Drugs, Delusions, and Depression with Ed Hagen
2025-08-12 12:00:00.000 +00:00

Uh I don't know why there's so many very I don't know why there's so many there the need to There's so many ways to fuck up. We've we're exploring the possibility space of ways to fuck up. It's incredible how small what a small number of words this is and how many times we've screwed up. So David, what is this podcast? Uh Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. And the tagline is uh actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologist. Yep, that's the thing you're listening to. Keep listening. Okay. That was great. All right. David, I uh I make it a practice to um actually listen to our episodes. Um and um this one I I learned a lot and in fact I learned so much that I I had to listen to it I think a second time to pick everything up because today

we're we're talking to Ed Hagan and uh there was just so much in this episode about um what was in this episode. I mean, w we got into depression, mental illness, delusions, uh drugs getting high, whether animals get high, uh uh, we got into leadership and intelligence. Uh Ed Hagan is absolutely brilliant. Um, uh really uh fierce intellect, wide-ranging knowledge. Um I always have such a blast talking to Ed. Um, you could kind of hear me fanboying out a bit in the interview. Did I sound like a fanboy? Um, I don't know what that word means exactly. So uh because I'm just a Luddite, but uh I'm a linguistic Luddite. But um uh you were you were you we you were wonderfully uh inappropriately appreciative of Ed and how wonderful Ed is.

And my favorite part of this episode is is also Ed's origin story. It's it's one of the funniest origin stories. I kind of don't want to spoil it. Um, but just you will I really think this is probably the funniest origin story we've had so far. I I would second that, yeah. Yeah. Uh just a quick spoiler alert. There's like uh drinking beer with Napoleon Shagnon. If you don't know who that is, you you can we'll find out um as we go. So but yeah. Without further ado, here is Ed Hagen talking about drugs and delusions and uh drinking uh with uh Napoleon Chagnon and how he got interested in evolutionary psychology. All right, so we have Ed Hagen on uh today. And Ed, you are um in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University,

Vancouver, And you were there after being at working with Peter Hammerstein, yeah, in in Berlin. And um and before that was UCSB, is that right? That's right. And who were you a student of? I was John Toby student. You were John Toby student. Okay. But your committee was sort of a who's who of sort of anthropology. Yeah. So actually, my master's, the chair of my master's committee was Knap Shagnan. And then for my PhD, I switched to John, but also had um Don Simons on there and Phil Walker on my company as well. Yeah, we talked about uh Don Brown, Human Universals, and Don Simons a bit. We haven't really talked much about, and we just have Brenda Bowser on who was alluding to Nap Shagnon. So these people have sort of been brought up, but we haven't really talked about who they

are or what, and maybe maybe we'll get into that um today. Um, Ed, when I think about sort of whenever we have somebody on, I sort of think about like what do I think about them or like what to say when when we start. And I have an adjective for you which is encyclopedic. Um so so Ed is like I know, for example, you have you made you at one point when you were at UCSB came up when you sort of core you tell me if I'm wrong, but like you basically like um you collated and sort of um uh what is that thing when museums collect things? Curated, curated is the word I'm looking for. You curated all the criticisms of EvSec into a very long, lengthy document. Does that still exist? It does. It's on GitHub.

So if you want to do it. We can we can link to that then on the show. Is that the evolutionary psychology FAQ? Is that what you're thinking of? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. I remember that. It's it's a very good uh document. I I like it a lot. Yeah. Um, but just I wanted to go over because Ed, like I I almost feel like we have so little time because so um information warfare, plant neurotoxins and the paradox of drug reward. I I mean, I remember you seeing I s a a talk by you talking about cigarette smoking and the worldwide deaths. I want to cover that because it's just incredible. Evolution of music and dance, evolution of leadership. I'm going in reverse alphabetical order for some reason. Evolution of knowledge specialization, depression, which is also something we should talk

about in other mental health issues, child nutrition and growth, parental investment, and yeah. So I mean just so many things to talk about. So I think we should start with something completely besides the point, maybe. Sure. But actually, maybe this is not beside the point, but one thing we do often ask people is sort of um how they discovered uh evolutionary behavioral sciences, the quote unquote origin story. Do you have a a sort of Yeah, my my villain origin story? Yeah. Um Yeah, it's a long one. Um so I started out as an undergrad in physics and math. And actually, that was kind of my first career, was in a polymer lab in UC Berkeley. But I realized I didn't want to be a polymer chemist, but I didn't really know what

the heck I wanted to do with my life. And I had no introduction or experience at all with any of the social sciences. I'd taken a Western Civ class, you know, as a breath requirement as an undergrad, but almost all my classes were physics and math courses, with the occasional, you know, history of Mesopotamia and philosophy course here and there. And it was actually the history of Mesopotamia class. Part of it was the Neolithic Revolution and the origins of agriculture about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East in Mesopotamia. And that was as, you know, uh however old I was at that point, 18 or 19 or something. That was a shock that we hadn't always lived via agriculture, but that we had this hunter

or gatherer past. That was actually most of our evolutionary history. And at the same time, I was um, you know, in college and you have all these kind of close relationships. And I really um, as I was pretty miserable realizing I didn't want to do what I had been trained to do, but didn't have any idea what the heck I did want, uh, I just started talking to people, and um I realized that you know some folks had real had real problems, unlike my I see. So like there were there were like tales of distribution on mental health. That's right. And so I was at one end where I'm kind of miserable, and then there were other people that were suicidal. Um and at the time, this was in the you know early 1980s, And

um, this was the rise of biological psychiatry. It was in all the you know, Newsweek, Prozac, ProZac Nation. And it was this biopsych model of depression that it's all chemical imbalances that we can correct with antidepressants. So biological and sort of like the biochemical, yeah, biochemical, low level neurotransmitter level. Um but in talking to all my friends, I saw very clearly that their you know levels of distress and depression were really linked to real life problems, huge conflicts with their family, sexual abuse, other kinds of you know, serious life problems. And so I I just didn't buy this, you know, chemical imbalance story. It'd be quite a coincidence if these chemical imbalances just happened to occur right when

these huge conflicts were taking place. Exactly. So uh I didn't know how to think about it, um, but uh I knew I didn't want to be a polymer chemist either. And so I said, you know what, I'm gonna kind of devote my life to figuring out what is actually going on here. Um and so I just started reading voraciously. Uh I just go to the library and any book that looked interesting, I would check it out and read it. Um and I was still working in the Polymer Lab at UC Berkeley, but I was sneaking off to classes by George Lakoff and John Cyril and Berlin. And really realized in combination with this new fact I had learned from Mesopotamian, my Mesopotamian history course, that we had basically evolved as hunter gatherers, even though

they hadn't phrased it that way. And so I began to put together my own very, very crude version of evolutionary, what we now call evolutionary psychology. So you invented evolutionary psychology. I invented a very crude version. Somehow the structure of our brains is due to this long evolutionary history as hunter-gatherer, so depression somehow is coming out of that. I don't know how yet. That's cool. But I realized that if I really wanted to pursue this, I should probably do research in with hunter gatherers. And who does that? Anthropology does that. So at that time, we didn't really have the internet. There was this huge volume of put out by the AAA, the American Anthropology Association,

of all the programs in the country. And this was somewhere around January or February of whatever 1989 or 1990 or something. And I was flipping through there and I was seeing that I had missed every single application deadline, except for one school. I had no idea who was there or anything, but I just like, you know, I want to do this now, and I have not missed their deadline. Um and so, you know, I quickly took the GREs, or maybe I'd already done it, I can't remember now, and um got my fellow lab mates to write me letters as if they were my supervisor. So they all kind of faked some letters for me because I didn't really have any. We'll we'll edit that out later. Yeah, you can edit that out later.

And I said, send this all in. Uh and I got in. Uh, and I had no idea that this was the center for evolutionary studies of human behavior. I had no idea who Tubi was, who Cosmides was, who Don Simons was, Don. Nothing. I knew nothing about that. So I came in as a actually as a sociocultural anthropologist. Um and and then of course the rest is is history. I began to see what was going on there. That's such a different most people, you know, they like they can't, they don't arrive at evolutionary psychology, but they they're they they have this, they're not satisfied with what they find. And then they discover it and they go somewhere that has it. You you somehow discovered it on your own and randomly ended up somewhere where it was

happening. Exactly. It was totally random. Wow. Totally random. Um good thing about that deadline. Whoever did that, well done, because we need Edda Higgins. So thank you. Whoever's whoever was like, we should just extend the deadline. Yeah. Uh who admitted me. So he was always kind of sort of my guardian angel. That's great. He was on the on the uh admissions committee, I guess. So uh Don Brown, Don Simons, and Nap Shagnan, these were people that um preceded at least me. Um, what was that? What was it like when you got to UCSB? Well, yeah, like how did you I mean, we can continue this, like so you're in you just randomly show up. How do you find out? Did you yeah, I randomly show up and um and I

actually uh the only thing I knew about Shagnon is that in my kind of reading quest earlier, I had come across this book by Ken Good, who was extremely harshly critical of Shagnon and really portrayed him as you know almost a monster. And so all I knew about Knapp was that he's this really notorious figure, and of course, he is my advisor now. Uh, and I go to meet with him. Uh it was kind of later in the afternoon or early evening, and I knock on his office door, and there's this huge, massive barking. And it was he had these two huge dogs in there. He's like, eh, come on in. And um he um opened up the fridge and he had two six-packs of beer. Yeah. He had uh Miller and it was probably uh PBR or something.

He said, I'll give you the good stuff. You can have the Miller. And uh so we just sat down and started drinking beers and talking. And um it was one of the most incredible, you know, conversations I've really had as an anthropologist. We just covered because I had been reading on my own heavily into anthropology and hunter-gatherer studies. So I was able to kind of talk about all this stuff and yeah, give nap all my naive ideas and um but what what what what made it uh remarkable was it that he knew so much or he had a different experience because he was well he he was very uh kind of open to letting me spout off on all the on my crazy ideas but he knew all the anthropologists that I had been

reading personally he knew Colin Turnbull and Robert Bailey and Irv Devor and all these guys So he was kind of able to give me all these kind of personal background and personal stories and more perspective on everything. And um and so it was just this wide-ranging conversation fueled by two six packs of uh of beer. And then when I kind of walked out of there reeling, okay, this is gonna be a wild ride. Um, and it was, And but at that point, I still I was still very much in the sociocultural side of things. And I realized pretty quickly that when I had gone into anthropology, I thought it was a science, to be blunt. And I thought it was very much, you know, what, you know, sort of the program like

Murdoch's program of trying to understand, you know, scientific models of human cultural diversity. And what I realized very quickly in my seminars was that many, many anthropologists were not really interested in understanding the world. They wanted to change the world. And so I had kind of a crisis early on. Do I really want to stick with this discipline that is much more focused on advocacy than science? And I realized, you know, I'm pretty late in my, I'm about 30 years old at this point. It's gonna be hard to have yet another career switch. And at this point, I hadn't taken uh I can't remember if I took into uh taken Tubi seminar. I know I was pretty skeptical of John's stuff even after taking his seminar.

