Magic, Shamanism, and the Scale of Cooperation with Manvir Singh
2026-09-22 12:00:00.000 +00:00

This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Actual Evolutionary Psychology. By actual evolutionary psychologists. We didn't introduce our names. Was that Yeah, sometimes we leave that out. It's kinda I don't know. Do you want to say your name? Oh, I'm David Pinsaff. I'm David. well, I always say David Petruzki, which is correct. I mean that's what's on my driver's license, but I should say Dave Petrozowski because that's our different things. Probably. I think the reason we sometimes leave this out is because they're not like an ideal or obvious place to put our names. Like where should we put it? Like at the very beginning? But then how do we segue? Or the middle? Yeah. Do we do it after evolutionary cycles?

This is pretty good. At the at the way end? This meta thing. No, we're just discussing where to put it. Um we should just be scientists about it in parametrically very I mean we should keep sentences whole, but otherwise we can put it at the beginning, middle, and end. Why don't we have our audience vote on it? Send us your opinions about where you think we should put our names. What are the options? Well, at the very beginning, before the name of the podcast and the tagline. We could put it in between the name of the podcast and the tagline, or we could put it at the end after the tagline. Or we have a long pause in the middle of the tagline and we could put it in between there, but that feels like an M-dash situation.

Actual evolutionary psychologist meaning me dated pins off and like put it like in the middle of the tagline. That's like such an academic writing. Like that's that's my bad writing habit. I've become a better writer, but I still have such a I really want to just put a I want to put a whole clause in between us in just sandwich those sentences, just onion layers. All right, let's shut up and get to my pretty music. Okay, here we go. Enjoy. Um you, me, and Madveer saying Yes, Vir Singh, uh, excellent scholar, uh, really doing cutting-edge, uh awesome work at the intersection of anthropology and cognitive science and uh evolutionary theory. Um we covered so many interesting topics in this. Um we talked about shamanism, why shamanism uh appears in so many cultures around the world

and why it's so psychologically compelling and attractive to the human mind. Um we talked a lot about um magical thinking like sympathetic magic, divination, and and what's going on there. Are these practices uh uh quote unquote stupid or irrational? Or are they serving some other function? Are they cognitive byproducts of um of the way our minds work? Or do they reflect a kind of error management logic? We get into all that stuff. Yeah. As a group psychologist, I've always wanted to talk to Monvier and Luke Gowaki about their recent work arguing that the social scale of ancestral environments or the EEA involves larger scale social communities than you might ordinarily think or people sort of thought in a sort of simple way from a in the

EEA from sort of a diorama model perspective of the savannah. I got a chance to ask Man Veer um about that, which was lovely as well. Yeah. Very fun conversation. And yeah, uh this idea that the EEA was broader and more variable than we think, then it's not just this picture of the small scale egalitarian hunter-gatherer band, I think, is a major advance in our evolutionary thinking and should be continued to uh to be reflected on by evolutionary psychologists and scholars. And Manveer had a great background uh during the episode. If you were only listening on the acoustic modality, go check it out. He had Australian, was it Paleolithic megafauna? Was that am I remembering that correctly? That's right.

He had a really great background. Yeah, yeah. And we talked a little bit about Ice Age uh creatures. Yes. And he's writing a book about mythology on the topic of Ice Age creatures. Yes, that's right. So get excited for that. It's gonna be a banger, I'm sure. Yeah. Um and uh anything else, David? No, I think that about that about does it. Okay. Well, uh enjoy Manvere and uh yeah, look for the megafauna. Look for them. Enjoy. Man Veer, we're really happy to have you here and and chat with you uh about all your interesting uh research interests uh and field work. Uh I have to interrupt before we even proceed. I'm really sorry. Um a terrible podcast co-host. Man Veer, can you explain your beautiful background, assuming you can see it yourself?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. This is place to see in Australia. Um so these are like places in megafauna. So we have the giant short faced kangaroo. We have diprotodon. It's like a giant wombat. Um yeah, yeah, I I I I have I'm kind of enchanted. To some degree. Yeah, I'm enchanted by the by the world of the megafauna. So what is not to be enchanted by? Um you you are in a good way a child who who didn't grow up like our children who love dinosaurs and are like, This is amazing. It is amazing, right? Uh it is. Yeah. I mean we have uh I I live close to the La Brea tar pits and I take my daughter there all the time. She loves it. But what's wild is just like these huge animals that coexisted with our ancestors.

I remember see the the one exhibit was um an ice age bear that stood t literally 12 feet tall. Was this a cave bear? Just an Ice Age bear. Oh, okay. It wasn't specifically a cave. I don't know. And there was a taxidermy exhibit where you actually look up and see this bear standing 12 feet tall, and imagining what it must have been like for our ancestors to have to contend with that in their environment is just wild. Yes. I'm gonna interrupt both of you again because this is a John Tubi story and it's worth saying. John Tubi is is he would tell undergraduates that you might think things are difficult, but your ancestors dealt with these 12-foot bears. Like you are more resilient. Your your nature is more uh resilient than you think.

You your ancestors successfully dealt with this stuff. You can deal with what you're dealing with. Not in a minimizing way, but in an empowering. It put puts our bullshit in perspective. Correct. So Monvirt that's wonderful. Um uh yeah, there's eucalyptus all over here in in is it also in Davis? 'Cause in Southern California they the the settlers uh planted eucalyptus, which wasn't great because it's like fi firebombs, you know, like during the There's a lot of eucalyptus here. Are is there a lot there? Yeah, yeah. Are are there any megafauna aside from well, koalas are not megafauna unless were there giant koalas, do you know? Um I don't know. I don't know. But I think diprotodon, I think wombats and koalas are nice.

Related. Okay. I mean there must have been. Yeah, because I'm just wondering, like, if there's like the interesting thing, like the avocado seed, and there's a giant ground sloth that could pass that pit, right? Because like, you know, seeds are for dispersal. Um, so the idea that there had to be something that could actually pass the pit of an avocado suggests a giant ground slot. So I was just wondering if there's any co-evolved megafauna in Australia for that have like weird plant relationships like that. Oh, I'm sure there are. I don't know. I don't know exactly. Have you seen this thing on a separate note? I think there are trees in the British Isles that there's a hypothesis that they're

adapted to regularly being toppled over by elephants. No, that's fantastic. Or something like that. Or being brushed up against by elephants. Something like that. Wow. What what is the the counter response to that selection pressure? How do they deal with that? You mean in their can like in a modern world? Yeah. Or what are you asking? What's the design feature that suggests that they're designed to be brushed up? Oh, oh. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. And that's a good question. Interesting. Maybe like uh sharp branches or something. Or maybe like um I wonder if the uh uh they're they kind of break easily, but maybe it doesn't yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Oh, that they can they can withstand uh bran branches breaking better than other trees or

something like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Interesting. There's a I think there's an argument that black bears are more docile than they should be given their relative formidability. And it's because especially at least in North America, They co-evolved with saber-tooth uh tiger cats and much bigger formidable animals. So we are actually very lucky. I mean, we killed off the grizzlies here in the continental US or southern or anyway, but uh but I think that's the argument is that they're more meek than they probably should be, and we're kind of grateful for that. But that's an EA holdover as well. Interesting. Interesting. Anyway, this is great. Anyway, Bonvier, thanks for coming. Uh this is great.

