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I'm David Pensoff.

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I'm David P.

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Trozicsky.

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And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast, actual evolutionary psychology.

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By actual evolutionary psychologists.

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Today we have a really impressive and wonderful guest, Sarah Matthew.

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She is a professor at the School of Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State

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University.

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Yeah.

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Um we talked about that.

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That that uh that it's a really cool uh interdisciplinary institution.

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But even more interesting, this was a riveting episode, David.

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Uh yeah.

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This was uh honestly one of my favorites.

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So yeah, we start out talking about interdisciplinarity and and research and how it gets

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done, and then we get into Sarah's amazing work and her uh pioneering

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perspective on cultural evolution uh and the cultural evolution of warfare.

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Uh, we get into so many fascinating topics like reciprocity, killing PTSD, um

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uh and just talking about with her work with the Turkana, where you know, she's really with

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with folks, really, you know, doing um uh doing violence um and h why that

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exists.

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But then also people not n not uh people who are you're not violent towards and why those

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rules persist.

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Um and the psychology of war and the consequences of killing.

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Um it just just incredible.

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Yeah, really wonderful stuff and we get into cooperation, self interest, uh and and just

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the the level of of detail that you get just being, you know, up close and

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personal with a group where half literally half the men are dying in warfare.

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And just familiarizing yourself with the cultural context there and just learning from her

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was just uh so fascinating.

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Um uh really recommend listening through uh to the end for for this episode.

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So it's a it's a banger.

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Yeah, enjoy.

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Here we go.

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Um so today we're I'm really excited to have uh Sarah Matthew on uh the podcast.

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Um Sarah is at uh ASU in the anthropology department.

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Um And Sarah, how long have you been at the in the anthropology department, ESU now?

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So since uh 2013, but I will have to correct you on the anthropology

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department because we are actually in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change

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and the Institute of Human Origins.

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And both of those programs are actually an interdisciplinary research group.

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It includes anthropologists, but it also includes sociologists, um, you know,

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psychology, even applied math people.

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So we are a we are an interdisciplinary group.

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That is a wonderful correction.

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And I remember looking at ASU.

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And was that something that Rob uh and Joan wrote Rob Boyd and Joan Silk started or helped

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found?

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Um, so the reorganization of ASU into these interdisciplinary schools

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started with President Michael Crowe.

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So when he started, when he took over as president of ASU, there was a huge

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reorganization into becoming a transdisciplinary school, like at its

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core, not like you know, you have Department of Anthropologies and then you make them talk

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together.

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No, it was just like break down all of old departments and disciplines and put like,

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you know, new new groups of people together.

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So we have the School of Sustainability, we have the School of Global Futures, School of

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Human Evolution and Social Change, and School of Family Dynamics, School of Transborder

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Studies.

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And these are all, you know, these are the main kind of academic communities

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here at ASCII.

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It's a very special place.

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Yeah, that's fantastic.

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So is it that literally like the physical building, the people that you see in the hall,

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the people that you're like spreading into or having meetings with, they're all they're all

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in these different disciplines.

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Yeah.

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So our faculty meetings, for instance, are, you know, all of the School of Human Evolution

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and Social Change faculty.

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And there's about 60 or 70 of us.

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So it's it's pretty big.

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But uh yeah, we're not um, we don't have a sub-community of

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anthropologists within that.

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We often have different programs, there's different kinds of you know collaborations

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within and across these schools, but yeah, we're sitting around with people

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who who are have um bought into the idea of of

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transdisciplinarity.

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That sounds fantastic.

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Do you find that um it works or are the barriers kind of hardier than you would like them

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to be?

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Because I often, you know, sometimes talking with people of different differ different

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disciplines, you have different vocabularies, uh different methodologies, it's it's hard to

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meet in the middle.

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It's hard to have collaborations.

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Uh they have different expectations about you know publishing in different journals.

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I remember um I think it was Jerry Fodor who who said uh that the best interdisciplinary

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uh work is done within one's own skull.

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Uh you know, the idea there being like uh it's it's good to avail yourself of different

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perspectives in different disciplines, but as soon as you have to sort of, you know, work

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things out with someone in a in a different community, things get kind of difficult.

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So do you buy the the Fodorian uh perspective that it's it's better to happen within one

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skull, or are you more of an optimist that it really can happen and those bridges really

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can be made?

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Yeah.

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Um, I think I'm an optimist, but I also do agree that actually there's a lot of integration

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that does eventually need to happen within one single individual, but that's aided a lot by

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who we're talking to, the kinds of vocabulary we're exposed to, the kinds of opinions we're

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exposed to.

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So I think that it has actually worked out pretty well.

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It is true that, you know, you will tend to um, you know,

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gravitate more towards the people that are talking the same things that you're talking,

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etc.

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But I also have um just noticed that there's just a lot more

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freedom because of this institutional structure to actually just do things

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that you want to do and not be constrained by what your disciplinary

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expectations are.

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So, you know, like you know, for for people coming up for promotion and tenure, it's okay

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that you know you'd got your PhD in anthropology, but you are not publishing in current

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anthropology, you're publishing in you know sustainability journals or conservation

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journals or engineering journals or you know AI journals, like it just simply doesn't

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matter, like you know, uh there isn't a rigid expectation, and that really opens

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up and allows people to kind of explore things that they might have wanted to

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explore in a different setup, but but are not able to.

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And that also means that, you know, the way people evaluated within the university is very

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different and it's very individualized.

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And people kind of make it a lot more upon the individual to make their case of who they

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are, how they're kind of bringing things together and stuff like that, rather than an

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exogenously imposed um uh kind of set requirements type

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of system.

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So yeah, I think the institutionally providing that freedom is um, you know,

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very useful um because otherwise, you know, in people might be interested but are

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constrained by by these factors.

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Yeah, I love this.

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I was just uh curious about if there was any particular project that you were able to get

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off the ground and get excited about uh b because of the absence of these constraints.

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Like um, is there anything that you felt uh liberated to pursue in this environment that

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you might have not otherwise pursued?

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Yeah.

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Uh yeah, I think so.

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Um so for I mean I'll start with kind of a little bit more of a standard kind of

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collaboration, which maybe many evolutionary anthropologists do engage in.

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But you know, one of the directions that I took my work in was

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to try to incorporate an understanding also of the genetic population

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structures in Turkana, because I was doing some work on, you know, how does culture shape,

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groups and what's the population structure of cultural variation?

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But then that kind of begs the question: how is that different from the population

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structure of genetic variation?

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And that's a very genetics question, but it needs to kind of be integrated with the

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cultural evolutionary approach too.

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So for that, I've been working with geneticists, so with Ann Stone, who's

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an uh geneticist from the anthropology side, but Melissa Wilson, who's a, you know,

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a bioinformatics, genomics person who is very much in the school of life sciences and not

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at all connected with anthropology.

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And that kind of was a bringing together of um, you know, uh two worlds in

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some ways and very different expectations about also how to work, how to do genetics

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research in small-scale societies, which, you know, when I have a collaborator here at

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ASU who's from the School of Life Sciences, I also know that, you know, they are free to

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like kind of step into the anthropological space and do things the way anthropologists do.

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So working genetics work in small-scale societies goes much slower.

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There's a lot, lot more need to like, you know, dialogue with the community, to like

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do different things, like not, you know, share the make the data publicly accessible for

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anybody to like do work because the communities haven't consented to that.

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So it's like it's a really different kind of beast for a genomics person to like

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work with an anthropologist working in a small scale society.

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But because they are here, everybody's used to this idea that

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you don't have to be constrained by the way your discipline does things.

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You can work with anthropologists, you can slow down, you can um, you know, you can say no

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to some things that might be expected in the genetics community, such as you know, putting

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up um the um uh the your your data

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publicly um etc.

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so it's um so that's one example um another um is that

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you know i am working with um a legal scholar um now

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and um you know that project initially started with working on norms and that's kind of

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close to like what i'm working um, I'm I'm used to, but you know, it has kind

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of also drawn us into, you know, working, thinking about how to build

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normativity into AI systems, because she's somebody who works as a legal

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scholar.

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She's worked on like how institutions, legal institutions need to change in order to

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accommodate new technology.

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And AI is like a big technology.

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So this is Jillian Hadfield, who's at Johns Hopkins University.

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And so now, you know, just about a couple months ago, we organized a workshop here at

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ASU in which we had cultural evolution folks, so very anthropology and psych

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people, but together with people from Google Deep Mind and

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people who are working on AI.

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And like I just feel that wherever your research kind of takes you, wherever your

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collaborations take you, and whatever feels interesting, that's that's the next step.