Um somehow John later became a really close personal friend, but was really rubbed me the wrong way. Do you remember what rubbed you the wrong way, what you took issue with as a young naive man? I don't know exactly. Uh there was I didn't see the logic of his approach yet. And I'll tell you how I got there. Um Once I saw it, I'm like, okay, now I get it. But I didn't get it at first. Even though I knew I was really excited to take his seminar at first, because the flyer had all the stuff that I exactly I was interested in: evolution of the human mind, cognition, hunter-gatherers, uh, ancestral environments, emotions. I was like, yes, this is it. And then I took the seminar and I was like, this is not it.

Um, at least at first. Um, But at the same time, taking all I was going as a sociocultural anthropologist and really having to decide do I want to stay in this field, which is really focused on advocacy more than science in many ways. And I did decide to stick with it. I'm glad I did. But what uh what really got me to understand uh to be in cosmic perspective was I was having to study for my comprehensive exams in sociocultural anthropology. Comprehensive is like second year, is that right? Yeah, it was like second year. So it's for your at Santa Barbara, maybe it's still this way, I'm not sure. But um it was basically if you pass your comps, you get your MA, right, your master's, and then you can go on and sort of do your dissertation.

So it's sort of like a um it's sort of like a hoop to catch people who may not be able to kind of sort of continue on in the program and make sure that you've got sort of enough uh conceptual knowledge before doing something like really in detail actual research. That's right. So it's a filter. And um I was sure I was going to get filtered because it was just tons of postmodernist theory and Marxist theory. And um it's hard to keep organized. Like even though it was really if there's not a lot of principles, it's hard to cut the organization. There wasn't a lot of principles. And so I was panicked. And so I said, you know what, I'm gonna do mine. At that point, they didn't have the separate, um, I don't know what they call it now, but

you know, um evolutionary anthropology program that didn't exist. So, but you could do it as a specialization. So I said, you know what, this stuff is really easy. It's I can understand it. So I'm gonna just do my you could pick like two or three topics that you were gonna be your specialties for the conference. So I'm gonna pick that as one of them. And um just because I think it's easy to pass. And so you chose it not because you found it inherently promising or instead of No, I I didn't. I was actually inherently skeptical of it. I was like, this is okay, it's not the way to go. This is so funny, and because I think if you like I think you have the most knowledgeable person in the heavily behavior sites, and everything in your story is like, oh, there was a

late deadline. I thought I was worried about sneaking in. Somehow you've you've really, yes. You've got to make up from the exactly. Yes, exactly. Um, but yeah, so I went to Don Simons and asked him, you know, what should I read for the the Evo comps here? Um and he said you should read blah blah blah, you should read George Williams, 1966. Um Adaptation National Soil Selection. Yeah, yeah, in course. And I'm like, it was 1963. Oh, come on, Don, isn't there something more recent? Do I really have to read this? You know, he's like, well, it's a classic. I'm like, okay, okay, I'll read it. And then once I read Williams, I'm like, now I get it. Tubi is applying Williams to the brain. And it all clicked.

And then it just clicked, and now I'm, you know, my wife refers to me as as Tubi's Bulldog. So yeah. That's kind of how I see myself too. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good way of putting it. Yeah. So that's my that's my villain origin. Yeah, that's that's really cool. Um what what what do you have an idea of what clicked for Williams? Yeah, so I was in the heart, you know, I was in the natural sciences, and as a kid, I was your typical nerd, your geek into model rockets and robots and computers, you know, building my own computers from scratch. Um, it was all you know the the the stereotypical male adolescent into things and technology. And early on, I really recognized that human engineering pales in comparison to nature's engineering.

That was just once you try to build anything and actually have to make something work. So I was trying to build electronic circuits and just all the challenges of controlling noise and timing and feedback loops and blah blah blah. You know, it just drives you nuts. Uh, or even just building simple things. Even earlier when I was younger, I would build, you know, these go-karts and you know, just getting getting them to work uh very, very hard. So and then you look at a mosquito and you're like, we can't even come close uh as humans to building some. So I recognize that was early on. I just had a kind of an appreciation for the engineering in nature, and that really came through in Williams, um, the adaptation part, the design part.

Yeah, And so that's where I clicked with tubies, you know, cognitive design and tubian cosmeties. Um, and so that's still, I would say, what drives my underlying intuition about all this stuff is is um just kind of the uh nature's engineering genius. When I first met John uh after he and Lita and I had lunch, Uh he uh he and I had a moment after lunch uh and we were sitting together and he used that moment to be like, What does your dad do? And I was like, Well, he sort of like does process like he worked like basically he was a mechanical engineer, and he sort of smiled, you know, and he was like, 'What is your you know, like do you have siblings?' And I was like, Yeah, she's a chemical engineer.

And he sort of smiled and he said, it's not everyone, but a lot of people in this have sort of an engineering thing in their background or in their family. Um my dad had a full machine shop, a full shop. Mine too, yeah. Uh we rebuilt all our cars, you know, from the ground up. And so it was just a thorough appreciation of of that. Yeah. Yeah. All right then. Well, uh so your first topic of study was that mental health stuff or or was it something else? It was meant to be, yes. Um so my master's was actually on delusional disorder. Um okay, yes. I remember that. It's I by the way, I think that's one of the most underrated papers. Your your paper on um on delusions. Um could you could you give us a quick uh synopsis of what the the main hypothesis there

on on delusions? Yeah. And this is it's kind of part of the of the villain origin story here that some of my uh one of my best buddies girlfriends was clearly, you know, delusional. Um and it was just trying to understand her delusions, uh, just being you know the amateur ethnographer at that point. And um, she had this horrific background of sexual abuse, um, and so trying to understand, and then her delusions were all paranoid delusions that her stepfather was trying to assassinate her. And her stepfather was the super, super famous lawyer, basically was on the board of Brown uh Brown versus Board of Education case, was instrumental in the civil rights movement, but had this really dark backstory, and his son was sexually abusing his

stepdaughter, this girlfriend. And so the basic idea is when you're really facing severe ostracism, humans we cannot survive without a group. We are obligatorily social. And yet, there's lots of reasons why we might get ostracized from a group, transgressions, conflicts. And that's basically a death sentence. And what are you gonna do if you if people aren't gonna cooperate with you? Um, you're screwed. And so my idea was that um you lie. Uh and you you you tell the biggest, most effective lies you possibly can in order to convince people that they still need you around. Maybe you have special information, you have special powers, uh, you have special connections to powerful people. And when you look at the themes of delusions, they match these powerful

social themes of somebody's trying to assassinate you. So some powerful an external enemy. And as David, you know from your work, what really motivates in-group versus out-group, in-group solidarity is going to be really heightened by out-group hostility. So if you're being threatened by some powerful external force that could potentially uh solidify your position in the in-group. You have information about um these this powerful external threat or you have incredibly important information that everybody needs or you have special powers that would be useful to others or you have a sexual relationship with some powerful person. So people wouldn't would be afraid to cross you. And these are all things that are kind of difficult to verify, but it might be enough to

tip the balance um in these really extreme cases of of um potentially lethal threats of ostracism so that's the basic idea and the idea is not yeah and the idea is not just to clarify for people listening because you know it's the range of people listening and and correct me if I'm wrong but it's not that a person is sort of de nouveau rationalizing this all out. It's that this is there's an evolved design that contingently is sort of looking for am I in this class of situation? It's this desperate situation. I don't have any other bargaining power. I'm about to be ostracized. And that the that sort of trips this thing, and then there's sort of the activation of these frames for whatever reason or whichever narrative is picked.

Um, so it's not something that's sort of like quote unquote the person is coming up with, but it's the expression of this evolved design that was selected for. Yeah, there's not some underlying manipulative mode in the case. Exactly. That's yeah, it's it's a mechanism that triggers you, the the person uh the that's suffering these delusions, genuinely believes them. Right. Um, and is actually uh very good at getting evidence to back them up um and uh make very convincing case for their story. Um and so uh yes exactly it's it's it's not uh a secretively it is a manipulative strategy but not with some underlying manipulative motive uh underneath it um so that was the first idea um not surprisingly no uh I'm curious do you do you still uh having been in

this field for a long time now how how has that hypothesis fared do you do you still subscribe to it um I still subscribe to it. Nobody else does, but I'll I'll stick with maybe that's my delusion, but uh I still think it's a good one. Yeah. No, I th I think it's definitely a compelling hypothesis. Um, but this this is a good segue into your other work on on mental health issues. So as we talked about the prevailing view in psychiatry and mental health research is that uh mental uh illnesses in general are are are dysfunctions. Uh depression itself is a chemical imbalance. We just need to rejinger the the right levels of neurotransmitters and we'll solve your problem. It's it's things breaking down.

Um and you have a different view on what mental illness is. Uh how what is your view and how does it differ from from the uh conventional view? Yeah, so it's it's not a view of mental illness in general. Um the brain can dysfunction just like every other system in our body can dysfunction. We have autoimmune disorders, we have cardiac arrests, we have liver dysfunction, kidney failures, vision problems, so forth and so on. So the brain can dysfunction. And I strongly suspect that things like schizophrenia and which is distinct, uh which is actually you can distinguish from the delusional disorder that I was just talking about. Even though delusions are part of schizophrenia, they They're uh nosologically distinct.

Um, but things like autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder probably are genuine uh uh cognitive dysfunctions. But if you look at depression and anxiety, quote unquote disorders, they really are different. Um and they're different in a number of different respects. First of all, unlike schizophrenia and autism, the environmental causation, the environmental component of depression is huge, whereas it's a really small component of schizophrenia, which is largely seems to be genetically heritable due to genetic variance. Um so you're referring to twin studies research where they compare. Twin studies research, GWAS research, um, genome-wide association studies, yeah. Exactly. And and those pretty clearly indicate that there's a really strong uh

Contribution of genetic variation to things like schizophrenia and autism, unlike depression, where the heritability, the contribution of genetic variation to variation in depression is quite small. There is some, but it's quite small. And there is environmental components to always mental health problems, but with things like schizophrenia and autism, we don't really know what those environmental components are. With depression, we know it's adversity. Bad things happen to you and you get depressed. That's what we were just talking about. Um, and that's been shown very convincingly that um it's not just associated with depression, but that adversity is very likely causal. Um now that doesn't mean everybody that suffers adversity will get depressed, but pretty

much everybody that's depressed has suffered adversity with rare exceptions. And there are some exceptions. But at least 80 to 85, maybe even 90% of the cases of depression have a clear link to some recent severe adverse event. It might be divorce, might be death of a loved one, might be sexual or physical abuse, might be loss of a job, financial problems, legal problems, something. But these are all things That would have had a very strong negative impact on our fitness. These are all common things. These are not new part of our new environment. And you know, there's not a person alive that hasn't had somebody die or been had at least some physical threat or had you know bad things happen to them.