I mean, it's it's good to start, you know, in broad strokes with the EEA as a concept with the ancestral selection pressures that's shaped human psychology. Um, and one of the most interesting things to emerge from these ancestral selection pressures is the practice of shamanism, which I know you've written um a beautiful book about called shamanism. I recommend that everyone read it. It's a wonderful book. And um a a priori, it seems like kind of a strange thing that would emerge from ancestral selection pressures. Shamanic practices these um elaborate rituals, um going into trances, taking uh hallucinogenic substances, um uh healing people or putting on ritualistic performances that suggest that some illness has been

healed or some misfortune has been remedied. For me personally, when I think about these practices and how widespread how widespread and ubiquitous they are, I find myself very puzzled because I myself, as a uh Western science-minded atheist, um cannot wrap my head around why people um buy into this and why they aren't more skeptical. And I'm curious if if you share that mindset when approaching, or if you shared it in the past and and approach this topic with a kind of um uh uh bafflement or or at least curiosity as to as to how people could um overcome their skepticism and epistemic vigilance. And I'm curious is if um as you've studied shamanism more closely, um if that mindset has changed and now you you can begin to see um how and why people uh entertain

these ideas and find them compelling. Yeah, there's a lot packaged into that question. Um and and there's a there's a lot to talk about. So yeah, one of the basic questions that I confronted in starting to think about shamanism was the one of why should people um pay other experts or specialists to engage in these practices? Why are we predisposed to rely on on practices or techniques that that by many measures seem to have no effect on their stated purpose. You know, you I I I promise to attack babies in a neighboring group, to change the weather, to divine the location of animals. Um as far as we know, these these kinds of promises, um, these these practitioners or specialists don't actually have the capacity to necessarily ensure those.

Um, and in the book, I I review some evidence for why I think that's the case. Um so honestly, at the at the foundation, what I think is really important is a kind of error management or uh a a a bet-hedging psychology, um, which has been used to understand superstition and magic and ritual more generally. Um, and so, you know, I think shamanism is is a really intricate or elaborate manifestation, but we can start with something as simple as why do sports players uh wear the same whatever boxers or sports trucks or whatever they're called socks. Yeah, or have they have their lucky job strap or whate whatever. Yeah, yeah. Why do they cross lines and dirt? Why do people who are about to take a big exam um wear certain amulets?

You know, there there are many manifestations, many forms of superstition, magic, ritual that we find even in contemporary Western societies. And I think a really powerful theoretical lens for explaining that has been a kind of error management psychology. That as people are evaluating causal relationships or choosing different interventions to act on the world in instrumental ways, there are two kinds of uh errors they can confront. They can either have false positives, so they can um they can think there's a relationship when there isn't one, or they can have a miss. They can fail to discern a useful relationship when there actually is one. Um, and uh as a lot of evolutionary psychology or some work in evolutionary psychology,

people like Mart Marty Hazleton have have shown, but also as has been explored in things like signal detection theory, um or um you know the the the the body of theory about uh air management more broadly, um uh when there is an asymmetry of costs um associated with with two kinds of errors, uh you want to uh you know, natural selection will favor uh setting the threshold in a way that minimizes the more costly error. Um and so I don't know what's going on over there. Okay, if you can't see there's an incredible light show happening in that mirror's zoom did something very interesting. Yeah. And we're just transformed into something supernatural. So so the the example that comes up a lot is is a um a a smoke detector, a a fire alarm.

Um and so yeah, you're going to you're gonna set the threshold sufficiently low that it's going to uh go off more than it should be. It's gonna go off when people are like smoking marijuana in their dorms or when someone's cooking some veggies and they start to burn. Um, But you're willing to take these costs, these false alarms, because it means the threshold is sufficiently low that you're going to minimize the cost of these costly misses. That even every time there is a fire, you're hopefully going to capture it. And so the argument is that magic fundamentally is the product of a similar psychology. And you can actually this this theory, this approach, an error management uh explanation of

magic makes all kinds of predictions about the contexts in which people shouldn't should use magic so they should use magic in contexts where that are um where there are uh high stakes so what we're what you might think of as very fitness relevant in in um in in high stakes ways um contexts in which um individuals have have minimal control in contexts that that resolve randomly in their favor. And you can actually make a prediction that as the likelihood of the outcome happening goes low, the potential benefit should should become larger. You should have this compensatory effect. And these are these are really well uh borne out. So um decades of research on magic and superstition. Oh yeah, Dave.

Can I just poke is that because the ex you're are you talking about something where the expected value is held constant such that the more variable it is, the higher the benefit is? Or can you just uh elaborate on that last point? I didn't quite follow why that would be Yeah. Well maybe maybe I'm mistaken. But yeah I'm thinking it's it's an expected expected benefit kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I guess we should actually think it should accounting for the cost of the intervention. Um, good. So the cost benefit is constant, but the expected value, so like a low probability but very high benefit thing versus a lower variability or more probable thing that's a lower benefit, these might have the same expected value value.

Okay, yes, yes, yes. I'm with you. Good. Good good. Okay. And and this is controlling for cost. Yeah, cool. Okay. Um so I I wanna chime in and and say why, you know, I I do f I find this logic compelling, I find the error management framework compelling, but I still don't find I I find that this doesn't quite scratch the itch for me in terms of satisfying my curiosity about why people believe uh this stuff. Because I can I can understand the error management logic, but it doesn't make it seem to me plausible that the particular causal relationship in question is at play. So, yes, um, insofar as errors are inevitable, we would expect natural selection to um uh favor the less costly error. Um, but also we would expect natural selection to minimize error in general, right?

Insofar as there is any kind of cost. And one way to minimize error in general is to ground one's causal models on plausible regularities or folk ontologies, right? And so it seems to me that there is a plausible causal connection between, say, the type of bat that I use if I'm playing baseball. Say, you know, maybe maybe I'm more likely to hit the ball if the if the bat is lighter, let's say. Maybe I'm more likely to hit the ball if I'm standing a little uh closer to the base, right? These are plausible, these have plausible causal connections to the outcome of interest to me, which is hitting the ball. Whereas what jock strap I'm wearing, that just does not seem to have any kind of plausible

causal mechanism that could increase the likelihood that I would hit the ball. And so it still seems odd to me that people would favor these explanations without a plausible causal mechanism at play. And ways that seem to violate our folk ontologies in a certain way. Usually we have folk physics, we have intuitions about how objects interact with each other, about how objects can't be in two places at once, about how if one thing is going to impinge upon another object, it has to make contact. We have all these intuitions. And it seems like uh there just doesn't seem to be a connection between, say, a jockstrap and and me hitting a home run. So I'm still my itch has not quite been scratched as to why people find these uh

explanations compelling. Okay. Sorry, there's sorry, there's there's one more, there's one more uh part of it. Even if we accept the error management logic, um that um it is less costly to say wear the jock strap than to miss out on a potentially valuable causal relationship. Even if we buy that, that doesn't necessarily imply that that I need to sincerely believe that the jockstrap causes um the the the home run hitting, let's say. Right. I could just I could just think, you know, it probably it doesn't have any effect at all. But I'm just gonna wear it anyway because on the off chance that it does have an effect, um, it'll you know, that's you know, the the benefit is so large that it's still worth it

for me to wear the jack strap, even though probably it doesn't do anything. Usually that's not how people talk about their superstitions. Usually they they have a sincere belief that it does have a causal connection, or at least that a causal connection is very significantly likely. So those are the two um areas that I would push back on in terms of this explanation. So why is the belief sincere um as opposed to say a low probability? Um and uh why do why are uh implausible or um folk ontologically unlikely causal relationships favored? Okay, awesome. Yeah. So let's maybe let's address the the second and then we can come back to the first. My my microphone is like blinking in and out of existence.

Fantastic. It's so it's so on point for this conversation. Um okay, so for the second, I I think you're totally right. And in in fact, the empirical literature, the empirical evidence to my understanding, is not that people will profess um sincere and absolute belief in these superstitions. So the example that that I'm thinking about, which I I um touch upon in the book, is there's a study where people survey baseball players in Japan and the United States about their various superstitions. And, you know, they do jock straps, they're marking X's in the the dirt, whatever. Um a number of these other interventions. Um, and they actually asked them about their perceived efficacy. And um, although I I forget the exact number, it's like 75% or 80% of players engage in

these superstitions, their uh evaluation for the efficacy is something like it's something between like almost never has an impact and maybe hasn't, or and maybe sometimes has an impact. And and that we should look at the paper, or or someone can look at the paper. Um, so so it's not necessarily do you believe in this? Yes, no, but it's like how effective do you think this actually is? And people's evaluation of the efficacy is is pretty low. Um and so I mentioned that to say that that um uh at least in the Western in this context, and kind of a weird context, um, people are not professing what we might call sincere absolute belief in this. In the in context where people are going to shamans, and one thing I talk about in my book

is that I also think there's often there isn't an uh what there is, you know, ethnographically speaking, is there seems to be some faith that there are shamans somewhere who have these capacities. Um, but there is actually a constantly a lot of skepticism about individual practitioners. Some people have have skepticism about many practitioners or or all of the shamans who exist right now. Um, and so I think people go to shamans often without necessarily expecting them totally to to to work. Um so so that's the your second point. Your first point is a really interesting one and something that I have been thinking about a lot with one of my PhD students. We're thinking about. So are you familiar with the idea of sympathetic magic?

