a in a into a shape that is going to be more beneficial for the parents' fitness than for the offspring's fitness. And so you might expect, you know, from the offspring's perspective, they uh are going to be better off learning from other kids in their peer group whom they're going to be

competing with as adults for status and for mates. Um, that's gonna be, you know, a more important source of information for them than you know, than perhaps you know, being trying to be molded by their parents uh to fit you know the parents' agenda. I don't know if if you if you if you buy any of that perspective in terms of parent offspring conflict, Karen, if or if that has informed your your thinking on this at all. Yes, uh uh I mean certainly certainly that's true and you do see those conflicts I guess to to the point I was making earlier about opportunity costs you know once those opportunity costs start to diminish diminish when kids reach reproductive age you certainly see those you see those conflicts you also see conflicts at the at the other

end around weaning I mean I have seen three year olds dump pots of boiling water on their one year old sibling. I mean, you do you do see stuff, you know, stuff happens where there's certainly conflict. You know, there's and it's usually around weaning uh age. But then, you know, I I do think there's kind of a sweet spot where there's just a really low opportunity cost for kids to not. I mean, what else is they don't like if you see a Maya kid working in the field, they're, you know, yeah, they'll weed a couple rows, they'll they'll weed for five minutes and then they'll pick up some dirt clods and throw them at birds and they'll, you know, kind of wander off, and then they'll come back and they'll do their thing and then they'll wander,

you know, that's you know, kind of kids are you you can't expect them. It's not like factory work for sure. Um, and I don't think parents, you know, what's one thing was interesting, you never, both with the Pume and the Maya, uh, you almost never hear the word no. Um you hear like they'll parents will tell kids go do this, but they'll almost never, you know, like a kid will be sitting right next to you, like singing a song at the top of their lungs, way off key, you know, something that we would tell the kid to like, could you just, you know, cut it out? And they would just not, they would just wouldn't, you know, whatever. Kids, kids could could have a lot of freedom, except if they did need to do something, they

would be told to do something. But you rarely heard like, don't do that, don't do this, don't do this. And you realize, yes, we tell kid, we have to tell kids that all the time because you know, there's the cleanser under the sink, there's the hot iron on the, you know, on the ironing board, there's the fertilizer that's on the grass. I mean, there's so there's the street, there's the dog, I mean, there's so much that we have to guard kids uh against. And um, yeah, so I mean, presumably though, there would be lots of things to guard against uh in a in a forager society. There, you know, there are poisonous plants, yes, animals and bugs, and you know, uh all sorts of dangers, you know, you know, fire and danger, sharp tools.

There are there are lots of things that kids could get into uh in a situation there too. Um so I'm I'm I'm curious about why why that difference exists with with the well I think there's just so much more that's dangerous. I mean absolutely you know kids don't uh if they live around big uh carnivores you know there are different rules. I've never I haven't worked with people who live around big carnivores but um certainly I I think adults are probably just as you know freaked out by them as little kids are. But yeah, there certainly are are things in place. But there's just it just seems like in our houses there's just a gazillion things that can this is a change of magnitude um in terms of the numbers of things that could

potentially hurt us or hurt our kids. Yeah. Do you detect any consequences of that freedom? Like compared to, I mean, you, you know, you you cross these cultures. Are there differences in kids? You know, like with freedom comes responsibility, sort of, you know, is that for example, or you know, are there notable differences? I mean, you talked about the two-year-old having a fit, uh, which was different for for the people, um, for the other kids, you know, in this other culture. Um, are there, you know, in your thinking about transposing yourself between these different cultures, um, yeah, are there things that you've sort of noticed about kids? Like you mentioned, you know, you're you're you're really thinking about, you know, we're

really missing something. Um, do you see those consequences? I mean, I even think about this, you know, as a parent, you know, even just small cultural differences, you know, between like, you know, living where my son grew up and where he lives now, and what that effect has on me. I mean, I, you know, do you have you thought about, you know, what are the things that we might be blind to about our own ourselves or the children we're raising because they're not more responsible or because we're not giving them as much freedom or because we're not letting them grow up in a mixed age cohort like like they might be designed to do um well I mean I um I I don't know how that would quite would spin out, but uh I think if you know from a young age you have a lot of agency and you do