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Um, another project that I'm doing is working with people who are in disease

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ecology.

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Um, so you know, to study zoonosis, because one of the things that we learned when we

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were working as anthropologists in the Turkana is that you know, the Tricana eat meat

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that is um even when they find the animal dead,

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they will eat the meat.

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And so that in a public health kind of outlook kind of is considered

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a very risky type of meat consumption.

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Yet in our observation, we're not seeing people get sick when they

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eat that.

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They eat meat of animals that are dying of certain diseases, like close to death from

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diseases and disease epidemics.

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You know, even I've eaten that meat when I'm there.

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Like we had the Rift Valley fever epidemic going around, like lots and lots of animals were

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dying.

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And so basically, like, you know, just a couple hours before the animal is dead, somebody

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is you know killing them and sharing that meat out.

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Um and uh so yeah, that that question basically was uh well, maybe they

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have cultural knowledge of how to process this meat and how to make it safe to eat, and

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also to recognize when it can't be eaten, when it can be, and also what organs maybe to

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avoid, who should who are who should avoid these things, like you know, maybe pregnant

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women.

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So we don't know that, but we're gonna like delve into that cultural knowledge landscape.

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But we also want to look at the physiological adaptations that maybe the

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tricana have, like either immune or like you know, um genetic adaptations they have

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for like you know this high pathogen load meat.

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and so that requires working with again like people who are interested in public health,

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disease ecology, zoonosis, um and and maybe genetics,

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immunologists.

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So it's um, you know, I feel like my work has kind of just progressed

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in a way where I, you know, I have certain questions that I'm really interested in and that

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keep me you know, on one path.

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But then that path also opens up a lot of like questions that you just stumble upon and

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collaborations that you stumble upon.

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And wherever those lead, I feel free to just, you know, go and be

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supported in every way by the institution and my department.

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I love that.

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And uh one of the throughputs that as I think about your work is um, and I don't know how

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much we've talked about this explicitly, is um as as I think the term you how you put it,

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um, which is sort of group structured cultural selection.

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And that's even a throughput of what we talked about already, which is like ASU has a

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different institutional selective regime.

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And so you're free to do things differently.

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But then even in the Turkana example, uh there might be cultural technology for people who

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may not know what that idea is.

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Um, can you sort of explain that?

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And then maybe I don't know if you the maybe the Turkana example, I mean it's sort of

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simple, but just even, you know, what the idea is refracted through that example of

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uh of, you know, how do you why do they know how to deal with um

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meat that in a way that other plea places might not?

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So, yeah, I guess your question kind of touches on two things that I think are maybe

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useful to kind of separate a little bit.

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So, one is the question of um just culture and cultural learning,

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social learning that produces um cultural knowledge that gets transmitted in humans.

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And there's a large number of people who are trying to understand that in

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the evolutionary human um sciences.

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And you know I think that that is uh

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as as do many people think that that is a very important part of like how humans um became

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very different from other organisms, our extreme reliance on culturally transmitted

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information, social learning.

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And that leads to um Variation between groups

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that might be genetically very similar, but have learned from different people, have had

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different role models in their past, and have been exposed to

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different environmental conditions in the past that have shaped the knowledge and the norms

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and the institutions, and then that gets transmitted, etc.

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So in the Tracana case, for example, yes, why do they know how to look at a

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day-old dead animal and figure out whether they can eat it or not?

245
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Whereas, you know, if we do, we will just say, no, that's not, right?

246
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We're both um uh kind of um on the face of it,

247
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um, should they maybe be able to like reason about those things similarly, but the Turkana

248
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are able to reason about it in a very different way because of that of the accumulation of

249
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knowledge that has come from being pastoralists for perhaps the last 5,000 years.

250
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So one of the characteristics of pastoralists is that a lot of people think

251
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pastorals eat a lot of meat, but the truth is that pastoralists are

252
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really good about not killing animals for meat.

253
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They use, especially like East African pastoralists, they use a lot of their animals

254
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mostly for milk.

255
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And milk is a huge form of their sustenance.

256
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They also consume the blood from the animals, but milk is a big sustenance.

257
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And they're really, really reluctant to kill an animal, a healthy animal for

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meat.

259
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They would do that for ceremonies, they do that, you know, like for marriage, um, where

260
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you have to kind of kill a bull, etc.

261
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They'll do that for like healing, like somebody is sick, and there's like a healing

262
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practice that says, you know, kill this kind of animal.

263
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But um just for food, it's kind of something that is done with a lot of intention

264
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and thought and very cautiously because you don't want to kill a healthy animal.

265
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Um, but when an animal is dying, when there's an epidemic going around, an animal is dying,

266
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then they kind of make use of uh the meat very um the same.

267
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They don't want to waste uh any part of that um animal if they don't have to.

268
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Um, they also sometimes find animals who've been killed.

269
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So when I was there once, there was a camel that was found just maybe a couple

270
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kilometers outside of the settlement that I was staying in, where my campsite is based.

271
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And it looked like the camel was maybe killed by a snake bite, because there are like some

272
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very, very poisonous snakes in the area, something that can't kill a camel.

273
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Um, and so the camel was found dead.

274
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Um, but they didn't immediately kind of cut open um the camel and

275
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start eating the meat.

276
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They had to find out, you know, who the owner is because the owner could have been it the

277
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camels wander quite a lot, so the owner might be somebody in like some other settlement.

278
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And so, you know, it took like maybe half a day to a day to like, you know, find the um

279
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the owner and then, you know, tell the owner camel's dead, we're killing.

280
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And then and then the meat, then, you know, in the evening we got a bunch of

281
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camel meat at our camp and heard the backstory of it.

282
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And I didn't even, I didn't, you know, even think twice about not eating it because, you

283
00:20:04,830 --> 00:20:06,110
know, everybody eats it.

284
00:20:06,270 --> 00:20:12,110
It's, you know, there is just no question that this is maybe something that's been,

285
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you know, sitting in the heat for too long.

286
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So they just they just know these things because they've had to deal with

287
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these challenges in the past.

288
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That's part of the cultural and subsistence package that they rely on.

289
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And it's a way of living that has allowed them to survive in habitats that you know

290
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you and I would not be able to survive in without that knowledge, like a very arid

291
00:20:40,920 --> 00:20:46,920
environment where agriculture, the crop cultivation is very difficult, except along

292
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like the riverbeds and stuff.

293
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And so uh that is how they have um potentially a lot

294
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of um knowledge that um allows them to do that.

295
00:20:59,490 --> 00:21:04,530
And then I think your other question related to the culture group structured cultural

296
00:21:04,530 --> 00:21:09,970
selection, which I think is a different question, but I'm gonna let you interject before I

297
00:21:09,970 --> 00:21:14,800
go into that phase because uh I'll yeah, no, no, that's wonderful.

298
00:21:14,880 --> 00:21:19,120
I have I actually have nothing to interject other than just I I think it's so powerful that

299
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like the transmission of knowledge is so important.

300
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I think about like the is that the Rob um Rob uh and Joan example

301
00:21:28,400 --> 00:21:33,040
of what was it that there was like you know, colonial travel or something, like traveling

302
00:21:33,040 --> 00:21:36,080
somewhere and they basically starve to death or almost starve to death.

303
00:21:36,310 --> 00:21:41,990
Do you do you know that is that yes that is um that is in their uh used to be in their um

304
00:21:41,990 --> 00:21:47,670
intro to anthro class at UCLA and uh uh here too and and also

305
00:21:47,830 --> 00:21:53,750
their textbook um but uh I believe um so yeah that is basically you know the

306
00:21:53,750 --> 00:21:59,750
thought experiment of if you think that um humans all have a

307
00:21:59,910 --> 00:22:05,860
um capacity, a psychological disposition, motivations,

308
00:22:06,100 --> 00:22:12,020
reasoning capabilities, cognitive skills, et cetera, that allow them to that that

309
00:22:12,020 --> 00:22:17,780
are sufficient for them to extract a living out of all the environments that

310
00:22:17,780 --> 00:22:23,550
humans currently live in, then your prediction is that uh, well, yeah, like you and I

311
00:22:23,550 --> 00:22:29,470
could go um to where the Inuit are living, or could go into the Sonoran desert,

312
00:22:29,550 --> 00:22:35,550
um, into the Australian um desert, into the rainforest, and be able to figure it out and

313
00:22:35,550 --> 00:22:36,430
make a living.

314
00:22:36,590 --> 00:22:41,310
Um yet, you know, if you just think about it, I think I wouldn't be able to.

