WEBVTT 00:00:00.400 --> 00:00:03.840 We're David Pinsov and David Petrozki. 00:00:04.240 --> 00:00:10.000 This is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast Actual Evolutionary Psychology 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:12.960 by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. 00:00:20.770 --> 00:00:22.050 David, good to see you. 00:00:22.530 --> 00:00:24.050 Good to see you too, my friend. 00:00:24.370 --> 00:00:25.890 We are on episode three. 00:00:26.290 --> 00:00:29.010 We are Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. 00:00:29.330 --> 00:00:30.850 Third time is The Charm. 00:00:31.170 --> 00:00:36.930 This episode, we neither interview Dave or David, but we start getting 00:00:36.930 --> 00:00:42.530 into what is evolutionary psychology and where we end up in this episode is largely 00:00:42.530 --> 00:00:48.220 talking about the bad of evolutionary psychology and the ways that it's been misused 00:00:48.460 --> 00:00:54.300 and abused and also um really kind of together really 00:00:54.620 --> 00:01:00.460 uh you know stumble into some of the problematic areas and misunderstandings of 00:01:00.460 --> 00:01:01.740 our discipline. 00:01:02.220 --> 00:01:02.700 Yes. 00:01:02.860 --> 00:01:06.850 Um this one uh goes into controversial territory. 00:01:07.010 --> 00:01:12.770 I think we try to get to the bottom of why evolutionary psychology has gotten under 00:01:12.770 --> 00:01:18.690 people's skin, why it has uh evoked such a backlash historically, uh 00:01:18.770 --> 00:01:23.410 we get into topics such as, you know, uh feminism and sexism. 00:01:23.890 --> 00:01:28.180 Um we we go into some uh dangerous waters. 00:01:28.740 --> 00:01:34.420 Yeah, and I and I appreciate one thing we do in this, David, is that um I I 00:01:34.420 --> 00:01:39.940 genuinely think that we are um trying to do this in a way that is 00:01:40.100 --> 00:01:46.020 respects what should be respected in this debate and and doesn't, you know, we're not 00:01:46.020 --> 00:01:51.140 gonna suffer foolish, cynical well cynical is the wrong word, but um people who are sort of 00:01:51.140 --> 00:01:53.970 being um parasitic or trolling. 00:01:54.050 --> 00:01:59.410 But I think, you know, this is a an honest and sincere discussion about some of these 00:01:59.410 --> 00:02:00.210 issues. 00:02:00.370 --> 00:02:04.290 Um and uh and I think, you know, I think we did okay. 00:02:04.450 --> 00:02:08.930 Um it's not the last word, but I think, you know, it was a open, honest discussion. 00:02:09.090 --> 00:02:15.090 We disagreed um at some points, but I feel like um uh I feel 00:02:15.090 --> 00:02:16.680 good about the discussion. 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:18.120 Yeah, no, me too. 00:02:18.200 --> 00:02:24.200 I think it will be uh enlightening for people to uh get into this area and to 00:02:24.280 --> 00:02:28.920 and to sort of have some perspective about where the controversy is coming from and and how 00:02:28.920 --> 00:02:30.680 we might move past it. 00:02:36.360 --> 00:02:37.720 All right, we're going. 00:02:37.880 --> 00:02:41.640 So uh so David, um good to see you. 00:02:41.990 --> 00:02:43.670 Good to see you too, my friend. 00:02:43.990 --> 00:02:47.910 Uh today we're going to talk about evolutionary psychology. 00:02:48.550 --> 00:02:49.190 Yes. 00:02:49.830 --> 00:02:55.430 What it what it is, um, and uh maybe why people, um, 00:02:55.670 --> 00:02:58.390 to what extent people do and don't understand it. 00:02:58.550 --> 00:03:04.550 Um, and uh all things sort of around evolutionary psychology or what it 00:03:04.550 --> 00:03:05.590 means to you. 00:03:05.940 --> 00:03:09.620 Yeah, what it means to us, why it matters, why you should care. 00:03:09.940 --> 00:03:10.260 Or not. 00:03:11.540 --> 00:03:12.500 Yeah, maybe you don't care. 00:03:12.740 --> 00:03:14.980 But if you're listening, probably you care at least a little bit. 00:03:15.380 --> 00:03:15.780 Good. 00:03:16.100 --> 00:03:20.580 Um, so to start out, um, what what what is evolutionary psychology? 00:03:20.660 --> 00:03:22.260 How do you how do you think about it or or here? 00:03:22.340 --> 00:03:25.060 Let me let me change the let me break that up into two questions. 00:03:25.140 --> 00:03:30.340 One is what do you think is sort of the the generally accepted idea of what it is? 00:03:30.420 --> 00:03:32.740 And then number two, how do you think about it? 00:03:33.290 --> 00:03:33.690 Yes. 00:03:33.850 --> 00:03:36.090 So th there's a big difference between those two things. 00:03:36.170 --> 00:03:40.890 And I think that's part of why we wanted to do this podcast was to better get at the 00:03:40.890 --> 00:03:46.650 difference between those two things and sort of give you the legit version of of Ev Psych 00:03:46.890 --> 00:03:50.730 as distinguishable from the uh popular version of it. 00:03:51.050 --> 00:03:56.170 We are as j I think George Carlin once said, uh you know, something about he was in this is 00:03:56.170 --> 00:03:57.690 why I'm not a professional comedian. 00:03:57.850 --> 00:04:02.520 He said something about, you know, I am a professional comedian, unlike the comedians you 00:04:02.520 --> 00:04:04.760 usually encounter in your day-to-day, you know, life. 00:04:04.920 --> 00:04:07.400 So we are professional evolutionary psychologists. 00:04:07.880 --> 00:04:08.200 Yes. 00:04:08.360 --> 00:04:08.600 Yes. 00:04:08.680 --> 00:04:09.560 We are professionals. 00:04:09.640 --> 00:04:11.960 We we publish in peer-reviewed journals. 00:04:12.200 --> 00:04:14.280 Um so what is evolutionary psych? 00:04:14.680 --> 00:04:17.000 Well, let's start with the popular conception of it. 00:04:17.320 --> 00:04:21.320 Um, here is my understanding of the popular conception of it. 00:04:21.560 --> 00:04:27.550 Um, it's basically like uh you hear the David Attenborough voiceover on the on the 00:04:27.550 --> 00:04:32.350 Planet Earth episode, or you're watching National Geographic or Discovery Channel and you 00:04:32.350 --> 00:04:37.870 hear some person talking about how the male is performing a courtship display to attract a 00:04:37.870 --> 00:04:43.630 female, uh or you know, the uh the animal is trying to uh escape the the 00:04:43.630 --> 00:04:44.750 predator, or you know. 00:04:45.150 --> 00:04:50.120 These kinds of sex and death related animalistic uh 00:04:50.600 --> 00:04:53.720 ideas and basically applying that to humans. 00:04:53.960 --> 00:04:59.880 So human men perform courtship displays uh to try to attract a 00:04:59.880 --> 00:05:00.440 mate. 00:05:00.680 --> 00:05:06.680 Um, and you know, humans are hardwired to escape the predator, to flee from 00:05:06.680 --> 00:05:08.120 the tiger or the lion. 00:05:08.360 --> 00:05:13.640 And a lot of the times this is sort of mixed in with a Fred Flintstone uh version of human 00:05:13.640 --> 00:05:16.360 history where we're dumb cavemen with clubs. 00:05:16.890 --> 00:05:22.410 And so a lot of pop F Psyche is like, oh, uh we make these 00:05:22.410 --> 00:05:28.410 mistakes because we have these dumb cavemen intuitions that, you know, 00:05:28.650 --> 00:05:33.050 might have made sense when we were cavemen, but now they're they're stupid and we need to 00:05:33.050 --> 00:05:35.450 rise above that stupidity. 00:05:35.690 --> 00:05:39.370 That's that's another side of the of the popular version of it. 00:05:39.450 --> 00:05:40.170 Do you think that's about right? 00:05:40.250 --> 00:05:41.690 Do you anything else you want to add? 00:05:42.380 --> 00:05:44.540 Yeah, no, I think that I think that's good. 00:05:44.620 --> 00:05:44.860 Yeah. 00:05:45.020 --> 00:05:50.380 I I also think even in Morse, and I think to be f to say, I thought I think that you also 00:05:50.380 --> 00:05:56.220 encounter that in uh professional uh research circles, 00:05:56.300 --> 00:05:58.540 not just sort of what you what you might find on YouTube. 00:05:58.860 --> 00:06:04.060 I think there are other things, and we may or may not talk get into this, which is um 00:06:04.540 --> 00:06:09.970 there's the uh there's the sort of are you a behavioral 00:06:09.970 --> 00:06:10.770 scientist? 00:06:10.930 --> 00:06:12.210 Is that your job? 00:06:12.450 --> 00:06:16.450 And do you do you understand or use evolutionary psychology? 00:06:16.610 --> 00:06:22.210 And then there's also sort of, do you are you uh an interested um 00:06:22.450 --> 00:06:23.410 outsider? 00:06:23.570 --> 00:06:25.970 Um, and uh and how do you use it? 00:06:26.130 --> 00:06:32.100 And I think in both there's sort of a continuum of sort of cynical use, idealized 00:06:32.100 --> 00:06:36.420 use, understands it, doesn't understand it, um, almost maybe as a two by two. 00:06:36.740 --> 00:06:42.100 Um, so I think uh so I think there's a lot of possible things to talk about, but I think 00:06:42.100 --> 00:06:48.100 what you just described is a good um is a good description of uh of sort of 00:06:48.100 --> 00:06:49.060 the general idea. 00:06:49.220 --> 00:06:53.460 I remember when I came first came across evolutionary psychology, this was when I was an 00:06:53.460 --> 00:06:54.180 undergrad. 00:06:54.420 --> 00:07:00.030 Um I I didn't like it at first because I understood it as basically just 00:07:00.030 --> 00:07:01.710 assigning things to instincts. 00:07:01.950 --> 00:07:04.990 So I didn't know anything about it, but my reaction was very negative. 00:07:05.070 --> 00:07:10.110 And it was just, and I think I even at the time, uh Steve Pinker's language instinct book 00:07:10.110 --> 00:07:10.990 was just out. 00:07:11.470 --> 00:07:16.750 Um and I um I was like, oh, well, this is just silly because it's just labeling something 00:07:16.750 --> 00:07:19.150 we already know about, but calling it an instinct. 00:07:19.230 --> 00:07:20.510 Um that was my first reaction. 00:07:20.590 --> 00:07:24.940 And so I actually have a very warm spot in my heart for anybody who hates evolutionary 00:07:24.940 --> 00:07:26.780 psychology and they don't know anything about it. 00:07:26.940 --> 00:07:28.700 Whenever I hear that, I'm like, that's awesome. 00:07:28.780 --> 00:07:29.260 Tell me more. 00:07:29.340 --> 00:07:30.540 I want to hear more about it. 00:07:30.700 --> 00:07:36.620 Um, when I was at the Mox Planck um in Berlin, um, uh uh, a good friend of mine who turned 00:07:36.620 --> 00:07:39.100 out to be a good friend of mine when I first moved there. 00:07:39.260 --> 00:07:43.020 Um, the first thing he said to me was like, Oh, really nice to meet you is very warm in a 00:07:43.020 --> 00:07:43.180 personal. 00:07:43.340 --> 00:07:44.700 He's like, I hate evolutionary psychology. 00:07:44.780 --> 00:07:45.820 And I sat down tonight next to him. 00:07:45.900 --> 00:07:46.940 I was like genuinely happy. 00:07:47.020 --> 00:07:49.100 I was like, Great, tell me about why you hate it. 00:07:49.260 --> 00:07:54.330 And you know, after about an hour of conversation, we realized we didn't disagree at all. 00:07:54.490 --> 00:07:58.650 Um, he didn't he hadn't misunderstood it reasonably enough based on what he had 00:07:58.650 --> 00:07:59.450 experienced. 00:07:59.610 --> 00:08:05.210 Um and yeah, I think that is part of why we're doing this and part of why um I 00:08:05.370 --> 00:08:10.730 uh I do have a soft spot in in my heart for people who who think they might hate it. 00:08:10.810 --> 00:08:12.730 And maybe they do, and maybe they don't actually. 00:08:13.040 --> 00:08:13.280 Yeah. 00:08:13.360 --> 00:08:16.640 I mean, I too hate the mangled popular version of it. 00:08:16.880 --> 00:08:20.160 So at least we hate I you know we have that in common with with our critics. 00:08:20.320 --> 00:08:20.480 Yeah. 00:08:20.720 --> 00:08:25.520 You know, their their caricatured version of it is, you know, is pretty dumb and awful. 00:08:25.840 --> 00:08:26.320 Yeah. 00:08:26.560 --> 00:08:32.400 Um, there's a lot of layers here, and it's almost overwhelming um to sort of unpack things. 00:08:32.560 --> 00:08:36.080 Um, but but how do you think of what do you think it actually is? 00:08:36.400 --> 00:08:36.880 Hmm. 00:08:37.610 --> 00:08:42.810 Um I think of it as a simple combination 00:08:43.130 --> 00:08:48.090 between uh Darwin's theory of evolution, um 00:08:48.730 --> 00:08:54.650 perhaps combined with the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, um, pioneered by Richard Dawkins 00:08:54.890 --> 00:08:59.290 and uh William Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, which sort of popularize this Gene Zi view 00:08:59.450 --> 00:09:00.010 view of evolution. 00:09:00.090 --> 00:09:05.840 So it's basically just you know evolutionary logic, evolutionary thinking, um combined with 00:09:05.840 --> 00:09:07.920 the computational theory of mind. 00:09:08.160 --> 00:09:10.480 Or in other words, you know, cognitive science. 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:14.640 The mind is an information processing device. 00:09:16.480 --> 00:09:22.080 It takes information as input, it processes it, and it uses it to regulate behavior in 00:09:22.080 --> 00:09:23.440 complicated ways. 00:09:24.560 --> 00:09:26.960 It's a machine, a mechanical device. 00:09:27.440 --> 00:09:31.250 We can talk more about our folk engineering systems. 00:09:31.330 --> 00:09:33.570 That's those are you know that they are part of the mind. 00:09:33.730 --> 00:09:39.570 I think we ought to understand the mind in the way that we understand tools and 00:09:39.570 --> 00:09:40.130 machines. 00:09:40.290 --> 00:09:43.010 I think that is the most useful way of understanding the mind. 00:09:43.970 --> 00:09:49.170 So yeah, it's just combining the fact that minds are physical computational systems uh with 00:09:49.170 --> 00:09:52.290 the idea that they are products of the evolutionary process. 00:09:53.180 --> 00:09:56.940 So that's very different than what people misunderstand about it. 00:09:57.100 --> 00:10:01.020 And I think we can unpack sort of the modern synthesis, the genes I view. 00:10:01.100 --> 00:10:05.180 And I know that there, you know, the genes I view has sort of been treated lately as sort 00:10:05.180 --> 00:10:06.220 of an outdated. 00:10:06.380 --> 00:10:11.420 There's this like idea of like the disco ball problem, which is sort of you read sort of 00:10:11.980 --> 00:10:17.980 really up-to-date um arguments in um in the evolutionary social 00:10:17.980 --> 00:10:23.710 sciences about you know this genes I view maybe being somewhat out of date. 00:10:23.790 --> 00:10:27.310 And I have thoughts about that and I'm interested to hear what you think about that. 00:10:28.510 --> 00:10:33.230 But before and also then the computational theory mine, these are all sort of minefields. 00:10:34.030 --> 00:10:34.350 Yes. 00:10:34.590 --> 00:10:40.110 And and in fact I think it's no accident that there's still um controversy and 00:10:40.110 --> 00:10:44.190 misunderstanding surrounding evolutionary psychology because it's sort of this combination 00:10:44.190 --> 00:10:49.260 of many things that are misunderstood or not generally 00:10:50.140 --> 00:10:55.900 part of curricula in training for psychologists or anthropologists, 00:10:56.060 --> 00:11:01.980 and also certainly not part of accepted sort of common 00:11:02.140 --> 00:11:04.780 common sense knowledge outside of the public, right? 00:11:04.860 --> 00:11:06.140 Or in the in the public. 00:11:06.380 --> 00:11:08.220 So I don't think it's any accident. 00:11:09.510 --> 00:11:13.590 The cartoonish version, the Fred Funstone version. 00:11:14.070 --> 00:11:18.710 I also like calling it Annie Wirtz and I sometimes call it the diorama model, where you go 00:11:18.710 --> 00:11:22.630 to like a natural history museum and there's sort of a diorama, you know, of like, you 00:11:22.630 --> 00:11:27.350 know, two people and they're hunting, you know, and uh what is in our evolutionary history 00:11:27.350 --> 00:11:30.550 like, you know, it's this very simplified sort of cartoonish view, right? 00:11:30.710 --> 00:11:32.870 Um like like it's a diorama. 00:11:33.190 --> 00:11:38.840 Um that diorama model, um, the the 00:11:38.840 --> 00:11:44.680 relationship between that and sort of uh when we go to our conference, like Human 00:11:44.680 --> 00:11:50.120 Behavior and Evolution Conference, or there's other conferences like in uh EB, um, or 00:11:50.120 --> 00:11:54.120 there's like anthropology conferences, there's or there's regional conferences. 00:11:54.360 --> 00:12:00.040 When you actually talk to people who are doing evolutionary psychology on a day-to-day 00:12:00.040 --> 00:12:05.530 basis and who are professionals in it, and we're a part of that crowd of people? 00:12:07.130 --> 00:12:12.490 Do you um what is your thought on sort of their their 00:12:12.730 --> 00:12:18.570 relationship to this misunderstanding, um, this sort of diorama model misunderstanding? 00:12:19.130 --> 00:12:25.130 So, how how widespread is the Fred Flintstone version of it, even among 00:12:25.130 --> 00:12:26.650 professional evolutionary psychologists? 00:12:26.970 --> 00:12:31.690 I mean, that's one way of interpreting the question, or another one is sort of uh, you 00:12:31.780 --> 00:12:37.700 know, do you think that the the popular outside understanding is something that uh 00:12:37.940 --> 00:12:43.780 is it, you know, understood and known and are people annoyed by that um in 00:12:43.780 --> 00:12:44.740 your experience? 00:12:44.980 --> 00:12:48.740 Or is it something where people generally feel like, oh, you know, people kind of 00:12:48.740 --> 00:12:49.940 understand what we're doing? 00:12:50.180 --> 00:12:55.540 Or um yeah, just like for people who don't know, who don't go to the conferences, like what 00:12:55.940 --> 00:13:01.390 um what is the how would you like kind of judge the the 00:13:01.390 --> 00:13:04.990 temperature on the street in terms of like if you're an evolutionary psychologist and 00:13:04.990 --> 00:13:08.510 you're like, oh yeah, no, what do pe what do people mostly think about what we do? 00:13:08.670 --> 00:13:10.750 Um do you think people understand it? 00:13:11.150 --> 00:13:12.030 Absolutely not. 00:13:12.190 --> 00:13:17.470 Yeah, I I don't think I can't remember a single interaction I've had with a lay person 00:13:17.630 --> 00:13:21.950 where I mentioned evolutionary psychology or said that I do evolutionary psychology and had 00:13:21.950 --> 00:13:27.900 them instantly get what I was talking about in a way without flaws or or 00:13:27.900 --> 00:13:30.140 caricatures or or anything like that. 00:13:31.100 --> 00:13:34.940 And that's because like it's objectively hard to wrap your head around. 00:13:35.020 --> 00:13:38.780 Like these are cut like the genes I view of evolution, the computational theory of mind, 00:13:38.860 --> 00:13:40.860 these are not simple ideas. 00:13:41.100 --> 00:13:46.300 These are nuanced, complicated topics that require a lot of elaboration and explanation. 00:13:46.620 --> 00:13:49.740 And it's not easy for a lay person to just get them automatically. 00:13:50.140 --> 00:13:55.490 It takes a lot of time and thought to really wrap your head around this way of thinking. 00:13:55.890 --> 00:13:59.490 And so we resort to the things that are easier to understand. 00:13:59.650 --> 00:14:02.530 So like sex and death are easy to understand. 00:14:02.610 --> 00:14:07.010 And ironically, I think we're so interested in sex and death because of our evolutionary 00:14:07.010 --> 00:14:07.330 history. 00:14:07.410 --> 00:14:11.170 And we can, you know, talk about our information acquisition adaptations and how they're 00:14:11.170 --> 00:14:13.490 sensitive to things like sex and death. 00:14:13.650 --> 00:14:19.330 Um, but a lot of people think of Evpsy as, oh, it's everything is about sex or everything 00:14:19.330 --> 00:14:20.770 is about survival. 00:14:21.080 --> 00:14:27.080 Uh, and we can explain anything we do in the modern world by telling some 00:14:27.080 --> 00:14:31.720 story about cavemen having sex or killing each other. 00:14:32.040 --> 00:14:33.880 Uh, and and that's how to understand it. 00:14:33.960 --> 00:14:39.400 And and along with that, there there are these uh political uh undertones as well that you 00:14:39.400 --> 00:14:45.240 that you see that you that a lot of people see it as a way of of rationalizing 00:14:45.400 --> 00:14:47.640 conservative traditional gender roles. 