you can make your own decisions. Um I don't know how that would affect, you know, kind of adult decision making or or um maybe not so much adult, but juvenile uh well young adult decision making. You know, we know all we hear, you know, we just hear so much bad stuff was what's going on with with young people, not so much children, but with with young adults. Um, you know, I guess the other thing I would say, it's, you know, we live in such a rapidly changing world. You know, it's just constantly uh it's really in an exponential state of change. Whereas, you know, I guess the people I'm talking about, there's there's some there's some homeostasis to their way of to their way of life. I mean the skill the skills you learn as a kid are the skills that are going to be useful

to you uh as as an adult. I think it I think it's important to really integrate society. I mean, I'm expecting, you know, something I I didn't set out to study, but the the the hunters and gathers in Venezuela, Venezuela is such a broken-down country, their lives probably it's too dangerous for us to go back right now, but their lives have probably actually really not changed. Um but in uh with the Maya, their life has changed a lot. And you do see the breakdown. I mean, you do see the beginnings of kind of breakdowns in terms of where kids spend their time, how they spend their time. It's not as integrated. You know, the other thing is that kids and adults in more traditional societies, kids are

kind of always there, like running. No, adults are like doing something. Kids are just constantly like running in or in and out of adult spaces. And so there's a lot of sort of spatial integrity, whereas I think we have a lot of actually spatial segregation. And so I don't know what that means about long-term sort of respect or intergenerational integration. Um, you know, I don't know, when I was a teen, I was embarrassed to be seen around my parents. You know, you do anything to like not like drop me off like two blocks away and I'll walk in or, you know, whatever. It's uh I I think that's changed back again. But you know, uh there you know, that would just never cross a puma or my child's mind to

be embarrassed by their parent or their grandparent or um yeah. So I I I I I it's hard to answer because I think there's there's so much flux and change happening right now. Yeah. Well, I think that's a very uh thoughtful and careful answer. And I think even just being aware of the difference, right? To just even point to the fact that it is different and and it is something to ask, right? I think that's a big part of it, is just even asking the question. Um, yeah, it's and we would not even get to that question if you weren't sort of looking at the kinds of things that you're looking at, or more broadly taking, kind of this evolutionary approach to life history. David, I think you were going to say something.

Yeah, I mean, I think we we've been talking a lot about life history. We've been throwing this word around a lot. Um, I don't think it's something that we've ever delved into uh uh thoroughly in this podcast before. Um, and it's really a core perspective, uh it's a t it's a core approach to a lot of people in the evolutionary behavioral sciences. Um so I think it might be worth um taking a moment to unpack, you know, what life history means and and what life history theory is and how that informs uh your work. So so what is uh life history? What is life history theory to you and how does that help you uh uh uh develop ideas in your research? Okay, well, I think you know it's a it's a concept that came out of evolutionary

biology, and it was a kind of a revolution at the time to thinking about how we could think about species being different in terms of what we're called RK strategies. So, you know, some species produce a lot of offspring and don't just much in either one, and other ones um produce a a few species few offspring and in invest a lot you know that's kind of the short of it and the idea is you know once you make kind of a typology like that you know there are gonna be so many exceptions so life history theory kind of um it didn't so much supplant it but it gives it another way of looking at that um life events uh are uh differential time and energy investments are made in different life events. And there are differential fertility rates, mortality rates.

So there's a focus on that, as well as on in growth and development. You know, whether you have a short infancy or a long infancy, or weaned early or late, or reach sexual maturity early or late. So it's the idea that you have a unit of time, a unit of calories, a unit of energy, unit of money in our case, and you can allocate it to this thing or to that thing that's either going to aid in your survival or reproduction. And so then it's heavily reliant on the idea of a trade-off that I can either do this thing or I can do that thing. So we can use that to think about, I mean, I think about many things about children, um, in terms uh including growth and development. You know, why is it that we have the kind of pattern of growth and development that we do,