So these are the kinds of things that would have been very, very common and routine over evolutionary history. And when they happened, would very plausibly have had a negative impact on fitness. And so they should, we should have evolved some kind of adaptive response, some adaptations in response to these kinds of adversity. And when you look stuff should should feel bad. It should be bad. We would expect it to feel bad. We would expect it to feel bad because it's having a negative impact on your on your biological fitness if your parent dies or your child dies or your wife or husband dies. Um and so that's one thing that really distinguishes two things that really distinguish depression um and anxiety disorders from some of these other ones.

And the other thing is they're really common. Um, so schizophrenia and autism are pretty rare. They're down at the one percent ish level. Um, depression is at least 10 times higher than that, if not more. Um and um schizophrenia and autism, lifelong conditions, and they develop early on in life, and you've got them for the rest of your life, typically. Um, not the case with depression. Um, typically, people will suffer one episode in their life if they suffer any episodes, and um they will have symptoms for several months, maybe up to a year or so, and then that's it. Um, and then they're back to normal after that. Again, very much unlike these these other much more plausible uh mental illnesses.

Yeah. It's hard to reconcile that with the chemical because if it was a chemical, I mean you'd expect it to last presumably your whole life until you get uh you know an antidepressant or something like that. But it would be weird to just have your your your chemicals become imbalanced for a few months, you know, coincidentally when when hardship is happening and then go back to normal. Like that's that's a pretty strange thing to happen if under the the chemical imbalance view. Yeah, exactly. And um this actually makes it hard to test antidepressants because when you have your control group, their symptoms are decreasing just about as fast as they are under antidepressant regime. So distinguishing there's this very slight difference in those survival curves.

It's not really, you know, a placebo effect. It's just that depressive symptoms. It's the baseline. It's the baseline. They tend to things resolve, you know, if you're having a problem. Yeah. Um, and when you take antidepressants, there is, you know, they may resolve slightly faster, very slightly. Um, but even that's not clear. Um, in in some sense, the jury is is kind of still out on antidepressants and if they're really doing anything. Um so you know, on a on the Hamilton scale, it's like two points out of whatever it is. I forget what the buttons like out of 30 points. It's a very limited effect size, very small effect size, about 0.3 D.3, for those of you know that stuff. So yeah, so exactly as David said here, my idea is actually, you know, and is pretty

much the same idea that most evolutionary people that have looked at this, they they have their own little spins on it. But it's basically just as as David said, um, when bad things happen, you should feel bad. And the reason you should feel bad is the same reason we feel bad when we get a physical injury and we feel physical pain. Uh, we need to know that something bad has happened um and we need to address it. Um, If you break your ankle, you need to see what you just did. You need to stop walking on your ankle. You need to, you know, sit down or whatever you're doing that broke your ankle. You need to learn whatever stupid thing you did. Don't do that again. So there's all kinds of rearrangements and learning that we need to

make when we have a physical injury, and that's why we experience physical pain. And we very likely experience psychological pain for very analogous reasons. Um, that when bad things happen, if your wife is getting ready to leave you, uh, you better figure out what's going on here. Is there can you change your behavior? Um, or you know, should you learn what to not to do next time, uh the next time you get a mate? Um, or if um someone close to you dies, uh feeling bad won't bring that person back, but you may begin to really think about what you could do to prevent the death of another close person that's close to you. Um, what could you have done differently that might have made things you know travel down a

different pathway? Or how can you live your life without this person that you were that you're doing? Or how can you exactly now um all those resources have disappeared or that social support or whatever it is? I need to now find alternative sources. So you do really need to think about these things um and learn from them and readjust your life. So it would be remarkable if we didn't feel bad. And when we look at depression, it's on a continuum, it's a continuous scale. And so when people suffer adversity, some people, you know, suffer less psychological pain, so they're not diagnosed. Some people suffer a little bit more. And that's because what looks like the same event, like a divorce, might be horrendous for

some person, but not so bad for another person. So the levels of depression or you know psychological pain that we might experience to what on the surface looks to be a similar kind of adversity might really have very different implications for different individuals. So that I think is at least part of the explanation why not everybody is diagnosed as depressed every time there's someone dies or they get fired or there's a relationship breakup. And it's because those things have different implications for people in different circumstances. So grieving and mourning, um, and I mean what I've heard, you know, maybe you this is your expression, Ed, but it's almost like kind of going on strike. Like can you talk a little bit about the proximate?

So like why is there a turning down of valuation or like feeling good or anything? Yeah. So go ahead, David. Yeah. So I mean, so this explains why the the feeling bad part of it, but that's not all of what depression is. It's not merely feeling bad that, you know, your spouse died, or you know, your you know your wife broke up with you or um or or whatever, you got fired from your job. It's not merely that you feel bad about these things, It's that you have lost your motivation to engage in everyday activities. You become dysfunctional. You can't do anything, can't get out of bed, you're not eating, you're not sleeping. So there's much more to depression than merely feeling bad about something bad that

happened to you. So how can we explain this extra stuff? Yeah. And one of the big ones there is uh suicidality, thinking about killing yourself and sometimes falling through on that. So what the heck is going on? And that's where my contribution comes in, are these more severe symptoms. And our approach there is where we add a little bit on to the psychological pain hypothesis, which is an internal signal. Um, but there's also going to be external signals a lot of times. So again, with physical pain, you know, we it hurts. Uh, but a lot of times we give uh external signals. We have a sad face or we start crying or screaming. Um, so we're signaling our need to others. Um, and in many cases, others will respond.

Again, as we talked about earlier, uh you know, humans are obligatory, uh obligatorily social. Um, and we have always lived in social groups, and in many cases, when we're suffering adversity, our social partners jump in, they are glad to help us, they value us. But that's not always the case. And this is kind of the theme that underlies a lot of my work on mental health: is that a lot of times when people are in need, they don't get the help they need. And that's because there's conflicts of interest. There's genuinely, if your wife is leaving you, uh, she's probably got good reasons for leaving you. Um, there's a conflict there. Um, if your spouse dies, you now need all the resources you were getting from them, from

somebody else, but others may not have those resources to give. Um you uh you know are physically assaulted or sexually assaulted, you need protection, but that puts other people at risk. Um, So, what do you do when there's conflicts and you do have needs, but other people are unwilling to fill them? And that's where what David brought up, this idea of a strike. If you are valuable, you know, a living person is extremely valuable. You have all kinds of skills and knowledge and capabilities. So you have tremendous value to others potentially. And what we argue that things like all these symptoms that David brought up of your motivation dials down, you can't get out of bed, you may stop eating, you may think of

killing yourself, what you're doing there is you're threatening to take away the value that you represent to others, take that away. And that's the idea of going on strike. So if workers aren't getting the salaries they need and deserve, um, And there's conflict with many, you know. Now, if management is good, they'll say, hey, I know you guys need it. But if they have conflicts with management, they're not going to necessarily get the salary increase they want. What do they do? They can withhold their labor. They can stop making the widgets, and the factory worker or the factory owners aren't gonna get their profit. And so now there's an incentive to bargain or negotiate. And so that's what we're arguing here: is that there's this signaling process where if

people aren't getting the investment they need from social partners in times of need, they can bargain with their own value to others. If you don't invest in me, I'm not going to take care of the kids. If I'm your child, I might end up killing myself, and that is going to be devastating to your fitness. Um, if I'm your spouse, um, I'm not gonna be bringing home the bacon or doing child care and all the things that are valuable to you until you step up and we reach some agreement that we can both live with. So that's that's our kind of twist on the psychological pain story is that it involves a signaling component, an external signaling component, especially when there's when there's conflict with with your social partners.

Right. And that's it. Go ahead, David. Go ahead. So would you view suicidality and self-harm? Would you view that as an extreme end of the continuum of this bargaining tactic? That I'm threatening, you know, the milder forms would be I'm going to withdraw uh my energy and investments in the relationship or in my everyday activities that would otherwise benefit you. But in the extreme end of the continuum, I'm going to actually hurt myself or threaten to kill myself, which would be the ultimate withdrawal of the value that I'm providing you. Yeah, exactly. And um, you know, you think about it, killing yourself is about the worst thing you can do to your own fitness. It really seems like the the antithesis of a fitness enhancing strategy.

So what we're proposing is that exactly as David said, um We're going with Dave and David, just to clarify. And which is where she named that on your own. I'm David. I so think of me as the one with the id. I'm the I'm the less mature one. Okay. Um so sorry, we just completely Yeah, yeah, no, that's that I was gonna ask that at the outset. Uh you know, what what am I getting? And you're both Dave P's too. So what are we gonna do? We should have David Putts on. Yeah. I know. Yeah, exactly. Um so what we're proposing is because folks, you know, you know, healthy individuals are extremely valuable to others potentially, um, but that they may not be getting what they need from others, um, that they may either

threaten to or actually engage in an act that with some low but non-zero probability could end up killing them. Um and for those uh listeners who are familiar with this, it's kind of a form of costly signaling. It's a credible signal that if you were being deceptive and just wanted more investment, even though you didn't really need it, you couldn't afford the cost of an actual suicide attempt where you're maybe taking a 1% chance of killing yourself or maybe a 10% chance. And the data showed that the vast majority of people who attempt suicide in fact survive it. And so, and the the ratio of attempts to completions in young adult women is 100 to one or so. Wow. Might even be higher than that.