315
00:22:41,390 --> 00:22:42,990
What do you think, would you?

316
00:22:43,600 --> 00:22:49,040
I think I think there would be a really good movie about me on the knife's edge of death.

317
00:22:49,120 --> 00:22:49,280
Yeah.

318
00:22:49,360 --> 00:22:52,320
And I would there's a very likely chance that I wouldn't make it.

319
00:22:52,400 --> 00:22:52,560
Yes.

320
00:22:55,840 --> 00:23:00,640
There would be moments where, you know, it would be sort of like uh uh what is the the Tom

321
00:23:00,640 --> 00:23:03,280
Hanks movie with uh the Castaway?

322
00:23:03,520 --> 00:23:08,000
Castaway where there's some comedy in there, you know, like the macabre, yeah, the the f

323
00:23:08,160 --> 00:23:12,450
the you know per the theory of humor where you make a big mistake, but it's kind of funny

324
00:23:12,530 --> 00:23:15,330
because it's really bad, high cost mistakes.

325
00:23:15,570 --> 00:23:16,290
No, totally.

326
00:23:16,450 --> 00:23:18,210
No, I mean, you know, um, for sure.

327
00:23:18,290 --> 00:23:18,450
Yeah.

328
00:23:23,890 --> 00:23:24,210
For sure.

329
00:23:24,370 --> 00:23:25,250
Yeah, no, for sure.

330
00:23:25,410 --> 00:23:26,850
We know how this ends for sure.

331
00:23:26,930 --> 00:23:27,730
Yes, exactly.

332
00:23:28,130 --> 00:23:28,450
Yeah.

333
00:23:28,610 --> 00:23:33,960
So, but then you know, sometimes I actually ask this to students when I'm teaching um the

334
00:23:33,960 --> 00:23:39,720
intro classes and um some of them actually think they can um like you know you know an

335
00:23:39,720 --> 00:23:45,320
18 19 20 year old is filled with like confidence they've gone they've like

336
00:23:45,480 --> 00:23:50,920
spent a few nights out uh and they feel like the in Arizona we also have like um

337
00:23:51,240 --> 00:23:56,770
survivalist community where like you know there are people who are like very into being

338
00:23:56,770 --> 00:24:02,450
able to live off the land and who are like are making bows and arrows, hunting, et cetera.

339
00:24:02,690 --> 00:24:07,730
So uh you'll have a couple of people say that they think they can survive much longer than

340
00:24:07,730 --> 00:24:09,330
I actually think they can.

341
00:24:09,490 --> 00:24:15,250
Um so um they haven't yet been humbled by the experiences of

342
00:24:15,250 --> 00:24:16,450
um life yet.

343
00:24:16,610 --> 00:24:21,250
Um, but you know, that's kind of why this thought experiment, this ex this historical

344
00:24:21,250 --> 00:24:27,020
experiment is a good um illustration of that because when we reflect on ourselves, we

345
00:24:27,020 --> 00:24:32,940
might be very confident of our capabilities, but we know that there were people, explorers,

346
00:24:33,020 --> 00:24:38,860
who were actually had a lot of information, just not the local information, but outside

347
00:24:38,860 --> 00:24:44,140
information, had a lot of technology, but not the local technology, but outside technology.

348
00:24:44,220 --> 00:24:47,500
And we, you know, some of the technology was really fancy, right?

349
00:24:47,660 --> 00:24:49,690
Like that the explorers had.

350
00:24:49,770 --> 00:24:55,130
They came from some of the most powerful and technologically developed countries

351
00:24:55,850 --> 00:24:56,810
of the time.

352
00:24:57,050 --> 00:25:00,090
And yet there's just one thing they lacked.

353
00:25:00,490 --> 00:25:04,410
They lacked the knowledge that somebody who grew up there had.

354
00:25:04,650 --> 00:25:09,770
And they lacked the kind of much simpler tools and technology that people who lived there

355
00:25:09,770 --> 00:25:10,090
had.

356
00:25:10,410 --> 00:25:13,240
And, you know, many of them died.

357
00:25:14,920 --> 00:25:18,360
It did have that tragic finale part.

358
00:25:18,840 --> 00:25:24,520
So it is uh it it is really I think a very

359
00:25:24,840 --> 00:25:27,960
important aspect of humans.

360
00:25:28,360 --> 00:25:34,280
But that said, you know, I um as somebody who's you know really into um

361
00:25:35,630 --> 00:25:38,590
taking these cultural aspects seriously.

362
00:25:38,750 --> 00:25:43,950
I also think that there are kind of, you know, then universal psychological

363
00:25:44,110 --> 00:25:49,870
predispositions people have that make

364
00:25:49,870 --> 00:25:52,910
it possible for them to acquire this information.

365
00:25:53,070 --> 00:25:58,740
So the evolved psychology for social learning is really, really important.

366
00:25:59,220 --> 00:26:05,140
And without that, you know, we wouldn't be able to get the relevant information, be able to

367
00:26:05,140 --> 00:26:11,060
prioritize what information we should be copying, know when to not copy, know

368
00:26:11,060 --> 00:26:16,820
when to innovate and ignore, know when to be a contrarian, those kinds of things.

369
00:26:16,900 --> 00:26:19,300
So the evolved psychology is very important.

370
00:26:19,540 --> 00:26:25,490
And that brings me to an ex uh an experiment that i always present to my undergrad

371
00:26:25,490 --> 00:26:31,090
students which date you feature in oh my goodness star actor there okay

372
00:26:31,490 --> 00:26:37,490
do you know what i'm talking i think i have an idea yes exactly yes uh this is the prepared

373
00:26:37,650 --> 00:26:43,300
um uh learning experiment that annie words and um you

374
00:26:43,940 --> 00:26:47,060
had um uh you were as I said, a star.

375
00:26:47,380 --> 00:26:49,220
I was I was an actor, I was a beautiful face.

376
00:26:49,940 --> 00:26:50,260
That was it.

377
00:26:50,340 --> 00:26:51,540
And he was the brains, yeah.

378
00:26:51,700 --> 00:26:53,460
It was just the I was a prop.

379
00:26:53,620 --> 00:26:53,860
Yeah.

380
00:26:54,420 --> 00:27:00,180
I think that's a really uh excellent example of how you can have um yeah,

381
00:27:00,260 --> 00:27:06,070
there's a lot of structure in the psychology that and there's a lot of preparation for

382
00:27:06,150 --> 00:27:10,310
being able to hone in on the kinds of things that we do need to socially learn.

383
00:27:10,390 --> 00:27:15,510
I really think of the that experiment as one of the um the best

384
00:27:15,670 --> 00:27:21,030
illustrations of that complexity where it's not like you have um uh

385
00:27:21,510 --> 00:27:27,430
it's not like you come with just a ready psychology to learn XYZ but rather you come with a

386
00:27:27,430 --> 00:27:33,080
psychology that's prepared to learn that you should

387
00:27:33,080 --> 00:27:34,520
learn socially, right?

388
00:27:35,160 --> 00:27:35,640
Right.

389
00:27:35,960 --> 00:27:41,400
So that I think is maybe this

390
00:27:41,400 --> 00:27:46,840
area where evolutionary psychology has taken

391
00:27:47,560 --> 00:27:53,160
a slightly different take on this than maybe people in human behavior

392
00:27:53,320 --> 00:27:59,170
ecology, cultural evolution, etc., where I think early on there was more of

393
00:27:59,170 --> 00:28:02,850
a resistance to how important culture was.

394
00:28:03,890 --> 00:28:09,410
But then, you know, that uh in some ways evolutionary psychologists were pushing back

395
00:28:09,410 --> 00:28:14,770
against an older model of witness in which there was no kind of

396
00:28:15,010 --> 00:28:20,530
preparation that the brain needed and it was um just this big container that could be

397
00:28:20,530 --> 00:28:21,730
filled with anything.

398
00:28:22,370 --> 00:28:28,200
But I think that I'm hoping that we're kind of in a space now where we can be

399
00:28:28,200 --> 00:28:33,880
doing more of the kind of sophisticated experiments that you start in and and really kind

400
00:28:33,880 --> 00:28:39,800
of parse out what is the evolved psychology

401
00:28:39,960 --> 00:28:45,160
and where is it much more open to taking in cultural information,

402
00:28:46,200 --> 00:28:51,800
and where is it more kind of you know canalized into learning

403
00:28:52,170 --> 00:28:58,090
certain things a little bit more rigidly and you know how how does that structure come

404
00:28:58,090 --> 00:29:03,930
about that's another question that I think is open and um I uh feel

405
00:29:03,930 --> 00:29:09,850
like a lot of my early exposure to this uh to these ideas of modularity and

406
00:29:09,850 --> 00:29:15,700
prepared learning um Came from the from you know UCSB, from

407
00:29:15,700 --> 00:29:20,420
like um John and Lita's work and from Clark Barrett and Dan Fessler.