Why don't you um I can go through it? Define it. Define it. Yeah. Yeah. So sympathetic magic is the basic principle that we find in a lot of magical practices as they occur across societies that like affects like. And there are two principles of sympathetic magic that are kind of codified in the anthropological literature. One is this idea of contagion that um something that touches something else, uh things that that touch end up impacting each other uh for a long time. So I can take one of your hairs and I can do magic on it and it will affect you. You can step in the dirt and I can you know affect w your footprint and it it'll affect you. Um The other one is uh similarity. Um, and this is more like that, like effects like the the quintessential example is the um

the voodoo doll that uh or an effigy. I can make something that resembles something else, and I I can uh uh act on it and it will affect the target. Or, you know, I want to make rainfall, and so I sprinkle water on a little thing that resembles my house. Um and um There's this question of why is sympathetic magic, why are similarity and contagion so culturally sticky, and we might even say cognitively sticky? What is predisposing humans everywhere to so reliably gravitate towards these practices? And one hypothesis is actually kind of in accordance with what you're saying. Um maybe humans are endowed with particular causal intuitions. You know, we in in trying to map a causal structural of the world, uh, we are especially

attentive, or or we are apt to suspect that things that touch end up imposing or are affecting each other, um, or somehow that things that that resemble each other have some kind of causal relationship or causal association. Um, and that predisposes us to favor those forms of magic. Now, that actually raises the question of why people should be endowed with predispositions that make them uh gravitate towards these causal relationships because it is not actually the fact that acting on things that resemble each other means that that they're they're affected. Um but but it's it's just to say that that I think at least one approach or one hypothesis is that yes, forms of magic that actually do accord with some kind of folk ontology of of

causality are favored. Um now I've had actually pushback, and and my PhD student has has made me Uh uh a bit more skeptical or or a bit more open to the to the possibility that this isn't the case, that this isn't actually the best way to explain sympathetic magic. Um, and what she has really been arguing to me in a really interesting way from engaging with people in computational cognitive science is that um epistemic vigilance may apply to information that's coming from social others, um, but maybe it doesn't apply as much to us mapping out causal relationships or or or ways of intervening on the world that maybe in fact people are are quite yes, we're we're we're we're skeptical and careful

of when when confronted with information by you know presented from from people who are maybe attempting to deceive us. But when actually trying to discern how what's affecting uh other things in the world, yes, we might have some folk physics, but we might actually be much more epistemically promiscuous or or open. Which which I find interesting and and goes against maybe some of the the things that I've really been been invited to think about or or ways that I've I've I've really thought about how humans get information and evaluate information from the world. But yeah, those are those are just some thoughts for your for your first question. Now actually going from your first question to shamanism, the interesting thing about

shamanism is that shamans are not, you know, giving people jock straps and saying that this will affect your um your your your baseball playing um they are actually really acting within people's folk ontologies people's models of the world um and so uh what shamans almost overwhelmingly do is that they um uh provide some service or promise to to uh produce some desired outcome by engaging with unseen agents that are believed to to oversee or be related to the outcome that that you're interested in. Um so you believe that you're sick because a witch has harmed you the shaman will attack that witch you believe that um yeah you're you're sick because a a a a particular ghost um attacked you, or because your soul was lost somewhere, they'll call back your

soul. You want rain, they'll engage with some kind of rain goddess. Um, and so so uh yeah, if we think about y'all might be familiar with model free and model-based learning, this idea that um when people are um learning or evaluating actions, they both use kind of expected costs and benefits, but also simulated models of the world. And I think to understand shamanism, it kind of helps to think about both that there's an error management way in which people um just um uh are using expected reward in ways that minimize costly errors, but then they're also actually evaluating practices within their own models of of reality. I mean, that then raises the question or begs the question of why do people believe that

gods, ghosts, spirits, witches uh are involved in the outcomes that that they're interested in, but um but I do think shamans are are actually tapping into people's folk ontologies of causality, if that makes sense. For sure. Yeah. I mean, what what do you think about this way of thinking about it? So this the sympathetic magic stuff doesn't really make sense in terms of folk physics. So if I if I water a model of a miniature model of my house. There's not really a physical mechanism that could link that to the rain, to real rain raining on my house, right? But in the social world, that relationship might actually make sense. So if I attack or burn an image of you or a statue of you, that really does suggest some animus toward you.

How I uh interact with something that is similar to you or symbolically represents you really could tell you important information about my allegiances. If I burn the American flag, for instance, uh, that might tell you something really important about my uh coalitional allegiances. So while sympathetic magic doesn't really make sense in terms of uh folk physics, it might make a kind of social sense, right? And insofar as the sympathetic magic ritual is a social ritual designed to affect um the actions of supernatural agents, um maybe it could be seen as a kind of intentional signal or communicative uh gesture toward um uh another supernatural agent as opposed to a physical mechanism. In other words, that the the the logic of social life and symbolism and communication is

being um brought into the domain of physics where it doesn't belong. Do you buy that way of thinking of this? So so then would you say that um sympathetic magic as it's used for non-social instrumental ends, hunting magic, for example, is like a kluge byproduct? Is that the account? Yeah. So I would I would suspect, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that that maybe the model that's that's uh that people have in their head is that there's some agent, some supernatural agent that is causally responsible for whether I succeed in this hunt or not. And if I make some kind of communicative or symbolic gesture that this agent would understand, then that might help me succeed in this hunt. So it's not so much that um the symbolic act is causally related to the to the success of

the hunt in a way that a billiard ball is related to the movement of another billiard ball. Uh it's that the ritual is a symbolic gesture or a social gesture or communicative act to an imagined agent. Yeah. Just to interrupt, it's like a storyboard. It's the function of storyboarding. So it's sort of storyboarding for the future to spirits as opposed to storyboarding so we can all make a movie. So that would that would predict that that these rituals would coincide with some belief in a supernatural agent, and you would rarely, if ever, see these kinds of rituals in the absence of any belief about a spirit or or a or s or a supernatural agent. Yeah, I the thing I struggle with. So it's an interesting account.

The thing I struggle with is that it it does seem like sympathetic magic. So so I do think like the the practitioners of sympathetic magic also often do hold beliefs in supernatural agents. When they're engaging in it, it doesn't seem like they often necessarily are invoking those supernatural agents, are trying to communicate with them. They do seem like actions devoid of these kinds of supernatural third parties. You know, you might you might argue back, well, that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't represent them as being there. Um yeah, I I I'll say that uh it's an interesting account. I am a little skeptical, but But it's interesting. Is that response sort of, I think, for for many listeners, presumably their more similar

experience would be something like if you're in church, there's sort of a right way to do a ritual. But we're not thinking like, oh, where is God in the building such that he's or Jesus or the Holy Spirit such that he's watching us right now? Is that the sort of flavor of what your response was? Is that if it's true, if David's storyboarding account is true, the proximate experience, at least on the ground, isn't really explicit awareness of the agent in the same way that I just described for most people's experience of church. Is that a fair characteristic? Yeah, you're saying if I wanted to buttress the account against the response that people aren't invoking it, one response might be that just as people are maybe

without awareness but still feeling watched in church or something. Yeah, or or maybe just uh I think I was just sort of many people aren't familiar with the the ethnographic or cross-cultural uh work that you are. And so I'm just sort of trying to imagine a more mundane for listeners and for myself even experience that's very similar that I think you could see it both ways, right? Like you can argue that there's this weird ritual we do in church. And if some kid is like, Well, why do we do this? It's because, well, honey, because God is watching us. But nobody's like, you know, like looking around, being like, Where is God? Or, you know, I mean But so I'll say like the difference I think. So I'll give you an example just uh uh in Mentui.