And so what we're arguing here is that that folks say, okay, I'm not getting what I need. I'm going to do something and that everybody will recognize could have killed me, but probably won't. But if you don't then step up, I might do it again. And at some point are gonna lose me. And so this is a a costly but credible signal that you genuinely do need more investment, that you're not faking it. And you're gambling that you will survive the attempt and get that will be enough to convince your social partners that you actually do deserve the investment and need it. And so the evidence in favor of that is that when we look in the ethnographic record, suicidality is pretty common across cultures, including small-scale hunter-gatherer

cultures. So it's not a modern, it's not a disease of modern civilization. That's right. And as far as we can tell, we see it in culture after culture. And it is ubiquitously associated with severe conflicts with social partners and folks that do survive the suicide. It's often a public sort of act. And then folks that survive often do get what they did. The person that was abusing them stops abusing them. The partner who left them comes back. uh the the issue gets resolved in their favor in many in many cases. So um not not not recommending doing it, but understanding doing it, not recommending doing it, just for the record. Yeah. No, I actually I have a question that is there any have you thought about like would a

would an intervention sort of be teaching people this theory? Yeah. I so I I I should say this at the outset. You know, I I love my own theories. Uh but I I don't recommend that anybody uh put them into practice because they are far from being proven. We're really talking kind of theoretically just in the early stages of of these things. I I think many of us social scientists far too quickly jumped to wanting to implement our our latest pet theories. And then we've all seen many bad examples of that. So I we're definitely just talking theoretically here and hypothetically. But what would be the, and you know, to dig a little bit further in the weeds here, the problem is what is private information that the outsiders don't necessarily know how

severe your need actually is. Right. Um, you could be faking it. There's conflict. Um, um, are you genuinely need or are you just uh looking for more? Um and so how do we, when there is this conflict, you know, are there ways to more credibly to reveal that private information without going down the road of a suicide attack. Um and that that might not be easy. Um, I think one of the big mistakes in psychiatry and therapy is that, you know, talking to a therapist is going to fix everything, but that therapist is not embedded in your community. They don't have any authority. Um, if your wife leaves you, the therapist has no influence over her. Uh and um and so how do we deal with situations where you know there's not any easy way to intervene in that person's complex

conflictual social network? It doesn't mean it's impossible. I it's not, you know, but I am a little bit skeptical about how easy it's it's going to be to fix to actually improve things. Yeah, it's kind of the chemical imbalance thing where it's sort of like what you're saying is that it's a control and support issue. And what we don't want to do is just recapitulate the thing of you just sort of gloss that over. If somebody is in a situation where they they're being harmed or they need more support or they need more control in their life and they don't have it, the solution, the easy solution is to just turn off the alarm in the person's head that that's a problem, right? But that's a bad solution.

A better solution is fix the lack of control, the harm, the those things. But that that is not something that you just pop a drug or an easy sort of social science intervention. That's changing the person's situation. Yeah. And I have two comments on that. One, when we think about physical pain, you break your ankle and you go to the hospital and you expect them to set your ankle, put some pins in, put a cast on, but they'll also give you a painkiller. but they won't do that until they've actually fixed the painkiller until they see it. And that's what we're doing with kind of depression therapy now with antidepressants, is we're giving you the painkiller, but without fixing the problem. So it does suggest there might be a role for a psychological painkiller, but only in

combination with genuine solutions to the social conflicts and social problems and adversity that actually exists. Um, so that'd be point number one. Point number two is we we kind of have, as humans, we have a moral system. Some people are on the right side and other on the wrong side. So your wife leaves you, uh, she could be the selfish person, um, or you could be a jerk. Um, and so when there's conflict and you have adversity, and you know, maybe you got fired from your job, but maybe you should have been fired, maybe you were stealing from the company or something. Um, so people have adversity sometimes because they are, you know, the innocent victim, but other times because they're the guilty victim.

We can't always assume that the folks in need are what the public would judge as uh sort of innocent victims of adversity. They might be guilty victims of adversity. And so that's going to make it even more complicated to address a lot of times that that folks that are suicidal um and we don't want that to happen but may have really genuinely transgressed against others or or done things that they really shouldn't have done. And that's going to make it all the more complicated to to kind of deal with their situation, I think. Um David, do you have something else on this? Because I was going to do a transition. Uh one last question. Um, could this potentially explain the limited benefits you see uh from

psychotherapy? So if you are deprived of you know social support, people who are listening to your problems and offering solutions, people who are there for you, um, that if you're deprived of that, and that's one of the causes of your depression, that regularly seeing someone who is compassionately listening to you could help to alleviate some of that, or at least the perception of social conflict, could give you the perception that at least some someone is out there who cares about you, and that and that could be responsible for for some of these limited uh benefits of psychotherapy. Yeah. And folks that are in the evolutionary psychiatry realm recognize, you know, this is sort of the alliance with your therapist that this is going to be now your social partner.

They're genuinely on your side. And you can develop this trusting relationship where you may begin to get some of that stuff. Um, and so in some cases, that could explain some of the really important benefits of therapy. Absolutely. Um, and then the limitations would be that the therapist can't intervene in your actual life in many cases. And I'll give you an anecdote. One of my colleagues and good friends in evolutionary psychiatry, Andy Thompson. You know, he and I have been talking about this stuff for years and years now. And he's kind of as a he's a psychiatrist. Um, and he works in student health. And so he's seeing students with often severe issues like being suicidal. And he just told me this one anecdote that he had one, and I can't remember the precise

details here, but he had one patient come in, one student. And it was really the stereotypical thing. You know, his parents were really pressuring him to be an engineer and major in engineering. And he was trying to do that, but he hated it. And what he really wanted to do was, you know, the arts and theater, something like this. I can't remember the exact details. And he was suicidal about this conflict with his parents. And um, but because Andy was, you know, a school therapist, he could actually call the parents. And he basically did. He called the parents and said, You really need to let your son drop out of engineering and switch to a major whether he wants to. And the parents immediately relented.

And literally, like a week later, this guy was fine. Um so in that anecdote where the therapist really did intervene in the conflict and change things in the patient's favor, or at least um in that one, you know, n equals one case, uh, it really seemed to help a lot. So it's interesting. So it it it suggests that this model of the disinterested, dispassionate therapist who doesn't intervene and isn't your friend, but is just a you know uh a professional, uh I don't know, mm psyche uh repairer. um, that this picture is actually could be counterproductive in terms of helping solve people's problems. That really what the people who come to see a therapist what they need is additional social support that they're currently not getting.

And insofar as that social support is provided, their their problems may well be improved. Um w is there something to that? Maybe. I I don't wanna, you know, there's my theory, there's the theories, and then there's the real world. Uh and the real world is obviously way more complicated, but I I do think there is is something to that. Um and um you know, I and there there there is, you know, there is a strand of there's family therapy and in where they do bring in the family but that sort of presupposes that the conflict is family oriented which in many cases especially with adolescents it is um so there they're kind of kind of putting into practice what I'm advocating here to to think about um but in other

cases the conflict is is not family it's at your job or um it's with some romantic partner that is just out of the picture at this point. Or it's not about that kind of conflict. It's, you know, your spouse has died and you're not, it's the neighborhood that's not getting together to help you, or your your social, you know, your broader social network that was really, you didn't really realize, but was really through your spouse. And now that they're dead, um all of the people you thought were your mutual friends um turned out to be you know his friends or her friends and um that social network begins to deteriorate and the therapist doesn't have any any power over that so yeah uh is the disinterested you know standoff kind of um

um type is that the way to go there there may be uh you know there's obviously more complications here um but um it would take a lot of work to really work out the the you know a lot of the evolutionary psychiatrists do have like Randy Nessie, you know, he he actually is a therapist and and um works with patients. And so um and he's put a lot of this stuff into practice. And um I'm not quite sure exactly what he would say, but I'd say I think he would not necessarily my theories, but his very similar theories. He seems, I mean, I having read his book, we should probably have him on the podcast, by the way, but having re having read his his book, he seems to uh be less of the disinterested therapist and tends to be more of an active uh supporter for his patients.

I remember one anecdote where um there was this guy who was doing these death-defying uh motorcycle races and he was suffering uh anxiety and fear about them because you know people have died doing these kinds of stunts, And he wanted uh something to take the edge off. He wanted his fear to be reduced so that he could continue doing these death-defying motorcycle stunts. And he actually, Randy actually introduced and said, No, I'm not gonna give you that. Like your your fear system is telling you something important that your life is at risk. And if I were to give you medication to reduce that, I would be doing you a disservice. I would be increasing the chance that you die. And so what you need to do is is not what you need to do is is is look into other

activities for yourself that are safer. Uh and so that seems to be at least crossing some boundaries between the therapist and the patient. And it's interesting that, you know, he crosses those boundaries in those ways, perhaps informed by his his perspective. Yeah. And I think many people that work in evolutionary psychiatry, but also then also work with patients, uh, would would take a similar approach. Many of them have mentioned sort of kind of being the allies of their patients. Um for these reasons exactly. So uh earlier um in the podcast, one episode I talked about Edward Bernays, who was sort of the father of sort of um public relations. And one of the things I mentioned was that one of his first projects was convincing women

who were not at the time smoking to smoke. Um, and so this is a way of bringing up this uh this thing that you um talk about, which is sort of use of drugs. Um, and every time I drink a cup of a cup of coffee now, I think a little bit, there's a little Ed Hagan on my shoulder saying, you're drinking pesticide. And so um so this is sort of an invitation to sort of um and and I remember seeing your talks when you were talking about um cigarette smoking um and uh and just the numbers of of deaths uh was staggering. Um so so I don't know, yeah, if you want to start either with coffee or cigarettes, um uh but but can you talk a little bit and maybe also like how did you get into that from depression?

Uh yeah maybe there is a segue. So uh it turns out that folks with mental health issues are heavy drug users. Um, and so one of my um started doing this um as graduate students, Roger Sullivan and I. We were both anthropologists, we were both working in on mental health issues. I was working more on depression, he was working more on schizophrenia, we were both taking an evolutionary perspective, and he was uh visiting from um Auckland to Santa Barbara to do a year at Santa Barbara. And so we were both really interested like what the heck is going on with the heavy drug use by folks with mental health problems. And so Roger was working in Palau with schizophrenics. And you know, these guys were using tobacco and betelnut and other uh drugs

copiously. And this is a really common pattern. It's widely recognized. And this was a this was a group of people who were in a a sort of um weird society or in sort of a more hunter or horror. They were more traditional. That's it's an island kind of basic island type, you know, heavy kin based non- So maybe not like a medical, maybe no not like psychiatrists or psychologists available, right? Well, they did have a clinic and so Roger got access to the patients through the clinic there. Okay, great. And so they they were kind of um and um I don't know if the if the clinicians were Western trained or not, but probably they were basing. Yeah, yeah. Um, but Roger was able to kind of see how these symptoms played out in a much more

traditional context. I don't think they would play out here. So we we started thinking about um, you know, what's up with with the heavy drug use. Um and um we decided that we want to take an evolutionary approach to this, obviously. And so we started like, what are the evolutionary origins of all these drugs? Let's not so much think about the drug use to begin with, but you know, why do tobacco plants produce nicotine? Why do coffee plants produce caffeine? Why do coca plants produce cocaine? Why do cannabis plants produce THC and other cannabinoids. I just want to interject one one quickly, uh one one uh thought real quickly. Um I think it's a beautiful example of how the evolutionary approach causes you to ask

questions that you would otherwise not think to ask. So why do plants have properties that make human beings high? Like that out of all of the chemical properties that a plant could have, it's kind of curious that it would have a property that i elicits pleasure and and pleasurable psychological states in uh apes like us. So I think just asking that question is is a really important question to ask. So continue continue, sorry to interject. Yeah, no, that's that's exactly right. So we uh of course knew that um these things are all what we call plant defensive chemicals, that tobacco is producing nicotine, not so we can produce cigarettes, but as um a way to defend itself against herbivores. So nicotine is a highly toxic substance.