and then also why we start to reproduce when we do or not? Do we curtail, in a sense, childhood and and and make that transition early, or do we make it later? And then kind of from the mother's point of view, also the children's point of view, this idea of how do you allocate your resources to different children in terms of fertility decisions and how kids allocate their time in terms of either being helpful or not helpful. So I guess it informs that structure of time and energy and resources are limited, and decisions are made about alternative choices, is kind of what informs, I guess, most of what I do. Yes. And I think just one thing I uh you know, because I think it's probably so baked in for

you, but I think, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you were one of the people to really go and look at what people were doing and not just listen to sort of what people were saying, which is, you know, you mentioned at the beginning, you know, you actually are going on these follows. And it's sort of easy to say in a few seconds on a podcast, but that's a very difficult thing to do. I mean, can you can you talk a little bit about, you know, like what how did you decide or why did you decide to actually do that? And like, was that actually difficult? You know, I mean, like that's I think for for many people, my generation, even understanding sort of because you know, we now that's sort of baked into, you know, if

you're gonna do this, you have to go do a follow and actually track calories. But that was not, as I understand it, sort of a thing as much. I mean, I know people started to do that, but can you talk a little bit about like sort of what is that like doing? Or if you're somebody listening who's never done that, like what does that involve, you know? Like well, um time allocation, scan observations, focal follows, all of that came out of studies with I think mostly with primates in the 60s and 70s, and the early behavioral ecologists. So I was a student of Hilly Kaplan's and Jane Lancaster's. And that's how they were they were trained by ethologists. They were actually trained here at the University of Utah.

They were students of Kristen Hawks, and uh including Hilly Kaplan and Magdalena Hurtado. And you know, they had a real emphasis on b behavioral observation Before I be before I started studying with with with them in behavioral ecology, I was an archaeologist and I was a student of Lou Binford's, who was kind of the father of the new archaeology. And his real emphasis was on bringing scientific thinking to archaeology and um and on ethno archaeology, which is we have to see what people are doing. We can't see it in the archaeological record, so we have to go actually live and work with people that are living close to those ways of life. So all of that kind of comes together both from the archaeology, the ethnoarchaeology point

of view and from the and then from the ethology point of view. And then as it translated into human behavioral ecology was behavioral observation. Right. So that was kind of the stuff that we used, I mean that was this when I was coming through, it was the stuff that we all, we all, we all did. You collected your reproductive histories when you first went into the field, and then you uh collected your time allocation uh data. And um it just has been abbreviated, I guess, over time. It's very, I can't talk any graduate students into doing it anymore. It's true. It's very, it's pretty it's pretty labor intensive, but and there are biases, but I would say it's uh you know, by watching people over the course of a year.

So usually a year time frame was the time frame you would um you would go from house to house and every 15 minutes say write down what everyone was doing in that house. And after you have hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of observations, you know, you can say three to five year olds spend this amount of their time doing this rather than um rather than asking. I think it would also be really hard, you know, maybe interview, you know, maybe it's really limited because you can ask adults that, but you know, I'm not sure about kids. And again, having parents say what kids are doing are probably really different than actually seeing them. So there was a real emphasis on it and I think that is actually, it's reverted now more to

um to interview even among behavioral ecologists, yeah. It's much, much more interview uh oriented. And different questions have emerged, you know, not so much what people how they spend their time, but I do think like knowing someone's, you know, age and sex, knowing what they do is is pretty fundamental to to so many questions that we want to ask. Yeah. I mean, and I don't, you know, we we can but but just the one question is sort of like what does that do? I mean, uh uh when before you did that and then after you didn't have that experience of being with a group of people and doing this sort of interesting and maybe slightly unnatural thing of every 15 minutes just noting down what people did.