so I I have for many years worked off the west coast of Sumatra in the Mintawe Islands. And as a part of my work, we built a small house. And whenever you build a house, you have to engage in a lot of magic to um protect it. Um and so you plant plants outside in the front, some of which um promise good and some of which deter bad. Um and so the plants that deter bad, there's one that um one of these plants that when you touch it, it kind of closes. There's another plant that is very twisty. And there's a lot of sympathetic causality invoked that when the evil comes or bad things come, these deter it in in very many ways. And so I when they're planting it and and thinking about this, uh uh the sense is more that this there's some kind of causal relationship here than there

is some kind of it's not even like they say that God is watching or spirits are watching, but they don't know they're not aware of them. It's it's it's really kind of detached from the discussion about supernatural agents, if that's clear. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I yeah, it and this is maybe my question too is that it might be also that magic or shamanism or rituals are s are a very heterogeneous class. And in fact, both things might be right. Yes, yes, yes. No, no, I think they are a very heterogeneous class. And I think you can have different mechanistic experiences. Did Clark Clark had uh some talks, and I don't know, hi Clark, if you're listening, um, on hunting magic. I remember that.

Uh in his argument. Yeah, and I think I don't know if it's published. I know he has this cool volume. Um, we can listen back to our episode. I think he talked about it when we interviewed him. But his argument was that um hunting magic in Monvere, you might know even better than me, um, if you remember more. But essentially it's sort of self-mental technology um of uh having a routine, just like meditation is it's a technology of um providing inputs to your own information processing system to, for example, de-stress, focus, attend. And those things can work, right? Like if you're too worried about performing, like you know, if you're on a sports team, then you might systems might be engaged that actually are counterproductive to peak

performance. And it might be some rituals like goalies wiping the mistake off the off the goalpost is is a way to ritualize getting in a certain information processing state. And I think Clark's argument was that some of hunting magic was like this, where it was a way to calibrate which systems within the phenotype are sort of turned on and how much and which ones aren't, and to get in that reliable state that apparently is fairly well attuned for, you know, for example, noticing prey animals or something. Monvir, I'm curious what you think about that. Is that a different account? Is that a different account for a different part of the elephant, so to speak? Pardon the the pun. Um or or or am I getting it wrong?

What do what are your thoughts about that? Yeah. Yeah, so I don't remember the exact account, but what you said does does vaguely accord with what I what I remember. So I um I I trust that that's like a solid representation. Um yeah, so I would say there's a there's a whole class of explanations of magic uh uh that also are empirically borne out to some degree that argue for what we might call intrinsic benefits. Um so there's also a bunch of literature, including some experimental work, showing that um people who are engage in magic or rituals or superstitions also um uh it it functions to reduce stress or anxiety and you can measure that in physiological measures. Yeah totally. Um yeah uh I think that's all plausible.

I think it's plausible that it has those effects. Um I I'm honestly I tend to be a little skeptical that those are the that is the function of magic, or that is the driving effect, that is the effect of magic that that contributes to its existence in the first place. Um now, yeah, I guess I maybe I'm so stuck in in kind of an error management point of view, but I find really, really compelling it's the the capacity of an error management approach or an approach that simply like trusts the instrumental ends that people are are ex explicating for explaining just the differentials and costs and benefits, the contexts in which people are engaging in magic. I just think that approach has been so predictively powerful for explaining so much of the

the context in which people are are using magic, just how how they think about it. And it it what I find also kind of compelling and and you know I I don't necessarily think we should always trust people's word for it, but it's it's an approach where it it like is pretty rigorous and sophisticated about the kinds of predictions it's making and it also totally accords with how people actually explicate their thought processes. You know, I am trying to use this practice because I want to have this objective on the world. So I I I think of these intrinsic benefits, this this whole class of intrinsic benefits as potentially epiphenomenal, but not necessarily I'm I'm I'm sometimes I'm I'm skeptical that if you want to understand why humans engage in magic, like that is the the

place to start. Yeah, that's totally fair. I think I'm channeling you when I say this, which we had Pascal Boy on recently, what did I say, on recently. And he was saying how your work and other people's work have moved him towards thinking not just about the consumers of epistemic, uh, you know, almost memes to kind of put it, to give it a gloss, you know, consumers of ideas or representations, but also the logic of the producers. And so one other thing, and I think your work you know has focused on this, is then there's also this issue that we haven't really talked about yet, which is we've talked about why would consumers consume shamanism. But then there's also the question of well, why would there be people who produce

shamanism? And it strikes me as there might be a lot of benefits to being seen as a shaman. I mean, I think you gotta you gotta win them over, and that's that ain't easy, right? So could you talk? Have have you thought, you know, this is one of your themes of your work as I take it. So can you talk a little bit about the production end of shamanism and um to what extent, if our conversation has been largely about the consumer end, what is there to say or know about the production and how have you been thinking about that? For sure. I mean, I think the question is like, yeah, we we've talked a little, let's say we we are taking a bet hedging or error management approach where people are engaging in magic

because they want to influence outcomes in the world that are self-serving. Um how then do you get from that to shamanism? How do you get from that to practitioners entering non-ordinary states, you know, healing people, et cetera, et cetera? And I really think you you need to think about there being an entire class of producers who are competing amongst themselves to provide these benefits or provide these services for benefits. I think then it actually really aids us to honestly use like a market analogy. Um, and so yeah, what I think is really critical is that once you have people who are willing to to pay small costs or or or costs relative to the expected benefit to have these outcomes, then you have sp other specialists competing amongst themselves to provide these

services. Um and those specialists will uh you Invest in these practices to the extent that they can expect benefits. The elaboration of those practices will track the potential for the for the consumers to pay for them. And so for outcomes like death and illness, you can have really, really elaborate practices where consumers are willing to invest quite a bit. Producers are incentivized to invest a lot to reap those benefits. I think shamanism inherently requires uh a species that is social enough where you can have people trading services. Yeah. I wonder too, to channel David a little bit, it once something becomes common knowledge. So I'm just imagining, let's suppose that somebody's child was sick

and they took their child to some shaman. And whether or not it worked, they tried, right? And then my child becomes sick, and people are like, Well, did you go to the shaman? You know, and my child's not better yet. It kind of looks like, and even to my own representation, I'm not doing everything I can for my child, and that sucks. Right. So I think this this common knowledge thing, once you kind of get it going, um uh that that's another thing too, where it's like, well, you know, why would it why would David have taken his child, even if it didn't work, he did something about it. You know, so I think there's you can you can imagine with all these caveats of there's competition, you can see how these things could sort of build on each other once they're

established. Yeah, I really like that um argument, David, and something I've been thinking about um in terms of how low efficacy actions can actually um convey more information to recipients as a signal than high probability actions. Because if I'm investing a huge amount of time and energy to do something that only shifts the probability of say helping my child or my wife or my friend by a tiny amount, then that shows that I really care about their welfare. Whereas if I do something that's very cheap and that um with a hundred percent likelihood of helping them, um, you know, I uh I don't know, I I I quickly do the Heimlich any anyone would do the Heimlich manumer if they knew how to do it and someone was choking, even a

total stranger, right? 'Cause that has, you know, really high efficacy. were thirsty give them water. Yeah. Exactly. If you're in the canteen and someone's thirsty, you give them water. Even if you even if you don't know the person, it doesn't send a strong signal of of loyalty and and toward that individual as doing something that a doing a low probability action does. So if I if I spend a lot of time and effort doing a ritual to say cure your your illness and it has a very small chance of working, that sends a stronger signal that I care about you than if I than if I'm your doctor and if I do something that's actually effective, right? Or if I prescribe you a medication, say. And so it may be that um the the low efficacy is actually a feature, not a bug, and

that they're sending stronger social signals. Yikes. Yeah, I would say, of course, that I think like for if my child is sick, we would expect people to first prioritize those kinds of outcomes that would maximize the benefit. And so like and because there are also opportunity costs for interventions, you know, I can even w with the mentality, I can spend time going to the clinic, I can go get herbs, I can call a shaman, I can, you know, massage my child, I can do any number of things. So I definitely think this might shift it, move some stuff around, but I do think the driving thing immediately, especially if my child has an illness that seems dire, would be to maximize expected benefit first.

of course. Yeah. Yeah. But within the cost-benefit calculus is what people are going to infer about me based on the actions I take. How good of a father am I if I don't do anything to help my child, if I don't take them to the shaman, if I don't perform the rituals? What are people going to infer about my level of parental investment in the child? right? And so in addition to the direct, I I obviously would want to help the child and do whatever I can to make sure that they're better. But in addition to those costs and benefits, there are the added social and reputational costs and benefits. And I think that's part of the calculus and that that might be part of the mechanism that drives these actions toward low efficacy rituals.