00:14:47.800 --> 00:14:49.560 That's that's a thing I hear a lot. 00:14:51.270 --> 00:14:56.710 That it's it's a it's a way of saying, oh, you know, uh men and women were different uh 00:14:56.710 --> 00:15:02.630 when when we were cavemen, therefore um you know women shouldn't be allowed to 00:15:02.630 --> 00:15:04.790 uh hold positions of power. 00:15:04.950 --> 00:15:09.110 Um that's another popular uh misunderstanding I see a lot. 00:15:09.510 --> 00:15:15.270 Um so the complexity and nuance of the field is sort of filtered through number one, 00:15:15.510 --> 00:15:21.320 what we find titillating, which is sex and death, uh and number two are 00:15:21.320 --> 00:15:26.200 political preconceptions and and where the uh the the battle lines are drawn in in the 00:15:26.200 --> 00:15:27.480 existing culture wars. 00:15:28.200 --> 00:15:33.800 And so when uh Ev Psyche, the complexity of it is filtered through you know through those 00:15:33.800 --> 00:15:38.120 two prisms, uh you get a very distorted understanding of of what it's all about. 00:15:39.080 --> 00:15:44.760 What what what do you think that's really um nice, a nice summary from that I also would 00:15:45.000 --> 00:15:50.970 would agree with that assessment um from my perspective um in my in my own experience. 00:15:51.210 --> 00:15:56.490 Um when people have this idea about sort of the David uh the the 00:15:56.490 --> 00:16:01.850 Attenborough um um I almost said Richard Attenborough, David Attenborough. 00:16:01.930 --> 00:16:07.930 Uh um uh when people have that idea, that's sort of the approach to 00:16:07.930 --> 00:16:08.250 people. 00:16:08.730 --> 00:16:14.180 Um I know people, it's not just a misunderstanding, and the politics point gets to this, 00:16:14.340 --> 00:16:18.100 which is there's also an emotional reaction to the idea. 00:16:18.260 --> 00:16:22.980 Um, and I wonder what you what you think that emotional reaction typically is. 00:16:23.060 --> 00:16:27.620 Like, I mean, obviously, superficially, there's sort of I even remember feeling it, right? 00:16:27.700 --> 00:16:31.810 I remember feeling sort of like annoyed at this idea. 00:16:31.890 --> 00:16:36.690 It's hard to sort of unpack what I was experiencing when I when I misunderstood it. 00:16:37.170 --> 00:16:42.930 But yeah, I think there's there's a lot of sort of there's the psychology of 00:16:42.930 --> 00:16:46.290 not of not understanding evolutionary psychology. 00:16:46.370 --> 00:16:52.290 And there's the psychology of sort of why we would be designed to have adaptations 00:16:52.290 --> 00:16:56.130 that would find these ideas, particularly as they're misunderstood, particularly as the 00:16:56.130 --> 00:17:01.660 initial representations that haven't been trained to sort of correct for this natural way 00:17:01.660 --> 00:17:02.460 of thinking. 00:17:03.100 --> 00:17:09.100 That initial state, I'm curious, sort of how you think about or how 00:17:09.100 --> 00:17:10.380 you would unpack that. 00:17:10.540 --> 00:17:15.820 That, you know, why is it easy to think that it 00:17:15.820 --> 00:17:21.740 rationalizes gender roles, or why why is it that some people 00:17:21.740 --> 00:17:26.050 are attracted to it who don't understand it, or people disagree with it who don't 00:17:26.050 --> 00:17:26.690 understand it. 00:17:26.850 --> 00:17:30.210 Um, and uh and but it plays out in certain ways. 00:17:30.370 --> 00:17:32.290 Like what do you think that that is? 00:17:33.250 --> 00:17:33.730 Yeah. 00:17:34.050 --> 00:17:39.490 Well, I think um the best way to understand it is probably in terms of uh 00:17:39.810 --> 00:17:43.010 Dance Berber's cultural attractor theory. 00:17:43.250 --> 00:17:49.010 Um so Dance Berber is a very cool evolutionary psychologist slash cultural anthropologist 00:17:49.330 --> 00:17:55.260 who's interested in in understanding uh cultural dynamics from an evolutionary perspective. 00:17:55.500 --> 00:18:01.420 Um and he has this idea that um when we pass information uh 00:18:01.580 --> 00:18:07.420 on to another person, the processes involved in uh transmitting that information 00:18:07.740 --> 00:18:12.060 uh uh faithfully to the other person are actually extraordinarily complicated, and we 00:18:12.060 --> 00:18:13.740 cannot take them for granted. 00:18:13.900 --> 00:18:19.370 Um so it's easy to see how complicated this is when you play a game of telephone, and what 00:18:19.370 --> 00:18:24.250 you whisper into someone's ear uh ends up getting lost in translation or mangled. 00:18:24.330 --> 00:18:27.690 And by the time it gets to the end of the chain, what you initially whispered into the 00:18:27.690 --> 00:18:30.250 person's ear is completely different and distorted. 00:18:30.410 --> 00:18:35.690 Um and that just goes to show how hard this problem is of getting a piece of information or 00:18:35.690 --> 00:18:38.410 a representation from my head into your head, right? 00:18:38.570 --> 00:18:42.090 There are plenty of things that can go wrong uh in that process. 00:18:42.250 --> 00:18:48.020 And we have evolved adaptations um for, in many ways, triangulating on on what the other 00:18:48.020 --> 00:18:51.380 person's intentions are, what they likely meant, what the most plausible way of 00:18:51.380 --> 00:18:52.580 interpreting what they said was. 00:18:52.740 --> 00:18:58.740 And and um we have lots of mechanisms that are at play when we 00:18:58.820 --> 00:19:04.820 uh transmit an idea to one another and and we have to understand those 00:19:04.820 --> 00:19:06.660 mechanisms if we want to understand culture. 00:19:06.820 --> 00:19:09.700 And so he has this idea of of a cultural attractor. 00:19:09.850 --> 00:19:14.170 So when you play a game of telephone, um, or you tell a story to someone, let's say you 00:19:14.330 --> 00:19:20.250 tell, you know, a fairy tale, um, and uh as that fairy tale gets passed on 00:19:20.250 --> 00:19:24.010 from person to person, it's likely to change and evolve in various ways. 00:19:24.170 --> 00:19:29.690 Um so maybe when you originally told the story, uh the protagonist wasn't a particularly 00:19:29.690 --> 00:19:34.250 good person, but as it passes from person to person, the protagonist becomes sort of a 00:19:34.250 --> 00:19:36.920 morally exemplary and virtuous and innocent person. 00:19:37.080 --> 00:19:40.680 So that would be an attractor of the innocent, virtuous protagonist. 00:19:41.480 --> 00:19:45.000 Maybe when I first told you the story, it didn't really have a happy ending. 00:19:45.080 --> 00:19:49.960 It kind of ended with a question mark or with, you know, uh people being sad and 00:19:49.960 --> 00:19:50.920 disappointed. 00:19:51.160 --> 00:19:57.160 Um and maybe in you know progressive tra uh transmissions of the story, uh 00:19:57.320 --> 00:19:59.240 the ending got happier and happier. 00:19:59.410 --> 00:20:03.970 And then it it sort of migrated toward this story of a virtuous protagonist with a happy 00:20:03.970 --> 00:20:04.290 ending. 00:20:04.450 --> 00:20:08.130 And so these are things that that Sperber would call cultural attractors. 00:20:08.370 --> 00:20:14.130 That as we pass ideas from head to head, certain ideas are just going to be more stable, 00:20:14.370 --> 00:20:18.050 uh, are going to be more likely to pop up because of what we're innately interested in, 00:20:18.210 --> 00:20:22.450 what we're more likely to remember, what we find more intuitive or less intuitive. 00:20:22.700 --> 00:20:26.940 Uh, and this perspective is a really helpful way of understanding culture and why certain 00:20:26.940 --> 00:20:29.340 ideas are sticky and others aren't. 00:20:29.660 --> 00:20:35.340 So I think that um evolutionary psychology is a a part of culture. 00:20:35.500 --> 00:20:38.060 It is a set of ideas, a set of representations. 00:20:38.380 --> 00:20:42.860 And there are cultural attractors surrounding the idea of evolutionary psychology, just as 00:20:42.860 --> 00:20:48.690 there are cultural attractors surrounding any idea Uh and I think 00:20:48.690 --> 00:20:53.410 those attractors revolve around things we innately find interesting, like sex and death. 00:20:53.650 --> 00:20:59.570 Um they revolve around uh things like politics and you know what side of the 00:20:59.570 --> 00:21:00.690 culture war you're on. 00:21:00.850 --> 00:21:03.170 We find those things innately interesting. 00:21:04.130 --> 00:21:09.250 Um it often gets oversimplified into things that are uh 00:21:09.490 --> 00:21:12.370 intuitive um and easy to grasp. 00:21:12.610 --> 00:21:14.290 So uh oh, we're just monkeys. 00:21:14.420 --> 00:21:16.020 Okay, that's what that's what it means. 00:21:16.180 --> 00:21:19.940 Or um we don't really have free will, we're just we're just these robots. 00:21:20.340 --> 00:21:24.500 Uh that's another uh uh simplifying way of of understanding it. 00:21:24.580 --> 00:21:28.660 So we we carve the world into you know plants and animals and and tools. 00:21:28.740 --> 00:21:32.900 Uh and oh evolutionary psychology says we're tools, and that means we don't have free will. 00:21:33.300 --> 00:21:38.590 Um so it it it not only filters through um what we innately find interesting and it filters 00:21:38.590 --> 00:21:42.350 through our politics, but it also filters through what we find uh intuitive and sort of 00:21:42.350 --> 00:21:47.950 these simplistic dichotomies of you know learned versus uh biological, uh freely 00:21:47.950 --> 00:21:51.710 chosen versus determined, or uh nature versus nurture. 00:21:51.870 --> 00:21:57.150 And so that's another way that um evolutionary psychology gets uh distorted. 00:21:58.110 --> 00:21:58.750 Would you buy all that? 00:21:59.070 --> 00:21:59.950 Yeah, no, for sure. 00:22:00.110 --> 00:22:05.940 And I mean I think that there's um I think for me, 00:22:06.100 --> 00:22:11.140 the reason why I really like evolutionary psychology to sort of hop around a little bit is 00:22:11.140 --> 00:22:16.740 that um it's a way to uh answer engineering questions about social 00:22:17.060 --> 00:22:17.460 things. 00:22:17.620 --> 00:22:18.340 Um right. 00:22:18.660 --> 00:22:24.420 So um what a what a system is for is really helpful for reverse 00:22:24.420 --> 00:22:25.690 engineering it, right? 00:22:25.770 --> 00:22:30.170 Like if if aliens, like classically, if you took like aliens and they had never seen a car 00:22:30.170 --> 00:22:36.010 before and you and they were just given a car, um, they wouldn't know what parts 00:22:36.010 --> 00:22:41.130 of the car were for, or they really wouldn't be know how to carve up the car, right? 00:22:41.370 --> 00:22:47.290 Um and you could imagine sort of a science of the car in our aliens world where 00:22:47.370 --> 00:22:53.360 you know it's just sort of in a showroom and what um what's important about the car is 00:22:53.360 --> 00:22:54.160 not clear. 00:22:54.240 --> 00:22:58.160 Um so you can imagine there's like they have a science of like how to, if you hit it with 00:22:58.160 --> 00:23:02.320 this, what kind of sound is made, you know, and you could just all the parts, right? 00:23:02.480 --> 00:23:06.960 Um there's an infinite ways, uh infinite number of ways to car sort of carve up the car. 00:23:07.040 --> 00:23:11.760 Um we have a theory of the red red cars do this and the blue cars do this, and you know, 00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:14.080 you get distracted by irrelevant features. 00:23:14.400 --> 00:23:14.720 Exactly. 00:23:14.800 --> 00:23:18.640 Everything, sort everything by is it bigger than a toaster, smaller than a toaster, right? 00:23:18.770 --> 00:23:20.290 Like is it magnetic or not? 00:23:20.450 --> 00:23:23.410 There's a million ways to carve something up that have nothing to do with like reverse 00:23:23.410 --> 00:23:24.450 engineering how it works. 00:23:24.610 --> 00:23:27.970 But of course if you know what a car is for, if you understand like well, what here's what 00:23:27.970 --> 00:23:29.730 roughly a person is, the person needs to sit. 00:23:29.810 --> 00:23:33.250 The function of it is like terrestrial motion with like inputs from the driver. 00:23:33.410 --> 00:23:34.450 Well what is a driver like? 00:23:34.610 --> 00:23:38.130 Well they have hands and feet and you know you have a rough idea about like what 00:23:38.130 --> 00:23:41.890 terrestrial locomotion requires all of a sudden you kind of understand well maybe you know 00:23:41.970 --> 00:23:46.920 the tires are touching the ground and there's something for driving the thing forward and 00:23:46.920 --> 00:23:48.840 for taking driver inputs in. 00:23:48.920 --> 00:23:54.920 And then all of a sudden those functions uh color your perception of that thing and what 00:23:54.920 --> 00:23:56.120 counts as important and not. 00:23:56.200 --> 00:23:59.240 And all of a sudden colors or maybe if it's magnetic or not doesn't matter. 00:23:59.400 --> 00:24:05.160 It might, if it is, like for example, it might be matter that the brake caliper um is 00:24:05.160 --> 00:24:10.680 magnetic because it's what holds the like friction um the the the pad to like you know the 00:24:11.090 --> 00:24:12.690 somewhere in the in the brake pad, right? 00:24:12.770 --> 00:24:13.090 Whatever. 00:24:13.250 --> 00:24:16.370 But I'm not gonna nerd out on car hydraulics. 00:24:16.450 --> 00:24:21.730 But point is that, you know, um what features are important um are are 00:24:21.730 --> 00:24:26.450 determined by the function, not just sort of random intuition. 00:24:26.690 --> 00:24:31.170 Um and in areas of psychology that have been successful, function has sort of been 00:24:31.170 --> 00:24:32.530 intuitive, like vision. 00:24:32.690 --> 00:24:36.900 So the the function of vision is sort of uh determining what is where. 00:24:37.140 --> 00:24:38.660 Um, and it wasn't always like that. 00:24:38.820 --> 00:24:43.460 For a long time, vision was actually um sort of a grab bag of here's weird things your 00:24:43.460 --> 00:24:45.380 visual system does, like here's an illusion. 00:24:45.460 --> 00:24:50.820 Um, but once vision became this idea of like what it's for, um the a lot of progress was 00:24:50.820 --> 00:24:51.140 made. 00:24:51.300 --> 00:24:55.060 For me, I'm interested in like things like social groups or social emotions, right? 00:24:55.460 --> 00:25:01.430 And it's really hard to think about well, how do you think about, well, why do we have why 00:25:01.430 --> 00:25:02.790 do we join groups in the first place? 00:25:03.030 --> 00:25:07.510 You can say something well, like, well, maybe people are just like joining groups feels 00:25:07.510 --> 00:25:10.310 good and we're motivated to feel to join groups. 00:25:10.550 --> 00:25:15.110 Um it's like, okay, well um well why and how, right? 00:25:15.270 --> 00:25:17.580 So if what kinds of groups? 00:25:17.740 --> 00:25:18.300 What is a group? 00:25:18.540 --> 00:25:21.020 Yeah, well, and and why does it feel good to join a group? 00:25:21.100 --> 00:25:24.700 And what does what do what what does that predict and what kind of groups exactly? 00:25:24.860 --> 00:25:29.740 And so um and so if you don't have an evolutionary approach, and I remember having this 00:25:29.820 --> 00:25:33.020 even as an undergrad, it was sort of terrifying because I'd be like, Well, I don't know. 00:25:33.180 --> 00:25:34.540 And so somebody must know. 00:25:34.620 --> 00:25:40.220 And so you sort of look for ideas or theories, and usually it's something like a construct, 00:25:40.380 --> 00:25:44.700 and it's you know, a construct like self esteem, and maybe there's like a thing you can 00:25:44.700 --> 00:25:50.350 measure, like maybe social class, or like people feeling like secure or insecure, 00:25:50.670 --> 00:25:56.030 or um uh you know, something that's measurable and sort of a construct that 00:25:56.350 --> 00:25:57.790 varies along continuum. 00:25:57.870 --> 00:26:00.190 And then you see, like, is there a relationship between these two things? 00:26:00.270 --> 00:26:02.270 And you're just like, I don't know, this is the way to proceed. 00:26:02.350 --> 00:26:05.070 I, you know, maybe this is the way to study groups. 00:26:05.230 --> 00:26:09.540 Um, but if you if you ask the question, it was like, well, let's unpack why are people 00:26:09.620 --> 00:26:10.660 motivated to join groups? 00:26:10.740 --> 00:26:11.700 What does that even mean? 00:26:11.860 --> 00:26:16.980 And you have this idea that under underlying that sort of what I would argue is sort of a 00:26:16.980 --> 00:26:22.820 vanilla statement of like joining a group feels good, is you have this idea of like, 00:26:22.980 --> 00:26:28.740 well, below all of that is we're organisms that have to make a living. 00:26:28.900 --> 00:26:34.770 And you know, organisms need social support, there's resources, uh, individuals 00:26:34.770 --> 00:26:38.690 can like gang up on you, there's differences in loyalty. 00:26:38.850 --> 00:26:42.370 Some people will take your side when it matters, some people won't. 00:26:42.530 --> 00:26:47.970 Um, and if you just sort of think about like just very simple but really important things 00:26:47.970 --> 00:26:52.930 about human existence or an organism's existence, all of a sudden the idea of well, what 00:26:52.930 --> 00:26:58.840 counts as a group, there's it gets filled, it gets populated with much more 00:26:58.840 --> 00:27:01.640 interesting things, like things about who do I trust? 00:27:01.800 --> 00:27:04.120 Who do I believe will come to my aid? 00:27:04.280 --> 00:27:06.040 Um, what is my security? 00:27:06.200 --> 00:27:06.920 What's my power? 00:27:07.000 --> 00:27:07.720 What's my status? 00:27:07.880 --> 00:27:08.680 Am I being threatened? 00:27:08.760 --> 00:27:09.800 Do I have enough stuff? 00:27:09.960 --> 00:27:13.880 Is there somebody coercion exerting coercion over me? 00:27:14.120 --> 00:27:17.560 It's a very rich um way to think. 00:27:17.640 --> 00:27:22.040 And it gives you ideas immediately beyond this like very vanilla thing of like people are 00:27:22.040 --> 00:27:23.560 motivated to join groups. 00:27:24.130 --> 00:27:29.970 I was at a conference in Geneva last December with international human 00:27:29.970 --> 00:27:30.610 rights lawyers. 00:27:30.930 --> 00:27:31.970 A really interesting conversation. 00:27:32.130 --> 00:27:33.730 We'll talk about that maybe another time. 00:27:33.890 --> 00:27:36.770 But one of the people there studied armed groups. 00:27:36.930 --> 00:27:42.850 And what he found was that the time when armed groups are most likely to break up 00:27:42.850 --> 00:27:44.530 is when they succeed. 00:27:45.020 --> 00:27:48.700 Um, which is not a prediction that you would make if you just had this idea of like, you 00:27:48.700 --> 00:27:50.540 know, join groups that make you feel good, right? 00:27:50.620 --> 00:27:55.580 But if the idea is sort of once a group has succeeded in their goals, then there's this 00:27:55.580 --> 00:28:00.460 issue of sort of you have the stuff that you've been working for, and then all of a sudden 00:28:00.620 --> 00:28:05.900 the uh you don't need to be unified, you know, because the in fact un unification could 00:28:05.900 --> 00:28:07.180 actually be counterproductive. 00:28:07.420 --> 00:28:10.060 As we know, the revolution devours its children. 00:28:10.140 --> 00:28:15.010 And once you achieve the goal that the group set out to achieve, uh, you're now faced with 00:28:15.010 --> 00:28:19.090 a different problem, which is how to divide the spoils of war or how to distribute the 00:28:19.090 --> 00:28:20.210 power that was seized. 00:28:20.450 --> 00:28:24.530 And that and the solution to that problem is often not unifying, but dividing. 00:28:24.850 --> 00:28:25.330 Exactly. 00:28:25.410 --> 00:28:26.210 Yes, exactly. 00:28:26.370 --> 00:28:29.970 Or at least uh left unchecked or unacknowledged. 00:28:30.210 --> 00:28:31.490 It it it definitely is. 00:28:31.570 --> 00:28:32.610 And so that's right. 00:28:32.690 --> 00:28:34.050 And that's exactly what he finds. 00:28:34.210 --> 00:28:40.180 So um, but that's an example of from the perspective of it's not just this 00:28:40.180 --> 00:28:45.700 bland statement of like the person is motivated to like groups. 