408
00:29:20,900 --> 00:29:26,740
Um, and so uh that's kind of how I I've been thinking about a lot of things, but I've also,

409
00:29:26,820 --> 00:29:32,820
as I've started working now with people in AI and cognitive science, I

410
00:29:32,820 --> 00:29:38,710
see a perspective where they are talking about how you can get these, yeah you

411
00:29:38,710 --> 00:29:44,550
know like for instance how neural networks are are um learning etc it

412
00:29:44,550 --> 00:29:49,270
seems like there is a lot about the brain that we don't understand and and it's possible

413
00:29:49,270 --> 00:29:55,190
that you can get structure in the brain with very few priors early on but with more of

414
00:29:55,350 --> 00:30:00,950
uh you know what you're exposed to early can kind of like uh create those hierarchical

415
00:30:01,780 --> 00:30:07,380
structures, or you know, to what extent do you need a lot more richness in that hierarchy

416
00:30:07,380 --> 00:30:11,140
to like uh already function?

417
00:30:11,540 --> 00:30:11,780
Right.

418
00:30:12,020 --> 00:30:17,300
And it it actually seems interesting to me that maybe like uh artificial

419
00:30:17,300 --> 00:30:22,980
intelligence um research can give us a little bit of insight into what is

420
00:30:22,980 --> 00:30:28,930
possible here because it seemed like for long it was a

421
00:30:28,930 --> 00:30:34,850
discussion between cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, folks that

422
00:30:34,850 --> 00:30:40,690
uh still were limited in their methods because you can't probe the brain in some of the

423
00:30:40,690 --> 00:30:46,240
same ways that you can kind of design a

424
00:30:46,240 --> 00:30:48,880
brain, like what the AI people are doing.

425
00:30:49,200 --> 00:30:50,640
Yeah, I yeah, I think that's great.

426
00:30:50,800 --> 00:30:55,520
And I think like computer science and AI, and Annie Wirtz and I just were working on a

427
00:30:55,520 --> 00:30:56,880
chapter about AI and EvSec.

428
00:30:57,120 --> 00:30:59,120
I think that's a really wonderful uh thing.

429
00:30:59,280 --> 00:31:03,520
And I think if you read some of the early AI work and even some of the later stuff by like

430
00:31:03,520 --> 00:31:08,800
Marvin Minsky, um, it's very much a person who's sort of a fellow traveler in the sense of

431
00:31:08,800 --> 00:31:12,770
there's problems in the world, uh, real world problems, right?

432
00:31:12,850 --> 00:31:16,610
Like focusing on on real world problems, even if they're if even if it's not maybe

433
00:31:16,610 --> 00:31:20,290
evolutionarily relevant problems, but still real world problems and analyzing them, doing a

434
00:31:20,290 --> 00:31:22,770
task analysis and saying what machinery do you need?

435
00:31:24,130 --> 00:31:29,490
My my take on, just just to say like my take on sort of how much structure you need, I

436
00:31:29,490 --> 00:31:31,650
think it's answering sort of two separate questions.

437
00:31:31,810 --> 00:31:37,570
Like I think the old school quote unquote sort of evps modularity stuff was sort of a

438
00:31:37,570 --> 00:31:43,480
discussion of what's the what's the sort of like full content architecture in

439
00:31:43,480 --> 00:31:48,200
the mind that's actually making doing the day-to-day stuff possible?

440
00:31:48,440 --> 00:31:53,640
And I think a slightly separate question is sort of how do you build that with the minimal

441
00:31:53,880 --> 00:31:56,360
genetic and developmental content?

442
00:31:56,760 --> 00:32:02,680
And I actually think a lot of the um machine learning uh and a lot of that stuff

443
00:32:02,760 --> 00:32:06,680
that's sort of asking how can we build the representations?

444
00:32:07,310 --> 00:32:11,550
It's a slightly different question, which is sort of what what's the minimal way, given

445
00:32:11,550 --> 00:32:13,230
that there's structure in the environment?

446
00:32:13,470 --> 00:32:15,550
And this is how development works already.

447
00:32:15,710 --> 00:32:20,830
It's sort of natural selection itself faces this challenge of how do I store the minimal

448
00:32:20,990 --> 00:32:26,830
amount of information, or even better yet, sort of like chemistry in a developmental

449
00:32:26,830 --> 00:32:32,270
little packet such that it reliably interacts with the regularities in the environment to

450
00:32:32,270 --> 00:32:33,710
produce a whole body, right?

451
00:32:34,030 --> 00:32:39,540
Like, and and and it's sort of the what's the minimal packet of contingencies that's

452
00:32:39,540 --> 00:32:40,020
necessary.

453
00:32:40,180 --> 00:32:42,180
And I think that's true for even the mind too.

454
00:32:42,340 --> 00:32:47,140
So I do think there's probably a lot of reinforcement learning or machine learning, a lot

455
00:32:47,140 --> 00:32:51,780
of the principles that we're learning about in AI or computer science, they're but and

456
00:32:51,780 --> 00:32:57,060
they're answering the question of what's the minimal structure required to sort of within a

457
00:32:57,060 --> 00:33:02,910
particular domain to extract a much ripper representation that isn't coded sort of

458
00:33:02,910 --> 00:33:05,470
by hand, or in this case, maybe in the genes, right?

459
00:33:05,630 --> 00:33:10,830
Or it, but it it's so it's sort of allows the environment to structure the thing and then

460
00:33:10,830 --> 00:33:12,190
the thing gets represented.

461
00:33:12,350 --> 00:33:16,510
So I think I kind of view it as it's it's actually complementary and it's actually kind of

462
00:33:16,510 --> 00:33:17,870
asking two different questions.

463
00:33:18,030 --> 00:33:22,510
It's sort of the old school stuff was sort of what is that final end state?

464
00:33:22,670 --> 00:33:22,910
Yeah.

465
00:33:23,070 --> 00:33:26,750
And then this stuff is sort of how do you get there in a minimal perspective?

466
00:33:26,910 --> 00:33:27,070
Yeah.

467
00:33:27,230 --> 00:33:27,870
Yeah.

468
00:33:28,380 --> 00:33:28,780
Yeah.

469
00:33:28,940 --> 00:33:34,860
So yeah, that that is um a a useful distinction for me to

470
00:33:34,860 --> 00:33:40,700
also get in my um mind because I think early on when I was um kind

471
00:33:40,700 --> 00:33:46,460
of absorbing the eb psych um view of modularity and stuff, I

472
00:33:46,700 --> 00:33:49,820
think I kind of just lumped those two things together more.

473
00:33:49,900 --> 00:33:55,670
Like you know, yeah if you if you um uh assuming that if you have a rich

474
00:33:55,670 --> 00:34:01,510
structure that emerges early on that there has to be more content that is

475
00:34:01,510 --> 00:34:04,630
programmed into the genetic machinery for it.

476
00:34:04,870 --> 00:34:09,270
But I think you've separated it um it's an interesting point Dave.

477
00:34:09,350 --> 00:34:13,990
I mean is is the distinction between the uh the the phenotype or the developmental

478
00:34:13,990 --> 00:34:19,700
phenotype and the way that the developmental phenotype gets Yeah, exactly.

479
00:34:20,020 --> 00:34:23,300
And that the the feet yeah, and so there are different the phenotype could be highly

480
00:34:23,300 --> 00:34:27,940
modular, and yet the way that that modular phenotype gets produced and interacts with the

481
00:34:27,940 --> 00:34:31,380
environment could be very minimalistic in terms of genetic context.

482
00:34:31,940 --> 00:34:32,100
Correct.

483
00:34:32,180 --> 00:34:32,340
Yeah.

484
00:34:32,580 --> 00:34:36,260
I actually think a lot of honestly, like I'm you know, I have a foot in developmental

485
00:34:36,260 --> 00:34:37,380
psychology too.

486
00:34:37,540 --> 00:34:42,660
Um it's not my only thing, obviously, but like and I actually honestly I read a lot of

487
00:34:42,660 --> 00:34:47,230
stuff between sort of what the quote unquote nativists and sort of empiricists in

488
00:34:47,230 --> 00:34:48,750
developmental psychology.

489
00:34:48,990 --> 00:34:50,910
And I actually think honestly it's the same thing.