It's a neurotoxin. Um people commit suicide with nicotine pesticides. It's a really effective pesticide. It's uh used by organic farmers. It's actually still pretty widely used. Go ahead. That only intensifies the mystery that a toxic substance is pleasurable to the to the human brain. Yeah, these things, the the the popular drugs can kill you. So you can kill yourself with caffeine. It's a little harder with caffeine. You can kill yourself with nicotine easily. You can kill yourself with cocaine, heroin easily. And these things are are very, very potent neurotoxins, and plants evolve them to deter herbivores from eating them. And um so that's exactly where we started. Why would and then how do they do that?

They do that by mimicking our endogenous neurotransmitters. So nicotine mimics acetylcholine. And cocaine, these mimic dopamine and other neurotransmitters. And so caffeine mimics adenosine. And that's plants based, and these neurotransmitter systems are not unique to humans. They're widespread among animals, including insect herbivores. They're ancient, ancient systems. And so plants have evolved compounds that mimic these systems to basically gum up the works, to interfere with cellular signaling, neural signaling. That's how venoms work as well. Same, same basic principle. And that means the plant really only has to produce a small quantity of this extremely deadly toxic substance and infuse it into its leaves in order to deter

herbivores. So the idea with an herbivore is sort of like if I'm an herbivore, I have an evolved system that sort of detects something in my works is gummed up. Don't eat this again. Yeah. And in us humans and um mammals and many vertebrates, it's taste receptors. So we have these bitter taste receptors on our tongues and in our oral cavities. Actually, we express them in many tissues, it turns out. And these respond uh quite quickly to toxic substances. Um and so all of these drugs of abuse taste bitter. Um, in fact, our body recognizes them as toxic very quickly. Anybody who remembers the their first cigarette um probably remembers feeling pretty queasy afterwards. And so Roger and I, to, to kind of get back, we were trying to think, you know, what what

benefits might there be to um you know taking substances that mimic neurotransmitters that are highly toxic. And as we were thinking about our um folks with these mental health issues like schizophrenia and stuff, of course, a lot of the reigning theories of of those disorders are neurotransmitter signaling deficits. So our kind of early idea, which we haven't really followed up on too much, but was could, and I still think there might be something to this, could these compounds kind of act as neurotransmitter substitutes in small quantities? Um, if in fact schizophrenia has something to do with some disruption of, let's say, dopamine signaling, could taking a dopamine analog, you know, partially

compensate for those deficits. And so that's kind of where we we started out. But the more we began to think about it, the more we realized, hey, these things evolve to kill plant parasites, basically. And if they kill plant parasites, they they might kill our parasites as well. And so the more we looked into that hypothesis, the stronger it got that um, and we really began to focus on uh intestinal worms because these are kind of macroscopic animals with nervous systems. Um, just I'm just laughing like people who are eating, so just like like like warning the warning for this portion of the yeah, warning for this portion of the talk. Um we're gonna get we could get into brain worms too um at some point here.

Fortunately, Ed does not have slides. I have to say that the most disgusting slides I've ever seen were from Ed's slides, Ed to your credit. So yeah. And so worms have nervous systems pretty similar to ours. And one of the first clues was that a lot of anti-worm medicines that are used commercially are in fact chemically very similar to recreational drugs. Lvamasole is very similar to nicotine. It interacts with the same acetylcholine receptors. Even to this day, we uh deworm dogs and other animals with a compound called aceticoline, not acetylcholine, but ercoline, which is an acetycholine analog produced in betel net, which is one of the world's most widely used drugs. We don't really use it here in the US that much, but in in the Pacific, and it's probably

the number four drug in the world. And so when we began to look at this, we realized that basically every single drug of abuse kills intestinal worms. And so could our taste for these neurotoxic substances be a form of self-medication that we are attracted to them because they are even today, what are some of the most valuable? We just were talking about antidepressants, it's a multi-billion dollar business. Drugs and medicines are still uh even today some of the most valuable substances that we have, some of the most valuable products. And that may well have been true over our evolutionary history, that discovering compounds that could kill our own pathogens and our own parasites uh would have been tremendously

beneficial. And plants and animals are basically attacked by the basic same broad classes of things that eat them. And so if plants are constantly evolving compounds that that harm those classes of organisms, they may also harm the ones that are trying to eat us. So that's that's the basic idea and that's how we how we got into it. And then to get onto oh go ahead, David. No. I just want to do a just just a a a recap of of the idea, just in case people aren't quite following. Um so the idea is that plants evolved neurotoxins to get rid of uh the animals that eat them. So plant parasites, right? And uh and we take these substances because we're often preyed upon by the same parasites. And if we take these toxins in small doses, it's enough to kill the per parasites without

harming us. So we evolved a taste for these things in small doses. In large doses, obviously, they can harm us. Uh, but if we consume them in small doses, they act as a as a medicine uh that can get rid of uh pathogens and parasites in us. That's exactly right. That we we basically have this, we didn't haven't recognized that we have a psychology to self-medicate with toxic plant compounds. And the reason why we're going to do that. We love spices and they are also toxic plant compounds. And there's a very strong case to make that we put them in our food to kill foodborne pathogens. And so is the idea that the pleasurable response that we get from consuming these drugs itself evolved? That we evolve so that originally maybe we didn't find it rewarding to consume these

substances and maybe, you know, there was there was no response, but over evolutionary history, perhaps those who found consuming these substances to be more rewarding, uh, had a reproductive advantage because of the self medication benefits. And then so we evolved to to find these drugs rewarding. Yeah, basically yes. Um I would be a little careful here because um the reward model is very tied up with dopamine signaling model that is still heavily debated and heavily investigated. So I and it is often conflated, the research on drug abuse is very much linked with research on reward-based learning mechanisms. And so even though those really are should be distinct, they're for historical reasons and

other reasons, really conflated and intertwined in kind of complex ways. And so we kind of want to, it's been challenging because uh people want to jump right in with the dopamine reward model. And we're not willing to, you know, put a blanket endorsement over that whole thing. We kind of want to step back from that and say, yes, we humans have some evolved propensity, a taste for these drugs. But exactly how that might be manifested in terms of our psychology and our psychological mechanisms, we want to leave that a little bit open because initially our reaction to it is aversion. You know, when folks first try some of these drugs, they their first reaction is correctly in a versive one. They taste better, they make you sick to your stomach, they'll often induce vomiting.

Um, and what we see is that kids avoid them just like the plague. So um, there's not this universal rewarding experience, just you know, um study here. The the drug use by age graphs you showed were just incredible. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. Yeah. So we began thinking about drugs as toxins instead of rewarding substances. So that the the basic model that is used by pretty much everybody in this area today, the mainstream folks, is that recreational drugs are like sugar. And that we like them and they they give us this rewarding feeling, and it's due to dopamine signaling. And that's why we use more of them. And then they have all kinds of complications around that basic story.

But our story, we start with these things are now. They're deadly toxins and they taste bitter. And your body recognizes them as toxic. They trigger vomiting reflexes and nausea. They trigger a versive learning quite effectively. It's actually really hard to get animals to self administer nicotine. And so from that perspective, we said, okay, who should not use these things? And we thought, well, these things are interfering with neurosignaling, and that's going to be really critical during development when your brain is growing rapidly. So we would predict that kids shouldn't lose uh use them. And I still even remember saying, you know, I'm gonna check what uh what we know about child tobacco use.

Uh and when I looked it up, I was just I was blown away the same way Dave was here. There's no drug use by kids uh under the age of 10. Um there's just almost none. Despite some of the YouTube videos that you might see. uh and and we replicated this in hunter gathers where there's um and and everybody thinks okay it's because your parents tell you not to do it and they prevent you from doing it um but you know all those 14 year old parents the parents of 14 year olds yeah smoke and do drugs right yeah right i i tell I tell my daughter to avoid eating too much candy she doesn't listen to me exactly that's what that's right I was saying like how I've never been able to struggle with not eat their you know Halloween candy or uh grab those cookies.

So when it comes to genuinely rewarding things like sweets, um, the kids don't listen to us at all. But we we have large scale um data where you know they've actually done drug testing, um, and we just see nothing in in kids for either caffeine, and caffeine is put into soft drinks. Um, and even there, the levels in kids are really low compared to adults. So um, And then from about age 10 to 20, everybody transitions to drug use. Everybody. It may be caffeine, it might be nicotine, it might be alcohol, it might be some, you know, it might be marijuana, some other drug. But basically everybody makes a very rapid transition. And our argument there is that once your brain is more or less fully developed, the cost of

interfering with brain development with these deadly neurotoxins has gotten down to the point, and the benefits of the self-medication have increased to the point where the balance now tips, and it's the benefits of self-medicating outweigh the costs. And we see this rapid transition. And the exception there is that there is a sex difference. Females are transitioning less than males and adults, and especially in their reproductive years. And we argue uh that that's because uh over our evolutionary history, women would often be pregnant, so they're not protecting their own brain development, but the development of their potential fetuses. Um, and so we have really good evidence uh supporting that hypothesis, too, that the

toxicity of drugs um explains a lot about the epidemiology of drug use that we see by age and sex. Yeah. And how facultative is do you do you think this is? So I mean, you know, if when you're thirsty, you want water and you drink water and you're sort of you feel better, and that sort of, you know, is a important representation for organisms. If, you know, if I'm infected with zoonotic parasites, that's that's that's a fun sentence to say out loud. Okay. Um, for the record, I'm not, I don't think. Um, but anyway, uh, if I'm infected with this and I take something, um, or or m my my question is sort of like do I might am I c do I crave things, you know? Or do I think so this is are these prophylactic or are they therapeutic?

Yeah, exactly. Thank you for putting it more much more sophisticated way than me. Uh yeah. And so uh I think the strongest evidence would be that we use them therapeutically. And this hypothesis, we're not the only ones researching this. There's a there's actually quite a few folks researching this idea in non-human animals. So in primates and even in insects, um, there's quite a bit of evidence now that other animals are self-medicating with toxic plant substances. Um so that's where we can get some of the best um experimental tests of kind of the um insects are smoking. Yeah They're getting high. Bug bugs are not. Well, they're they're using they're consuming toxic plants that don't make sense

nutritionally. And um so presumably they would be they would be getting some kind of high, if your model is correct. If I if if I would and if they're neurotoxins, plants are producing a wide variety of toxins, not all of which are neurotoxin, but some of them are, yeah. So it could be they're getting but they may have different representations, you know, how it affects their psychology. But yes. Now there I will say the evidence is mixed because in those experiments, you can experimentally infect your insect that's in your and see, does it then increase consumption of, or you can experimentally infect your rat model or your mouse model or whatever it might be. Um, and there the results have been have been really mixed.