00:28:45.940 --> 00:28:51.300 It's it's this, there is this really rich um 00:28:52.260 --> 00:28:58.180 real life consequence infused dynamic that's causing 00:28:59.010 --> 00:29:00.770 Psychological relationships. 00:29:00.850 --> 00:29:06.130 The I like groups, or like I feel good when I join a group, it's very much couched in this 00:29:06.130 --> 00:29:10.770 sort of folk psychological language and what I really find 00:29:11.650 --> 00:29:13.970 invaluable from an evolutionary perspective. 00:29:14.210 --> 00:29:19.810 And for me, what I what I think an evolutionary approach is, is it's 00:29:19.810 --> 00:29:25.220 constantly taking Folk psychological descriptions, including my own experience. 00:29:25.300 --> 00:29:29.060 I'm not saying like other people are folk psychological, I'm not, but like going around and 00:29:29.060 --> 00:29:31.780 just being like, you know, I love my son to death. 00:29:31.940 --> 00:29:34.820 I am, you know, I'm nervous in this situation. 00:29:35.300 --> 00:29:41.140 Um uh it really would feel good right now to like post this on social media or like, look, 00:29:41.220 --> 00:29:46.820 this person is doing this thing, um, or people are saying like this group exists. 00:29:47.170 --> 00:29:51.970 it's taking all of those things that humans do all the time and translating it into 00:29:52.930 --> 00:29:58.930 what software would have been selected for, given these 00:29:58.930 --> 00:30:03.730 real-world dynamics that we can be confident are reliably occurring. 00:30:03.970 --> 00:30:09.330 Like not like esoteric things, like simple, basic, everyday things. 00:30:11.010 --> 00:30:16.300 Given a world in which an organism needs software to deal with these kinds of things. 00:30:16.460 --> 00:30:20.300 How can we think about this phenomenon as being produced by that software? 00:30:20.540 --> 00:30:25.900 And how does that give us purchase into sort of seeing that software beyond 00:30:26.140 --> 00:30:29.660 behind this phenomenon? 00:30:29.900 --> 00:30:35.740 So for me, what I love about it is it's really a way to think almost like 00:30:35.740 --> 00:30:39.290 we're squishy robots, and you can think about the software. 00:30:39.370 --> 00:30:44.490 And the in the for me, the benefit of thinking about the software is exactly the 00:30:44.490 --> 00:30:46.650 opposite of what we talked about. 00:30:46.730 --> 00:30:52.730 The misunderstanding was the point of the software and the point of software in 00:30:52.730 --> 00:30:58.490 general, or any sort of contingency rule, is that it enables 00:30:58.490 --> 00:30:59.530 flexibility. 00:31:00.620 --> 00:31:06.300 It is, if you look at anywhere in the world, there are certain laws or 00:31:06.300 --> 00:31:11.980 rules that enable flexibility, that enable things to be complicated and not random or 00:31:11.980 --> 00:31:13.100 entropic. 00:31:13.740 --> 00:31:19.580 And I think the great insight of evolutionary psychology is that 00:31:20.220 --> 00:31:25.260 relationships in the world, this idea of differential reproductive success, which is the 00:31:25.260 --> 00:31:29.970 Darwinian notion of variation in gene 00:31:29.970 --> 00:31:35.490 frequencies yoked to variation in the design 00:31:35.810 --> 00:31:41.730 that is reliably developing by virtue of those genes, how 00:31:41.890 --> 00:31:46.850 those designs do in the environment, do they differentially reproduce or not? 00:31:47.090 --> 00:31:52.610 Changes those gene frequencies such that the designs that fit well and that do 00:31:52.930 --> 00:31:58.580 well in uh in an environment that differentially re uh are 00:31:58.580 --> 00:32:03.860 differentially successful, differential reproductive success, that's the kind of software 00:32:03.860 --> 00:32:09.700 we're allowed to expect, that it's well designed and and dovetailed to these features of 00:32:09.700 --> 00:32:10.340 the environment. 00:32:10.500 --> 00:32:15.940 And so um that idea then is that um 00:32:16.180 --> 00:32:21.330 it's not that we there's part of us that's sort of the evolved part and the other part that 00:32:21.330 --> 00:32:24.210 isn't the monkey or the caveman inside us. 00:32:24.610 --> 00:32:25.010 That's right. 00:32:25.090 --> 00:32:26.610 The part of me I can't control. 00:32:26.850 --> 00:32:32.530 The idea is that all of you is an evolved thing, and everything, even the aspirational 00:32:32.530 --> 00:32:38.210 parts, even the parts of me that say no, I don't agree that that's just all there is to me. 00:32:38.370 --> 00:32:43.410 There's another part of me, and I have autonomy, I can have goals, I can think about 00:32:43.410 --> 00:32:43.810 things. 00:32:44.050 --> 00:32:48.700 The argument is that's all evolved software too, and in fact, what you would expect for for 00:32:48.700 --> 00:32:49.500 an evolved system. 00:32:49.660 --> 00:32:55.660 And I think this is the this is almost where the the misunderstanding happens often 00:32:55.820 --> 00:33:00.780 is people want to put a boundary around the evolved part of you, 00:33:01.980 --> 00:33:03.180 which is makes sense. 00:33:03.260 --> 00:33:07.180 I mean, you know, there's a sense in which, you know, like I'm not hunting and gathering, 00:33:07.420 --> 00:33:07.660 right? 00:33:07.820 --> 00:33:10.620 Um, my life is different than a hunter-gatherer life. 00:33:10.780 --> 00:33:16.750 And so unless you have this idea about I am my software, 00:33:16.910 --> 00:33:22.750 and my software was designed by evolution, that's a weird way to 00:33:22.750 --> 00:33:22.990 think. 00:33:23.150 --> 00:33:28.270 And even what it means, the full entailment of that take a while to understand. 00:33:28.510 --> 00:33:33.150 Um, without that, it's really hard to connect up your own personal experience with an 00:33:33.150 --> 00:33:34.190 evolutionary approach. 00:33:34.270 --> 00:33:38.990 And I think that that's one of the reasons why it's it's so it's so difficult. 00:33:39.710 --> 00:33:41.220 Yeah, absolutely. 00:33:41.380 --> 00:33:47.380 Um another aspect of this confusion I think comes from 00:33:47.380 --> 00:33:50.180 viewing fitness as a dichotomy. 00:33:51.300 --> 00:33:53.060 So you're either alive or dead. 00:33:53.300 --> 00:33:57.940 And our adaptations are uh designed to keep us from dying. 00:33:58.420 --> 00:34:03.070 And so you you see this in some simplistic theories of group psychology, for example, like 00:34:03.070 --> 00:34:05.710 we we want to avoid getting killed by a rival group. 00:34:06.030 --> 00:34:09.550 And surely, you know, that that was a selection pressure for us, no doubt. 00:34:09.790 --> 00:34:15.390 Um, but if you think in terms of fitness increments, something that couldn't 00:34:15.550 --> 00:34:21.550 increase your fitness probabilistically, um, there's a whole continuum that uh 00:34:21.710 --> 00:34:24.680 natural selection can move you uh along. 00:34:24.920 --> 00:34:26.920 So it's not merely alive or dead. 00:34:27.000 --> 00:34:29.240 It's well, how healthy are you? 00:34:29.400 --> 00:34:31.240 How much social support do you have? 00:34:31.400 --> 00:34:34.360 Do you have people who are ready to take your side in conflicts? 00:34:34.520 --> 00:34:38.120 Do you have people who are ready to help you out if you get sick or injured? 00:34:38.360 --> 00:34:43.960 Um, do you have uh a network of of friends who will who will you know give you 00:34:44.360 --> 00:34:45.320 important information? 00:34:46.130 --> 00:34:49.090 Um, are you uh formidable? 00:34:49.250 --> 00:34:53.810 Are you likely to prevail in uh uh again against other people in conflicts? 00:34:53.970 --> 00:34:55.730 Um, is your group formidable? 00:34:55.810 --> 00:34:58.450 Is your group cohesive and well coordinated? 00:34:58.610 --> 00:35:01.890 Do you have uh skills that others value? 00:35:02.050 --> 00:35:07.810 Uh and are you irreplaceable uh to other members of your group, such that if you were sick 00:35:07.810 --> 00:35:12.530 or injured, they would have a reason to keep you alive, uh independent of any favors you 00:35:12.530 --> 00:35:14.080 might give for them? 00:35:14.640 --> 00:35:19.280 Um, what about uh your uh attractiveness on the mating market? 00:35:19.440 --> 00:35:20.720 What about your kin? 00:35:20.880 --> 00:35:23.520 Your brothers and sisters, your parents, your children? 00:35:23.680 --> 00:35:24.640 How healthy are they? 00:35:24.800 --> 00:35:26.000 How well supported are they? 00:35:26.240 --> 00:35:28.560 How uh valued are they? 00:35:28.800 --> 00:35:32.640 Are they, you know, learning skills that will make them irreplaceable to the group? 00:35:33.120 --> 00:35:39.040 These are a whole array of rich and subtle questions, uh, the answer to which 00:35:39.040 --> 00:35:44.690 would would make a huge difference uh in in your uh biological fitness, 00:35:45.090 --> 00:35:45.410 right? 00:35:46.530 --> 00:35:51.730 So it's not merely that like a single gene will keep you from dying. 00:35:51.890 --> 00:35:53.410 That's that's the wrong way to think about it. 00:35:53.490 --> 00:35:59.170 It's that a a single gene might nudge you a little bit uh further along this this fitness 00:35:59.250 --> 00:36:05.250 promoting continuum, that it might make you a little bit more likely uh to choose an 00:36:05.250 --> 00:36:07.890 ally who will uh choose you in return. 00:36:08.130 --> 00:36:13.660 It might make you a little bit uh less likely to be ganged up on by a 00:36:13.660 --> 00:36:14.460 rival group. 00:36:14.540 --> 00:36:19.340 Uh and these are just tiny probabilistic changes uh that are that are being selected for 00:36:19.420 --> 00:36:24.300 that add up over time and create a complex adaptation and a complex group psychology and 00:36:24.300 --> 00:36:28.380 psychology of loyalty and backstabbing and you know conspiratorial thinking and all all 00:36:28.380 --> 00:36:31.660 this stuff comes into existence gradually piece by piece. 00:36:31.980 --> 00:36:37.610 But we have to understand it as coming into existence piece by piece and not, you know, I'm 00:36:37.610 --> 00:36:41.290 gonna die and I have this adaptation that's gonna keep me from dying. 00:36:41.450 --> 00:36:42.650 It's not that simple. 00:36:42.810 --> 00:36:48.730 And evolution is is rarely that simple uh because uh genes have 00:36:48.730 --> 00:36:49.690 tiny effects. 00:36:49.930 --> 00:36:52.970 This is something we've known in genetics for a really long time. 00:36:53.290 --> 00:36:58.730 Um, there's not gonna be a single gene that uh keeps you uh from from dying. 00:36:58.810 --> 00:37:04.330 Uh it's just going to change the way you think and the way you feel uh in subtle ways. 00:37:04.620 --> 00:37:10.140 And over time, those subtle changes can add up and uh create something like a 00:37:10.140 --> 00:37:15.900 complex emotional system or a complex motivational system or a a a complex set of 00:37:15.900 --> 00:37:21.500 intuitions about groups and group membership and whose whose side you're on, uh etc. 00:37:22.540 --> 00:37:23.260 Yeah, that's right. 00:37:23.420 --> 00:37:27.340 And thinking about genes across bodies um and time too. 00:37:27.500 --> 00:37:33.050 So thinking and even about design, it's sort of what design would would uh designs extend 00:37:33.050 --> 00:37:33.690 across bodies. 00:37:33.850 --> 00:37:38.490 A good example of that is, I mean, there's there's more additional sophisticated ideas 00:37:38.490 --> 00:37:44.250 about what causes senescence, but a really simple and apparently still correct idea is that 00:37:46.250 --> 00:37:52.090 prior to reproductive age, if something uh if there's some attribute that 00:37:52.090 --> 00:37:58.020 causes death, that's going to be a really strong selection pressure because if you die 00:37:58.020 --> 00:38:02.900 before you reproduce, then you know, David, both you and I have ancestors 00:38:03.700 --> 00:38:08.980 stretching back since the dawn of time, since the dawn of life, um, who have successfully 00:38:08.980 --> 00:38:12.660 survived and reproduced up and through um reproductive age. 00:38:12.820 --> 00:38:16.020 That's we're we're very lucky um where we wouldn't be here. 00:38:16.180 --> 00:38:21.780 Um and uh so if there's something that causes death prior to 00:38:22.670 --> 00:38:26.030 reaching reproductive age, that's a very strong selection pressure. 00:38:26.190 --> 00:38:28.270 If that exists, that'll just be selected out. 00:38:28.430 --> 00:38:34.350 But if there are things that accumulate after reproductive age, um, and in particular, 00:38:34.430 --> 00:38:38.830 if there's a trade-off between the two where something keeps you alive prior to 00:38:38.830 --> 00:38:44.270 reproductive age, but it might cause problems like post-reproductive age, um, 00:38:44.590 --> 00:38:47.630 those things are going to be less strongly selected. 00:38:47.790 --> 00:38:53.360 In other words, from the perspective of natural selection, um, the 00:38:53.360 --> 00:38:59.280 less so after you've successfully reproduced, if your investment in the next generation 00:38:59.440 --> 00:39:05.040 is less and less, uh then natural selection doesn't sort of see you and 00:39:05.200 --> 00:39:08.800 doesn't care about you or keep you, it doesn't maintain you. 00:39:08.960 --> 00:39:14.800 Um because uh, you know, reproduction can be exponential, and reproduction is always cares 00:39:14.800 --> 00:39:18.800 more about the next generation than the than the past one if it's going to choose between 00:39:18.800 --> 00:39:19.360 the two. 00:39:19.600 --> 00:39:25.550 Um And uh and so the idea is that the reason why we wear out and the reason why 00:39:25.550 --> 00:39:31.470 we um uh why we die is because there's a massive drop-off in the 00:39:31.470 --> 00:39:37.470 selection pressures to keep us around um after our sort of actuarial contribution 00:39:37.470 --> 00:39:39.710 to reproduction in the next generation. 00:39:39.870 --> 00:39:45.580 And so um so that's that's a nice example of uh 00:39:46.060 --> 00:39:51.020 the the engineering attention to keeping you alive differs 00:39:51.020 --> 00:39:56.940 dramatically prior to reproductive age and post-reproductive age and reproductive age 00:39:57.100 --> 00:40:00.780 because parenting for a highly investing species like humans. 00:40:00.860 --> 00:40:05.190 But but that's it's this is the other thing I really like about an evolutionary approach is 00:40:05.190 --> 00:40:09.190 that things that just sort of seem seem like an act of God or just the way things 00:40:09.190 --> 00:40:12.870 necessarily are, that you that sort of take for granted. 00:40:13.110 --> 00:40:17.190 Um uh you can sort of ask a deeper why question. 00:40:17.270 --> 00:40:19.350 Um, for example, like why do we die? 00:40:19.430 --> 00:40:19.590 Yeah. 00:40:19.830 --> 00:40:19.990 Yeah. 00:40:20.150 --> 00:40:21.350 Why do why do we age? 00:40:21.510 --> 00:40:21.830 Yeah. 00:40:21.990 --> 00:40:25.680 Uh from a naive uh Darwinian perspective, it might seem puzzling. 00:40:25.840 --> 00:40:27.920 You know, why why wouldn't we evolve to live forever? 00:40:28.000 --> 00:40:28.160 Yeah. 00:40:28.400 --> 00:40:29.360 Wouldn't that be even better? 00:40:29.840 --> 00:40:30.880 It would be super adaptive, yeah. 00:40:30.960 --> 00:40:31.440 Or would it be a good idea? 00:40:31.600 --> 00:40:32.320 Yeah, super adaptive. 00:40:32.480 --> 00:40:32.560 Yeah. 00:40:32.880 --> 00:40:33.360 Totally. 00:40:33.520 --> 00:40:37.440 But um, you know, once you move past the naive Darwinian thinking and get into the 00:40:37.440 --> 00:40:42.720 nitty-gritty of how evolution works from the genes I view, um these 00:40:43.200 --> 00:40:45.600 age-old mysteries begin to dissolve. 00:40:47.490 --> 00:40:53.330 Um when uh when we talked about people use it to rationalize political stuff um 00:40:53.570 --> 00:40:57.570 or people not liking it, what I mean, what do you think is going on with that? 00:40:58.690 --> 00:41:04.210 Oh, I mean, I I have a whole paper on uh political beliefs as 00:41:04.210 --> 00:41:08.210 rationalizations for coalitional interests. 00:41:08.450 --> 00:41:14.280 Um yeah, I mean, I think we have political conflicts uh uh 00:41:14.440 --> 00:41:15.720 surrounding feminism. 00:41:15.800 --> 00:41:18.760 It's a hot button culture war issue. 00:41:18.920 --> 00:41:24.600 Um and one of the tactics that um feminists have used to advance their cause is to argue 00:41:24.920 --> 00:41:29.720 for uh social constructionism, that that men and women aren't really different, that if 00:41:29.720 --> 00:41:32.280 they are different, then they're socialized to be different. 00:41:32.360 --> 00:41:38.280 And any differences we see um are a result of patriarchal socialization, therefore 00:41:38.360 --> 00:41:42.630 they're unjust, and we should fight uh against them and fight for gender equality. 00:41:42.790 --> 00:41:48.310 And so there's a whole uh slew of beliefs that I think are well designed to mobilizing 00:41:48.310 --> 00:41:53.190 support for the feminist cause and opposition uh to their political opponents. 00:41:53.350 --> 00:41:57.270 Um and we can debate whether those beliefs are correct or not, and how correct they are and 00:41:57.270 --> 00:41:58.870 where they might be right and where they might might be wrong. 00:41:58.950 --> 00:42:03.990 But I ultimately think that is uh the purpose of those beliefs, is that they are uh tactics 00:42:03.990 --> 00:42:07.510 for mobilizing support uh for one side of a conflict. 00:42:08.040 --> 00:42:13.720 And the problem is that a lot of evolutionary psychology runs right into that culture 00:42:13.880 --> 00:42:15.240 war conflict. 00:42:16.280 --> 00:42:22.200 It starts to uh present some ideas that, hey, maybe men and women are different 00:42:22.280 --> 00:42:27.320 uh for evolutionary reasons, and maybe not everything about them is socially constructed. 00:42:27.560 --> 00:42:33.240 Um, maybe there are some explanations for gender differences um that don't involve 00:42:33.270 --> 00:42:37.350 patriarchal socialization, but involve our evolutionary heritage. 00:42:37.750 --> 00:42:43.750 Um, and once evolutionary psychology starts to interject with those kinds of ideas, well, 00:42:43.830 --> 00:42:48.230 we're we're primed to see the world as uh you're either with us or you're against us. 00:42:48.390 --> 00:42:53.350 And if you don't share our ideas, and if you don't share our uh uh political uh 00:42:53.510 --> 00:42:57.510 mobilization tactics, well, that's a cue that we use that you're not with us, that you're 00:42:57.510 --> 00:42:58.950 an enemy, you're on the other side. 00:42:59.110 --> 00:43:03.840 Uh and I don't think that evolutionary psychologists intended to elicit this inference. 00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:07.600 I think most evolutionary psychologists that I know are strong feminists. 00:43:08.800 --> 00:43:14.800 But because their ideas sort of activated these Q-based inference systems of are you on my 00:43:14.800 --> 00:43:19.120 side or are you not, they sort of got inadvertently categorized as being on the other side 00:43:19.280 --> 00:43:24.560 because they were uh challenging some of the prevailing ideas uh coming out of feminism. 00:43:24.690 --> 00:43:28.530 And if you're and if you disagree with our ideas and with our political mobilization 00:43:28.530 --> 00:43:32.370 tactics, that's a sign that you're on the other side and you're against us and you're our 00:43:32.370 --> 00:43:34.770 political enemy and we must destroy you. 00:43:35.170 --> 00:43:36.530 That's sort of how I understand it. 00:43:36.610 --> 00:43:37.410 Do you buy that? 00:43:37.730 --> 00:43:37.970 Yeah. 00:43:38.290 --> 00:43:38.530 Yeah. 00:43:38.610 --> 00:43:40.450 Well, I and I want to uh have a follow-up. 00:43:40.770 --> 00:43:43.810 So in the converse, then do you think the converse is true? 00:43:43.970 --> 00:43:49.660 And I mean, so this idea that sort of people who are um who 00:43:49.980 --> 00:43:54.620 are conservative in the US sense of the word, um, which is different than sort of a 00:43:54.620 --> 00:43:56.780 historical or international view of conservatism. 