490
00:34:51,070 --> 00:34:54,350
Where like I think they're both right and they're just sort of having they're kind of

491
00:34:54,350 --> 00:34:58,670
talking past each other because they're talking about the the process versus the outcome in

492
00:34:58,670 --> 00:34:59,870
a lot of cases.

493
00:35:00,590 --> 00:35:01,150
Mm-hmm.

494
00:35:01,710 --> 00:35:02,190
Yeah.

495
00:35:02,590 --> 00:35:03,230
Um yeah.

496
00:35:03,310 --> 00:35:08,990
So I guess that was a little bit of um uh um uh tangent to what I'd

497
00:35:08,990 --> 00:35:14,920
started off with, which is I guess uh uh the you know how the trikana are getting their

498
00:35:14,920 --> 00:35:16,200
cultural information.

499
00:35:16,440 --> 00:35:22,440
But then you'd also asked me about group structured cultural selection processes.

500
00:35:22,760 --> 00:35:27,880
And I think this is actually a space where

501
00:35:28,920 --> 00:35:34,840
I have um it's actually what drew me into the field of cultural evolution

502
00:35:35,000 --> 00:35:40,830
was because you know when I was doing my undergrad um in ecology and evolutionary biology.

503
00:35:41,230 --> 00:35:46,910
That was as an undergrad was the first time I was actually like really getting introduced

504
00:35:46,910 --> 00:35:48,750
to evolutionary biology.

505
00:35:49,070 --> 00:35:54,830
But I just kind of really fell in love with the

506
00:35:54,830 --> 00:35:59,550
idea that you can explain so much about the world through through the through this

507
00:35:59,550 --> 00:36:00,430
framework.

508
00:36:00,750 --> 00:36:06,670
And the idea of like cooperation kind of stood out as something

509
00:36:06,670 --> 00:36:12,580
that is just, you know, uh counterintuitive but still can be explained and

510
00:36:12,580 --> 00:36:18,340
so it was a it's very you know very interesting and intriguing in that way that it's just

511
00:36:18,340 --> 00:36:24,180
kind of a little bit not fully within the what you would expect but then

512
00:36:24,180 --> 00:36:29,460
there are like these narrow pathways by which you can get it and so I was you know super

513
00:36:29,460 --> 00:36:34,030
interested in like um sociality in ants and stuff like that.

514
00:36:34,190 --> 00:36:39,630
But being in a biology department, I realized like, you know, there's just a lot of

515
00:36:40,190 --> 00:36:45,710
uh potential here to think about humans, but nobody seems to want to do it.

516
00:36:45,870 --> 00:36:50,670
Like, you know, it's about bio evolutionary biology departments.

517
00:36:50,830 --> 00:36:53,870
We're still very focused on drawing the line.

518
00:36:54,510 --> 00:36:59,790
You know, we can explain a lot up to like chimps and then humans are just crazy

519
00:37:00,340 --> 00:37:02,900
and weird and we don't know what's going on.

520
00:37:04,260 --> 00:37:09,460
But that's when, you know, towards the tail end, I I was really interested in the

521
00:37:09,460 --> 00:37:15,380
cooperation question and I read um um Robin Pete's 1985 book, Culture and

522
00:37:15,380 --> 00:37:16,660
Evolutionary Process.

523
00:37:17,140 --> 00:37:22,810
And um, you know, the this idea of um culture

524
00:37:23,770 --> 00:37:29,210
allowing for a pathway by which you can get

525
00:37:29,530 --> 00:37:34,570
selective processes that are otherwise unavailable to genetic

526
00:37:35,210 --> 00:37:39,290
populations and genetic systems was really very

527
00:37:41,050 --> 00:37:46,460
intriguing because I always felt like, you know when you think about human

528
00:37:46,460 --> 00:37:52,460
cooperation it's so it stands out in so many regards it's not just that

529
00:37:52,700 --> 00:37:57,900
um the scale of cooperation is large you know that's a lot of the times what we focus on

530
00:37:57,980 --> 00:38:03,100
that oh we cooperate in large groups in transient interactions with strangers so that is

531
00:38:03,100 --> 00:38:08,910
spectacular we do do that and that's a big thing but there are other things such as that

532
00:38:09,070 --> 00:38:13,310
scale seems to not be constrained by the number of people, right?

533
00:38:13,470 --> 00:38:19,310
Like it has gone, it has changed from something that might be like 50, 60, 100

534
00:38:19,310 --> 00:38:25,150
people to something that can scale up to like thousands and potentially millions of people.

535
00:38:25,230 --> 00:38:30,360
So the fact that that scale is something that can be moved so like quickly

536
00:38:31,080 --> 00:38:35,080
is very unusual in the animal kingdom, right?

537
00:38:35,240 --> 00:38:40,840
Like we usually have a lot more constant selection

538
00:38:40,840 --> 00:38:46,760
produces a constant kind of social scale at which the cooperation is

539
00:38:46,760 --> 00:38:48,600
happening to these other mechanisms.

540
00:38:49,000 --> 00:38:54,190
The other thing that I've really tried to emphasize more recently is that you know small

541
00:38:54,350 --> 00:39:00,270
scale cooperation in humans is also really different from small scale cooperation in other

542
00:39:00,270 --> 00:39:00,910
animals.

543
00:39:01,390 --> 00:39:07,310
So we cooperate way more with kin, we cooperate way

544
00:39:07,310 --> 00:39:13,150
more in reciprocal interactions than other animals that have many of

545
00:39:13,150 --> 00:39:19,150
these pathways of you know kin based kin selection reciprocity available to

546
00:39:19,150 --> 00:39:19,310
them.

547
00:39:19,390 --> 00:39:24,440
So if you think about it, you know, uh animals that live in stable social

548
00:39:24,600 --> 00:39:29,960
groups have a lot of opportunity for repeated

549
00:39:29,960 --> 00:39:30,920
interactions.

550
00:39:31,480 --> 00:39:37,240
And you know, you there can be, I I I am of the view that

551
00:39:37,240 --> 00:39:43,000
the benefits of cooperation are potentially there in a lot of different ecologies, like

552
00:39:43,080 --> 00:39:48,600
there's turntaking, there's possibility for food sharing, for collective child care,

553
00:39:48,920 --> 00:39:54,290
for group defense, for collective uh predation, um, etc.

554
00:39:54,850 --> 00:40:00,210
So, but you are not getting the kind of intense

555
00:40:00,690 --> 00:40:06,450
um reciprocal cooperation that actually traverses reciprocity theory

556
00:40:06,610 --> 00:40:12,130
predicts, which is you know, like WB greater than C is the condition for

557
00:40:12,130 --> 00:40:13,490
reciprocity to evolve.

558
00:40:13,570 --> 00:40:19,380
And like that means if you see somebody on if you're expected to see somebody more than two

559
00:40:19,380 --> 00:40:22,260
times, you should be cooperating like your full siblings.

560
00:40:22,500 --> 00:40:28,340
Um, so uh, but we're not there's so much of that cooperation, it's just absent.

561
00:40:28,420 --> 00:40:29,540
We're not seeing it.

562
00:40:29,780 --> 00:40:35,700
We're instead evaluating whether reciprocity theory is uh

563
00:40:35,700 --> 00:40:41,470
supported by saying, okay, conditioned on the fact that we are seeing cooperation,

564
00:40:41,950 --> 00:40:47,950
do we see it happening in a way that is balanced and suggests that there's some

565
00:40:47,950 --> 00:40:49,550
kind of contingency going on?

566
00:40:49,630 --> 00:40:54,270
That's how we are evaluating the theory empirically, but we're not addressing one big

567
00:40:54,270 --> 00:40:58,270
problem, which is that you know, by conditioning it on cooperation that's already

568
00:40:58,270 --> 00:41:02,830
happening, we're not evaluating all those cases where cooperation is not happening when it

569
00:41:02,830 --> 00:41:04,590
should be, according to theory.

570
00:41:05,630 --> 00:41:10,940
But in humans, we engage in just an intense amount of reciprocal

571
00:41:10,940 --> 00:41:11,660
cooperation.

572
00:41:11,820 --> 00:41:17,740
And like we we do treat friends in ways that are comparable to how we

573
00:41:17,740 --> 00:41:18,620
treat kin.

574
00:41:18,860 --> 00:41:24,780
And even among um within families, there are people that we

575
00:41:24,780 --> 00:41:27,820
will share a lot more with because they're sharing back with us.

576
00:41:27,980 --> 00:41:30,460
And there are people family members will ignore.