Yeah. Or David, then also might this is related, it's not an alternative, but it also might explain coordination of what the rituals are, in the sense of if you just do something because you're desperate and nothing else has worked, per what Monvir said is you're gonna go with efficacy, but you're trying everything, and then you start going to the low probability, higher cost things, but you still it's a high cost, like your kid's sick, so you'll do it. Yeah. But you do that one thing because there are, you know, you can only do one thing and there's opportunity cost, as Monvier said. If I'm the social learner and I look at you, I don't know everything that's going into your calculation, but I'm like, well, if David did it, there probably was some reason for why he

did it. And so if if among all the other low probability things, I'll probably just do what David did because why would he have gone through all that effort if there wasn't some chance it might work, even if it was low? So you could imagine, even in the absence of a shaman coordinating information about what the ritual is, whatever you just land on, David, if your kid gets sick before mine, I might just copy you because I might just it's just, you know, it's just social learning where I just assume you found out something that I didn't have access to. Yeah, that might be part of it too. I mean, so another thing that I think might be driving this is, you know, we're not so much interested in in people's reputation in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense.

We want to know who is relatively more loyal to me or to the community uh than than other people, where loyalty is a continuous dimension, where I could be well, I could care more about the group than you, say. And so if there is a low probability ritual that we can perform to benefit the group, say a rain dance, um, and everyone is participating in that raindance but me, that sends a signal that I don't care about the group as much as everyone else. And that all of a sudden paints a target on my back. And so once there emerges, once there once uh common knowledge of a low efficacy way to benefit the group emerges, it takes on a life of its own and suddenly everyone is sort of forced to engage in that low efficacy activity, lest they pay a social

price for looking less uh altruistic or less loyal than everyone else in the group. And all of a sudden it becomes a kind of tragedy of the commons or prisoner prisoners' dilemma, where we all benefit from not doing the wasteful thing, but individually we pay a price if any of us decides not to. And so it just kind of continues and stabilizes, even though it's not really effective, it's stabilizing uh uh um for social reputational reasons. Yeah, that's interesting. Can uh maybe I I I just kind of more more generally, sometimes I and maybe this is something for us to talk about, I'm sometimes skeptical of the ext- I think we can have our intuitions about the signaling value of behavior from weird contexts with a not a lot of anonymous interactions

in very very fluid partner markets and infer those or extrapolate those to small-scale societies. But I I am sometimes skeptical because in small-scale societies, relationships and behaviors are much more contextual. They're related to very long histories of interaction, how, you know, how I interact with someone is partly informed by some trait that they have, some enduring trait, but I think is m much more strongly shaped by the history of interaction. And that's just to say that I think sometimes I think we can be quick to extrapolate signaling benefits to to other contexts. But my own experience s has very in many in ways that often have really surprised me about the ways that people actually do not extrapolate so much information from how people

interact with other people towards how they're going to interact with themselves. But wouldn't wouldn't one just to sell to be devil's advocate for David's position is wouldn't it just shift from then? I'm not making a character inference maybe as strongly, but I'm just thinking David's making a mistake. So for example, it's just that I know David's a good guy, but boy, his kid's sick and he's not doing this. So I don't think he doesn't care about his kid. I think he's making a mistake, though, because I believe this intervention does work. I think he's got his cost-benefit calculus wrong in this decision. I might go over and be like, David, come on, man. I think you should do this. It worked for Bob down the street, which is another way it may work, right?

If it's random, it's going to work every once in a while, or it's going to look like it's going to work every once in a while. And then there's the one person in the village who's like, this worked for me, you should do it too. Cause, you know, it was just luck of the draw. But I mean, that might be a way to salvage this even uh thing where it's not, I'm abandoning David or changing drastically how I think about him, but it's more just I think he's making a bad decision in this situation because I think it he should do it. And he's he's doing a bad thing. Um, you know, that that kind of inference would still exist even in this model that David's um accounting for, I think. Yeah, you could you could pay a cost to to either your moral reputation or your

intellectual uh reputation by not participating in in a group ritual. Yeah, that that could also be a play. Yeah. Yeah, like it doesn't have to be long term. Like it's not like I'm I'm doing this calculus of like, do I abandon who do I fluidly choose, as you said, Man Veer? But it could just be like more generally, what kind of inferences do I make about how he will behave towards me based on how he is behaving in this other context? Yeah, that might be it. Or like a more a more uh a more or another version would be I know David's a good guy, but I think he's making a mistake now, and that's still important for me and has fitness consequences for him, and I care about him, or it has fitness consequences for me,

his welfare. So even if it doesn't change those It's wait, is that still a signaling account? I don't know. I I think there's also I don't want to centralize signaling. I don't actually know what where a signal it you're making an inference, right? You're you're you're saying, look, but you're making an inference doing making there's there's some costs. Um it's indicative of he's taking a stance towards how he's gonna deal with his sick child. And I'm making inferences about that and assessing what the effects are on him, on me, on everyone else. And those inferences in one case might be uh very broad in a weird society. They might be more narrow in the sense of, you know, David and I in a small scale society,

we're locked in in terms of what I think of his character, how much we interact. But I might be like, dude, you're making a big mistake because your kid's going to still be sick and it's going to affect you and I because you can't go hunting when your kid's sick, and I need to eat, and my kids need to eat. Um, so I don't know if that's signaling, but yeah. I think it it would be signaling insofar as the inferences are anticipated by the actor and factored into their behavior. It seems like signaling insofar as Dave's inference about David then impacts how Dave interacts with David and David and anticipating that benefit changes his behavior. Right. Yes, that would that would be a yeah, that would be an intentional signal as opposed to an

evolved signal. Yeah, right. That would be an intentional signal. Um but yeah I don't I'm not trying to like I know in like Q versus signal like I I'm not right now I'm not so worried about it. I think I mean for me at least the argument would be that I could see many mechanisms whereby the inference that David is not doing this thing is perceived as a cost, and there's motivation on the part of me, for example, in this example to go over to David and be like, hey man, you should do this ritual. Yeah. And cues have a way of becoming signals in our in our species. So even if you if you as soon as you point out that something is a cue, it has a way of transforming into a a signal as soon as people gain common knowledge of that.

Um in Manvir, I wanted to shift a little bit to uh and we can come back to shamanism too, but I also wanted to talk a little bit about, and this comes back to your background, the EA. Um, you and other people have argued that the scale of social interaction for human groups may have been much more variable and might have included much larger scale. Um I don't I don't know what word to use, but social structures for lack of a better word. So to just contextualize this, the background is as evolutionary psychology grew up, there was very much an argument that we evolved for a small-scale social world of face-to-face interaction, and that the design features in the mind are for this vanished world coming from a scientific, modern, weird perspective.