00:43:56.860 --> 00:44:02.620 But um uh and uh and maybe people who are interested in preserving patriarchy 00:44:02.780 --> 00:44:05.180 um seem attracted to this idea. 00:44:05.340 --> 00:44:06.940 Do you think that that's fair? 00:44:07.580 --> 00:44:09.020 Uh in in some ways, yes. 00:44:09.180 --> 00:44:10.300 So they they are an art. 00:44:10.540 --> 00:44:16.540 They're attracted to it uh insofar as it justifies the traditional gender hierarchy that 00:44:16.700 --> 00:44:17.900 that they're advocating for. 00:44:18.460 --> 00:44:23.850 Uh But the problem is that you need to believe in evolution and and and cold Darwinian 00:44:23.850 --> 00:44:24.730 thinking to get there. 00:44:25.130 --> 00:44:29.130 And they're often opposed to Darwinian thinking and evolutionary thinking for religious 00:44:29.130 --> 00:44:29.690 reasons. 00:44:30.250 --> 00:44:33.210 So yes and no, they're partly on board with it and partly not. 00:44:33.610 --> 00:44:37.450 They like it for the traditional gender role reasons, but don't like it for the 00:44:37.450 --> 00:44:38.970 evolutionary reasons. 00:44:39.050 --> 00:44:43.850 Aaron Powell So for the part that they do get on board, and so what we're so the argument 00:44:43.850 --> 00:44:48.400 is that um, you know, and again, you know, there's the professional understanding, but 00:44:48.400 --> 00:44:50.080 we're not talking about that yet. 00:44:50.800 --> 00:44:56.160 Um, people who are interested who argue, you know, look, women until very 00:44:56.160 --> 00:44:58.960 recently had very few rights. 00:44:59.120 --> 00:45:02.320 The bargaining power socially has been low. 00:45:02.480 --> 00:45:04.080 Um, I mean, it's ridiculous. 00:45:04.240 --> 00:45:09.670 Like, you know, the the the recency with which if you if you watch um 00:45:10.150 --> 00:45:15.510 um videos in the sixties or seventies or eighties or nineties right um you know it's the 00:45:15.590 --> 00:45:21.190 the sexism the ambient sexism and the laws are are are insane right um 00:45:21.830 --> 00:45:27.670 uh the arguments for equal treatment being taken seriously like that's the history of 00:45:27.670 --> 00:45:33.430 that is very clear there's a long clear history of people um with with 00:45:33.980 --> 00:45:39.660 not not doing well in the um the competition for status and power 00:45:39.820 --> 00:45:43.100 or being granted even an equal seat at the table. 00:45:43.260 --> 00:45:48.940 Um those people and the people who want that to continue, right, are 00:45:48.940 --> 00:45:51.500 both accepting sort of a premise. 00:45:52.060 --> 00:45:57.900 It sounds like that this idea that there's an evolved psychology 00:45:58.060 --> 00:46:03.650 um generally and then specifically um that there's sort of 00:46:03.810 --> 00:46:09.810 um uh sex based design differences in human psychology is 00:46:09.810 --> 00:46:12.850 consistent with sort of one side versus the other. 00:46:13.410 --> 00:46:18.450 Um number one, and and this is a big question, number one, like why do you think that is? 00:46:18.610 --> 00:46:21.170 Um like why do people think that that's true? 00:46:21.330 --> 00:46:24.930 And then number two, if it isn't true, why isn't it true? 00:46:25.400 --> 00:46:25.800 Yeah. 00:46:26.120 --> 00:46:28.440 So I don't think this is unique to feminism. 00:46:28.600 --> 00:46:33.800 I think any time there is an intergroup conflict over status or resources or power or 00:46:33.960 --> 00:46:38.760 something like that, um, the group that has more status or resources or power will 00:46:38.760 --> 00:46:43.800 invariably try to justify uh that advantage in terms of in uh 00:46:43.960 --> 00:46:45.080 superiority. 00:46:45.240 --> 00:46:49.240 Um so the reason we have more power and status and resources because we're just innately 00:46:49.240 --> 00:46:49.640 superior. 00:46:49.720 --> 00:46:53.930 We're smarter, we're wiser, um, we're more virtuous, whatever. 00:46:54.010 --> 00:46:57.850 And the uh it's God's will, it's the divine right of kings. 00:46:57.930 --> 00:47:03.770 There's always some kind of of uh justifying narrative uh behind it. 00:47:04.090 --> 00:47:09.450 Um and naturally the people who have less power and status and resources will uh try to 00:47:09.450 --> 00:47:10.570 challenge that narrative. 00:47:10.810 --> 00:47:16.730 And so uh where the power ends up lying is going to depend in large part 00:47:16.730 --> 00:47:21.420 on how plausible uh each disputant finds the narrative, right? 00:47:21.500 --> 00:47:24.860 Because the narrative is a is a kind of coordination device. 00:47:25.100 --> 00:47:30.780 If we all agree that we're innately superior to them, um, then there's no 00:47:30.780 --> 00:47:33.020 reason to oppose the social hierarchy. 00:47:33.100 --> 00:47:36.300 There's no reason to expect other people to oppose the social hierarchy. 00:47:36.460 --> 00:47:40.700 There's no reason to expect other people to expect other people to oppose the social 00:47:40.700 --> 00:47:41.420 hierarchy. 00:47:41.500 --> 00:47:45.740 We we need to coordinate and create common knowledge for collective action. 00:47:46.310 --> 00:47:50.630 And one of the ways that we do that is by creating a shared narrative. 00:47:51.110 --> 00:47:54.790 And so a big part of politics is just a battle over narratives. 00:47:55.030 --> 00:47:57.590 What narrative are we going to collectively share? 00:47:57.670 --> 00:48:01.510 And what kinds of social arrangements is that narrative going to justify? 00:48:01.910 --> 00:48:06.310 So these narratives are hugely politically important. 00:48:07.860 --> 00:48:13.780 different groups rise or fall uh in direct proportion to how many people buy 00:48:13.940 --> 00:48:15.220 the narrative. 00:48:16.260 --> 00:48:22.260 So that is the context in which um evolutionary psychology enters 00:48:22.260 --> 00:48:23.060 the picture. 00:48:23.300 --> 00:48:28.900 And because with us or against us is a dichotomy, um, 00:48:29.380 --> 00:48:35.270 and we're looking for any reason at all to suspect you of of being the enemy or or of being 00:48:35.270 --> 00:48:40.870 against us because of this kind of uh smoke alarm principle where you know we're biased to 00:48:40.870 --> 00:48:42.550 uh make the less costly error. 00:48:42.710 --> 00:48:47.670 Like it's much much less costly for us to assume someone is an enemy even when they aren't, 00:48:47.830 --> 00:48:49.910 than to miss a real enemy when they're really there. 00:48:50.070 --> 00:48:55.910 So we're biased to sort of see the world in conspiratorial ways and uh uh overperceive uh 00:48:56.070 --> 00:48:57.670 people being out to get us. 00:48:58.150 --> 00:49:03.560 And so uh any deviation from the narrative, even if it's a mild one, even if it's a 00:49:03.560 --> 00:49:09.240 relatively subtle deviation from the narrative, um gets filtered through our 00:49:09.240 --> 00:49:12.680 coalitional psychology as this person's against us. 00:49:12.920 --> 00:49:18.680 If they don't cross every uh T and dot every I on our political narrative, 00:49:18.840 --> 00:49:20.280 then they're an enemy. 00:49:20.920 --> 00:49:26.610 Um it's not, oh, they agree with us 90%, or they agree with us on most of these things, or 00:49:26.610 --> 00:49:29.090 they have this subtle objection to this particular detail. 00:49:29.330 --> 00:49:32.850 If they don't accept the whole narrative, then they're not with us. 00:49:32.930 --> 00:49:38.850 And I think that uh explains why evolutionary psychology um got 00:49:38.850 --> 00:49:42.210 categorized as being on one side of this political conflict. 00:49:42.370 --> 00:49:47.170 Um it's not because uh like uh yeah, I I I think, you know, certain evolutionary ideas do 00:49:47.170 --> 00:49:49.410 challenge certain parts of feminism. 00:49:49.860 --> 00:49:54.100 But I don't think that uh it is incompatible with feminism. 00:49:54.180 --> 00:49:58.340 And I think that the the things that it challenges about feminism are relatively subtle and 00:49:58.340 --> 00:50:03.540 require a lot of uh uh debate and discussion to really, you know, nail down the details. 00:50:03.700 --> 00:50:08.420 Uh but because it's any kind of deviation at all from the shared narrative, it elicits this 00:50:08.420 --> 00:50:09.780 reaction of you're not with us. 00:50:10.420 --> 00:50:11.940 In in yeah, that's great. 00:50:12.020 --> 00:50:13.870 And I appreciate that that subtle point. 00:50:14.030 --> 00:50:19.310 And I mean I'm happy to unpack this with you, but I'm just wondering like what is that if 00:50:19.310 --> 00:50:24.510 you take all that and accept that, it leaves us with the question as, Well, what are those 00:50:24.510 --> 00:50:28.590 things that are apparently incompatible or maybe not? 00:50:28.750 --> 00:50:30.590 Um, why do people think they are? 00:50:30.830 --> 00:50:32.110 Both sides think they are. 00:50:32.270 --> 00:50:33.710 What are those things? 00:50:34.920 --> 00:50:38.280 Well, um let's let's wade into the minefield then. 00:50:38.440 --> 00:50:38.760 Yeah. 00:50:39.640 --> 00:50:44.920 Um so there's this issue of, you know, women in positions of power. 00:50:45.320 --> 00:50:50.200 Um men tend to be overrepresented among CEOs, for example. 00:50:50.520 --> 00:50:55.250 Um one way to explain this is this is because of discrimination against women, that they're 00:50:55.250 --> 00:51:00.850 uh uh expected to do poorly, or they're expected to be irrational, or or we praise men more 00:51:00.850 --> 00:51:02.930 than we praise women, or or something like that. 00:51:03.170 --> 00:51:09.170 Another explanation is that um men are uh more motivated 00:51:09.170 --> 00:51:15.090 to seek status and resources than women because uh status and resources is a 00:51:15.090 --> 00:51:20.780 greater ticket to mating success uh uh among men than it is among women. 00:51:20.940 --> 00:51:25.660 And there's plenty of evidence to suggest that that is true, that women tend to prioritize 00:51:25.660 --> 00:51:30.860 uh status and power and resources among men more than women do so sorry, more than men do 00:51:30.860 --> 00:51:31.900 among women. 00:51:32.140 --> 00:51:37.820 Um if uh status competition uh throughout our evolutionary history resulted in 00:51:37.820 --> 00:51:42.140 differential reproductive success among high status men relative to low status men, which 00:51:42.140 --> 00:51:47.980 seems pretty clear that it likely was, then uh men would have a a pretty powerful 00:51:47.980 --> 00:51:49.150 status psychology. 00:51:49.310 --> 00:51:52.270 This isn't to say that women don't have a status psychology, but it's going to be slightly 00:51:52.270 --> 00:51:52.830 different. 00:51:52.990 --> 00:51:58.830 Um and this could uh explain the overrepresentation uh of men among uh, you know, 00:51:58.990 --> 00:52:04.190 say CEOs, or maybe it it explains their overrepresentation among sort of riskier 00:52:04.990 --> 00:52:06.270 uh jobs. 00:52:06.430 --> 00:52:10.580 Um there there's a whole other literature on greater uh risk risk-seeking among men because 00:52:10.580 --> 00:52:15.300 there's uh more variation in reproductive success among men, so they've evolved to pursue 00:52:15.300 --> 00:52:18.900 riskier strategies on the off-chance that they might hit the jackpot. 00:52:19.300 --> 00:52:24.740 Um, it explains uh why men are more aggressive and more violent in competing for uh status 00:52:24.740 --> 00:52:25.860 and resources. 00:52:26.100 --> 00:52:29.620 Um maybe this could explain uh that phenomenon. 00:52:29.700 --> 00:52:32.820 And if that's true, then all of a sudden it's no longer an injustice that we need to 00:52:32.820 --> 00:52:35.150 rectify, it's just how the world works. 00:52:35.470 --> 00:52:39.630 Or take the gap among women in STEM. 00:52:40.910 --> 00:52:46.430 So there are very large empirical differences between men and women 00:52:47.310 --> 00:52:50.030 in terms of their interest in people versus things. 00:52:51.230 --> 00:52:56.960 And this is related to stuff like where you are on the autism spectrum, but roughly men 00:52:56.960 --> 00:53:01.440 tend to be more interested in mechanical systems than women, and women tend to be more 00:53:01.440 --> 00:53:05.520 interested in people and their inner lives and thoughts and feelings than men are. 00:53:05.920 --> 00:53:07.760 It's a pretty large gender difference. 00:53:07.920 --> 00:53:10.160 I think it's like a standard deviation difference. 00:53:11.120 --> 00:53:14.960 And that could explain why men are overrepresented in STEM. 00:53:15.280 --> 00:53:19.120 That they're just they just find this stuff more uh innately interesting. 00:53:19.200 --> 00:53:21.840 They're more interested in mechanical systems than women. 00:53:22.000 --> 00:53:27.710 Um and and it's just a a a basic outcome of different uh 00:53:27.950 --> 00:53:33.710 uh temperaments, different predispositions between men and women, and it's not an injustice 00:53:33.710 --> 00:53:34.670 we need to rectify. 00:53:34.830 --> 00:53:36.110 Uh it's just the way things are. 00:53:36.350 --> 00:53:40.430 And so the truth or falsehood of these stories, and I I'm not taking a stand on on these 00:53:40.430 --> 00:53:40.670 stories. 00:53:40.750 --> 00:53:45.390 I'm just saying, you know, uh these these are possibilities that we need to uh evaluate and 00:53:45.390 --> 00:53:48.990 and look at the evidence for them and look at the arguments and and and try to you know get 00:53:48.990 --> 00:53:50.590 as close as we can to the truth. 00:53:50.750 --> 00:53:56.280 But these narratives matter, and that whether we accept either narrative as as true is 00:53:56.280 --> 00:54:01.240 going to determine whether we push for, you know, getting more women into STEM or 00:54:03.240 --> 00:54:08.360 policies that uh um prevent discrimination against women, say. 00:54:08.600 --> 00:54:11.320 Um these have real tangible political implications. 00:54:12.120 --> 00:54:14.280 Um Yeah. 00:54:14.600 --> 00:54:14.760 Yeah. 00:54:15.250 --> 00:54:15.570 What do you think? 00:54:15.890 --> 00:54:16.770 Did I step on a mine there? 00:54:17.010 --> 00:54:18.610 Yeah, no, you did, but that's okay. 00:54:18.770 --> 00:54:21.730 Um because we're gonna we're gonna keep unpacking this. 00:54:21.890 --> 00:54:25.730 I mean, one of the things you said, and I appreciate what you're saying, and I think that 00:54:25.730 --> 00:54:31.250 that's you know a genuine um um you know honest 00:54:31.250 --> 00:54:32.690 assessment of it. 00:54:33.090 --> 00:54:38.530 Um one thing, you know, in a lot of these discussions, um, 00:54:38.690 --> 00:54:43.460 especially when there's sort of been a group of people who have been in power and other 00:54:43.460 --> 00:54:48.020 people who haven't, and that's you know, throughout history, and and there's a clear recent 00:54:48.020 --> 00:54:50.260 history of that for many groups of uh people. 00:54:50.500 --> 00:54:56.420 There's a tension between sort of and and be well, I don't want 00:54:56.420 --> 00:55:00.980 to form too complex a sentence, but basically, there's a tension between um 00:55:01.620 --> 00:55:07.300 accepting the values of the dominant group and 00:55:07.300 --> 00:55:12.950 wanting to meet that and rise to those values as opposed to rejecting those 00:55:12.950 --> 00:55:13.590 values. 00:55:13.830 --> 00:55:19.670 And in some sense, that those things are the valued things is a consequence of the the 00:55:19.670 --> 00:55:23.190 nature or the characteristics of the group that has been dominant. 00:55:23.430 --> 00:55:28.790 And this is a tension, this was a very explicit tension in the civil rights movement. 00:55:28.870 --> 00:55:33.080 This is a very explicit tension in the women's rights movement. 00:55:33.480 --> 00:55:39.320 Um, throughout history, um, there's sort of the idea, you know, boiled down 00:55:39.320 --> 00:55:42.440 to the group that has been dominant over us. 00:55:43.800 --> 00:55:48.360 Do we want to accept the premise that all the things that they think are good are do we 00:55:48.360 --> 00:55:49.240 want to agree with that? 00:55:49.400 --> 00:55:49.640 Right? 00:55:49.800 --> 00:55:51.480 Is that is that is that true? 00:55:51.880 --> 00:55:52.120 Yeah. 00:55:52.280 --> 00:55:58.150 Um, and for some things, uh, maybe yes, because you know, like having like healthy food 00:55:58.150 --> 00:56:02.310 and safe homes and protected kids, you know, that's pretty universal. 00:56:02.630 --> 00:56:08.630 Um, but sort of, you know, other attributes are sort of um are 00:56:08.630 --> 00:56:12.470 sort of spin-offs of sort of the the problem in the first place, right? 00:56:12.630 --> 00:56:17.990 Like that what counts as a high status, high power position means that you don't think 00:56:17.990 --> 00:56:19.110 about your family, right? 00:56:19.270 --> 00:56:24.760 And because, you know, historically, if that's men, um it's not 00:56:25.400 --> 00:56:30.040 variability in men's motivation to care for children is higher than women's. 00:56:30.200 --> 00:56:32.440 Um assume let's assume that. 00:56:32.520 --> 00:56:36.840 And so yeah, um, so sort of the idea that what a workplace looks like and what an 00:56:36.840 --> 00:56:40.520 acceptable workplace looks like is one that doesn't have kids in it or that doesn't have 00:56:40.920 --> 00:56:42.120 parenting in it. 00:56:42.760 --> 00:56:47.560 Um that that is that's not just a concept, that's not an act of God. 00:56:47.640 --> 00:56:50.520 That's a consequence of who, which group was in power. 00:56:50.650 --> 00:56:51.450 Um, right. 00:56:52.010 --> 00:56:55.290 Um, and so I think that relates then. 00:56:55.450 --> 00:57:01.210 That's my preface to this this thing you said, which is um, and I think it this does 00:57:01.210 --> 00:57:05.610 speak to what people often think, and I do want to challenge it a little bit. 00:57:05.690 --> 00:57:08.730 I'm not saying you think this, I want to we're we're exploring this together. 00:57:08.810 --> 00:57:10.010 I want to be clear. 00:57:10.170 --> 00:57:15.880 Um, is this idea that um so if there's more women 00:57:16.040 --> 00:57:22.040 there's more men than women in positions of power um uh or if 00:57:22.440 --> 00:57:28.200 um or or women's representation in stem for example because of interest in mechanical 00:57:28.200 --> 00:57:33.960 versus social things then and in this this expression that it's not an injustice that's 00:57:33.960 --> 00:57:39.550 just sort of how the world works I think that that's I think that that's what people think, 00:57:39.630 --> 00:57:41.550 and I think that's the inference they draw. 00:57:41.710 --> 00:57:47.630 But I do worry that that runs this risk of it 00:57:48.670 --> 00:57:52.830 there's a set of inferences there that I think are not spoken. 00:57:52.910 --> 00:57:56.190 And I and I'm I would push back on it and challenge it a little bit. 00:57:56.270 --> 00:58:01.070 And it relates to this thing that I just said about the the sort of standards. 00:58:01.230 --> 00:58:06.860 So for example, STEM The idea that men 00:58:07.020 --> 00:58:12.860 versus women, their representation in STEM is different because interest in 00:58:12.860 --> 00:58:15.180 mechanical versus social things. 00:58:15.340 --> 00:58:17.980 Um, let's let's accept that that's true. 00:58:18.060 --> 00:58:23.980 Like let's not, you know, uh things can be factually correct and in in it, 00:58:24.060 --> 00:58:25.980 let's let's assume that that's true. 00:58:26.210 --> 00:58:31.570 Um, on average, there's still the issue of um 00:58:31.810 --> 00:58:37.730 there's ways to be a really good scientist that engages and appeals to 00:58:37.730 --> 00:58:39.890 being interested in social things. 00:58:40.690 --> 00:58:46.210 Uh and there's there's a way to be a scientist that engages an interest in mechanical 00:58:46.210 --> 00:58:46.610 things. 00:58:46.850 --> 00:58:52.130 And you know, you and I know people who um from all walks of life, just the individual 00:58:52.130 --> 00:58:55.200 differences, they really like different things like that. 00:58:55.280 --> 00:58:59.440 And yet, and I think for me, I love thinking about social things from a mechanical 00:58:59.440 --> 00:58:59.760 perspective. 00:58:59.920 --> 00:59:01.680 Like actually marrying those two is really weird. 00:59:01.760 --> 00:59:04.480 And I actually think that that's what I love about evolutionary psychology. 