Um for for those of us who haven't done that, like does that change how you think about people or how you observe, or what what when you when you come when you're you know when you start doing that process, how does that change you as a person or scientist? Well, I think it was the most magnificent way to have kind of come up at doing research. It um it does, it did deeply change me as a human being. I I think in an in a number of ways that maybe if you don't, you know, sit there day after day after day in the boiling hot, and you know, half the time you're really bored, but um it is it it is so human to understand that just watching what people do, it's not what they say they do, but you know, we all love our

children in the same way. We all, you know, are annoyed by the same things. We all, you know, feel certain ways. I've it was it was um I I mean, I think it's I go into the field every year. It's the most important thing, I think, to keep me as a kind, honest human being is to understand that we're all connected in this, we're all human. I mean you can't walk out of that situation and be very prejudiced about people. I mean it's uh you know even though you know they're hunters and gatherers, they are there there's so much that we um have in common. So yeah, I think there was uh there's a fundamental effect that it has on one's humanity for sure. Um and sense of empathy that we're all up, you know, we're all up kind of up against the

same, some of the same basic things. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I um yeah, and especially, I mean, just as a parent, especially, you know, like I think even uh whenever I see another parent, whatever the social distances, you know, I I sort of get a sliver of that. So I can't it must be uh really um life changing to sort of experience that in lots of different ways day to day over a year. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and then people there people are mostly good. Yeah. They're mostly really kind and really loving and really good. I mean, you know, there's sometimes a few, you know, bad eggs and and um, you know, I think you deceive yourself as an anthropologist to think that, you know, you are beloved like

family. I mean, there's always a um you know, there's always a you know, there it you you leave in the end. And so, you know, there's there's there's is a difference. Um, yeah, I think it's a kind of a mistake to think that you are kind of one of them, but um yeah, it's uh and it's a very different sense since you're asking the question. It's really different to miss a whole community. I can't even say what that's like because we don't really have that sense. Like when I'm not with them for a while, it's like I miss a village of 500. How do you even explain that? Like we we miss individuals, we miss you know, our kids, our parents, our friends, but like to miss a whole village is like a different thing.

But uh anyway, thanks for asking. Yeah, it's it's sort of, I mean, I think a lot of the anthropologists we have on express that, and it's almost like you have this sort of strange alternate dimension, not strange, but just it's it is an unusual thing as a human to sort of have this uh other life that you miss. Um many people have expressed that, and um yeah, and that's it's it's a wonderful thing. And I think it also ties to one of the things that David um and I mentioned a lot on this podcast is sort of how um, you know, like you said, what we talk about may not always be representative of what we do. And it's it's nice that you're saying that in a way of sort of a lot of what we do is actually very universal and often very sort of uh just

normal, everyday human stuff, and maybe not necessarily the stuff that makes the news um or or all the horrible stuff, uh, but but just sort of beautifully mundane sort of stuff. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, one one, you know, one of the mundane human things that um that our live that our lives revolve around is um parenthood itself and and the idea that there are two parents working together, the the dad and and the mom. Um and uh you've done some research on examining that question of you know what is the natural sort of family structure. You have a paper with Ryan Schacht with uh the question is, are we monogamous? is the title of the of the paper. Um and uh I'm curious how you would answer the question that you posed in the title of that

paper. Do you see uh human life history as uh uh you know, in terms of biparental investment with with a mother and a father, uh, or or is it more uh is it is it is it different? Is it, you know, are there different family structures that we have that we are perhaps more suited to? What do you think is the answer to the question of what is the what is the most uh uh natural or or species typical uh uh parenting arrangement well that's a great question I think there's been huge evolutionary changes in that I mean um uh one of the one of the things I have argued is you know we can't see these well we can't see these behaviors in the past so we really have to we have to work from phylogenetic studies we have to work from what we know from closely

related species. We have to work from what we know about living in these more traditional societies. I think we can say a couple of things. I do have a couple of papers on the cooperative economy of food and the evolution of the human family. That it is, well, one, the nuclear family is probably very novel. Um, the idea of that you get a mom and a dad in a house. So at least in the past we grew up in extended, I think that's a minimum you could say extended family households, and it's highly variable cross-culturally. You know, some places you get men's houses and you get women's houses, other places you get a lot of in you know, you get integrity between the the two. So it's it's it's it's quite, you know, it's quite variable.