Um, a lot of I think what the data show most clearly is that animals um are uh more inclined to eat toxic foods lace with these toxins than they should be, um, given that they are toxic. So that would support either that we're wrong, and our whole idea is is wrong, or that it's more of a prophylactic um type adaptation than a therapeutic one. But there is, there are, there are some studies that show increased intake of toxic substances after infection, experimental treatments with infections. Now in humans, it's tougher. We did one experiment with hunter gatherers where we went in the opposite direction. So we were working with ACA hunter gatherers in the Congo Basin. And we were working with this population because they use a lot of drugs.

The men do. The women almost do not at all, nor do the kids, but almost 100% of the men, basically 100% of the men either use tobacco or cannabis or both. And basically 100% are infected with worms. And so what we thought is, well, uh the ideal experiment would be to infect somebody with worms and see if they start smoking more, but um that might not be ethically permitted. So we'll do the reverse. We'll take a bunch of people who are already infected with worms that are already smoking and treat them for worms. So we did a double blind RCT randomized controlled trial, placebo controlled trial, where we took a large number of ACA hunter gatherer men and got stool samples to confirm their worm infected status and saliva samples to confirm their

tobacco use and cannabis use. And then we randomized them double blind into two groups, one getting a placebo and one getting albendazole, which is a powerful anti-worm medication. And then we waited two weeks. And then we got everybody back and tested them for worms again and tested them for uh salivary cotinine, which is a nicotine metabolite again. Um, and indeed the abendazole worked, not too surprisingly. All those guys were cleared of worms, the other guys weren't. But the key result is uh that in the treatment group, uh nicotine levels went down compared to the control group. And they went down in proportion to how badly infected they were with worms to begin with. So the more heavily infected guys reduced their tobacco use more, and we got the same

result for cannabis use. So um that result needs to be replicated. We have not replicated it, uh so put a little asterisk on all these things. Um, but um that it was definitely an encouraging result. And then the the follow-up, we followed up with all these guys uh a year later um because you get reinfected with worms pretty quickly. And so um, and what we found a year later is that the guys who had um started smoking more were less likely to be reinfected than the guys who were smoking less. So that would be more the prophylactic effect that I mean kind of prevents you from from infections. This is such a cool result um and such a a great example of you know an evolutionary perspective providing you with a really bold, testable prediction that nobody

would have thought to make. Nobody would have thought to make, you know, yeah, if if you if we cure your intestinal parasites, then you're gonna smoke less, right? Right. Like no no one would make it. For at least two weeks. Yeah, for at least two weeks. Yeah. Like that that's an incredibly bold, testable prediction. It it has been confirmed. We still want it to be replicated, obviously, but uh it's a really beautiful example of the utility of the evolutionary approach. Um I also love how it it just it beautifully explains really strong patterns in the empirical data, like as we s as we mentioned, that kids don't uh do drugs. They don't have an interest in doing drugs, despite uh them having an interest in, say,

sweets. And our you know, parents are have a hard time keeping them away from the sweets. We I don't have a hard time keeping my daughter away from my coffee. Uh she has no interest in it at all, or any, you know, uh and we s we see similar drops, you know, when when women are pregnant, they they don't uh consume these substances. So we see a close match between what you would expect uh from the self-medication hypothesis, that that use is calibrated to the cost-benefit ratio of self-medication. Uh, and it it doesn't really match this idea that drugs are just hijacking our reward system. If they're hijacking our reward system, then you would expect kids to be uh uh grasping for this stuff the way they grasp for candy.

You expect everybody to be doing it, and the more you do it, the the more pleasure you'd get. Um so here's another prediction that your model makes. I'm not sure if there's any evidence for this. Given that these uh substances only have self-medicating effects in small doses, and then in larger doses they have harmful effects, um, you would expect the pleasurable response to only occur at small doses and start to become aversive at large doses. Uh is there evidence for that? I mean, intuitively that's strong evidence, strong evidence for that. So um if the if the hijack model is correct, that these things are hijacking over basically everybody should be overdosing. Yeah. Um and nicotine can easily kill you.

Um, and yet nicotine overdoses are vanishingly rare. They're actually more common now than they've ever been due to vaping, and the fact that um these vape fluids are often have flavors in them, and so you've got vial, and it's it's basically young infants. Oh god that so the the uh visits to uh poison centers have skyrocketed uh with the onset of vaping because um little little babies or uh toddlers are getting into the vape fluids and they kind of smell sweet and and flavored and then they get a big dose of nicotine um and have to be rushed to the hospital. So um but absent that uh nicotine overdoses are really, really rare. And so the evidence in favor of what David was saving here is there's been many, many

studies of what's called um nicotine titration. And so these are experimental studies where you take smokers and you um measure, you actually have this little box that measures that you're in flow, how deeply draw you're drawing in the tobacco. So it's measuring airflow. Um so you kind of stick your cigarette on one end, smoke it through the other end. Um And uh so you do this uh to get everybody's baseline levels of of basically, and you can also measure their nicotine levels in their blood, their cotinine levels, that's the nicotine metabolite. Um and then what you do is you randomize them into groups where they either kind of get their normal cigarette or they get a cigarette that's either got more nicotine in it than

usual or uh less nicotine in it than so a high nicotine cigarette or a low nicotine cigarette. And what you find is that people titrate. If you give them the high nicotine cigarette, they dial back and they dial back their smoking to basically getting the same levels of nicotine they were getting at baseline. If you give them the low nicotine cigarettes, they inhale, they puff more deeply, more puffs, bring to bring their nicotine levels back up. So folks are very, very accurately titrating their levels of nicotine in a very narrow range. And that range is pretty much just below the range where you start to trigger acute toxic reactions. So people are, and that suggests to me that there's got to be an evolved mechanism to do

that, to be that precise with such a dangerous substance. That folks are very, very good at keeping their nicotine levels within a pretty narrow band, even when you manipulate their source of nicotine. Yeah. Awesome. It's really beautiful work. I I love I love this stuff. It's mind blowing. Um I I gotta ask though, what's the deal with heroin? Like that your your model has a hard time explaining this. It destroys people's lives. They it does seem like something is being hijacked and something is going wrong there. Uh what's what's going on there? Yeah the opioid one is the tough one for us. I agree with that. Um and uh I don't have a great I don't have a great story here. Um a lot of it is that the way you take a lot of those uh ones that are really dangerous

is you bypass a lot of your toxin detection mechanisms. So you inject them. Um, for example. Um and so, for example, with cocaine, we don't really see folks overdosing seriously with cocaine if they snort it. But if they inject it, that's when you get the overdoses. And also, you know, with, you know, toxicodone and fentanyl, you're taking pills that again, you're bypassing a lot of your innate toxin defense mechanisms. So I think that's that's part of it. If you really had to taste the bitterness of of these things and you were fully engaging your your toxin detection mechanisms, they may be less dangerous. Interesting. And they do destroy people's lives. Alcohol does too. Alcohol is another little bit of a tough case for us because it's not a plant toxin, for

example. But it is a toxin and it is an antibacterial, powerful antibacterial substance. So I don't fully know. And you know, not everybody gets addicted to opioids. So could there be something about the environment, either the social environment, or you know, could there be some I've I've looked for patterns. For example, we have IgE measures from around the country, which is a biomarker of uh worm infections, uh, to see if those kind of correlate with drug use patterns around. I haven't really found anything too convincing. Um allergens. You know, you David was saying he didn't think he was infected with parasites, but actually you are. We all have these little mites that are in uh inhabiting our hair follicles.

Um and those can actually stimulate immune responses. So we do have a lot of these ectoparasites on us. Um and so um, and in some folks you get these really severe outbreaks from them. Most of us tolerate them pretty well. So, could there be some immune system thing going on? And that there's a quite a bit of evidence that, and there's actually animal models of this, that stimulating the immune system does increase drug intake in laboratory animals. Um, and in correlation studies in humans, um, immune activation seems to be associated with opioid use. So, it could be some kind of immune uh variation that might explain some of the variation in susceptibility to opioid. You see, maybe you are self-medicating, uh, but because your immune system is activated in

a way for you, either due to your environment that you're in, um, obviously it's associated with poverty, uh, and that's obviously more associated with exposure to pathogens and lack of sanitation. Um, So this is all hand waving, but this would be some of the some of the paths that would follow for that. More more research is needed, or as as or as my friend Dan Sneezer would say, more funding is needed. So it does it does opium that comes from like the poppy plant, right? That's right. So presumably if people were making tea from the poppy plant, they would be less if your model's correct, you might expect them to be less likely to get addicted. If they're ingesting the substance through normally ecologically valid ways, their nervous

system has evolved to titrate, that presumably you would expect this, these kinds of uh addictions to be less prevalent. Yeah, well, less severe. So addiction is a tricky concept, and I really don't like it because it has this thing that um you're using a substance um that you know is harmful to you, that you you want to stop, but you can't stop it. So it involves all this kind of weird intrapsychic conflict where you somehow know the harms, whatever that means. Uh and you want to stop, whatever that means, but you can't stop, whatever that means. So that it's a really fuzzy and I think unhelpful concept. But are we addicted to food? Are we addicted to oxygen? Um, are we addicted to water? I'm addicted to oxygen.

Yeah. Yeah. I can't stop breathing even though I want to all the time. Right, yeah. So uh and if I don't want to stop using heroin, then I'm not addicted to it. You know, you have to want to stop using it. Um and you know, when we think about coffee addiction, um, nobody really worries about it. And we don't even really call it that except as a joke. Um, but really why so kind of habitual use is one thing, and then use to the point that it destroys your life is another thing. And I think habitual use, I think is perfectly consistent with our model. We habitually use stuff that's beneficial to us. And so if it's a prophylactic, uh, we need to habitually use it. We need to use it uh all the time.

You know, are we habitually addicted to pepper uh and spices? Um no, we we want them, we like them. Yeah. So it's more of the life destroying aspects of what you think that um that's the more challenging part. Why would you be using them to that, to that level? And and maybe as you say, if if they weren't bypassing a lot of our toxin defense mechanisms, um and that's that's kind of ideas that Randy Nessie has floated and then other people have floated too but that's fascinating. So presumably if you're I mean again, we don't know if you're right, but if you are right, it could have very important implications. It could suggest that the best way to prescribe people opiates and painkillers is not by

giving them pills that they could potentially destroy their lives with, but by giving them teas or whatever kinds of, you know, ancestrally ecologically valid ways of consuming these substances that would prevent them from destroying their their lives with these substances. Yeah, or a mimic that did that. Because a lot of the challenge with drug design is that your body, we are so well defended against plant toxins that it's often hard to get the drug to the target tissue. In fact, that's why it's almost impossible to train brain infections and brain cancer, because we can't get drugs across the blood brain barrier. And so a huge amount of engineering in in pharmacology is exactly how do we bypass uh toxin defense mechanisms.