00:59:04.720 --> 00:59:10.720 But that's also why, you know, I think there's a lot of people who like marrying 00:59:10.720 --> 00:59:12.000 those two things together. 00:59:12.160 --> 00:59:17.790 Um, and and so, but I but I would say that if there's more 00:59:18.110 --> 00:59:23.790 men than women in in in science, um the question then is is that 00:59:23.790 --> 00:59:29.310 science is that is that a consequence of um is that an 00:59:29.310 --> 00:59:34.510 objective feature of sort of what who makes the best scientist for that topic 00:59:35.150 --> 00:59:40.240 versus um That's a consequence of the 00:59:40.880 --> 00:59:46.320 evolved psychological differences in the human beings that have been granted 00:59:46.320 --> 00:59:52.080 status to do that science and generate the research questions and talk about 00:59:52.080 --> 00:59:53.040 what exists. 00:59:53.440 --> 00:59:58.790 Are those is that bias in that organism 00:59:58.950 --> 01:00:04.550 evolves psychology first, and then consequently, the science itself is a reflection of 01:00:05.030 --> 01:00:06.630 those differences. 01:00:07.270 --> 01:00:13.270 Um, and so I I do think there's an argument that um it might be an 01:00:13.270 --> 01:00:19.190 injustice, and it's not how the world works, because it it it it assumes that the current 01:00:19.190 --> 01:00:24.920 distribution Is a consequence of the of the best way to do science as opposed 01:00:24.920 --> 01:00:30.520 to um saying, well, how would if you had a 01:00:30.520 --> 01:00:36.040 science that uh anybody could do, uh anybody could 01:00:36.280 --> 01:00:40.520 anybody could do it no matter what their social class was or what they look like or their 01:00:40.520 --> 01:00:46.280 social bargaining power in an ideal world, how different would the content of the 01:00:46.280 --> 01:00:52.170 science be um For um compared to what it 01:00:52.170 --> 01:00:52.490 is now. 01:00:52.730 --> 01:00:55.690 And let me give you an example of this that I think is true. 01:00:55.930 --> 01:01:01.850 That is the flip side of this, which is that academia 01:01:01.850 --> 01:01:03.290 is deeply classist. 01:01:05.050 --> 01:01:10.650 There's not a lot of people that come from working class backgrounds in 01:01:10.650 --> 01:01:11.770 academia. 01:01:12.540 --> 01:01:18.220 you know and I think some of that is uh that's not always true but um 01:01:18.460 --> 01:01:24.300 uh but it's in historically it was less true I think but that's very few 01:01:24.300 --> 01:01:28.460 people who don't you know have parents who are college graduates or have graduate degrees 01:01:28.540 --> 01:01:31.340 or or you know that's right the first yeah yeah that's right. 01:01:31.500 --> 01:01:36.690 And so one question to ask is sort of um The ways in which 01:01:37.010 --> 01:01:42.050 class issues or social justice issues or anything gets framed, 01:01:43.010 --> 01:01:44.290 is that a consequence? 01:01:44.450 --> 01:01:48.690 Like, how would that be different if more human brains that experienced 01:01:50.530 --> 01:01:52.610 deprivation social class based? 01:01:52.690 --> 01:01:57.890 I mean, I'm not saying, you know, obviously there's lots of people interested in, you know, 01:01:58.050 --> 01:02:03.980 uh women's rights or black rights or you know multinational conflict or 01:02:04.060 --> 01:02:05.980 or things who have experienced these horrible things. 01:02:06.060 --> 01:02:12.060 I'm not suggesting right that, but um but it's an example of there might be a 01:02:12.060 --> 01:02:17.100 biased perspective in the science that's a consequence of sort of the li the life the life 01:02:17.100 --> 01:02:19.980 experiences of uh of the scientists. 01:02:20.140 --> 01:02:26.010 And I think um so that's I that I want to just put that idea out that um that it 01:02:26.010 --> 01:02:31.130 may not it may be an injustice in the sense of um 01:02:31.770 --> 01:02:37.530 uh running the experiment to see is this distribution what we would 01:02:37.530 --> 01:02:43.290 expect to see for people who are interested in uh pursuing what they find 01:02:43.290 --> 01:02:44.090 interesting. 01:02:44.540 --> 01:02:45.580 Yeah, no, totally. 01:02:45.740 --> 01:02:49.420 I I I I fully agree that there is a case to be made there. 01:02:49.900 --> 01:02:55.180 Um, but I think that case is different from the case that has conventionally been made. 01:02:55.340 --> 01:03:01.340 Uh and because of that difference, um, it it's hard to convince people that, you 01:03:01.340 --> 01:03:05.660 know, evolutionary psychology is on the side of feminism or is compatible with with 01:03:05.660 --> 01:03:06.220 feminism. 01:03:06.460 --> 01:03:09.020 So it took you a long time to spell out that argument. 01:03:09.180 --> 01:03:14.490 Um and often uh people don't have the patience to sit there and hear those uh 01:03:14.490 --> 01:03:16.650 alternative arguments for feminism. 01:03:16.810 --> 01:03:21.290 Um instead, they have the conventional argument for feminism, which is men and women are 01:03:21.290 --> 01:03:25.290 equal, any difference is a result of discrimination, therefore we see differences, 01:03:25.450 --> 01:03:28.330 therefore, that's um an injustice. 01:03:28.490 --> 01:03:32.410 That's the conventional way of understanding the political situation. 01:03:32.490 --> 01:03:37.370 And insofar as you depart from that conventional understanding, uh you're going to get uh 01:03:37.450 --> 01:03:40.980 uh rightly or wrongly categorized as being on the other side. 01:03:41.140 --> 01:03:44.900 And it could be that you don't take that that conventional understanding and you have a 01:03:44.900 --> 01:03:46.020 different argument for feminism. 01:03:46.180 --> 01:03:49.700 And there are different arguments you could make, and and many of them are likely valid and 01:03:49.700 --> 01:03:50.340 plausible. 01:03:50.420 --> 01:03:53.940 Uh but insofar as you are making a different argument from the conventional argument, you 01:03:53.940 --> 01:03:58.420 run this risk of of being uh categorized as being on the other side. 01:03:59.380 --> 01:03:59.860 Interesting. 01:04:00.100 --> 01:04:04.820 Yeah, I wonder, I do wonder the assumption that sort of people 01:04:06.770 --> 01:04:10.610 People have to be equal or the same. 01:04:10.770 --> 01:04:16.530 Um, and if it's not, I I do I know people say people say that 01:04:16.770 --> 01:04:21.090 it would be interesting to sort of look at that and and sort of poke on that empirically. 01:04:21.170 --> 01:04:25.490 Maybe we can find somebody who who does this professionally and and see what they think 01:04:25.490 --> 01:04:26.130 about that. 01:04:26.290 --> 01:04:31.540 Um the the people who use Ev 01:04:31.700 --> 01:04:36.100 PSYC to sort of further these ideas, and there are, if you look on YouTube, I mean, I think 01:04:36.100 --> 01:04:42.100 one of the reasons why for me I started, I wanted to do this podcast was, you know, I was 01:04:42.100 --> 01:04:44.900 talking to lots of colleagues in Ev Psyche. 01:04:45.140 --> 01:04:49.620 Um, and and a lot of people were saying, you know, if you really look on YouTube or 01:04:49.620 --> 01:04:51.780 podcasts, it's really horrible what's out there. 01:04:51.860 --> 01:04:53.700 And I was like, well, how bad can it be? 01:04:54.020 --> 01:04:59.930 And so I looked one day, and the very first thing that came 01:04:59.930 --> 01:05:05.210 up was, and I'm not gonna mention um whose podcast this was, but you people can look it up 01:05:05.210 --> 01:05:05.770 if they want. 01:05:05.930 --> 01:05:11.370 But uh the title of the type of the episode was Kamala Harris is a lobotomized 01:05:11.370 --> 01:05:12.250 communist. 01:05:13.050 --> 01:05:18.560 Um, and that was one of the first uh um uh podcasts that came up and and 01:05:19.200 --> 01:05:21.200 so this came up after searching for evolutionary psychologists. 01:05:21.280 --> 01:05:22.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:05:22.160 --> 01:05:22.480 Oh wow. 01:05:22.560 --> 01:05:22.720 Whatever. 01:05:23.040 --> 01:05:24.480 Yeah, that was one of the yeah, exactly. 01:05:24.560 --> 01:05:28.080 And I mean, and I actually listened to it because I was like, well, I find this really 01:05:28.320 --> 01:05:32.480 offensive, but like, you know, I'm an evolutionary psychologist about my finding something 01:05:32.480 --> 01:05:32.880 offensive. 01:05:32.960 --> 01:05:36.400 And I I am a student of of the David Pinsoff et al. 01:05:36.560 --> 01:05:42.240 argument, which is that um my own political opinions and my own sort of like 01:05:42.240 --> 01:05:45.630 feeling like something is morally reprehensible. 01:05:45.790 --> 01:05:50.670 I mean, there are, of course, there's you know, real morally reprehensible things, but um 01:05:50.910 --> 01:05:53.310 in clear lines, but sort of something like that. 01:05:53.390 --> 01:05:54.430 I was like, oh, that's horrible. 01:05:54.510 --> 01:05:56.190 But like, let's see, what's the argument, right? 01:05:56.430 --> 01:06:02.270 And I mean, it was basically something like um uh the idea was uh 01:06:03.310 --> 01:06:08.260 groceries are expensive, people sort of feel taken advantage of. 01:06:08.500 --> 01:06:14.020 And if you um and so Kamala Harris was interested in sort of um 01:06:14.340 --> 01:06:19.700 some policies that would address that concern, and the perspective of the person was sort 01:06:19.700 --> 01:06:23.460 of like, well, that runs counter to all of human nature. 01:06:23.700 --> 01:06:29.410 Uh, because you know, people by nature are sort of uh competitive, they don't want 01:06:29.410 --> 01:06:30.450 equal outcomes. 01:06:30.610 --> 01:06:35.490 And so if you force people uh to sort of um 01:06:36.050 --> 01:06:41.330 equal outcomes, then you're gonna have um, you know, uh Lenin 01:06:41.490 --> 01:06:46.930 style um disorder and chaos, and you're running completely 01:06:46.930 --> 01:06:51.250 contrary to to human nature, um, was sort of the the idea. 01:06:51.490 --> 01:06:56.140 Um And uh and I found that 01:06:57.100 --> 01:07:02.860 historically, but also just evolutionary psychologically super reductive and pretty lazy, 01:07:03.020 --> 01:07:03.900 frankly. 01:07:04.220 --> 01:07:10.220 Um and I think for me, what I'm always struck 01:07:10.220 --> 01:07:15.630 with is um is how one-dimensional a lot of these narratives are. 01:07:15.870 --> 01:07:20.910 Where it's the sort of thing of, you know, if men, men are more interested in sexual 01:07:20.910 --> 01:07:26.750 variety than women, you know, um, if that's uh just given differences in selection 01:07:26.750 --> 01:07:27.310 pressures. 01:07:27.470 --> 01:07:30.270 Um and so part of the mating psychology is that. 01:07:30.350 --> 01:07:32.350 And then and then it's sort of dot dot dot. 01:07:32.510 --> 01:07:38.110 Therefore, you know, we can excuse or justify or explain or 01:07:38.110 --> 01:07:43.160 understand why there's nothing to be done about these other the these outcomes in life 01:07:43.320 --> 01:07:49.160 right that that people take issue with um reasonably enough or not 01:07:49.320 --> 01:07:53.880 depending on what what it is um but but again that that's sort of it's really 01:07:53.880 --> 01:07:59.880 unidimensional be and it comes back to this diorama model I think which is looking at this 01:07:59.880 --> 01:08:05.000 outcome you're saying well look over evolutionary time I think this was like a recurring 01:08:05.000 --> 01:08:10.610 dynamic right um For example, let's assume that over evolutionary time there was 01:08:10.610 --> 01:08:11.810 domestic abuse, right? 01:08:11.890 --> 01:08:14.690 I mean, chimps actually do a lot of this. 01:08:14.770 --> 01:08:18.450 Um, it's not something people like to talk about because there's concerns about, you know, 01:08:18.690 --> 01:08:19.650 protecting chimps. 01:08:19.730 --> 01:08:23.650 And if people find out there's a lot of domestic abuse among chimps in natural 01:08:23.650 --> 01:08:28.240 environments, people might not like that reasonably enough, but um, but it's true. 01:08:28.320 --> 01:08:29.360 Um it does happen. 01:08:29.520 --> 01:08:34.480 And so um, this idea, this naturalistic fallacy, that sort of this idea that something 01:08:34.480 --> 01:08:39.680 happens, therefore it's inevitable, again, I think it's sort of this this unidimensional 01:08:39.680 --> 01:08:39.840 thing. 01:08:39.920 --> 01:08:42.080 And it's because you're not thinking about the software. 01:08:42.480 --> 01:08:42.640 Yeah. 01:08:42.880 --> 01:08:48.480 So so let's say, for example, that um let's stipulate that uh 01:08:48.640 --> 01:08:53.680 the value of sexual variety as a representation is higher in men than it is in women. 01:08:54.130 --> 01:08:56.610 I think there's good empirical evidence for that. 01:08:57.650 --> 01:09:01.970 If you take that, if you take that claim and somebody says, well, look, at the level of the 01:09:01.970 --> 01:09:04.290 software, that representation is there. 01:09:05.330 --> 01:09:06.850 That's a claim about the software. 01:09:06.930 --> 01:09:08.850 It's not a claim about the inevitability. 01:09:09.330 --> 01:09:12.450 It's not of any outcome or any even any behavior. 01:09:12.610 --> 01:09:16.770 And it's it's framed in a way where, in the way you and I naturally think, but I think in 01:09:16.770 --> 01:09:21.810 the way many people, especially who are not trained in this approach, they don't think, is 01:09:21.810 --> 01:09:25.580 that there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not trillions. 01:09:25.740 --> 01:09:29.100 I mean, what my iPhone does in a second is like a trillion things at once to take a photo. 01:09:29.180 --> 01:09:32.460 So we don't have to worry about like how many process processes there are. 01:09:32.540 --> 01:09:34.300 There can be any number as many as we need. 01:09:34.380 --> 01:09:35.340 There's a lot. 01:09:38.220 --> 01:09:39.740 There's a lot of stuff going on. 01:09:39.820 --> 01:09:41.180 There's a lot of representations. 01:09:41.340 --> 01:09:47.190 So even in a romantic relationship, um maybe sexual variety is a 01:09:47.190 --> 01:09:52.870 higher is valued higher in men than women, but there's all kinds of other things going on. 01:09:53.030 --> 01:09:59.030 There's also um am I what kind of relationship there's just what kind of relationship 01:09:59.030 --> 01:10:00.710 am I in with this person? 01:10:01.190 --> 01:10:04.230 Um what uh do they trust me? 01:10:04.470 --> 01:10:06.790 What do I get out of this relationship? 01:10:06.950 --> 01:10:08.870 What are they counting on me for? 01:10:09.110 --> 01:10:11.510 Am I trying to exploit them or not? 01:10:11.670 --> 01:10:17.500 Um There's there's counter-detection of exploitation in the partner. 01:10:17.900 --> 01:10:21.500 There's a lot of um what are the things that we need to do? 01:10:21.660 --> 01:10:24.300 Is this going to be a betrayal of the relationship? 01:10:24.620 --> 01:10:30.300 Um uh there's just a ton of things that are all evolved things 01:10:30.540 --> 01:10:36.110 that all have selection pressures for them that are really important 01:10:36.430 --> 01:10:40.990 for fitness and that would be part of our software. 01:10:41.630 --> 01:10:47.150 And if you just sort of take one representation out of context and say, 01:10:47.790 --> 01:10:51.470 on average, just this sort of representation is here, 01:10:54.110 --> 01:10:59.150 you can kind of see how people, if they're not thinking about all the other software and 01:10:59.150 --> 01:11:03.940 all the other reasons, all the other countervailing software, Um 01:11:04.900 --> 01:11:09.220 it it if you just talk about um 01:11:10.980 --> 01:11:16.180 if you just talk about the one bit of software, it sort of essentializes it or it almost 01:11:16.180 --> 01:11:21.140 metonymizes to to pull a word, you know, metonymy uh the part for the whole. 01:11:21.380 --> 01:11:21.620 Right. 01:11:21.780 --> 01:11:27.570 Um it sort of it sort of it does that to and it it in it 01:11:27.810 --> 01:11:31.570 it is essentially it's overly reductive or essentialistic. 01:11:31.810 --> 01:11:35.490 It's the same, the same thing, and I'll I'll shut up in a second, but the same thing with 01:11:35.490 --> 01:11:41.250 the podcast, which is this idea that um, you know, communism, quote unquote, and 01:11:41.250 --> 01:11:46.930 usually, I mean, that's a that's a there's been a lot of um uh propaganda 01:11:46.930 --> 01:11:50.380 related to the idea of communism um over over time. 01:11:50.540 --> 01:11:52.140 And I mean, I'm not a communist. 01:11:52.220 --> 01:11:58.220 And I was living in Berlin and I understand what a communist regime, not personally, but 01:11:58.300 --> 01:11:59.980 you know, I saw a lot of the consequences of that. 01:12:00.140 --> 01:12:05.820 But this idea that sort of caring about social well-being 01:12:05.820 --> 01:12:11.470 among other people, or that intrinsic um that people only are 01:12:11.470 --> 01:12:17.310 interested in exploiting one another, um, or any any sense of sort of a dynamic of 01:12:17.310 --> 01:12:22.190 equality or checking exploitation runs counter to human nature. 01:12:22.510 --> 01:12:28.510 That idea was implicit in why Kamala Harris is a lobotomized communist, right? 01:12:28.750 --> 01:12:33.660 Um but but actually if you look, and one of the people we should have on here is Chris von 01:12:33.820 --> 01:12:39.580 Ruthen, um who studies egalitarian societies, there's a lot of complicated software in 01:12:39.580 --> 01:12:39.820 people. 01:12:39.980 --> 01:12:45.660 And what even um um Alan Fiske s finds is that there's all there's 01:12:45.660 --> 01:12:49.740 different kinds of um uh sort of um 01:12:50.690 --> 01:12:56.530 reciprocal relationships or status relationships that are sort of stable and 01:12:56.530 --> 01:12:58.530 modes of representing relationships. 01:12:58.930 --> 01:13:03.090 So sort of things where there's a market or or there's a quality. 01:13:03.730 --> 01:13:08.050 These are sort of all different kinds of representations and they hold under different 01:13:08.050 --> 01:13:09.410 circumstances for different reasons. 01:13:09.490 --> 01:13:11.650 And there's costs and benefits to each. 01:13:16.780 --> 01:13:20.940 or even for like the women being, you know, pursuing power thing. 01:13:21.020 --> 01:13:26.540 I think all these things sort of they they talk about a narrow representation in the 01:13:26.540 --> 01:13:27.660 evolved system. 01:13:28.700 --> 01:13:34.220 And then there's a long, often implicit logical chain leading to, 01:13:34.700 --> 01:13:38.050 well, therefore, there's nothing to be done about this thing. 01:13:38.130 --> 01:13:41.330 And for me at least, that's where I would push back. 01:13:41.650 --> 01:13:46.850 And I think it's an overly reductionistic um approach, 01:13:47.490 --> 01:13:53.250 which is um looking at any outcome in the world and seeing it as 01:13:53.250 --> 01:13:54.210 inevitable. 01:13:58.770 --> 01:14:00.770 And things are pretty complicated. 01:14:01.880 --> 01:14:06.600 And I mean, even looking, and one of the benefits of an evolutionary approach too is I 01:14:06.600 --> 01:14:12.360 think looking across cultures, because I, you know, I 01:14:12.360 --> 01:14:16.040 mentioned one of the first episodes that, you know, I grew up in a very religious 01:14:16.200 --> 01:14:21.720 fundamentalist um upbringing, and discovering that there were things that were very similar 01:14:21.720 --> 01:14:27.160 to what I experienced in hunter gather groups, where there was like possession, um, and you 01:14:27.160 --> 01:14:30.920 know, basically the hunter gatherer equivalent of like speaking in tongues. 01:14:31.070 --> 01:14:35.710 Um, you know, that was really compelling for me because I thought, oh, well, that this is 01:14:35.710 --> 01:14:38.030 like more of a human universal thing, right? 01:14:38.190 --> 01:14:39.470 But there's also differences. 01:14:39.550 --> 01:14:45.550 Like there's there's um there's evidence of like people being gay or transgender 01:14:45.550 --> 01:14:50.430 in the um um um anthropological literature and people 01:14:51.390 --> 01:14:54.750 don't react immediately with violence against those people. 