But I think what you can say is that the nuclear family is probably very, very recent, and you know, in terms of hundreds of years. Um, there's no question that you know, moms don't care who they get the help. I mean, I would say moms are agnostic, mothers are agnostic who they get the help from, whether or not it's their own kids, whether or not it's a partner, whether or not it's a grandparent. Uh And I guess I think probably the earliest systems were probably maternal, maternal structures where you get mothers and maybe related women and children that uh it's it's a big evolutionary step to get male parental care in there. And it happens, of course it happens. Um, but uh I would say it's one of the harder things to, you know, there has to

be some big um uh social organizational changes, and that's what I mean. I've explored this topic with some evolutionary biologists uh before that paper with Ryan about about monogamy, and it is I think what's interesting about it is if you think of us as cooperative breeders, so what I mean by that is people other than mothers helping to raise offspring, very rare in the animal world, doesn't happen all that much, Happens across a great diversity of species, but not that many species. And the evolutionary biologists usually argue that in order for that to have happened, there had to have been monogamy in the system at some point in the past. So there is a precedence for thinking that monogamy and cooperative reading uh go together.

Why why sorry, why why's the evolutionary reasoning behind those links? Because they're trying to explain why sexually mature uh individuals would help a mother raise offspring that are not their own. So there's this high opportunity costs that we've talked, kind of talked about. And so if everyone is highly related, if you're more related in the community through monogamy, you're more likely to want to pay the opportunity cost. And I guess what I argue is that because if kids are that valuable to helping mothers, you don't necessarily, they may be half siblings, but they're not going to be any more distantly related than that. So you don't necessarily need that entry point of monogamy. In many other cooperative breeders, monogamy happened sometime in the evolutionary past,

and then the breeding system changed. So I guess to go back to your question, there is no question that male parental care is important in human societies. I think it's probably relatively, you know, in terms of a big evolutionary picture, relatively late, because it requires a pretty big um social organizational um change that kids helping raise uh kids wouldn't require. Um and I don't think older individual, you know, I think older individuals, that's just demographically fairly not so probable. What what social organizational changes do you think need to be in place for male parental care to well there has to there's this trade-off where you're gonna have to assure paternity confidence, women are gonna have to, you know, classic sexual selection.

Um, I guess you're gonna have to, you know, males will have to um Bernard Chapet has made a lot of arguments in this direction, which is kind of you know how we weigh dampen down male-male competition. Although I think you could argue, yeah, we don't bludgeon each other, but we certainly have other ways that we heavily males heavily compete with each other. But you'd have to dampen that. You'd have to respect, you'd have to respect your brother's children, your your brother's wife, I guess. And so, you know, oddly enough, we live in these communities where we have multiple breeding aged males and multiple breeding aged females. Just, you know, a village, uh, your neighbors. And we somehow dampen down the competition to, you know, we we don't

we respect those boundaries. And that's a big evolutionary change to what other great apes do. So we, you know, probably go from a pretty polygynous past of some form of some form we don't really know, to one where we start respecting each other's boundaries. And I think that's a pretty, that's pretty sophisticated. Yeah. Well, sort of, I mean, we had Chris von Ruden on and he talked about Chris Bohm and sort of leveling mechanisms or coalitions. Is that sort of the thing you're you're referring to? Like I mean, that's the next step. I mean, it's all speculative, and of course, we're sort of on the edge here of sort of what the the the key topics, but I mean, is that sort of what you're uh um talking about

too, where it would be just sort of, you know, just from a very basic perspective, just sort of to the extent that we have a phenotype that allows us to be coalitional, then you know, we can sort of enforce norms like that. And that a belligerent, um, aggressive male might be teamed up against and it's sort of a leveling mechanism in the crispome kind of way. Yeah, but I mean that's a big step because other primates don't do that. I mean, they they form co coalitions, certainly, but they also have no problem um, you know taking on you know there's no yes they're promiscuous yeah um so yeah I think monogamy monogamy is pretty pretty difficult to get to yeah there's I mean I I know there's some new

new thinking on that but you know I I think the human the human story whether or not we have deep ancestry in that that's with that paper that's previous work that I've done with Andy Russell looking at this question in other species of cooperative breeders. You know, we we have some of those traits sort of, and you know, we don't have others. So uh biological traits, social traits. So I think um I teach this a lot in in and I just kind of let students uh know kind of what the evidence is on this side or that side, and they can make up, they can make up their mind. I think it's a really loaded, it's a really loaded question. Um and there's other ways, you know. We know in societies where there isn't a lot of paternity certainty, it's it's the uncles