577
00:41:30,700 --> 00:41:36,470
So uh and you know, just stepping into like the Turkana land again, Uh

578
00:41:36,710 --> 00:41:42,470
people have friends that, you know, like people are still walking many kilometers

579
00:41:42,470 --> 00:41:43,830
to go places.

580
00:41:43,910 --> 00:41:45,030
They don't have vehicles.

581
00:41:45,190 --> 00:41:49,350
But sometimes you'll meet somebody and they're traveling from like a place that's like 20,

582
00:41:49,430 --> 00:41:50,470
30 kilometers away.

583
00:41:50,550 --> 00:41:52,390
And you ask them, like, where are you going?

584
00:41:52,710 --> 00:41:55,030
They stop by like our uh camp.

585
00:41:55,190 --> 00:41:58,260
Um and they're like, oh, I'm gonna say hi to my friend.

586
00:41:58,500 --> 00:42:02,660
He's like, you know, another 30, 40 kilometers down that way.

587
00:42:02,820 --> 00:42:08,260
So like somebody is just walking, um, you know, like three days or so.

588
00:42:08,660 --> 00:42:11,460
And his claim is he's gonna say hi to his friend.

589
00:42:11,540 --> 00:42:13,380
Now he's gonna say more than hi to his friend.

590
00:42:13,460 --> 00:42:15,140
He's gonna say hi to his friend.

591
00:42:15,300 --> 00:42:20,100
His friend is gonna kill a goat for him, he's gonna stay there a couple of days and then

592
00:42:20,100 --> 00:42:21,710
potentially come back.

593
00:42:22,510 --> 00:42:22,910
Right.

594
00:42:23,470 --> 00:42:28,830
But it's like this level of investment in maintaining

595
00:42:29,070 --> 00:42:34,990
close friends in places that are far and wide and that you can then trust your

596
00:42:34,990 --> 00:42:40,190
animals with to like, you know, kind of hedge your pets, spread your risk,

597
00:42:40,910 --> 00:42:43,390
to call when you're going on a raid.

598
00:42:43,470 --> 00:42:48,430
So you know, when people are going on raids, sometimes they say, um, so I'm planning to go.

599
00:42:48,590 --> 00:42:54,480
Um and uh I sent this person all the way to that settlement to tell

600
00:42:54,560 --> 00:42:58,400
it so that he can go find my friend and tell my friend that I'm going.

601
00:42:58,560 --> 00:43:02,320
I'd like him to come and to meet me, you know, here.

602
00:43:02,800 --> 00:43:08,320
So the friendship uh and and even on the raids, they stay together with their friends.

603
00:43:08,480 --> 00:43:10,160
They're not staying with their family.

604
00:43:10,240 --> 00:43:14,950
They are um they're not supposed to stay with their fathers and older siblings because

605
00:43:14,950 --> 00:43:18,310
they're supposed to stay with their age mates, which means that they're you know together

606
00:43:18,390 --> 00:43:19,030
their friends.

607
00:43:19,350 --> 00:43:25,350
So that part is not that is extremely unusual in humans that we

608
00:43:25,350 --> 00:43:31,350
are also cooperating much more intensively in small scale interactions, which

609
00:43:31,510 --> 00:43:36,630
technically theoretically should be supported for a lot of other species, too.

610
00:43:37,190 --> 00:43:42,680
Um And uh this is uh I think the other

611
00:43:42,680 --> 00:43:48,600
puzzle is or the other kind of um unusual aspect um is that

612
00:43:48,920 --> 00:43:54,600
um we are also co able to cooperate to a

613
00:43:54,600 --> 00:43:59,880
huge extent while still being fundamentally fairly selfish, I would say.

614
00:44:00,120 --> 00:44:06,030
Like, you know as somebody who studies pro-sociality and cooperative behavior I will say

615
00:44:06,030 --> 00:44:11,630
that we are a fairly self-interested species um so

616
00:44:11,630 --> 00:44:17,230
we've managed to solve the problem of cooperation without um

617
00:44:17,870 --> 00:44:23,230
having to commit to being purely pro-social um

618
00:44:23,550 --> 00:44:28,960
whereas um ants and you know they're so pro-social that they're just

619
00:44:29,520 --> 00:44:31,760
becoming obligately sterile.

620
00:44:33,280 --> 00:44:39,200
And uh so it's just this very um kind of

621
00:44:39,200 --> 00:44:44,640
contradictory thing where like, you know, we can collaborate to like send people up to the

622
00:44:44,640 --> 00:44:47,840
moon to manage something like the International Space Station.

623
00:44:48,080 --> 00:44:53,770
Yet on a day to day basis, a lot of what we're doing is still, you know, going to

624
00:44:53,770 --> 00:44:56,890
be best predicted by what's in our interest.

625
00:44:57,050 --> 00:45:02,090
I mean, there is a little bit of like a real pro-social psychology there, but by and large,

626
00:45:02,410 --> 00:45:07,690
if you were to land, if an alien were to land here and try to predict um,

627
00:45:08,410 --> 00:45:14,010
you know, uh something about, for instance, economic

628
00:45:14,010 --> 00:45:19,610
models work really well, actually, like you know, prices go up, um, of wages go up,

629
00:45:19,850 --> 00:45:25,660
um We can make certain predictions about how people will respond to those

630
00:45:25,660 --> 00:45:26,620
incentives.

631
00:45:27,340 --> 00:45:33,180
And people do respond to those incentives to a large extent in those ways.

632
00:45:33,420 --> 00:45:38,540
So yeah, how do we get so much cooperation while still like not having a

633
00:45:38,540 --> 00:45:44,450
psychology that is is you know truly actually

634
00:45:44,610 --> 00:45:47,250
having that level of pro-sociality, right?

635
00:45:47,490 --> 00:45:50,050
So that that's that's one uh one question.

636
00:45:50,210 --> 00:45:56,050
Another question uh I think feature is that uh we um unlike a lot

637
00:45:56,050 --> 00:46:01,810
of cooperative breeders, so uh you know, if you look at um mere cats,

638
00:46:02,050 --> 00:46:07,330
if you look at cooperative breeding primates, etc., uh they have much more of a hierarchy

639
00:46:07,330 --> 00:46:08,370
in their cooperation.

640
00:46:08,450 --> 00:46:14,000
So there's somebody that's amassing the surplus of cooperation, which is the breeding

641
00:46:14,480 --> 00:46:20,400
female, but and the others are kind of you know getting the short end of the stick kind of

642
00:46:20,400 --> 00:46:20,800
thing.

643
00:46:21,920 --> 00:46:24,400
And humans, we do have that too.

644
00:46:24,560 --> 00:46:28,640
We do have hierarchies that have emerged in the course of cultural evolution.

645
00:46:28,720 --> 00:46:32,720
We have status differences, um, wealth differences, and all that stuff.

646
00:46:32,950 --> 00:46:38,950
But it does seem that this idea of um fairness, of equity, and

647
00:46:38,950 --> 00:46:44,710
egalitarianism is one of the important pathways by which humans have achieved large-scale

648
00:46:44,710 --> 00:46:45,430
cooperation.

649
00:46:45,670 --> 00:46:51,030
That's very different from how it's been achieved in eusocial insects and multicellular

650
00:46:51,030 --> 00:46:56,780
organisms, only the, you know, um The sex cells, the gametes

651
00:46:56,940 --> 00:47:02,540
are getting getting to really reproduce, everything else is supporting it.

652
00:47:03,100 --> 00:47:08,620
So you don't really have a very good example of this kind of

653
00:47:08,940 --> 00:47:14,860
large-scale cooperation that is still built somewhat on the idea that everybody needs

654
00:47:14,860 --> 00:47:20,620
to get something, that there's ideas about equity, fairness,

655
00:47:20,780 --> 00:47:26,330
and it doesn't always work, but when it doesn't work eventually like people get upset

656
00:47:26,490 --> 00:47:32,490
and they try to break down those systems and and um don't go along with with

657
00:47:32,490 --> 00:47:38,010
those things so you know we're intensively cooperative but we're also so

658
00:47:38,010 --> 00:47:43,290
different um from other organisms in many aspects of our

659
00:47:43,290 --> 00:47:48,820
cooperation at every scale and um so I think that

660
00:47:49,060 --> 00:47:54,420
when you have a situation like this, it feels like, well, something really is fundamentally

661
00:47:54,420 --> 00:47:59,140
very different about the conditions that are amenable to cooperation in humans compared to

662
00:47:59,140 --> 00:47:59,700
other animals.