01:14:54.830 --> 01:14:59.080 You know, they're people they know and they're just like, you know, that's different, uh, 01:14:59.240 --> 01:15:01.800 interesting, and they um in many cases they don't care. 01:15:01.880 --> 01:15:07.640 And so I think seeing cultural variation is sort of baked into the um 01:15:08.120 --> 01:15:13.800 evolutionary social sciences in this way of uh it's with this 01:15:13.800 --> 01:15:19.480 political, a political class that's interested in divisive issues and 01:15:19.800 --> 01:15:22.760 is looking for a market of ideas that are divisive. 01:15:23.000 --> 01:15:28.990 Without that, there are just certain outcomes that that aren't uh that don't have the same 01:15:28.990 --> 01:15:30.750 energy that that they have for us. 01:15:30.910 --> 01:15:34.510 And so um actually I don't know what my point was. 01:15:34.590 --> 01:15:36.270 I mean I've been rambling. 01:15:36.350 --> 01:15:36.830 I'll shut up. 01:15:37.630 --> 01:15:39.470 Let me say what I think your point was. 01:15:39.710 --> 01:15:40.190 Okay, good. 01:15:40.670 --> 01:15:45.950 Uh I think your point was that if you focus on any particular 01:15:45.950 --> 01:15:51.420 adaptation while blacking out everything else, um, and use 01:15:52.060 --> 01:15:57.980 that spotlight understanding of one particular part of us to uh form moral 01:15:57.980 --> 01:16:02.700 and political arguments, you're inevitably going to have bad moral and political arguments 01:16:02.860 --> 01:16:04.460 because humans are complicated. 01:16:04.540 --> 01:16:07.260 We have many different interacting parts. 01:16:07.340 --> 01:16:12.220 Um and if you focus on one part and isolate it and ignore all the other stuff, uh, you're 01:16:12.220 --> 01:16:17.650 gonna have an impoverished understanding of what humans are like and and what the best ways 01:16:17.650 --> 01:16:20.050 are to arrange humans in political systems. 01:16:20.290 --> 01:16:24.530 The mistake would sort of be like zooming in on the bladder and saying we evolved to empty 01:16:24.530 --> 01:16:29.170 our bladders, therefore we shouldn't have toilets because we need to empty our bladders and 01:16:29.170 --> 01:16:31.250 we should just walk around with adult diapers. 01:16:31.730 --> 01:16:35.410 Obviously, that argument is fallacious because we have, you know, lots of competing 01:16:35.410 --> 01:16:35.890 motivations. 01:16:35.970 --> 01:16:40.620 The urge to empty our bladder is one of many motivations that uh filters up the processing 01:16:40.620 --> 01:16:41.580 hierarchy into our brain. 01:16:41.660 --> 01:16:42.700 It makes it into consciousness. 01:16:42.860 --> 01:16:47.500 And we can weigh that motivation against other motivations, like uh whether there's a clean 01:16:47.500 --> 01:16:52.300 bathroom around us, you know, how far away we are from home, um, et cetera, et cetera. 01:16:52.620 --> 01:16:58.620 So uh focusing on one adaptation uh while ignoring all the other ones 01:16:58.620 --> 01:17:00.030 is is is bad. 01:17:00.830 --> 01:17:05.150 We need to understand the fact that um adaptations don't uh exist in a vacuum. 01:17:05.310 --> 01:17:10.430 They often evolve in tandem alongside other adaptations, and they evolve to fit well with 01:17:10.510 --> 01:17:12.110 uh other adaptations. 01:17:12.750 --> 01:17:18.750 Um and the other uh flaw in that line of reasoning is that it's sort of this 01:17:18.750 --> 01:17:24.360 puppeteer model of uh human behavior, where there's sort of uh a one-to-one 01:17:24.520 --> 01:17:29.640 mapping between gene and behavior or gene and outcome, where the genes just directly pull 01:17:29.640 --> 01:17:31.080 the strings of your behavior. 01:17:31.240 --> 01:17:36.200 They directly make you do something, and there's no intervening layer between the gene and 01:17:36.200 --> 01:17:37.560 the outcome, right? 01:17:38.120 --> 01:17:43.910 Um this is sort of the mistake that um early sociobiologists made 01:17:44.070 --> 01:17:50.070 is that they they uh they focused on behaviors and genes for behaviors, uh, as if 01:17:50.070 --> 01:17:53.110 there was no intervening layer between the gene and the behavior. 01:17:53.350 --> 01:17:59.350 Um this was uh the insight that Leda Cosmodies and John Tubies had John Tubi had when they 01:17:59.350 --> 01:18:04.790 uh uh developed evolutionary psychology, is that we need to focus on the intervening layer. 01:18:04.950 --> 01:18:10.720 There's all this stuff that happens in between the gene and the behavior that is 01:18:10.720 --> 01:18:12.400 extraordinarily complicated. 01:18:12.560 --> 01:18:15.920 And that is the stuff that we need to understand. 01:18:16.320 --> 01:18:21.760 You can have a gene that increases a motivation by a small amount. 01:18:21.920 --> 01:18:27.760 You can have a gene that uh increases uh the likelihood uh that you might 01:18:27.760 --> 01:18:33.650 form a particular conclusion about um a set of facts, but the genes are 01:18:33.650 --> 01:18:35.810 not pulling the strings of your behavior directly. 01:18:35.970 --> 01:18:41.090 What they're doing is they're shaping your motivations and predispositions and intuitions 01:18:41.090 --> 01:18:46.210 in a way that might tilt you toward behaving uh in some ways in some contexts. 01:18:46.450 --> 01:18:50.530 Um, but it's not a one-to-one deterministic mapping. 01:18:50.850 --> 01:18:56.200 There's this whole uh layer of intervening stuff, And a lot of that, I think, is what 01:18:56.200 --> 01:18:57.160 consciousness is for. 01:18:57.320 --> 01:19:03.240 So we have tons of different systems in our head, different uh motives that are competing 01:19:03.320 --> 01:19:05.960 uh to guide our behavior at any moment in time. 01:19:06.120 --> 01:19:08.520 And we need some way of adjudicating between all of them. 01:19:08.760 --> 01:19:12.440 You know, do I uh go home to go to the bathroom or do I hold it? 01:19:12.600 --> 01:19:18.520 Um, do I say the thing that I want to say, or do I uh suppress it and say the nice 01:19:18.600 --> 01:19:20.280 sounding thing instead? 01:19:20.440 --> 01:19:23.080 Um I think this is what consciousness is for. 01:19:23.160 --> 01:19:25.330 This is why we have consciousness. 01:19:26.210 --> 01:19:30.850 So the the one of the most popular theories of consciousness is called the global workspace 01:19:30.850 --> 01:19:35.890 model, where we have all of these different um systems in the head that evolve to serve 01:19:35.890 --> 01:19:36.770 different purposes. 01:19:37.090 --> 01:19:42.050 We have different motivations, different urges and long-term desires, different plans and 01:19:42.050 --> 01:19:43.570 expectations and intuitions. 01:19:43.730 --> 01:19:46.850 And all of this stuff just sort of dumps into this global workspace. 01:19:47.010 --> 01:19:51.890 And the global workspace is the part of the mind where everything dumps into, and we need 01:19:51.890 --> 01:19:53.260 to figure out what to actually do. 01:19:53.420 --> 01:19:54.780 We only have one body, right? 01:19:54.940 --> 01:19:56.460 We can only do one thing at a time. 01:19:56.620 --> 01:19:59.500 We can only pursue one course of action at a time. 01:19:59.740 --> 01:20:02.780 How do we figure out what to do next? 01:20:03.260 --> 01:20:08.380 Um, and so that I think is probably is is is the best theory of consciousness that I've 01:20:08.380 --> 01:20:09.580 heard so far. 01:20:09.740 --> 01:20:14.590 Um, and once we understand that our minds work this way, that we have this uh this global 01:20:14.590 --> 01:20:16.350 workspace that everything dumps into. 01:20:16.590 --> 01:20:21.950 Uh you get away from this idea that there's a one-to-one mapping between, oh, men uh want 01:20:21.950 --> 01:20:25.230 to have sex with lots of women, therefore they're inevitably going to have sex with lots of 01:20:25.230 --> 01:20:25.470 women. 01:20:25.630 --> 01:20:27.870 Well, no, that's not the only adaptation in men's head. 01:20:28.030 --> 01:20:33.150 They have all sorts of other motivations and agendas and priorities and considerations that 01:20:33.150 --> 01:20:37.300 are uh duking it out uh in the in the theater of their conscious awareness. 01:20:37.460 --> 01:20:39.940 Uh and we need to understand how all that stuff works. 01:20:40.100 --> 01:20:46.100 We can't focus on one part tiny part of it in isolation and expect to have uh a coherent 01:20:46.180 --> 01:20:50.180 uh uh uh moral understanding uh uh to emerge from it. 01:20:50.820 --> 01:20:51.860 Yeah that's right. 01:20:52.020 --> 01:20:53.140 Um very good. 01:20:53.220 --> 01:20:58.990 And I think um and I would add to that that there's this additional thing in addition to 01:20:58.990 --> 01:21:00.430 misunderstanding and isolating. 01:21:00.510 --> 01:21:02.350 Thank you for articulating my point. 01:21:02.510 --> 01:21:08.270 Um is there's also then this additional idea beyond this essentializing 01:21:08.270 --> 01:21:14.190 or unitizing the adaptations, which again are not 01:21:14.190 --> 01:21:18.430 just motivation settings, but also making motivations possible, decision making possible, 01:21:18.510 --> 01:21:18.910 etc. 01:21:19.230 --> 01:21:24.030 Is that um there's also the thing of beyond 01:21:24.980 --> 01:21:30.340 psychology, there is this thing of well, what is the structure of these social 01:21:30.580 --> 01:21:31.220 institutions? 01:21:31.860 --> 01:21:37.300 It comes back to the spurber idea of what are the representations in people's 01:21:37.300 --> 01:21:38.180 heads. 01:21:38.740 --> 01:21:40.660 What does psychology look like? 01:21:40.820 --> 01:21:45.780 What does science look like as a consequence of a historical process of evolved organisms 01:21:45.780 --> 01:21:48.740 in a status game, in a status competition? 01:21:49.510 --> 01:21:54.950 I'm sure you and I, and any psychologist or anybody in any status scheme has a 01:21:54.950 --> 01:22:00.150 criticism of the current state of it and thinks it would be better in a different form 01:22:00.710 --> 01:22:02.230 for various reasons. 01:22:02.470 --> 01:22:03.350 I certainly do. 01:22:03.430 --> 01:22:04.950 I I think you do too. 01:22:05.110 --> 01:22:11.110 Um, and uh and but but that's the third point I would make too, which is that 01:22:11.800 --> 01:22:17.320 when people look at the status quo, they're arguing that the 01:22:17.320 --> 01:22:23.000 current form of what a science looks like, um, what uh 01:22:23.160 --> 01:22:28.040 what the power distribution in society looks like, the expectation of what a scientist is, 01:22:28.200 --> 01:22:33.080 how I interact with the scientist, the kinds of questions that are rational, the kinds of 01:22:33.410 --> 01:22:37.650 concerns that are the right concerns, the right concerns that we're allowed to talk about 01:22:37.730 --> 01:22:41.970 that we're not allowed to talk about, that matter or don't matter, 01:22:43.730 --> 01:22:45.970 those things are not an act of God. 01:22:46.050 --> 01:22:48.690 Those are a consequence of the particular status schemes. 01:22:48.770 --> 01:22:53.650 And so the argument would be that the 01:22:54.920 --> 01:23:00.280 leaving aside the misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology, the argument is that no 01:23:00.920 --> 01:23:06.520 single adaptation or structure of an adaptation is a complete story of why the status 01:23:06.520 --> 01:23:11.160 scheme has produced a science that looks like it does, or a society that looks the way it 01:23:11.160 --> 01:23:11.560 does. 01:23:11.800 --> 01:23:16.280 It's a complicated answer to even if you knew everything about the individual psychologies, 01:23:16.360 --> 01:23:18.040 there's a dynamic of how they interact. 01:23:18.120 --> 01:23:22.490 And that's why anthropology and sociology just doesn't reduce to psychology. 01:23:22.650 --> 01:23:26.970 Even if we knew everything about the software and the mind, we would still have these other 01:23:27.290 --> 01:23:30.490 systems or these other sciences to study these things. 01:23:30.650 --> 01:23:36.650 And so I think the analog or the analogy for me would be something like um women 01:23:36.650 --> 01:23:40.810 in men's proportions are different in clothing, generally speaking. 01:23:42.330 --> 01:23:47.450 If you have a history where all the clothing has been designed for men 01:23:48.140 --> 01:23:54.140 And uh and then you women start trying on clothing and they're like, well, it doesn't 01:23:54.140 --> 01:23:55.260 fit you, right? 01:23:55.420 --> 01:23:56.380 There's two choices. 01:23:56.540 --> 01:23:59.340 You can say, well, women shouldn't wear clothing, right? 01:23:59.580 --> 01:24:05.020 Or, well, there's men differences between men and women, and um we should design, 01:24:05.420 --> 01:24:08.140 we shouldn't assume clothing is what men's clothing is. 01:24:08.300 --> 01:24:13.850 We should assume that you know clothing is different for men and women and and make it 01:24:13.850 --> 01:24:14.490 differently. 01:24:14.650 --> 01:24:20.330 And I think that's that is the argument for something like, 01:24:20.650 --> 01:24:23.770 well, women in leadership or women in science, right? 01:24:24.010 --> 01:24:29.770 Which is uh there hasn't in this signal detection perspective or this error management 01:24:29.770 --> 01:24:35.370 perspective, there might be a world where the ideal distribution 01:24:35.690 --> 01:24:41.680 of different kinds of people isn't equal in these different fields or 01:24:41.680 --> 01:24:43.040 in these different careers. 01:24:43.200 --> 01:24:48.720 That might very well be the case, but the idea is that uh we're 01:24:48.720 --> 01:24:54.320 nowhere near letting that experiment be run, given the 01:24:54.640 --> 01:24:59.600 uh recent history and ongoing history with uh with 01:24:59.600 --> 01:25:04.720 restricting um people and keeping um uh 01:25:05.310 --> 01:25:11.070 valid and important perspectives from in these evolved psychologies that that are 01:25:11.230 --> 01:25:16.510 that have different social bargaining power come from different um walks of life um 01:25:17.150 --> 01:25:22.590 you know the I think that's the argument is that um that there's um 01:25:23.710 --> 01:25:29.550 that uh the uh the distribution based on these status schemes is 01:25:29.630 --> 01:25:35.320 is coloring um what the science is and that's not inevitable Um, 01:25:35.480 --> 01:25:36.120 yeah. 01:25:37.320 --> 01:25:37.800 Totally. 01:25:38.040 --> 01:25:40.040 Yeah, no, I I I buy all of that. 01:25:40.600 --> 01:25:45.720 Um so I mean, we already talked about the political 01:25:46.040 --> 01:25:50.840 implications of evolutionary psychology and how they're often distorted and oversimplified 01:25:50.920 --> 01:25:56.040 and used by both sides, uh, sometimes uh dishonestly. 01:25:56.120 --> 01:26:01.640 Uh certainly we have some people abusing uh evolutionary psychology on YouTube and drawing 01:26:01.640 --> 01:26:06.330 uh bad uh implications from it and making bad arguments uh from it. 01:26:06.810 --> 01:26:12.810 Um why else should evolutionary psychology matter beyond you 01:26:12.810 --> 01:26:17.930 know how it might inform our political debates and and color the way we talk about 01:26:17.930 --> 01:26:19.290 political issues? 01:26:19.450 --> 01:26:22.250 Um why else should should people care? 01:26:22.650 --> 01:26:23.850 Yeah, that's a good question. 01:26:24.090 --> 01:26:29.240 I mean I think one of the things and and I don't, you know I think it's 01:26:29.240 --> 01:26:32.840 inconvenient for almost everybody that people are complicated. 01:26:33.000 --> 01:26:37.880 Um and I think, you know, if you look at the history of 01:26:41.000 --> 01:26:47.000 of even an individual person growing up, myself or watching my son, or um, or if 01:26:47.000 --> 01:26:51.160 you watch the history of social interaction, 01:26:53.170 --> 01:26:59.170 It's it's very easy to be aware of our own concerns and what we want and 01:26:59.170 --> 01:27:00.130 care about. 01:27:00.450 --> 01:27:06.210 Um, but it's uh it would be easier and 01:27:06.210 --> 01:27:12.210 it's sometimes a a challenge to sort of grant all the rights 01:27:12.210 --> 01:27:14.450 that we want to other people, you know. 01:27:14.690 --> 01:27:20.540 And uh, and I think um and I think that that very natural feeling 01:27:20.540 --> 01:27:25.660 of wanting other people to be simpler than us 01:27:26.460 --> 01:27:32.380 in in an effort to sort of um move 01:27:32.380 --> 01:27:37.340 through the world in a in a in as way in a way that is as beneficial to us as possible. 01:27:37.580 --> 01:27:42.070 Um That's not a mature way to go through the world. 01:27:42.150 --> 01:27:47.830 And that's not, you know, the Rawlsian way in this sense of what's moral is to sort of say 01:27:47.830 --> 01:27:52.390 the rules or you know, the golden rule of sort of what applies for me should apply to you, 01:27:52.470 --> 01:27:55.510 and I should hold myself to the same standards as I hold you. 01:27:55.830 --> 01:28:01.350 And I think why we should care about evolutionary psychology is in that 01:28:01.350 --> 01:28:07.260 effort to sort of treat people with the full dignity and complexity that 01:28:07.260 --> 01:28:08.300 they embody. 01:28:08.700 --> 01:28:10.460 And even ourselves. 01:28:10.700 --> 01:28:15.820 Um, you know, there are things about our nature 01:28:16.780 --> 01:28:18.460 that are intrinsic. 01:28:18.620 --> 01:28:24.460 We we are evolved organisms that uh intrinsically value certain things, 01:28:24.620 --> 01:28:29.740 that need certain things, that like and prefer certain things over other things. 01:28:30.140 --> 01:28:35.770 And I think in in the sort of like very honest self 01:28:36.410 --> 01:28:42.330 discovery that every person goes through as they grow up, or as every 01:28:42.330 --> 01:28:47.690 sort of institution or culture goes through as they figure out, you know, what have we done 01:28:47.690 --> 01:28:50.410 that's been good or bad or ignored for now? 01:28:50.650 --> 01:28:53.290 Um, or every relationship. 01:28:53.610 --> 01:28:57.130 An honest assessment of sort of what do we need? 01:28:57.610 --> 01:29:00.810 How can we exist well in life? 01:29:01.210 --> 01:29:06.600 Um if there is a human nature and you ignore that about 01:29:06.600 --> 01:29:12.360 yourself, about a somebody else that you're in a relationship with, about people at a 01:29:12.360 --> 01:29:15.720 social level, then you're gonna make mistakes. 01:29:15.960 --> 01:29:21.320 Um acknowledging how people are and what they need and what 01:29:21.880 --> 01:29:26.590 um you know, we bought guinea pigs for my son just recently. 01:29:26.750 --> 01:29:32.190 And you know, honestly, like the best descriptions of like how to care for a pet is a 01:29:32.190 --> 01:29:36.270 description of what its natural environment is, you know, like what is its natural ecology, 01:29:36.350 --> 01:29:38.510 what is its software built around? 01:29:38.750 --> 01:29:39.070 Yeah. 01:29:39.230 --> 01:29:44.990 Um, and you know, as far as a user guide guide to yourself as 01:29:44.990 --> 01:29:50.120 a person, yourself as a human being, um, you know, 01:29:50.440 --> 01:29:56.280 understanding that the things that I worry about or 01:29:56.280 --> 01:30:01.800 the things that I think about sometimes 01:30:02.760 --> 01:30:08.670 are genuine mistakes in the sense of I understand them for 01:30:08.670 --> 01:30:11.390 what they are and I see them from an evolutionary perspective. 01:30:11.470 --> 01:30:16.350 And I'm like, oh wow, that's my that's human nature in its terrible form, right? 01:30:16.430 --> 01:30:20.990 Like vilifying an outgroup that doesn't really exist, being um 01:30:22.830 --> 01:30:26.750 a hypocrite, you know, holding myself to a different standard than other people. 01:30:27.150 --> 01:30:31.310 But you can still under identify and understand that and understand why it would evolve and 01:30:31.310 --> 01:30:34.190 not feel like, oh, there's something wrong with me that I think that way. 01:30:34.350 --> 01:30:39.080 And I'm glad that I have these other adaptations for representing that that's possible and 01:30:39.080 --> 01:30:40.440 maybe correcting that. 01:30:40.600 --> 01:30:46.360 Um, and then there are other things that are just sort of like, you know, um, I I 01:30:46.360 --> 01:30:50.920 really like walking around and being in nature and like I'm annoyed when I have to drive 01:30:50.920 --> 01:30:51.400 everywhere. 