We need them to not trigger, you shouldn't, we don't want you to vomit. We don't want your body to metabolize this. We need it to get to the target tissue. Often we disguise it as one thing, and then we count on your metabolic enzymes to convert it into the active product later. And that's actually what's happening with morphine and heroin. And so if we were to begin to think about designing these things, we would want, you know, we have the there's these trade-offs of getting getting the drug to the target tissue to do its job, but then also um not you know either triggering or not triggering toxin defense mechanisms to get the ideal outcome. So it it would be a tricky problem, but I could imagine putting in other bitter substances

maybe. Um and I I don't know what the case with opioids and all these different opioids um in uh uh washing down your uh your your opium your opiate pill with some horseradish or something like that. Something, yeah, with some wasabi or something. Uh for me that would be I I find wasabi kind of addicting myself. But yeah, I like it too. Yeah. Um, can you talk a little bit about the cigarette thing and the Yeah? So tobacco is, you know, this hugely it is very deadly, but it's deadly in the long term. It has these, it's not the nicotine that kills you uh with smoking, it's all the other stuff um that gives you cancer much later in life or um heart disease. And so in high-income countries like ours that have a history

of high prevalence of tobacco use, about one in five deaths are due to tobacco. Worldwide, it's about one in ten. And so it's this enormously costly drug that uh whose costs occur late in life. Um, But it's exactly one of these drugs that we've been talking about to plant neurotoxin. It's very deadly. We're very good at titrating it. And there's been a huge debate in public health about vaping, because vaping delivers the nicotine without all of those other harmful, or without most of the other harmful substances, or at least stuff that's a lot less harmful than the highly reactive compounds when you burn tobacco leaves. And so on the one hand, you might say this is perfect. And as a smoking cessation device, it is very good that folks find it a lot

easier to stop smoking by transitioning to vaping. And that's often more effective, is my understanding of the literature, than things like nicotine patches and nicotine gum. And that's an interesting question why that is. And so, but the worry that public health folks have is that it's kind of a gateway drug to actually smoking. And so there's been this huge debate over the last 10 years with the rise of vaping. Should we encourage it because it's way safer than smoking? Or should we continue to discourage it because it's really going to just be a gateway drug to regular actual smoking? And I don't know if the evidence, I it's hard to kind of separate out there the two camps, you know, and they're they're kind of fighting each other.

It's kind of like you know the debate over COVID and all this stuff. Um it's gotten to the point where it's it's hard to know what the where the real truth is and what the best policy would be. But I my bias is that eventually we're going to need something kind of like a drug sub. We we love drugs so much. Um, and I think you know, the rise of Starbucks and coffee is great because that one is really safe and it satisfies our kind of desire for plant toxins. But we'll probably need a lot more of these that kind of satisfy our taste for plant toxins, but don't come with all these tremendously harmful side effects like cancer and heart disease or ruining your life with opioids. Um and vaping was kind of the baby steps in that direction, but

one that's been very controversial and you know, understandably so. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like the almost everybody we've had on, in some way or another, it's the argument that things are you can have insights from an evolutionary perspective that you would never get, but it also highlights that if you have a cartoonishly oversimple view of the world, you're gonna be wrong. And so the idea that like immune function or parasite load has anything to do with drug abuse. And it's not just shame on you for being immoral for taking drugs. Like that, you know, it it it challenges just this really cartoonish view of the world where it's just you take drugs because you're a bad person, right?

Or a weak person, or because it's hijacked your reward system. Um, and you know, just pop culture, you know, dopamine hit, we hear, you know, constantly. Um and it's really kind of getting the whole thing backwards, you know, that these neurotransmitters are how your body works. And the buzz and the high is not from neurotransmitters, it's from compounds that evolve to interfere with with cellular signaling. Hit is right, but they mean it. They're saying the right word, but it's the wrong intention. Yeah. Yeah. There it's it's we're not getting hits from dopamine. We're getting from hits from compounds that evolve to interfere with dopamine. Exactly. Yeah. So it's exactly the opposite. Yeah. So exactly.

Um the uh I mean David, I'll you know, feel free to jump in. I just wanted to because I just want to cover a little more ground. Um knowledge specialization and sort of um we've had some folks on talking about leadership and also like female leadership has been something we've kind of been going around. Can you talk a little bit about you know, we you and I, we both had leadership papers come out roughly around the same time. Yours was an enormous, again, encyclopedic um thing. Can you talk a little bit about what you're thinking about from kind of new ideas about um leadership and and family leadership? I I I know you've been thinking about that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So Zach Garfield um gives credit for the encyclopedic uh treatment of

leadership there. He's the one that did all the work there. Well, is that Oh, I said great. And actually we've been having try we're getting trying to get Zach on um with field site uh scheduling things. But yeah, that's great good to know. So yeah, yeah, he he gets credit for for that. Um so this was uh this kind of actually goes back to Shagnon. Um right around the time I was getting my PhD, 2000, a book came out that um accused Shagnon and his early collaborator, James Neal, who's a geneticist of deliberately triggering an epidemic in the Onomamo using a dangerous measles vaccine. I was an anthra minor when this was happening and I was learning about it real time. I think the first John Tubi thing I ever read was John's um basically just like

post online about sort of what he found out about this. So yeah, this was a real thing when it was happening. This darkness in El Dorado. Yeah, this is called The Darkness in El Dorado is the name of the book. Um and uh we got early notification of this um coming out, and so John and Michael Price and myself started looking into what the heck was actually going on, And it turned out just to be completely made up. Basically, it was a vaccine scare. So the same kind of anti-vaxx stuff we're seeing today. Probably some evolved psychology about vaccines are you got to get stuck with a needle. Somebody's injecting some weird thing into you. And so people are kind of hesitant. So there's we probably have some reason to that, you know, it's probably pretty easy to

trigger fears of vaccines. And so that's what this book was kind of at its core was another yet another vaccine kind of scare that there was this dangerous vaccine. But you know, vaccines cannot cause epidemics. Uh they prevent epidemics. Um, and the evidence for that was overwhelming with this measles vaccine and that it was used properly in all the right context, blah, blah, blah. So now Shagnon was sort of Sam the Neil and Shagnon were basically inoculating them against measles, but there was this book that was basically, for various reasons, which maybe are not worth going into, uh falsely accused them of creating a problem. Yeah, this is kind of the you know the controversies over evolutionary approaches to human

behavior. And of course, Shagnon was one of the pioneers in that. And so to tarnish uh the field of evolution and human behavior. Um, that was kind of one of the underlying motives of this book. There were several underlying motives. That was one. Basically accusing of Shagnon and Neil of this unethical research to test some evolutionary theory of leadership in the onamo. And so that was the idea that Neil uh thought there was a leadership gene. He didn't. And that he concocted a plan to trigger a measles epidemic to test his nefarious theory of leadership in the Onomammo. and uh his sidekick Shagnon, you know, helped him carry out this plan. So that was the the kind of the story of the book.

Yeah cartoon uh and you know, published by Norton, this you know, well-respected academic publisher, published in the New Yorker with fact checking, blah, blah, blah. Turned out to all be completely made up. Uh, but it did get me curious. So this is how it leads into the leadership question. So um I was doing all the, I was kind of John's research guy behind the scenes, me and Michael Price doing a lot of the all the getting all the papers and reading them. And so I was reading the two grad students, right? The two grad students doing all the work here. Um and John was doing a lot too. Um I'm sure, yeah. But trying to figure out what was going on. So I was reading Neil's papers, and you know, what did he say about leadership?

And what the what the heck? Leadership gene. You know, he's a geneticist. Is that really what he was thinking? And um, no, Neil had this really key insight back in the 1950s and early 60s, before anyone really. And he's really his work has been forgotten, sadly, in my view. But he, like many, many others, realized that if we really want to understand human evolution, we have to really understand what's going on in these kind of small-scale, more traditional societies. So he started working in Amazonian groups, the Anomama with one and the Chevante, another, and really trying to understand, you know, what's going on and being a geneticist, he was really focused on survival and reproduction. So he was you know putting together all these demographic tables and kinship charts and

who's reproducing and who's not, what are you know, um, what are the mortality rates, just all the real basic stuff. And what he discovered um was that uh the headman in these communities were having way more kids, like way more than everybody else, uh, than all the other men. And um, and so he really began to think through what are the implications for human if this, and you know, he was careful scientist, but if this pattern characterized human evolution, these kinds of societies that there's this real reproductive skew that it's the headmen that um are having uh most of the kids. um among the men what are the implications for human evolution and um of course many many folks have looked at status and you know that this would select

for status striving um and the desire to you know achieve status and that was not neil's uh approach he was like what traits would be under selected? What traits allow these men to rise into leadership positions? And his answer was intelligence. Um, that they are, they're not the most aggressive guys or the strongest guys or the most violent guys. Um, they're good at pretty much everything. They're kind of jack-of-all trades. Um, they are good warriors, they are good hunters. They're not necessarily the best warrior, they're not necessarily the best hunter, They are good at tribal lore and knowledge, um, and all the things that leaders are good at. And he said that takes smarts. Um, and he said, You know, I'm not talking about IQ here, but I'm talking about some more

general um notion of ability, these general is it just the ability to pick things up quickly, just like to learn skills? Well, he didn't go into his idea too much. I mean, he was really a geneticist and much more focused on genetics, so this was a little bit of a hobby side thing for him. He only wrote a few things on it. Um, and he left a lot of details out, like what okay, so these guys are maybe smarter than average. Um, and he had these kind of Monte Carlo models actually, uh, where he kind of shows that it wouldn't take too much given the the patterns that he's seeing, and given you know, a bell curve of the heritability of some sort of innate ability, uh, you'd get selection pretty quickly for it.

But he really didn't go into okay, these guys might be, you know, on the smart end of the scale, but um, why how does that allow them to rise into the leadership position? He and he admitted, he said, I'm not really sure what it is. He said, You know, he observed these guys, what they did. And he said, You know, I can really see that they're respected by everybody and they're respected for their talents. Um And I thought, you know, and I remember talking about this with John, and we were both like, wow, that's actually a really good idea. Um and Neil was viewing this as one of the driving forces in encephalization. So you know how Encephalization meaning brains getting bigger over evolution time.

Brains getting bigger over evolutionary time. You know, how do we go from a chimp sized brain of 400 milliliters to a human sized brain of, you 12 to 1400 milliliters. And so he said, could this be one of the keys to that puzzle? This reproductive skew and headman. So I've always kind of I tucked that in my back pocket as an idea to pursue later and begin to work out, you know, fill in some of the gaps that Neil didn't fill in. Like, how do these guys rise into this position? And so when I took on Zach as a Zach Garfield as a student, I said, Hey, um, you've been working on status with Ray Haynes as an undergrad. And I've been always wanting to kind of look at leadership more broadly. Is Neil right?