I've seen you give talks about this. Can you talk a little bit about that work as well? Because you know, in what what should people know about that? And then maybe we can have some discussion about that point as well. For sure, for sure. Yeah. So I think that there has long been a sense, both among academics and in the popular conversation, the popular consciousness, that um humans spent most of our evolutionary history in relatively small scale societies. And and when people often sketch that out, it's like small, relatively egalitarian, mobile bands. There's this discussion of the magic number of 25 um bands of 25, but they could be fluid enough that people are moving around within some kind of ethnolinguistic group.

Um they're mobile, there's often a sense that uh they live in dry, open, arid habitats, um, which was for a long time a pretty dominant model of the um of the Plaistocene. Um and so that has ended up impacting, you know, how we think about how social organization has transformed throughout history, how we think about um the environments in which humans evolved, which kinds of societies we think provide the best models for making inferences about human history, which societies we researched, you know, studying small, mobile, relatively egalitarian groups like the Hadza or the Agta or the Aceh versus societies that are sedentary, that have larger societies that have institutionalized hierarchy.

Um, and so an argument that I and Luke Lowacki have made, and we are uh you can say part of a larger conversation or a larger set of scholars who are pushing against it, is that um based on what we know now, we should be much more open to the hypothesis that there was much more social diversity, that groups, um, residential groups could be in the hundreds, maybe even the low thousands, that um you uh had semisetism, that you had hierarchy and potentially institutionalized hierarchy or very formal hierarchy. You had large-scale cooperation, people, you know, hundreds of people potentially cooperating on projects. Another thing that we have argued is that there has probably been cultivation and maybe

even incipient domestication, but that's not something we necessarily have to cover today. And as a result, we should rethink the kinds of broad trajectory stories we tell about human history. We should rethink the societies in which humans necessarily evolved and and the all the inferences we make then about evolved psychology. And we should revisit the kinds of societies in the contemporary world that we think provide the best models for human evolutionary history. I can go a little bit into the evidence for why we m make that argument. Should I do that? I I well maybe like one or one or two examples. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean the basic story is that um we now appreciate or or the basic story is that

when human groups, including uh non-agricultural societies, live in environments with dense, rich, reliable resources, especially aquatic environments or places with aquatic resources, um They make larger, sedentary, more hierarchical societies. So the Pacific Northwest, parts of New Guinea, here in California, Florida, and then many places before agriculturalists got there. Japan, Scandinavia, the really rich parts of China, the Nile, the southern African coast, many of these places exhibit these features. And I think there has just been, there have been a number of paradigm shifts since the 1960s when this generalized forager model or the nomadic style was institutionalized or articulated that I think now lead us to question that as a general model for

hunter-gatherers and especially for hunter or for hunter-gatherers in the past, and and definitely for hunter-gatherers more generally. And and I one thing that I think is really important or relevant to this conversation, especially in thinking about evolutionary psychology, is that in the 1960s, you have, you know, some researchers, you have a number of researchers who are studying hunter-gatherers, but you have a big project, the Harvard Kalahari Project, which uh involves Richard Lee and Irv Devor. They come, they coordinate the 1960 conference, the Man the Hunter conference, at which you have for the first time hunter-gatherer specialists coming from everywhere. There is some articulation of variation in hunter-gatherer societies, even then.

But you have a formalization of the generalized forager model or the nomadic style in a chapter written by Leon DeVore, great scholars, but but that honestly, and I think we all do this to some degree, uses the Kung as kind of a stand-in for for human history. And they have already been articulating, you know, arguing that the Kung provide a great model for human history to justify their project. And then you have evolutionary psychology really develop in the shadow or in the literal living room of Irv Devore. You have uh Tubi and Cosmodese meet in Irv Devore's living room at a um Simeon seminar, I I believe. Um you have a number of those other, you know, you have um and although he's not explicitly speaking it just as like a foundational evolutionary psychologist, you have Bob

Trivers who's spending all of his uh evenings in Herve Devore's living room. You have this figure who uh has been so critical, so important in establishing what hunter-gatherer societies looked like, and especially what they've looked like for a hundred thousand years. And by no coincidence, you also have this field really strongly developing in his uh literal orbit. Um Yeah. Um what what one oh yeah uh David, you know, I just think it's it's a beautiful example of um the field of evolutionary psychology advancing uh and and you making a major contribution to the overall uh theoretical framework uh by which we we do research. Because you know, as we know, the ancestral environment uh is a hugely important concept

for developing theories about the human cognitive phenotype. And insofar as we are wrong about what the ancestral environment was like, what the ancestral selection pressures were like, we are going, our theories about the phenotype are going to be wrong. And so making sure that we have an accurate picture of what kinds of dimensions existed and what the variation was like on those dimensions is going to help us develop a better, more precise, more rigorous theories. And I think it's it's a it's a really great example of science moving forward and challenging a lot of different hypotheses that exist in the field that are that are based on this premise that the ancestral environment was necessarily small scale and

egalitarian. Um I think now we need to begin entertaining the hypothesis that actually there may have been selection pressure for large-scale cooperation, for large-scale social hierarchy. And we can begin to investigate what that psychology might look like. And certainly it won't be a rigid context-insensitive psychology, because we know that not all societies were uh were like this. There was substantial variation. So we would expect a context-sensitive psychology that can adjust um behavioral strategies based But I any anyway, I just want to um compliment you on really a wonderful paper that I think has uh advanced the field uh significantly. Thanks, David. Yeah, thank you. And I wanted to and I wanted to ask a question, which is to what extent do you think

there is a substantial implication for people like me who are psychologists, who are fans of ethnography or anthropology and love reading it and love keeping up to date. And I can see two models. One, and I think an analogy with food might be relevant, which is sort of like, you know, as an evolutionary psychologist, really interested in the psychology. If I think about food, I think, well, the EEA of food was variable, right? And I suspect like a modern environment is probably a range of the variation for most of us, because we most of us aren't starving for long periods of time, at least involuntarily, fortunately. But I can understand, you know, that there's sort of a intuitive range of sort of the level

of resources. And I sorry, I have sort of a picture of the EEA. Um and there's there's a version where I can have my picture of the EEA of food psychology and do studies on the psychology of food and be right. There's another version though where I've completely missed a feature of the ancestral environment. And in fact, there was more variability to the point where it's almost qualitative, that like there's something wrong about the way I'm thinking about the design. Now shift over to groups where I have this idea, like, you know, one of my day jobs is being a group psychologist. And I do have this idea that I'm thinking, you know, what any one individual's social existences in groups is sort of uh probabilistic.

They're gonna have some very direct, interpersonal. There's gonna be some more abstract ones. I almost think about it as like a probability cloud coming up on your work, hearing that there might have been selection for even larger scale social interaction than we have imagined, I have been unclear in my own mind where to place my so far intuition about, you know, in and maybe it's unanswerable, but I'm just curious: like, what's your do you suspect if I am imagining an EEA of relatively small scale, like as you said, 25 or like the Dunbar 250 or something. And I'm thinking about all the design features for that kind of a world versus the one you're describing. Am I or people like me, are we missing something?