01:30:51.560 --> 01:30:55.160 And there's nothing wrong with me that I feel that way. 01:30:55.390 --> 01:30:58.190 that's just part of like the way I'm built, right? 01:30:58.430 --> 01:31:03.230 Um and and understanding that too, and sort of and sort of saying, well, look, maybe it's 01:31:03.230 --> 01:31:09.230 that we shouldn't have social planning or or um physical planning of infrastructure 01:31:09.230 --> 01:31:11.630 that's like built around what people like. 01:31:11.790 --> 01:31:16.430 I mean, there's other considerations too, like people like to not exert calories um and 01:31:16.430 --> 01:31:18.510 sweat and bike or like get hit by cars. 01:31:18.590 --> 01:31:20.030 So you know, there's all kinds of things. 01:31:20.190 --> 01:31:26.180 But um, but I for me, that's I think beyond the benefit, the scientific benefits 01:31:26.180 --> 01:31:31.060 of having a theory of function or the underlying software. 01:31:31.300 --> 01:31:37.140 For me, the thing that I find most um fundamentally important 01:31:37.140 --> 01:31:42.980 about an evolutionary approach is it's an entire window into the fact that 01:31:42.980 --> 01:31:48.010 people are complicated and it's a way to populate that with ideas. 01:31:48.090 --> 01:31:50.570 And some of them might be wrong, some might be over reductive. 01:31:50.650 --> 01:31:56.490 I'm sure everything I think about how I work from a software level perspective is 01:31:56.490 --> 01:31:57.930 too simple and wrong. 01:31:58.490 --> 01:32:02.090 But it's less simple and wrong than the stuff that came before me. 01:32:02.330 --> 01:32:08.330 Um and and I think uh for me, that's the 01:32:08.330 --> 01:32:14.300 humility and the benefit of an evolutionary approach is you the 01:32:15.100 --> 01:32:18.220 I describe this one one time to people. 01:32:19.100 --> 01:32:25.100 And I just there's like this metaphor of sort of you imagine this room full 01:32:25.100 --> 01:32:27.900 of people who are not saying anything. 01:32:28.140 --> 01:32:31.660 And they're just quiet and they're sort of waiting there for somebody to like ask them a 01:32:31.660 --> 01:32:31.900 question. 01:32:31.980 --> 01:32:35.580 And then this like really loud group of people comes in and they're all like shouting and 01:32:35.580 --> 01:32:38.380 yelling or whatever, and they're arguing with each other. 01:32:39.350 --> 01:32:44.150 And I kind of think that quite group of people are our adaptations, and the loud yelling 01:32:44.150 --> 01:32:45.990 group of people are scientists. 01:32:46.870 --> 01:32:52.550 And we have these adaptations that exist in us, that have existed in us since 01:32:52.550 --> 01:32:55.190 60,000 years ago or however long. 01:32:55.350 --> 01:32:58.550 We're just now starting to do a science of psychology. 01:32:59.430 --> 01:33:04.070 And people often have very strong opinions about how we work. 01:33:05.200 --> 01:33:06.880 And you know, B.F. 01:33:07.040 --> 01:33:12.160 Skinner, James Watson, Franz Bentano, David Hume, uh, 01:33:12.320 --> 01:33:15.840 Aristotle, Plato, they all had an evolved psychology. 01:33:15.920 --> 01:33:18.640 They had all the adaptations that you and I have. 01:33:19.040 --> 01:33:21.920 And those adaptations are just sitting in there quietly. 01:33:22.080 --> 01:33:26.320 And our students, two or three generations from now, have all these adaptations, they're 01:33:26.320 --> 01:33:27.520 just sitting there quietly. 01:33:27.840 --> 01:33:32.170 Our job is to like shut up and start asking them questions, right? 01:33:32.250 --> 01:33:36.250 Is to like not play a status game as much as possible. 01:33:36.330 --> 01:33:41.770 It's not, you know, but just but to just sort of be humble and say, look, we're complicated 01:33:41.770 --> 01:33:42.730 organisms. 01:33:43.210 --> 01:33:44.490 How do we work? 01:33:44.730 --> 01:33:48.730 But adaptation, let me start talking to you and asking you how you work. 01:33:49.760 --> 01:33:55.440 And for me, that is like sort of the overriding metaphor of what evolutionary psychology 01:33:55.440 --> 01:33:55.600 is. 01:33:55.680 --> 01:34:01.520 It's a it's a humility about how complicated we are, that we don't understand a lot about 01:34:01.520 --> 01:34:02.480 who we are. 01:34:03.280 --> 01:34:08.560 And the a lot of the unnecessary pain and 01:34:08.560 --> 01:34:12.560 discomfort of life sometimes is inevitable. 01:34:12.720 --> 01:34:18.410 People have conflicts of interest, certainly, but if you don't understand um how 01:34:18.410 --> 01:34:22.890 people work, it's gonna you're gonna be more likely to to make these mistakes. 01:34:22.970 --> 01:34:25.370 And so that's that's for me why you should care about it. 01:34:25.530 --> 01:34:26.730 But I'll shut up now. 01:34:27.210 --> 01:34:28.010 What do you think? 01:34:29.050 --> 01:34:32.330 Um I totally buy all that. 01:34:32.410 --> 01:34:38.200 I mean what I'm hearing from you is that it uh is is useful 01:34:38.200 --> 01:34:39.400 for two reasons. 01:34:39.560 --> 01:34:45.160 Uh one is creating a sense of humility, uh, not only about your own 01:34:45.160 --> 01:34:51.080 flaws and limitations, but about how complicated humans are and how uh poorly equipped we 01:34:51.080 --> 01:34:55.560 are to truly understand them in all in all their richness and complexity. 01:34:55.960 --> 01:34:57.320 Um that's part of it. 01:34:57.400 --> 01:35:03.330 And the other part of it is that evolutionary psychology gives us a better understanding of 01:35:03.330 --> 01:35:07.890 what our needs are, of what is actually most important to us. 01:35:08.050 --> 01:35:10.770 Um and that isn't always apparent. 01:35:11.010 --> 01:35:17.010 Uh we often lack a lot of insight into what's going on uh downstairs in 01:35:17.010 --> 01:35:19.010 the basement of unconsciousness. 01:35:19.410 --> 01:35:25.170 Um and bringing some of that to light can be 01:35:25.170 --> 01:35:25.890 helpful. 01:35:26.050 --> 01:35:31.000 Um, you know, that you you made, you know, the smaller point of we have this desire to be 01:35:31.000 --> 01:35:33.960 around nature and to be around beautiful things. 01:35:34.120 --> 01:35:39.560 Um, you know, that's that's one small part of the story that we can tell about what our 01:35:39.560 --> 01:35:41.400 needs are as animals. 01:35:41.640 --> 01:35:45.800 Um but there are other parts uh that that come to light as well. 01:35:46.120 --> 01:35:50.600 Um I think you know, people are people talk about the the loneliness epidemic. 01:35:50.680 --> 01:35:54.040 I'm not sure how much of that is empirically substantiated or not. 01:35:54.200 --> 01:35:59.630 Uh, but I do think that uh human beings have a need to form meaningful 01:35:59.630 --> 01:36:01.230 relationships with one another. 01:36:01.390 --> 01:36:04.270 Um, and not just shallow or superficial relationships. 01:36:04.350 --> 01:36:09.470 We I think we have an evolved psychology for differentiating between the shallow uh and the 01:36:09.470 --> 01:36:14.190 meaningful, uh, between the fair weather friend and the deep friend who truly cares about 01:36:14.190 --> 01:36:18.880 you, because those distinctions were of critical importance uh for our ancestors' survival 01:36:18.880 --> 01:36:20.160 and and reproduction. 01:36:20.400 --> 01:36:23.840 Um being able to tell the difference between someone who's going to be really there for you 01:36:23.840 --> 01:36:28.480 and have your back and take care of you and someone uh who is not and who's going to stab 01:36:28.480 --> 01:36:31.840 you in the back or betray you or abandon you. 01:36:32.080 --> 01:36:37.280 Um these are hugely important distinctions that the mind evolved to 01:36:37.600 --> 01:36:42.000 process and think about and obsess about in certain ways. 01:36:42.560 --> 01:36:47.970 And I think in many ways the modern environment that we live in, our our wild, 01:36:48.210 --> 01:36:53.650 weird world, deprives us of these needs because our 01:36:53.650 --> 01:36:59.010 society is built on shallow, superficial, contingent 01:36:59.010 --> 01:36:59.890 relationships. 01:37:00.210 --> 01:37:06.100 The modern economy is built out of trade, out of trading X for 01:37:06.100 --> 01:37:08.500 Y on a contingent basis. 01:37:08.580 --> 01:37:14.500 Uh and a trading or reciprocity relationship is very different from the kind 01:37:14.500 --> 01:37:19.700 of deep, meaningful relationship that we evolved to crave as social animals. 01:37:19.940 --> 01:37:25.860 Someone who is only going to help me if I can give them something in return is going to be 01:37:26.100 --> 01:37:30.870 uh much worse for my fitness than someone who truly cares about me and will help me 01:37:30.950 --> 01:37:34.390 regardless of whether I can reciprocate. 01:37:34.630 --> 01:37:40.310 And we evolved to be uh much more motivated to seek the latter kind of social partner than 01:37:40.310 --> 01:37:41.590 the former kind of social partner. 01:37:41.750 --> 01:37:46.870 And when we are embedded in a society of those kinds of shallow contingent exchange 01:37:46.870 --> 01:37:52.860 relationships, these quid pro quos, and that's all we see throughout our day-to-day life. 01:37:52.940 --> 01:37:57.980 Most of what we do, you know, we we we we go to work and we engage in explicit quid pro 01:37:57.980 --> 01:37:59.580 quos with our employer. 01:37:59.900 --> 01:38:05.260 Um everything that we get to enjoy, our wonderful standard standard of living, the cars we 01:38:05.260 --> 01:38:11.180 drive, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, has all been brought to us via shallow 01:38:11.340 --> 01:38:14.780 contingent exchange relationships. 01:38:15.340 --> 01:38:20.810 And so in many ways, we are living in a 01:38:20.810 --> 01:38:23.210 shallow, meaningless social environment. 01:38:23.370 --> 01:38:28.970 And I think part of our minds know this and they crave for something better, for something 01:38:28.970 --> 01:38:29.770 deeper. 01:38:30.090 --> 01:38:36.010 Um, I uh many, many times uh these instincts and motives 01:38:36.010 --> 01:38:41.610 will lead people to join cults because there are many people out there who take advantage 01:38:41.610 --> 01:38:47.210 of this part of our psychology and use it uh for self aggrandizing purposes. 01:38:47.690 --> 01:38:52.380 Um Sometimes they form religious groups, sometimes they, you know, channel it into 01:38:52.380 --> 01:38:53.500 political activism. 01:38:54.140 --> 01:38:58.860 Um, we need these kinds of deep, meaningful relationships where we're intrinsically 01:38:58.860 --> 01:39:01.580 valuable to one another and irreplaceable to one another. 01:39:01.740 --> 01:39:05.500 Uh and the modern environment is just not fulfilling that need right now. 01:39:05.660 --> 01:39:07.820 It is it is failing to serve us there. 01:39:07.980 --> 01:39:13.290 Um, and I think taking an evolutionary perspective 01:39:13.850 --> 01:39:15.130 helps us to see that. 01:39:15.290 --> 01:39:20.810 And it helps us to think about how we can design our societies to better fulfill those 01:39:20.810 --> 01:39:26.410 needs of ours and what the consequences might be for people when those needs are being 01:39:26.410 --> 01:39:28.250 chronically unsatisfied. 01:39:30.090 --> 01:39:32.170 So, yeah, that's the needs part. 01:39:32.400 --> 01:39:35.360 The humility part is also huge. 01:39:35.760 --> 01:39:39.840 Uh, and I see it as a huge corrective um in the social sciences. 01:39:40.000 --> 01:39:45.040 I feel like the social sciences have taken a bad turn in terms of viewing humans as stupid 01:39:45.040 --> 01:39:45.920 and irrational. 01:39:46.720 --> 01:39:51.600 That, you know, if you look at psychology textbooks, it's it's a collection of biases and 01:39:51.600 --> 01:39:52.560 errors. 01:39:53.030 --> 01:39:55.910 Uh, you know, these are all the ways that we're dumb. 01:39:56.150 --> 01:40:00.790 These are all the ways that we're oversimplifying the world and making ourselves miserable 01:40:00.870 --> 01:40:03.110 and not serving ourselves. 01:40:03.350 --> 01:40:09.030 Um, here are a bunch of tips and tricks to, you know, live a better life or find 01:40:09.030 --> 01:40:11.110 happiness or whatever. 01:40:12.630 --> 01:40:17.110 And here are all the ways uh that we're gullible and biased in the political sphere. 01:40:17.510 --> 01:40:22.640 Here are all the ways in which we're vulnerable to misinformation uh and in group uh 01:40:22.960 --> 01:40:25.360 superiority bias and motivated reasoning. 01:40:25.520 --> 01:40:29.840 Uh and and usually these are often framed as everyone else uh is vulnerable to these 01:40:29.840 --> 01:40:31.280 biases, but not me. 01:40:31.920 --> 01:40:36.320 Um but if you take an evolutionary approach, you start to realize that people aren't stupid 01:40:36.480 --> 01:40:38.080 and people aren't gullible either. 01:40:38.240 --> 01:40:42.800 There's a there's a wonderful uh recent book by uh Hugo Mercier called Not Born Yesterday, 01:40:42.960 --> 01:40:47.830 where he bas he systematically debunks this myth that humans are gullible dupes. 01:40:47.990 --> 01:40:52.790 And he actually provides a lot of striking evidence for the opposite: that we're quite 01:40:52.790 --> 01:40:58.790 vigilant and skeptical and distrustful of people when we uh don't think that they're on 01:40:58.790 --> 01:41:01.270 our side or they have our best interests at heart. 01:41:01.430 --> 01:41:07.030 Uh and that explains a whole uh wealth of uh behavioral 01:41:07.030 --> 01:41:07.990 phenomena. 01:41:08.230 --> 01:41:13.140 Um And you only would have arrived at that insight if you took an evolutionary perspective. 01:41:13.780 --> 01:41:18.500 If you started thinking through the basic game theoretic logic of how does communication 01:41:18.500 --> 01:41:18.900 evolve? 01:41:19.060 --> 01:41:23.620 Well, it evolves when it's mutually beneficial to both communicators, when it uh increases 01:41:23.620 --> 01:41:24.980 both of their fitness. 01:41:25.300 --> 01:41:30.500 And communication cannot be beneficial if I'm being lied to or deceived or manipulated or 01:41:30.500 --> 01:41:31.140 exploited. 01:41:31.300 --> 01:41:37.060 You would expect a very strong selection pressure for people to be vigilant and skeptical 01:41:37.250 --> 01:41:38.690 and distrustful of people. 01:41:38.850 --> 01:41:43.330 And you would expect an aversion to being deceived and manipulated and exploited. 01:41:43.410 --> 01:41:46.690 And you would expect the psychology to be sensitive about a whole host of factors. 01:41:46.770 --> 01:41:48.290 Like how how loyal is this person? 01:41:48.450 --> 01:41:50.050 Are they on my side or the other side? 01:41:50.210 --> 01:41:52.370 Do they have my best interests at heart? 01:41:52.530 --> 01:41:54.690 Is this information going to be useful to me? 01:41:54.850 --> 01:41:56.770 Is it going to be useful in mobilizing our group? 01:41:56.930 --> 01:42:01.020 Is it going to signal that I uh uh am on the right side of this issue? 01:42:01.180 --> 01:42:03.580 Is it going to signal that I'm a good person to other people? 01:42:03.820 --> 01:42:07.660 All of these considerations are at play when we consume information and transmit 01:42:07.660 --> 01:42:08.300 information. 01:42:08.540 --> 01:42:12.620 And uh without taking an evolutionary perspective, you'd be vulnerable to this myth that 01:42:12.620 --> 01:42:17.180 humans are gullible dupes and social scientists are are smart and not gullible. 01:42:17.260 --> 01:42:22.140 Uh and uh therefore um psychologists are superior to the masses. 01:42:22.380 --> 01:42:26.830 Um I think humans are much smarter than we make them out to be. 01:42:27.310 --> 01:42:32.030 The mere fact that we exist, that all of our ancestors successfully survived and 01:42:32.030 --> 01:42:37.150 reproduced, suggests that we have a kind of deep rationality within us, the kind of 01:42:37.150 --> 01:42:42.110 rationality that it took to survive and reproduce in harsh environments again and again. 01:42:42.350 --> 01:42:48.110 So our default assumption when approaching the human mind and approaching uh the 01:42:48.270 --> 01:42:54.100 the complexity that uh you know behind our eyes is to ask 01:42:54.100 --> 01:42:57.620 ourselves, what what are the functions? 01:42:57.780 --> 01:42:58.820 What are the purposes? 01:42:59.060 --> 01:43:01.300 How is this smart and strategic? 01:43:01.620 --> 01:43:04.020 Not how is this stupid and broken? 01:43:04.420 --> 01:43:10.420 And I think once we ask the question of how is this a strategic, well designed 01:43:10.420 --> 01:43:11.140 adaptation? 01:43:11.300 --> 01:43:16.770 How is this serving the interest of the person or the genes that constructed it, 01:43:17.890 --> 01:43:22.850 we have a much better and more productive set of questions to ask and a much more 01:43:22.850 --> 01:43:27.090 productive research program when we begin with that question than when we begin with a 01:43:27.090 --> 01:43:32.370 smug, dismissive people are stupid, people are gullible, I'm smarter than them attitude. 01:43:33.090 --> 01:43:38.340 Yeah, and you can, I mean, uh one sees that in the history of sort of 01:43:38.340 --> 01:43:40.740 intellectual um thinking. 01:43:41.220 --> 01:43:47.220 Um so Edward Bernay's early 20th century um you know started the era the the field 01:43:47.220 --> 01:43:52.740 of propaganda um which turned into um um which turned into 01:43:53.620 --> 01:43:58.850 um public relations um and very important public 01:43:59.010 --> 01:44:04.690 intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, who was also the person who started the um the 01:44:04.690 --> 01:44:06.610 concept of stereotyping. 01:44:06.690 --> 01:44:08.530 Um he coined that term as well. 01:44:08.610 --> 01:44:12.210 He was a um very important, influential person. 01:44:12.530 --> 01:44:18.500 If you read Bernays or Walter Lippmann, I mean it is very explicitly we're the smart 01:44:18.500 --> 01:44:23.940 ones, and uh the masses are stupid, and we have to make the decisions for them. 01:44:24.020 --> 01:44:28.340 And there is a vein of very deep paternalism 01:44:29.700 --> 01:44:34.740 throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, social sciences. 01:44:34.900 --> 01:44:36.260 And and that's right. 01:44:36.420 --> 01:44:42.100 And I think that this idea of thinking, well, how are people, even 01:44:42.210 --> 01:44:46.690 ourselves, how is what's coming up into in us not simple but complicated? 01:44:46.770 --> 01:44:47.730 And how is it smart? 01:44:47.890 --> 01:44:49.570 It doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right thing. 01:44:49.650 --> 01:44:51.250 Even like what I experience, right? 01:44:51.330 --> 01:44:54.850 Of like, you know, oh man, I really want to click on the social media post, but I know I'm 01:44:54.850 --> 01:44:58.210 feeding the algorithm that's going to produce an outcome that is bad. 01:44:58.370 --> 01:45:01.170 You know, like I'm selecting this and I don't want to do that. 01:45:01.410 --> 01:45:05.340 But it's not treating me as myself as like, oh, I'm bad or simple or stupid. 01:45:05.420 --> 01:45:10.220 It's that there's a there's a there's a smartness to this and there's a complexity to this, 01:45:10.300 --> 01:45:11.980 and you have to respect that. 01:45:12.220 --> 01:45:15.020 Um and no, I think that's exactly right. 01:45:15.180 --> 01:45:21.020 Um, and I do think that um I also think there's this thing of 01:45:21.100 --> 01:45:26.990 you know, the it comes back to this idea that if it evolved, Um, or if it's 01:45:26.990 --> 01:45:32.030 a part of our evolved, this this isolated thing, like um it's it's bad. 01:45:32.270 --> 01:45:36.430 I do think is also uh I don't think it's a universal thing, right? 01:45:36.510 --> 01:45:41.150 I also think it there's a historical social um context to that too. 01:45:41.230 --> 01:45:45.470 And I think, you know, especially in the US, which is very um 01:45:46.110 --> 01:45:51.710 overrepresented for historical reasons um in science, especially behavioral 01:45:51.710 --> 01:45:52.590 sciences. 