Is there this reproductive skew? Um are these guys viewed as smart and intelligent? Um is that you really a universal feature of leadership in Hunter Gather and other small scale society? So I said, if you're interested, we can really dig into that and see if Neil was on to something here. And what we found is that yes, uh, leaders are nearly universally viewed, not all leaders, but just in general, every culture values intelligent, knowledgeable leaders. That is a very highly valued trait that is possessed by uh leaders in most um small-scale societies. Um, there's clear evidence of that they are more reproductively successful than other men. And so that really gave us the empirical foundation that yes, Neil's onto something here,

and we should start to think about the importance of knowledge to other people and the importance of some of these skills to other people that would allow these guys to rise. And what are the cognitive challenges of leadership that these guys might be better at solving than, you know, and just a little bit better. Doesn't have to be a lot. Uh, just that little bit of genetic variation. Um and um, so that's that's kind of where we're coming in is is trying to figure out what what are the cognitive demands of leadership that would be valuable to both. And that's the interesting thing of leadership. They're not a lot of folks have focused on how leaders are valuable to other men or how they're valuable to women.

We're like they they're valuable to both, you know, both sexes are seeing value in what these guys are offering. And so what kinds of things would be valuable to both sexes? Um, and so that's where the family issue comes in. That we kind of realize that human societies are uh multi-level societies that we kind of have the family level that is nested kind of within the more community or residence level that's nested in with a more broader political level, but that the challenges, there's kind of similar challenges at each level. And so the kinds of traits that would make you a good leader would also make you a good husband. That you're gonna and some of those things are gonna be conflict resolution.

We conflict was kind of a theme earlier in our talk here. Uh, that what leaders are doing across cultures is solving conflicts to prevent group visioning. Um and that's tough because you have to know just about everything about everybody to understand what those conflicts are and be able to search a pretty broad space of solutions pretty quickly to figure out where you might be able to square the circle here and find a solution that everybody can rely on. And that's the style of leadership. This is not a top-down style leadership, what we see in small-scale societies. It's not hereditary, it's not a formal position. These are just guys who uh people listen to when they speak. And they're listened to because they have valuable things to say.

They know something or they have some idea, something valuable to offer consistently over a lifetime. And so it's it's those are the aspects that we're kind of exploring to how these guys actually, you know, what cognitive uh capabilities they have that might, you know, be part of our now, today, our common humanity that we all have by virtue of the fact that these things have been under constant selection throughout human evolution. Yeah. So it's kind of like the idea that there's an entry for variation in a certain set of abilities. And I like that you're unpacking that we don't just sort of like treat intelligence quote unquote as just obvious or intrinsic, but then it's saying, well, what

what would be a important thing for organisms or other people to sort of want in somebody else? Right. And so things like coordination or having knowledge to sort of see a possibility space of for what to do or how to resolve a conflict. Um that kind of gives that teeth. Um yeah I like that. Right. And we're we kind of the way we're talk about this is a computational services that we humans um are valuable to others many times because we offer valuable comp uh computational services to others. Sometimes it's information, sometimes it's decisions, solutions. Um sometimes uh this comes in with the self medication aspect. The the sort of triad there is that we have kind of spices and drugs, but we also have

traditional medicine that shamans are key figures in small-scale societies. And one of the main things they do is offer traditional plant-based medicines that are, again, special plant toxins that are effective at treating certain kinds of illnesses. And that's a very cognitively demanding task to figure out which of these various combinations of these various plant substances. You know, you have a symptom profile that you have to figure out what that symptom profile indicates? Um, and then how do I match it to some combination of plant toxins? There's a lot of computation going on there to solve those kinds of problems. So that would be another example of a computational service in addition to these more

leadership-oriented ones that we think might have been really valuable in traditional societies. Um we're kind of broadly characterizing this as and then when you look at the family level, who's doing all of those things? It's mothers. They're having to treat their kids and they know a lot of traditional medicine. They're having to solve conflicts with all their kids, some of whom are adults, some of whom are infants. There's this daily conflicts that moms are having to solve. So we actually think a lot of the selection wasn't in these male leaders, but in moms leading their families and doing exactly the same thing that the headman is doing at the community level, moms are doing at the family level.

So the selection on the cognitive abilities might initially have been in females. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean being a parent and you know we're all parents and David and I are really on the thick of it right now is like the control system is like a division of labor. I mean my my son's gonna be getting a bit older and I think is a bit older than your daughter, David, but you know, you're like your brain is for two, you know. You're like you're watching the cars or more. You're more. And if you're in a traditional society, you have a you have five kids because you have humans have this short interbirth interval of about two, two and a half years and this very long developmental period.

Um and so you're not like a chimp mom where it's one kid at a time. Um human moms are, you know, one, then two, then three, then four, then five kids, uh, and you're dealing with all of them. Yeah. And they're at different ages, they have different needs. Um, you know, some of them are ending the mating market, others are sick, others are fighting with the you know the kids next door. Um, and so you're you know, it's just a massive problem that you're trying to solve on a literally a minute by minute basis. I I can't say, like, I I think, I mean, maybe science approaches it, but I don't think there's an thing in my life that I've ever used like every drop of my quote unquote intelligence as much as in for parenting.

Yeah, my my wife, you know, uh teases me that this whole idea she deserves credit for this whole thing because me observing her, you know, and also both of us just dealing with parenting when when our kids were young. It was just constant uh scheduling and negotiating. And um just the cognitive demands were that were just really pushed both of us to the the edge of what we and then you know, both trying to get our careers going, and um it was uh intense. Yeah, it definitely resonates with me as a married man with a kid, just all of the incredible cognitive labor that my wife manages to pull off with navigating schedules and social networks and like it uh it's it's dizzying to me. Yeah, you're you're you're you you're figuring out, okay, your kid like I remember even

myself thinking, like, I am what am I worrying most about now? My my you know five year old daughter's social relationship her and her friends in kindergarten and who she's having conflicts with and uh you know is her friend dissing her or is she getting along and so you're you're having to build a cognitive model of of their social worlds and then figure out what you can do and then their parents and what are your relationships with their with those kids' parents. Um it's it's just uh and in mothers in traditional societies that's just it's it's multiplied by by uh the number of kids that they're and plus you know, environmental threats are are way more severe and health threats. I there we we're gonna have to wrap up soon, but uh parenting brain or like what what

happens the adaptations for parenting, I think is such an understudied Yeah. I totally if there's like a ratio of sort of like what there is to the research on it, that's probably maybe one of the biggest sort of like elephants of the room in terms of evolutionary psychology. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Absolutely. And we often ask people, this has been great, lots of fun things to talk about. Um some we often ask people, or always ask people, if there's anything we should have asked you. Um god. Uh no, I think I think we've covered the the big uh I guess. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of 20 stuff I wanted to talk about. We gotta have you on again. Um we have music and dance.

Yeah, we have music and dance. We haven't talked about that one. Um we haven't talked about the challenges and barriers and successes of of evolutionary thinking in the social sciences. Uh yeah. Um yeah, we were just talking to Christina um about about sort of what even are the areas within the evolutionary social sciences. And we talked a little bit so like Dan Conroy Beam on about sort of how the mating literature has been progressing. But we haven't, you know, we've there's been ebbs and flows of like how the evolutionary behavioral sciences are going. But yeah, we haven't there's still a lot more to say about that. Yeah. Right. So that'd be an area I'm trying to think if there's any other um you are incoming human

behavior and evolution society president too. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and the kind of polarization that we see in the nation is reflected in our society as well. So that's gonna be fun. Yeah. Um, that's gonna be fun to navigate. Yeah, scientists are people. I mean, you're gonna need to do a lot of computational services as well. I mean, I'm exactly like uh conflict management there. I may uh I may lose my position and may be dethroned very quickly. Hopefully it doesn't hurt my reproductive success too much here. Um yeah, uh that'll be interesting. Um and we do have there's um there's child challenges in science in general right now and um the publishing landscape. Um there's a lot of challenges there too with our journal EHB and how do we want to go with

that that we're going to be uh dealing with? Um right, which is uh Elsevere, yeah. Which is the Elsevier, which of course is pretty controversial with many academics. Uh I was shocked. I mean, uh uh we can cut this, but I was shocked at like the Elsevier profits or like publishing profits. It's insane. Yeah, there's a paradox there. Um that their publishing profits are insane, and yet their publishing fees are about the same as nonprofit journals. So if you look at the um article publishing costs, they're they're all about the same. Yeah. So how is El Selvier raking in these huge profits, whereas the nonprofits are nonprofits? Yes. Uh, and they're charging the same thing. And I think I don't know the answer, but I think it's economies of scale.

Like Salvia just has huge numbers of titles. Uh well, isn't it the institutional contracts? You mean with libraries and stuff? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So they they say we'll sell you this bundle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's cable. Yeah, yeah. There's actually there's academic work on this and that they actually keep it under they like there's non-disclosure agreements. Because I actually I I did a lecture for Intro Psych about um uh like issues in the field. And actually one of them was like the publishing issues, you know, just for like, you know, where are your tax dollars going? Um and if people it's not just tax, it's tuition dollars. I was just looking at there's all this stuff about overhead right now.

So I was looking at where is our overhead at WSU going? So just the other day I was digging into our budget um and it turned out a lot of it is going to the libraries to pay for these journals. Exactly. So, you know, folks were saying, oh, it's paying for this, it's paying for that. Actually, it's it's paying for our journal subscriptions, at least at WSU. That's where a lot, that's where a lot of it's going. Not not all of it, of course. Yeah, we're a little in the weeds. Maybe we can have a whole episode on journal publishing. So or maybe we're getting into the weeds here. Yeah. Well, all right. Well, this was an awesome conversation. I wish we had uh you know a a million hours to to fully explore the landscape of your

ideas and your work and to just shoot the shit and and you know bounce new ideas off of you. Um you're you're a truly um uh inspiring role model and capacious mind. Um it was a pleasure to have you on, and I look forward to having you back. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, take care, guys. So David, we finished up another episode. Uh really uh I'm enjoying this. How are how are you how are you doing? I'm having a blast. I mean, I have a great time on each one. Yeah, I learn a lot and it's fun to talk to you. And um yeah, and so I hope everybody is enjoying it. If you are enjoying it, please, what can people do, David? Well, they can leave us a kind review, they can tell a friend, they can climb a mountain

and shout Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast is the best, uh, as loud as possible. Oh, that was really specific. That was good. Yeah, well, uh yeah, if everybody did that, then you know, everyone would know about us. It would it would be weird and and interesting. Um uh you can also check out our Patreon page and support us. Uh really any kind of encouragement, support, uh uh of any kind is fuel for us. It just motivates us to uh keep doing these episodes, bringing on new people, talking to each other. Um, you we really depend on you for for your support. So yeah, and I have one more thing to say, which is if you have thoughts or suggestions about, you know, topics or content you'd like to have on, just you know, let us know on

social media or, you know, send the podcast an email yeah yep all right uh david i'll see you in about a week see you