Or are we not there yet? Because there still hasn't been a lot of fleshing out of what the design features would be even for the 250 world, let alone the 250,000 world or the 25,000 world. Yeah. So the question is what's at stake intellectually for our models of psychology? That's much more concisely said. We can cut out the other 15 minutes. No, I mean I I I can articulate it because it's just something I've I've wondered to myself. Um so in the paper, we gestured a couple of things. Um I mean, the the very ear easy, not necessarily super easy, but clear example is is a lot of the discussion about hierarchy and and the evolution of of of um of humans' dominance psychology. And you know, there's one approach that says that um efforts to dominate were uh

very strongly curbed, even to the point of execution. Um you know, I think the thing to to interrupt myself for a moment, I think the thing that evolutionary psychologists have had to contend with is on the one hand that they are building a model or often working with a model of the human past as small-scale, relatively egalitarian, mobile bands. And on the other hand, that we live in this society where we have a president and we have, you know, school bullies and gangs and whatnot. And you uh fundamentally have to reconcile them. And so um, if I were to um argue against myself that there are stakes here, I would say, well, from the for for a very long time we've had to, we've had to deal with this,

with this discrepancy um and we've had to account for variation. Um so so I I I want to acknowledge that and say that I think like psychologists and evolutionary psychologists in particular have for a very long time. It's not like they're working with a species that they only think lives in small, relatively egalitarian bands. They're working with a species that shows incredible variation and their their theories have to contend with that. On the other hand, uh I, you know, when I look at some of the the research on how has human morality evolved and and the critical role of egalitarianism in that, or how has social psychology evolved and the critical role of egalitarianism in that, or um you know, how how the kinds of arguments people make about the evolution of dominant

psychology. Again, just to focus on this one example, I do see a uh quite a discrepancy over there where there's often a a very strong emphasis on egalitarianism being this really critical shaper of human moral psychology, of pro-so-so psychology. You can just look at the number of papers that have cited um Chris Bohm's book or Chris Bohm's classic 1993 reverse dominance hierarchy paper. So that's less about our models of how human psychology works and more our models of where human psychology has come from. Another context, though, that we mention in the paper is what is often taking us this fundamental question in evolutionary approaches to behavior: how can an organism adapted to or that that spent its evolutionary history in very small groups then live in

large complex societies as they exist today? And my own view is that that's actually the the the puzzle is misstated. The way that I think about human evolutionary history is not that we lived in these tiny bands and now we live in these large scale societies. It's that we have been incredibly variable. In fact, we evolved the critical period of human evolution, you know, the last 2.5 million years, when you find this explosion in brain growth is arguably one of the most climatically volatile periods with you know incredible climatic fluctuations that have occurred in the evolutionary history of mammals. And so we are, in many ways, a species that is fundamentally adapted, I would say, less to

dry arid plains than constant volatility. This is the variability selection hypothesis. Um, and so what is really notable about the the last 10,000 years is that we have left the incredible volatility of the ice age and we have entered a period of incredible stability and been able to accumulate these efforts in a way. And so I think the puzzle gets gets we kind of shift how we view the puzzle, not you know, tiny mobile bands, but but instead a species that has adapted to variability and and contended with variability, suddenly put in a period of of like very nice temperateness for twelve thousand years. Yeah if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. Yeah. And uh I I think it's um actually uh it gives an important insight about

why the human brain is so big. Because if the ancestral environment was very stable and very predictable, such that there were the same types of foods that were available in every possible ancestral environment, the same type of climate, the same type of ecology, the same type of social environment. If that was true, there would be no need for a large brain to make context-sensitive evaluations of what's going on in the physical and social environment and respond strategically. Because if everything is predictable and everything is stable, you can just develop a very predictable, stable uh adaptation uh in response to that feature of the environment. But if the environment is volatile and variable, then

the selection pressures favor a context-sensitive psychology that can adapt to whatever the circumstances are and learn the relevant contingencies and deploy the optimal or quasi-optimal strategies given those conditions. And that I think is a more insightful explanation of of human brain evolution. That uh we're not so much adapted to a specific EEA, uh, but to a very uncertain range of possibilities. And the reason why our brains are so big is to figure out what kind of environment we actually are in and how can we best make a living in that environment. Um I think yeah yeah totally agree totally agree I mean that's increasingly how I how I also think about it and uh something that I've really appreciated is this just to use one

example this shift in how we think about the evolution of the human diet and the human niche. You know, I I think for a long time it's this idea that humans are omnivores. Um but there that has shifted because we don't actually look like a lot of omnivores. You look at a raccoon, I'm not eating garbage, you know, I'm not eating like little bits of eggs. Um Instead, it's this idea that humans are generalist specialists. We look like specialists, and yet we look like the specialists in every environment. We eat whales, we eat honey, we dig up tubers, we are hunting meat, we are getting um, you know, lots of fruit or whatever. Um and it's it's it's that we're very we're we're specialized at um adapting quickly to new environments.

And you know, there are arguments that this is this is a manifestation of culture, but I honestly think it goes it goes deeper than that. You look at um Neanderthals had lived at the edge of the Arctic for tens of thousands of years. Homo sapiens comes in and within 10,000 years is already b into the Arctic. Um I guess that's not a great ar argument against culture or about culture, but um the the point is that I think um, yeah, I I I I I think humans are are incredible at um being versatile and at um specializing in new environments and and learning about their new environments and learning different ways to intervene in their environments to do well. And I think that's a product of us having evolved in such volatile of during the

Pleistocene. And and there there's an argument that many African species um I mean humans are are an extreme example or or homo has been an extreme example and we can think about it. But then in many African species you've actually seen an uh adaptation for greater variability throughout the Pleistocene, that that um the ancestors of hippos um were you know less variably able to to move between aquatic and non-aquatic environments, that that uh the ancestors of warthogs were much more specialized and different from modern warthogs, which can actually uh contend with many environments just because of how climatically volatile the world, including Africa, was. That's awesome. We should put all those animals on a t-shirt.

That's fantastic. Do you view the extractive foraging account? This idea that, you know, why we have big brains is also because, as you said, we're generalist about real specializing in the context-dependent extractive foraging. Do you view variability and extractive foraging accounts as rival or complementary? No, no. I would say no, no, no, no, no, no. I I see I see kind of like extracting foraging as a mechanism toward contending with variability. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just for for just to uh say it out loud for everyone listening, the idea is that extractive foraging is that there's resources in the environment, but there's a high sort of search or handling cost or knowledge cost to get them.

And we are really good at doing that, but lots of different places using lots of different methods. And so there's this idea that um part of needing a big brain too is to have models about what that process is to extract those resources and make a living in that environment, both food, shelter, you know, just getting around being comfortable. Totally. Yeah. Um yeah, if if the but i the resources in question require lots of knowledge and specialization, uh in a in a way that is radically opposite to, say, eating a eucalyptus leaf that is abundant in your environment. You don't need to do any processing, you don't need to there they're very low search costs, the leaves are right there, they're abundant.

Um that is not the type of selection pressure that would lead to a complex uh um psychology forging psychology and and um food learning psychology. Did you just insult koala bears? I think I did, actually. Sorry, koalas. But also to link this back with No value. No value judgment. To further link this to the to the thing about variable social organization, one way that I think about it is that humans were not only living in arid open habitats, they were living in a variety of environments. And that was, I imagine this kind of cyclical thing. The environment is very variable. Humans or Homo, ancestral Homo becomes better adapted to living in more environments. And then can can, and we know this, the range expansion of Homo expands, it starts to adapt

to new environments, including aquatic environments. It can start to extract very high value resources. And that ends up just because of the ways in which ecology shapes social organization, leading to more social diversity and and favoring a selection on a more socially variable or a psychology that is prepared for more social variation. Yeah, absolutely. And so insofar as as the resources um that people are subsisting on vary and the strategies and the properties of those resources vary, then the social threats and opportunities are going to vary along with the ecology. Some resources are easier to loot, to store, to hide. And that has social implications, right? Certain environments have different opportunities for aggression, predation,

weaponry, poisoning. All these are features of the ecology that can affect the social world. And so there's an intimate link between both the social structure and the ecology and the way that people make a living. So yeah, we would expect not only a sensitive psychology to the structure of the physical world, but also uh to the social world. Nothing's new under the sun. Yeah. In a certain level of abstraction. Yeah, for sure. Um Monvir, we're we're we're kind of running and uh towards our end here. Um, is there anything that we should have asked you? Um or that you would have liked to, or you would like to mention something exciting that you're currently doing, or that students or people who want to look at your work, or

um, you know, just what is there something people might want to know that they might not know? Well, uh so uh this is unrelated to our conversation really, but I'm currently working on a book on early Indo-European mythology that I think will be awesome and people should definitely check out when it's out. But otherwise I mean I've also a lot of what we've talked about, the Ice Age, Variability and Social Organization, Generalists, Specialists, is something that I've also been trying to package into a book, but that's a a slower project. How do you do the research on the mythology? Yeah, well so the the story of this book, do you all maybe we can take like two minutes about do you all know much about early Indo-European mythology?