01:45:52.830 --> 01:45:56.800 Um, and there's an interesting history about that too. 01:45:58.240 --> 01:46:03.280 Thank you, Nazis, for running for lots of things, including uh the 01:46:03.600 --> 01:46:06.720 integration of uh of the ethologists. 01:46:06.800 --> 01:46:11.120 So the ethologists were doing quite well um in in Europe. 01:46:11.360 --> 01:46:17.360 And then um uh you know the the Third Reich took over and knocked, you know, 01:46:17.440 --> 01:46:22.560 um sort of took over and ate a lot of scientific progress in the behavioral sciences. 01:46:22.720 --> 01:46:28.630 Um but uh but this idea that sort of like evolved things are bad or part 01:46:28.630 --> 01:46:34.550 of human nature is bad, I mean, I think has very like, you know, a lot of roots in 01:46:34.550 --> 01:46:39.750 sort of puritanical and Calvinist thinking that this country was founded on. 01:46:39.910 --> 01:46:44.230 Um, and I also I do think that that still colors some of this narrative too. 01:46:44.390 --> 01:46:50.310 I do think that it's not an act of God, per uh pardon the pun, but um, and that uh 01:46:50.550 --> 01:46:56.460 and this comes back to sort of like it's it's okay If there's an evolved part of you that 01:46:56.460 --> 01:46:57.740 needs something, right? 01:46:57.900 --> 01:47:01.980 It's not okay if it like involves, well, I need to like, you know, dominate myself over 01:47:01.980 --> 01:47:03.740 people or like, you know, exploit people. 01:47:03.900 --> 01:47:04.940 Well, that's not okay. 01:47:05.020 --> 01:47:10.140 I mean, or it's okay in the sense of you can acknowledge why it's there, but then um, you 01:47:10.140 --> 01:47:15.820 know, use the fact that there are other adaptations with other logics to sort of check it 01:47:15.900 --> 01:47:18.060 um or understand why it would exist. 01:47:18.470 --> 01:47:24.390 But I think this um, but having this narrative of like, well, we are all moral hypocrites, 01:47:24.630 --> 01:47:24.950 right? 01:47:25.190 --> 01:47:30.470 That we all have this tendency to sort of um uh um 01:47:30.790 --> 01:47:36.710 essentialize and outgroup or exploit people, um, you know, it's complicated, 01:47:36.870 --> 01:47:39.990 it's not stupid, but it's still not ideal, right? 01:47:40.150 --> 01:47:41.670 I think, I think that's right. 01:47:41.750 --> 01:47:47.600 I think it comes back to what we talked about, which is this idea that if we're simple, and 01:47:47.600 --> 01:47:53.600 this idea that um you know and even well intended ideas that 01:47:53.680 --> 01:47:59.600 you know I if your vocabulary is I want 01:47:59.680 --> 01:48:04.240 things to be equal and I see inequality and I don't think that's good 01:48:05.440 --> 01:48:10.870 in my experience if you actually unpack and you talk to people who say that that is that's 01:48:10.870 --> 01:48:13.430 a consequence of a lack of vocabulary. 01:48:13.510 --> 01:48:17.670 It's not a typical thing to sort of like differentiate between like social level outcomes 01:48:17.670 --> 01:48:22.310 and individual psychological outcomes, let alone that there's lots of adaptations in our 01:48:22.310 --> 01:48:25.750 heads that are a consequence of lots of different calculations, right? 01:48:26.070 --> 01:48:31.510 And so I I this is where I think having a richer 01:48:31.510 --> 01:48:36.800 vocabulary of we are composed of lots of complicated adaptations. 01:48:37.280 --> 01:48:43.120 Just because they are evolved doesn't mean that they're morally suspect or that 01:48:43.120 --> 01:48:46.880 we should ignore that part of us. 01:48:48.080 --> 01:48:50.560 And it doesn't mean that they're stupid or smart. 01:48:50.720 --> 01:48:55.200 I mean, they're not stupid in the sense of they're not stupid in the sense of they're so 01:48:55.200 --> 01:48:56.400 dumb they wouldn't work. 01:48:56.560 --> 01:48:59.840 They're not so stupid that other people need to make the decisions for me. 01:48:59.920 --> 01:49:05.290 And I think that's what you were saying before is that this sort of the that people are 01:49:05.290 --> 01:49:10.090 stupid and need to be herded and we're gonna do the hurting. 01:49:10.250 --> 01:49:15.850 You know, I think that that does not um do justice to the dignity and 01:49:15.850 --> 01:49:20.010 autonomy of people and it doesn't respect them. 01:49:20.410 --> 01:49:22.730 Um and and that's right. 01:49:22.810 --> 01:49:28.400 And I think that that is one of the the things that gets lost um in this both 01:49:28.400 --> 01:49:33.840 sides back and forth sort of culture wars that we started with. 01:49:34.640 --> 01:49:35.280 Yeah. 01:49:37.440 --> 01:49:39.120 Well, we have a few minutes left. 01:49:39.360 --> 01:49:40.000 Yeah. 01:49:41.840 --> 01:49:47.760 One question I'm curious about from you is how bullish are you 01:49:47.760 --> 01:49:49.810 on evolutionary psychology? 01:49:49.970 --> 01:49:51.730 I mean, there there's a whole continuum here. 01:49:51.890 --> 01:49:56.210 You know, on one end of the not very bullish continuum is just, oh, it's just a useful 01:49:56.210 --> 01:49:57.250 perspective to have. 01:49:57.410 --> 01:50:00.930 Um, I think, you know, it's helpful to for people to take an evolutionary perspective from 01:50:00.930 --> 01:50:01.730 time to time. 01:50:01.970 --> 01:50:04.210 Um, it can help you ask the right questions. 01:50:04.290 --> 01:50:09.330 And on the other end of the continuum is the social sciences need to be evolutionary. 01:50:09.410 --> 01:50:15.400 This needs to be at the heart of everything we do that has to do with the 01:50:15.400 --> 01:50:16.600 study of human behavior. 01:50:16.760 --> 01:50:21.560 We need to f couch every debate in terms of evolutionary logic. 01:50:21.720 --> 01:50:27.320 It needs to be the meta-theory that subsumes psychology, anthropology, sociology, political 01:50:27.320 --> 01:50:30.440 science, culture, even philosophy. 01:50:30.840 --> 01:50:33.320 Where are you on the bullishness continuum? 01:50:34.520 --> 01:50:37.560 That's a good question because for me, um 01:50:40.290 --> 01:50:42.450 Here's here's my short answer. 01:50:42.690 --> 01:50:48.050 Um I think evolutionary 01:50:48.050 --> 01:50:51.570 psychology and I've heard other people say this. 01:50:51.730 --> 01:50:56.130 I think evolutionary psychology in an ideal world puts itself out of a job. 01:50:56.530 --> 01:51:02.450 Because what evolutionary psychology is, in essence, is saying is taking a an 01:51:02.450 --> 01:51:08.380 approach in a existing approach to humans that had historically been lacking 01:51:08.460 --> 01:51:10.220 an evolutionary lens. 01:51:10.380 --> 01:51:14.540 And to take that evolutionary lens requires all the things we talked about earlier, which 01:51:14.540 --> 01:51:18.540 is understanding human behavior is a result of design. 01:51:18.700 --> 01:51:20.220 Design is different than behavior. 01:51:20.380 --> 01:51:22.140 Design is different than an individual. 01:51:22.220 --> 01:51:24.540 It's the continuity across generations. 01:51:24.700 --> 01:51:29.420 What counts as design is a meshing of 01:51:30.130 --> 01:51:35.170 software and invariant features of the environment and the dynamics of what counts as a 01:51:35.170 --> 01:51:37.650 good outcome or good as differential reproductive success. 01:51:37.730 --> 01:51:41.010 That all sounds like jargon, but it's really crucial for understanding. 01:51:41.170 --> 01:51:46.610 There's like a bunch of little systems in us that are designed around what would lead to 01:51:46.610 --> 01:51:51.250 the survival and reproduction of that software in a natural environment. 01:51:52.540 --> 01:51:58.300 That idea that humans are composed of lots of software that's for 01:51:58.300 --> 01:52:04.220 solving real-world problems according to the logic of natural selection and not some other 01:52:04.220 --> 01:52:10.220 logic of just feeling good or just being duped into what everybody says around you or 01:52:10.220 --> 01:52:12.380 any other infinite number of things. 01:52:13.770 --> 01:52:19.450 I think that philosophy, psychology, anthropology, all the behavioral human 01:52:19.450 --> 01:52:25.130 behavioral sciences, thinking about humans in general, I think it's really hard 01:52:25.770 --> 01:52:31.370 to argue that anybody who hasn't gone through that way of 01:52:31.370 --> 01:52:32.010 thinking. 01:52:33.690 --> 01:52:34.890 That was a negative. 01:52:34.970 --> 01:52:37.130 So let me let me rephrase that. 01:52:37.370 --> 01:52:43.220 I think anybody who has gone through that way of thinking comes out the other 01:52:43.220 --> 01:52:49.060 end and is a better and more sophisticated consumer of any human thought 01:52:49.060 --> 01:52:50.580 than any human has. 01:52:51.860 --> 01:52:57.300 I believe that an organizing principle of all sciences, 01:52:57.540 --> 01:53:03.540 including like, you know, physics, where we're like, well, why was a certain level of 01:53:03.540 --> 01:53:07.620 physics intuitive for people and then all of a sudden it became unintuitive, right? 01:53:07.910 --> 01:53:13.830 Um, and new why did Newtonian forces, why were those sort of weird and didn't 01:53:13.830 --> 01:53:14.310 make sense? 01:53:14.390 --> 01:53:19.990 And why is quantum physics and relativity like super strange to the point where nobody 01:53:19.990 --> 01:53:22.310 actually like intuitively understands that? 01:53:22.710 --> 01:53:28.630 Um why uh um why that is is 01:53:28.700 --> 01:53:33.500 a consequence of the fact that we evolved a folk physics and we evolved a physics for a 01:53:33.500 --> 01:53:35.100 certain scale and range of things. 01:53:35.180 --> 01:53:39.980 And so I think even all sciences, let alone all sort of human thinking, 01:53:40.460 --> 01:53:44.620 benefits from this particular approach and is organized by it. 01:53:44.780 --> 01:53:50.730 So I think as a um as a addition to 01:53:50.970 --> 01:53:56.730 and part of our collective cultural knowledge, I am very 01:53:56.730 --> 01:54:02.250 bullish about evolutionary psychology in the sense of I do believe 01:54:02.890 --> 01:54:08.170 that many issues that have seemed like mysteries 01:54:09.050 --> 01:54:14.600 resolve if you understand that everything humans are doing is an output of evolved software 01:54:14.600 --> 01:54:17.080 that's designed for ancestral environments. 01:54:17.320 --> 01:54:19.240 And I think it's revolutionary. 01:54:19.320 --> 01:54:24.760 And I think that the percentage of that revolution that is underway is still under 1%. 01:54:25.960 --> 01:54:27.240 There's much more to do. 01:54:27.400 --> 01:54:29.800 So in that respect, I'm extremely bullish. 01:54:30.200 --> 01:54:35.720 The alternative answer, though, or the another way to answer it is 01:54:36.760 --> 01:54:42.490 um day to day, do I think that everybody 01:54:42.490 --> 01:54:48.330 should take an evolutionary approach and that it's the only right way to do things? 01:54:49.050 --> 01:54:52.650 Um, I don't think that that's true. 01:54:52.810 --> 01:54:58.250 Um, because um, I do think that there's, for example, certain 01:54:58.250 --> 01:55:03.450 areas of psychology where the function, the intuitive function, you don't really need 01:55:03.690 --> 01:55:06.660 thinking about selection pressures to do that. 01:55:08.020 --> 01:55:12.420 I still think design mindedness is helpful, but I don't think you need design mindedness 01:55:12.420 --> 01:55:13.380 from an evolution perspective. 01:55:13.460 --> 01:55:16.340 Although we could have a whole argument about whether or not you can really be design 01:55:16.420 --> 01:55:18.420 minded if you don't take an evolutionary approach. 01:55:19.380 --> 01:55:25.140 But I think for things like motor control or vision, and I mean, I'm not even sure I agree 01:55:25.140 --> 01:55:28.500 with this, but I think there's an argument for you don't need to take an evolutionary 01:55:28.500 --> 01:55:32.180 approach because you can sort of be design minded without that. 01:55:32.900 --> 01:55:35.890 There's also an argument you don't need to be design-minded either, right? 01:55:35.970 --> 01:55:39.730 There's people who, you know, it's important to do science collectively without that. 01:55:39.890 --> 01:55:45.890 So science is a large uh inter enterprise with lots of 01:55:45.890 --> 01:55:48.210 different people all doing different roles. 01:55:48.370 --> 01:55:54.050 And so in that respect, I don't think everybody should be taking an evolutionary approach. 01:55:54.210 --> 01:55:58.530 And I think there should be a plurality of them in any case, because who knows? 01:55:58.690 --> 01:56:01.410 And I'm sure we're all wrong for sure. 01:56:01.650 --> 01:56:07.160 Um uh and I look forward to you know hearing the next the next better things, 01:56:07.400 --> 01:56:13.400 but um but in terms of like can we do without it from a 01:56:13.400 --> 01:56:18.520 uh cultural institutional perspective, can the conceptual insights be 01:56:18.520 --> 01:56:19.720 jettisoned? 01:56:19.960 --> 01:56:20.760 I don't think so. 01:56:20.920 --> 01:56:23.240 I think in that respect it's invaluable. 01:56:23.880 --> 01:56:24.520 Yeah. 01:56:24.990 --> 01:56:26.830 Um, well, I agree with you. 01:56:26.910 --> 01:56:29.230 I'm about as bullish as you are. 01:56:29.390 --> 01:56:35.150 Um, I think that it ought to be the meta theory of social science in 01:56:35.150 --> 01:56:35.790 general. 01:56:35.950 --> 01:56:41.550 Um, given that humans are animals and products of the Darwinian process, um, 01:56:41.710 --> 01:56:47.470 I see no way in which we could actually understand humans and human nature without 01:56:47.470 --> 01:56:52.560 thinking about evolution, without thinking about the actual process that produced us. 01:56:52.800 --> 01:56:58.560 That it seems uh wacky on its face that we could develop a complete 01:56:58.560 --> 01:57:04.000 understanding of who we are while completely ignoring the actual process that 01:57:04.000 --> 01:57:04.960 produced us. 01:57:05.520 --> 01:57:11.520 I think evolutionary thinking should be part and parcel of all of our investigations into 01:57:11.520 --> 01:57:14.080 human psychology and behavior and culture. 01:57:14.320 --> 01:57:20.320 Um and insofar as it is not a part of those questions, we are invariably going to 01:57:20.320 --> 01:57:24.690 stray down blind alleys and go in wrong directions. 01:57:24.930 --> 01:57:30.850 I think evolutionary thinking is crucial for evaluating the plausibility 01:57:30.850 --> 01:57:34.770 of hypotheses and theories before we even begin the process of testing them. 01:57:35.010 --> 01:57:38.850 When you think about humanity, there are an infinite number of hypotheses and theories you 01:57:38.850 --> 01:57:39.810 could generate. 01:57:40.610 --> 01:57:43.890 And the vast majority of them are going to be wrong-headed. 01:57:44.740 --> 01:57:50.420 What evolutionary thinking helps you do is it helps you assess, well, which of these 01:57:50.420 --> 01:57:52.180 ideas is actually plausible? 01:57:53.060 --> 01:57:56.420 Which of these questions is actually a good productive question? 01:57:56.660 --> 01:58:00.980 Which of these theories about human mental life are worth investigating? 01:58:01.140 --> 01:58:05.060 Which of these functions make sense from a Darwinian perspective? 01:58:05.220 --> 01:58:09.910 It helps you ask the right questions and develop the right theories, and that's invaluable 01:58:09.910 --> 01:58:14.070 in a field where there are an infinite number of theories you could potentially dream up. 01:58:14.630 --> 01:58:17.510 So I agree with you that we should be bullish about it. 01:58:17.670 --> 01:58:22.470 I think also it uh should subsume much of philosophy. 01:58:22.630 --> 01:58:26.470 I mean, you've written about um the the interplay between evolutionary psychology and 01:58:26.470 --> 01:58:28.070 philosophy, you know, the question of free will. 01:58:28.230 --> 01:58:33.180 Ultimately, the whole free will debate is an output of our psychological adaptations, of 01:58:33.180 --> 01:58:38.940 our intuitions about how to uh carve the world into people and inanimate objects 01:58:39.100 --> 01:58:40.780 and mechanical systems. 01:58:41.020 --> 01:58:46.300 Um, and we cannot understand the free will debate and the conflicting intuitions that are 01:58:46.300 --> 01:58:49.100 at play without doing good evolutionary psychology. 01:58:49.260 --> 01:58:53.180 I think the same is true with philosophical debates about morality, what the nature of 01:58:53.180 --> 01:58:57.900 morality is, the same is true with debates about consciousness, how consciousness arises 01:58:57.900 --> 01:58:59.740 from mere brain activity. 01:59:00.150 --> 01:59:05.110 all of these philosophical debates ultimately derive from evolved psychological systems 01:59:05.110 --> 01:59:07.350 that produce conflicting intuitions in us. 01:59:07.590 --> 01:59:12.310 And we need to understand where those intuitions come from and how they work before we can 01:59:12.310 --> 01:59:17.110 even begin to answer the question of which intuitions we should rely on and which 01:59:17.110 --> 01:59:18.630 intuitions are correct. 01:59:18.870 --> 01:59:23.590 We need to learn about where those intuitions come from and how they work before we can 01:59:23.590 --> 01:59:25.830 begin to make real philosophical progress. 01:59:26.070 --> 01:59:30.940 So I think that evolutionary thinking is indispensable not only for social science, but 01:59:30.940 --> 01:59:32.300 also for philosophy. 01:59:32.780 --> 01:59:37.020 I'm very bullish on the importance of evolutionary thinking. 01:59:37.340 --> 01:59:39.740 I'm not so bullish on the type of evolutionary thinking. 01:59:39.820 --> 01:59:43.580 We could have debates about whether we want to be, you know, cultural evolutionists or 01:59:43.580 --> 01:59:47.580 biological evolutionists, or whether we want to be Sperber-style cultural evolutionists or 01:59:47.580 --> 01:59:51.980 Heinrich-style cultural evolutionists, or whether how modular we want to be, whether 01:59:52.140 --> 01:59:56.130 modularity makes sense, whether how adaptationist we want to be, you know, how how just how 01:59:56.130 --> 01:59:57.810 good of an engineering system is natural selection. 01:59:57.890 --> 02:00:00.130 We can have these debates and I'm I'm happy to have them. 02:00:00.370 --> 02:00:04.290 But they need to be uh under the umbrella of evolutionary thinking itself. 02:00:04.450 --> 02:00:09.970 Um and that to me is the only way to gain r real progress and make real insight 02:00:10.290 --> 02:00:14.290 into how humans work and the the human condition itself. 02:00:14.610 --> 02:00:18.690 And I think our shared bullishness on this topic is the reason why we're here. 02:00:18.770 --> 02:00:20.450 It's the reason we're having this conversation. 02:00:20.610 --> 02:00:23.400 It's the reason we wanted to start this podcast. 02:00:23.560 --> 02:00:27.560 And I think that's about as good as end good as good as an ending to this episode as we 02:00:27.560 --> 02:00:28.440 could possibly ask for. 02:00:28.520 --> 02:00:29.240 What do you think? 02:00:29.880 --> 02:00:30.440 Sounds good. 02:00:30.520 --> 02:00:30.760 Yeah. 02:00:30.840 --> 02:00:36.440 We should just talk to the adaptations silently awaiting us in the party that were 02:00:36.680 --> 02:00:40.360 uh running around screaming uh not talking to them. 02:00:40.520 --> 02:00:46.050 We should just talk to them and talk to people who haven't been listened to. 02:00:50.370 --> 02:00:54.610 All right, we've finished another episode of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. 02:00:54.770 --> 02:00:56.290 Thank you for listening. 02:00:56.610 --> 02:01:02.210 If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, uh, leave a good comment, or feel free 02:01:02.210 --> 02:01:04.450 to support us on Patreon if you can. 02:01:04.610 --> 02:01:06.370 If you can't, no problem. 02:01:06.850 --> 02:01:09.730 And David, we're we're gonna keep doing this, yeah? 02:01:10.040 --> 02:01:15.800 yeah every week you'll get one of these podcasts so please subscribe amazing um 02:01:15.960 --> 02:01:21.880 so david we'll we'll see you you know a couple days yeah yeah sounds good okay see you 02:01:21.880 --> 02:01:23.800 next week until next time bye