that play a big so so there, you know, I think we do have to distinguish between male parental investment and paternal investment. Right. So, you know, you certainly can't. Oh, those in terms of you know the the father investing versus uncles or other men. Yes, yes. Yeah. So where there's a lot of promiscuity in those societies where there's a lot of promiscuity, it is uh mother's brother that um will invest. Okay. So a lot of facultative sort of in lingo sort of facultative design here in terms of or not parenting, but just uh investment in in allo parenting and offspring and uh and children. Yeah. Well I think that's a good place for me to probably end is that you know I think the human the brilliance of the human strategy is our incredible flexibility.

And you know we don't have just one breeding pattern. We've got all of these I I would say we're not committed male parental investors at all. It's pretty it is facultative and and we we solve it in so many that's our that's why we're so successful at what we do. We solve these things in so many different ways. Yeah. We we we have a mandatory question, which is is there anything we should have asked you uh during this? Oh yeah I I guess I I mean I brought up some of them, but I guess I was thinking, okay, what are like one's Eureka moments? You know, what gets them to? And we talked, we we did actually talk about a few of them, but um, or you know. Yeah, or how did you get, or maybe one question just sort of is like, how did you um how

did you discover, how did you become an anthropologist or become an evol interested in evolution? Well, um, I I was an archaeologist and as I said, in ethnoarchaeology was really a big uh was really what was important at that time was studying uh living hunters and gatherers or or recently um ethnographic hunters and gatherers. And I just fell in love, I didn't have the patience for an archaeolog for archaeology, really, the slowness of it. And I guess I like um, I guess I would call myself, you know, a behavioral ecologist or an evolutionary anthropologist. And I guess I like thinking about origins questions, not historic narrative, uh, not just explaining you know why things are the way they are, but actually have what what

the origins are, what origins are, origin stories. And I also think it's a really good message for our time, Because times are so sort of divisive that it focuses in some ways on what makes us all human. And I think in psychology, there's even a greater emphasis on universals. I do think you do have to stay focused on variation in order to advance the science. But I do think it does pull together a lot about, you know, what makes us fundamentally human. And I think that's a good message for we need that message. Students need that message at this time. Yeah. Yeah. And I think even, you know, one of the themes of this, in addition to sort of being aware of the agency of of people who haven't, you know, whose agency has sort of been

overlooked, is also just that it offers this interesting, and I mean your work is just it it highlights the uniqueness of what is our universal uh nature, right? That I think, you know, if you don't take an evolutionary approach, you wouldn't even ask the question of, you know, is monogamy what what we're designed to do, or think we may ask questions about facultative male investment in children or things like that. And so I think seeing what we often take for granted um and seeing if it is weird or not um is a real value thing and i think your work is a wonderful example of that and um and it sounds like you're working on a book is that right i am yes yeah so we look forward to uh when whenever that comes out we uh yes well it's it's an experiment

because writing writing a popular book is something very different from writing an academic paper right so um yeah well thank you for that and i yes um uh and thank you for your podcast. It was really a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you so much for being on. We really appreciate it. And yeah, uh best of luck. And we look forward to having you on uh when the book is is coming out. So so I'll enjoy that. Okay, thank you. Okay, bye. Great pleasure talking to you all. Yeah, you too. Bye, Dave and David. Bye. David, how can people uh support the podcast now that we're all done with this episode? Well, they can say that Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast, is awesome on social media. They can leave us a kind review, uh, or they can visit us on Patreon and maybe throw us a

few bucks because uh more funding is always needed, as our friend Dan Sneezer would say. And uh also uh just in general, reach out to us. You know, tell us what you think, give us ideas. We're uh we're lovely to talk to, if I uh don't mind saying so. See so yourself, yeah. I agree, David. So yeah, and without further ado, um here's gonna be the next episode in a few moments or in a week. Good enjoy.