663
00:47:59,860 --> 00:48:04,900
It can't be some, you know, sometimes I see people saying, well, mobility solves

664
00:48:04,900 --> 00:48:08,820
cooperative dilemmas, but then I'm like, well, zebras can move, right?

665
00:48:08,980 --> 00:48:13,700
Um so like you we c we need an explanation that really can

666
00:48:14,610 --> 00:48:20,050
encompass the fact that humans have just a ton of stuff,

667
00:48:20,370 --> 00:48:23,330
ways of cooperating that other organisms don't have.

668
00:48:23,570 --> 00:48:29,250
And the explanation should then account for the lack of cooperation in other

669
00:48:29,250 --> 00:48:29,730
species.

670
00:48:29,890 --> 00:48:35,730
It shouldn't just account for cooperation in humans, but then if that mechanism is seen

671
00:48:35,730 --> 00:48:38,690
somewhere else, we should expect that kind of cooperation.

672
00:48:38,850 --> 00:48:44,740
That's, I think, a type of theoretical precision that we need to be bringing

673
00:48:44,740 --> 00:48:45,780
to the table.

674
00:48:46,420 --> 00:48:50,820
And so the idea of culture, I think, is one of the big like,

675
00:48:53,460 --> 00:48:58,980
you know, it stands out because it is something that

676
00:48:58,980 --> 00:49:04,510
humans really very much differ from other organisms in the kind of extreme

677
00:49:04,510 --> 00:49:10,350
reliance on imitation and culture, and the fact that that has led to

678
00:49:10,350 --> 00:49:16,030
some things like abilities for norms, transmission of norms, variation

679
00:49:16,190 --> 00:49:21,630
between populations in those norms and institutions that was

680
00:49:21,630 --> 00:49:27,180
previously you know, not available in genetically structured populations like group

681
00:49:27,580 --> 00:49:30,140
group level variation, all that stuff.

682
00:49:30,300 --> 00:49:36,220
So I've been really drawn to this idea that there are various things about culture

683
00:49:36,460 --> 00:49:42,460
that are uh what is very central to why our

684
00:49:42,460 --> 00:49:47,900
kind of cooperation is very different from what it looks in other animals.

685
00:49:48,380 --> 00:49:54,170
And um the idea of cultural group selection has

686
00:49:54,170 --> 00:49:57,130
been one of the prominent ones.

687
00:49:57,450 --> 00:50:03,210
And because people don't like to use the word group selection loosely

688
00:50:03,530 --> 00:50:08,810
in in these contexts, I've kind of tried to resort more to group structured cultural

689
00:50:08,810 --> 00:50:09,370
selection.

690
00:50:09,530 --> 00:50:09,610
Right.

691
00:50:10,120 --> 00:50:15,960
although the term hasn't caught on really so um i'm not really

692
00:50:15,960 --> 00:50:21,160
good with coming up with terms that that have to catch on but i'll continue trying to use

693
00:50:21,480 --> 00:50:26,040
yeah yeah not no yeah with like weird is one of these like oh my gosh like oh yeah that

694
00:50:26,040 --> 00:50:31,560
just I know that just spread like wildfire oh yeah yeah so um

695
00:50:31,800 --> 00:50:37,330
yeah anyway group structured cultural selection it's a bit of a mouthful but um uh

696
00:50:37,490 --> 00:50:43,490
I think uh that is one big way in which culture

697
00:50:43,490 --> 00:50:47,250
has changed something in in humans.

698
00:50:47,410 --> 00:50:52,930
So you know historically we always oh people were drawn to this idea of genetic group

699
00:50:52,930 --> 00:50:58,450
selection because yeah if you can get groups then you do and those groups are very

700
00:50:58,850 --> 00:51:04,820
vary, then you know you do get the potential for selection to act on these entities.

701
00:51:04,900 --> 00:51:09,940
And if you can get selection at that level, you're going to get adaptations at that level.

702
00:51:10,260 --> 00:51:13,700
And those could be you know cooperative dispositions.

703
00:51:13,940 --> 00:51:19,780
But you know the reality proved those people wrong because you just don't get that

704
00:51:19,780 --> 00:51:22,580
kind of um population structure with genes.

705
00:51:22,660 --> 00:51:28,180
And we confirmed that in our study with the Tracana and neighboring pastoral groups

706
00:51:28,580 --> 00:51:34,490
that So when we did our genetics project, we sampled four different pastoral groups in

707
00:51:34,490 --> 00:51:39,690
the Northwest of Kenya, the Turkana, Samburu, Burana, and Rendili.

708
00:51:40,330 --> 00:51:45,290
And we sampled them at different social scales, so the scale of clans,

709
00:51:45,530 --> 00:51:50,700
subterritories, and ethnolinguistic groups, so that we could see whether there's genetic

710
00:51:50,700 --> 00:51:52,700
variation at any of those scales.

711
00:51:52,940 --> 00:51:57,820
And no, the level of genetic variation is just really, really low.

712
00:51:57,900 --> 00:52:03,500
Like it's less than a percent, like even between uh ethnolinguistic groups.

713
00:52:03,660 --> 00:52:09,260
Um yeah, and just to clarify that we had just had Brett Beheim on, and he talked about

714
00:52:09,260 --> 00:52:12,140
there there's sort of the within group variation, between group variation.

715
00:52:12,300 --> 00:52:15,660
This is saying that the between group variation is very low compared to the within group.

716
00:52:16,140 --> 00:52:17,580
Exactly, exactly.

717
00:52:17,900 --> 00:52:23,750
So um uh it's not and this is actually um

718
00:52:24,230 --> 00:52:28,790
uh I mean I think that some geneticists would have say said you don't even need to like do

719
00:52:28,790 --> 00:52:30,630
this study, like we know this.

720
00:52:31,110 --> 00:52:33,270
Um don't waste money on this.

721
00:52:33,430 --> 00:52:37,590
And in fact, one geneticist that I spoke to before this project said, Why are you doing

722
00:52:37,590 --> 00:52:37,750
that?

723
00:52:37,910 --> 00:52:39,990
I mean, I know I know the answer to that.

724
00:52:40,220 --> 00:52:45,740
uh, but and then I almost started not doing that project, but then I gave a talk somewhere

725
00:52:45,740 --> 00:52:51,100
where the question, the person asking the question almost assumed that that would be a

726
00:52:51,420 --> 00:52:52,540
thing, yeah.

727
00:52:52,860 --> 00:52:58,060
Because you know, like clans, for example, are like lineages of people who share a

728
00:52:58,060 --> 00:53:03,870
relative, and they're sometimes uh endogamy, and actually the tracana even though they

729
00:53:03,870 --> 00:53:09,710
don't have rules against uh ethnic exogamy most marriages are within ethnic groups

730
00:53:09,790 --> 00:53:15,070
um so most tracana are marrying other tricana because that's who they're seeing at dances

731
00:53:15,070 --> 00:53:20,510
and running into and things like that so but despite this high level of ethnic and

732
00:53:20,750 --> 00:53:26,660
endogamy it's still the border is kind of non-existent, the genetic border is

733
00:53:26,660 --> 00:53:29,460
non-existent, but there is a cultural border.

734
00:53:30,180 --> 00:53:35,860
And we get at the when you look at the cultural variation, you get

735
00:53:36,900 --> 00:53:39,860
things on the order of like 10 to 15%.

736
00:53:40,660 --> 00:53:46,420
And maybe the highest value we had was like 18 or 19% at the scale of ethnolinguistic

737
00:53:46,420 --> 00:53:47,140
groups.

738
00:53:47,860 --> 00:53:52,970
So there is something different in how cultural variation and genetic variation

739
00:53:53,290 --> 00:53:56,650
gets organized in populations.

740
00:53:56,970 --> 00:54:02,810
And cultural variation does seem more amenable to these kind of group like

741
00:54:03,450 --> 00:54:04,410
structures.

742
00:54:05,530 --> 00:54:11,370
And so that I think is a very important premise of group

743
00:54:11,450 --> 00:54:13,050
structured cultural selection.

744
00:54:13,130 --> 00:54:18,720
And I was very excited by the work that I'd done with Carla Handley with these four

745
00:54:18,720 --> 00:54:21,440
populations that kind of showed showed that.

746
00:54:22,560 --> 00:54:28,480
And to me, it explains some things, not all

747
00:54:28,480 --> 00:54:34,240
things, but it explains some very important features about human cooperation,

748
00:54:34,400 --> 00:54:39,600
which is why you get norms that make people want to

749
00:54:39,600 --> 00:54:45,120
cooperate at these really large scales, and why that scale can be so variable.