No, no. I know at least two books worth. No, I know nothing. Okay. Well, and so maybe you're familiar with the Indo-European language family. So this is these are languages. Um, so languages from the from Sanskrit to Icelandic, many languages are part of a single language family. So um there's all the Baltic languages, the Slavic languages, the Italic languages, so the Romance languages, the Celtic languages, the Germanic languages, and then also Iranian languages and these North Indian languages that derive from Sanskrit are all part of a single language family. They all derive from a single language called Proto-Indo-European. This is the Indo-European language family. Proto-Indo-European was probably spoken above the in the Eurasian steppe about 5,000

years ago. And so there are linguistic relatives across these languages. My name, Munvir, the Mun, shares the etymology with words like remember or mind. Um it can invoke like the mind or the soul, and then the vir shares uh etymology with words like virile or werewolf or world. Um, and it um can mean like strong man, brave. Um but just as as words share origins, uh, so do mythologies. And one example is the sky father. So in Greek you have Zeus Pater, uh in uh um Latin, you have Jupiter, Jupiter in Old Sanskrit, you have Dyaus Pitr, and people have been able to reconstruct these mythological figures that are behind Greek, Norse, Roman, uh, Old Indian, Ancient Iranian mythology. There's kind of a progenitor mythology.

So my book is trying to retell these mythologies. So every chapter is like me in vivid prose retelling one of these reconstructed myths along with some scholarly attestations. So how scholars know that these particular figures, and you can do it partly based on similarities in text. So for example, we know that many of these, uh, or we're pretty sure that that there was an ancestral tale of a thunder god who slew a serpent, a brash-bearded thunder god who liked to drink a lot, that then manifests as like Zeus and Typhon, as Thor and the Midgard Serpent, as um Indra and And Vrithra. So anyway, it's a yeah I'm I'm drawing on a lot of scholarship and it's it's just like a a fun project. So that's awesome.

Let's green light that movie too. Yeah I really wanna I'm excited to read it. Do you have any um thesis or argument about um what function these myths are serving or why they have the properties they do or is it more of a descriptive um historical uh anthropological project. It's more of a descriptive historical anthropological project. There are a a number of theories about what these myths were serving. But the thing is that as these myths so the two things. One is that even what we call the Proto-Indo-Europeans, that's a a thousand-year period and they're over a long expanse. And I I'm sure that these myths were doing different things in different places. And you know, to come back to the producer-consumer conversation at the outset.

Um, you know, there's a lot of conversation about what is the function of myth? Why do people tell myths? And I think it's sometimes to justify or um yeah, justify some kind of social arrangement, but it can also be to praise a leader. It could also be just for pure entertainment. Um it can be, yeah, I think there are many functions. And I think just even in the ancestral like early Indo-European society, they probably served a number of functions. And that was especially the case as it diversified. And so, yeah, it's more of a honestly, it's like my my own feeling is that for two centuries, scholars have been these like really very detail-oriented, very careful scholars working with comparative evidence have reconstructed these things.

And it's this incredibly rich imaginative world that has all of these, it's both uncanny in its familiarity, but also really rich and and new. Um but it's locked in scholarly tones and and it's a world that I think is incredibly cool. So I my book is really more of like it's it's like a paternity leave project. It's it's just like a an excuse to to share this this really cool scholarship, these incredible stories with a with a a broader audience. Cool. So I I I I would imagine um the the storytelling that you might be doing for your your children as well might um be a a happy uh synthesis with with sure yeah yeah my daughter's at the age where she's like every like hour like tell me a story and then it's

like actually but some of these stories are are you know it's like a primal giant was massacred and his body was used to create the world is not necessarily like the happiest story. That's true. My daughter would be into that story, but perhaps not all children. Although Germanic uh right? Yeah you're you're fine. Yeah. Hansel and Renault, yeah. Well, brother's grim. It's it's grim, is correct. It is grim. Yeah, no. I mean, yeah, the stories were much more violent back back in the day. I don't know what happened, but uh just like the playgrounds. Um Monvir, this has been wonderful. Uh, you know, we'll we'll put show notes to your website and and things like that. But um but just as you said, you know, um the book is sort of a window into a cool

scholarship. We're trying to do the same thing. And it's been wonderful to have you on. And um, you know, I think w one of our goals of having this podcast has been to just highlight cool work that's showing that evolutionary behavioral sciences are not stale and there's things happening. And I think your work is an excellent example of that. So thanks for doing that and thank you for being on. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me and for doing this project. It's it's um both are are deeply appreciated. And this was a lot of fun. Cool. Thank you so much. And uh and if you weren't uh in a visual format, do check out Monvere's background um on the YouTube channel. It is visually stunning. I I I will attend I I kinda wanna have that wallpaper in my home.

It's just beautiful. Yeah, yeah. I love I love paleo art. I love I mean, just as I love like mythical reconstruction, I love people who have like really put a lot of time into trying to figure out what Lost Worlds look like. Um and so uh Monveer Coffee Table Book, uh Paleo uh Worlds. Okay next book after the after the mythology one, Coffee Table and Paleo Worlds. Yeah. I would totally buy that. All right, good. All right. Monveer, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, boo. Well, here you are. You listened to another episode of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast, this time with Manver Singh. We referred back to some of our greatest hits, like the the one with Pascal Boyer. Uh what can the listener do to support uh what they're hearing, Dave?

Well, uh we have a Patreon account and we all we have David, both you and I have children and presumably we're gonna have to put them through college. So That's true. You know, I'm just putting it out there. Yeah, so if you want to support our reproductive success, uh you know, throw in some money on the Patreon too. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's one way to do it. Yes. That's probably the easiest way to do it. The best way. It's the uh the most ethical way to do it. And um uh on that note, boom boom, um anything else people should know? Well, I mean we really do need um just just contact us and volunteer yourself to be on this podcast if you're an evolutionary behavioral scientist. Uh we've actually uh the summer is very difficult um scheduling people and we've had

wonderful guests. Um, but if we've contacted you and you haven't gotten back to us, please get back to us. And if we haven't gotten back to you, apologies. And I think I'm going to edit all of that out. Oh no. I mean, it's totally like, yeah, the summer's been a little hazier. I feel like, yeah, people have been a little flakier. It's been a little harder to schedule stuff. So uh apologies for the patchiness of this summer. I think it'll it'll get better when things cool down. Yeah, I mean I I mean jury duty was a big was a big one. Yeah that was a big one. I just moved into a new house. It's uh it's been a really chaotic summer so far. There's not full time um school during summers. People are traveling.

Um you know there's there's a lot of first world problems during the summer. Lots of first world problems. So um So you should really donate on Patreon to see. Right. We need your support to help us with our first world problems. David, has anybody sent you a fanny pack with french fries? No, I'm still waiting on the fanny pack with the french fries inside it. We also have to get to uh get to France with Pascal. Yes, that too. That would be great. Yeah, you can't. You know, it's so hot. I feel like the heat would probably preserve the French fries at the optimal temperature. Oh good uh good uh topical because it's hot in in in Europe right now. It's also hot it's yeah it's it's hot you know in most places.

Yeah. Santa Barbara's pretty moderate. Except maybe the southern hemisphere, not not so hot there. Doesn't the seasons work differently there. Yeah. Hi, Australia. We should have um we there's some Australian folks and New Zealand folks we should have on. Yeah, we really should. We have have we had any Australians on? Uh no, nor New Zealanders. I think the time difference is quite a challenge, but that's true. It's a really big time difference. Yeah. But but we know who you are and we're thinking about you. Yeah, don't be afraid to invite yourself on. Uh we love it when when people do that. Okay. So maybe we can we can have a kangaroo on as well. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, thank you for bearing with us.

Uh we'll see you either next week or following week. And enjoy the rest of your summer. Or if you're listening later, enjoy whatever season it is and um do something for yourself this week. Yep. Take it easy. Do something ethical though, not unethical for yourself. Yeah, do something nice. Yes, that's a good better way to put it. Yeah. Okay. Cool. On that note, okay. Bye, David. I'll see you. See you next week.