750
00:54:45,630 --> 00:54:51,550
So because of uh what cultural group structured cultural selection is saying is that

751
00:54:51,630 --> 00:54:57,390
you know the scale of intergroup competition um is going to be

752
00:54:57,390 --> 00:55:00,590
mostly along the scale of cultural variation.

753
00:55:01,790 --> 00:55:07,710
You know so um uh it in this case in Northwest Kenya it's going to

754
00:55:07,710 --> 00:55:13,120
be mostly intergroup competition between ethnolinguistic groups and selection is

755
00:55:13,440 --> 00:55:19,040
favoring norms and behaviors that then make people do

756
00:55:19,040 --> 00:55:23,760
things that benefit that cultural group.

757
00:55:24,320 --> 00:55:30,000
And that can explain, for instance, this really odd thing that you know, like the Tricana

758
00:55:30,240 --> 00:55:35,120
go on raids to get animals from other groups, but they

759
00:55:36,240 --> 00:55:41,850
have a norm that says if you go and read another tricana, you're a criminal,

760
00:55:42,170 --> 00:55:44,170
that's banditry, that's criminal.

761
00:55:44,330 --> 00:55:49,690
And even if you bring animals back to our community and share those animals, we don't like

762
00:55:49,690 --> 00:55:50,730
you, we don't want you.

763
00:55:50,810 --> 00:55:55,450
We're gonna, you know, discipline you, we're gonna report you to those people that you

764
00:55:55,450 --> 00:55:58,730
stole the animals from, we're gonna make you return those animals.

765
00:55:59,050 --> 00:56:05,000
So there's the strong norm that is um telling people

766
00:56:05,240 --> 00:56:10,680
that there is this arbitrary group of people somewhere far down south but who call

767
00:56:10,680 --> 00:56:16,360
themselves trikana that you need to not harm in order to like bring

768
00:56:16,360 --> 00:56:21,000
something to your own community but then there's another group of people there that it's

769
00:56:21,000 --> 00:56:26,760
okay to um to and as long as it's benefiting us and in fact it's not just

770
00:56:26,760 --> 00:56:32,190
okay to in in this particular cultural system it's you know praised and and really

771
00:56:32,510 --> 00:56:38,190
um encouraged and people get a lot of status and um glory from doing that.

772
00:56:38,350 --> 00:56:44,270
Um so you have to kind of explain that there's a particular scale

773
00:56:44,270 --> 00:56:50,190
at which that norm is operating and it's providing benefits at this ethnolinguistic scale.

774
00:56:50,270 --> 00:56:55,940
It's it's creating social order at an at at this scale of a million people and

775
00:56:56,100 --> 00:56:59,300
but it's breaking down at another scale, right?

776
00:56:59,380 --> 00:57:04,820
Like as soon as you step past that Turkana boundary, that's that norm is really

777
00:57:05,460 --> 00:57:08,980
would be useful, but it's not happening.

778
00:57:09,140 --> 00:57:14,900
It's um it would be useful in the sense that you know, along the border, half of adult male

779
00:57:14,900 --> 00:57:17,300
mortality is due to warfare.

780
00:57:18,950 --> 00:57:22,470
And so many people on both sides are dying.

781
00:57:23,590 --> 00:57:28,630
And so if they could actually cooperate at this bigger scale, in which you know those other

782
00:57:28,630 --> 00:57:33,510
groups would be part of that in-group, everybody would be better off.

783
00:57:33,910 --> 00:57:36,470
But this is the classic cooperation problem.

784
00:57:36,630 --> 00:57:42,630
Even if we would both be better off if we both cooperated, if

785
00:57:42,950 --> 00:57:48,240
defection gives you even more, both sides are going to defect, and that's kind of what

786
00:57:48,240 --> 00:57:53,600
happens is that unilaterally raiding another group has huge

787
00:57:53,600 --> 00:57:54,320
benefits.

788
00:57:54,480 --> 00:57:57,360
So let's say the Turkana say we won't raid the taposa.

789
00:57:58,080 --> 00:58:03,360
Well, great time for the taposa to like go in and raid the tracana, right?

790
00:58:03,520 --> 00:58:04,960
Um, and vice versa.

791
00:58:05,200 --> 00:58:10,800
So you have the classic breakdown of cooperation between at that level that is

792
00:58:11,040 --> 00:58:16,070
uh causing so much um so much uh

793
00:58:16,070 --> 00:58:21,430
inefficiency, um, loss of lives, and no, and everybody even knows they don't want this.

794
00:58:21,590 --> 00:58:27,270
Like it would be great if we didn't have to deal with this, but can't kind of overcome that

795
00:58:27,270 --> 00:58:27,590
problem.

796
00:58:27,830 --> 00:58:33,590
So uh I think cultural uh group selection is a very good candidate for being

797
00:58:33,590 --> 00:58:39,510
able to say why you can get the scale of cooperation to be something that's

798
00:58:39,510 --> 00:58:44,780
pretty big, but can all can also get bigger if like the cultural group just expands.

799
00:58:44,940 --> 00:58:50,860
Like the Tracana have expanded from like 250,000 people 20, 30 years

800
00:58:50,860 --> 00:58:56,860
ago to like a million people, but those norms have still persisted that say, you

801
00:58:56,860 --> 00:59:01,900
know, now this new million people still are ones that we can't harm.

802
00:59:02,460 --> 00:59:02,860
Right?

803
00:59:02,940 --> 00:59:08,650
Um back in the day it used to be 100,000 or 50,000 people, but now

804
00:59:08,730 --> 00:59:14,250
as they've spread and been successful, they've displaced a lot of other groups from that

805
00:59:14,250 --> 00:59:18,010
area and they've occupied this big area, they're about a million people strong.

806
00:59:18,330 --> 00:59:24,170
And uh the norm now just extends to this much larger group of

807
00:59:24,170 --> 00:59:24,490
people.

808
00:59:24,650 --> 00:59:30,650
Uh, but there is a constraint on that norm, that is, that it's not able to go past a

809
00:59:30,680 --> 00:59:32,200
particular boundary.

810
00:59:32,440 --> 00:59:38,440
And uh if we were to think that humans are reasoning about this through their intelligence,

811
00:59:38,600 --> 00:59:44,040
through their recognition of the mutual benefits to cooperation, by sitting together and

812
00:59:44,040 --> 00:59:50,040
talking, by playing soccer games with each other and stuff like that, then you know this we

813
00:59:50,040 --> 00:59:51,240
wouldn't have this problem.

814
00:59:51,400 --> 00:59:57,400
They wouldn't be warring for like the last um 30, 40 years, probably

815
00:59:57,400 --> 00:59:57,960
longer.

816
00:59:58,120 --> 01:00:03,970
Um so I um I I I've talked for long, so I'll

817
01:00:04,050 --> 01:00:07,410
I'll I'll stop talking about interject.

818
01:00:08,130 --> 01:00:08,370
Yeah.

819
01:00:08,530 --> 01:00:11,570
I mean, yeah, so so many different threads that I would wanna go down.

820
01:00:11,730 --> 01:00:14,130
Is there one that you wanna go down most, Dave?

821
01:00:14,450 --> 01:00:19,250
Um, I I was gonna channel you because I think the last thing we said was sort of, I mean,

822
01:00:19,490 --> 01:00:25,440
the it sounds like that the Turkana example and the thing about why there's not sort of why

823
01:00:25,520 --> 01:00:29,120
why aren't they cooperating or why why can't we end the violence with the other group?

824
01:00:29,280 --> 01:00:34,240
I mean, I feel like that's I'm Dan Channel David is just it's a it's that the Turkana norm

825
01:00:34,400 --> 01:00:39,200
is sort of a coordination uh solution, it's a coordination technology of common knowledge

826
01:00:39,280 --> 01:00:44,000
that even if everybody on the border, for example, um says, like, as an individual, I don't

827
01:00:44,000 --> 01:00:48,400
want to do this, like you said, I can't be sure that the other people, even if like the one

828
01:00:48,400 --> 01:00:54,030
person I know doesn't want to do it, the other people, I don't know if they're not gonna

829
01:00:54,030 --> 01:00:57,230
want to do it too, or they might just use it as the opportunity to like screw me over,

830
01:00:57,310 --> 01:00:57,470
right?

831
01:00:57,550 --> 01:01:01,310
Like that, that that the example you use, there was a Saturday Night Live, I think it was

832
01:01:01,310 --> 01:01:06,830
quotes by Jack Handy, where I can imagine a society with no guns or no violence and no

833
01:01:06,830 --> 01:01:07,310
warfare.

834
01:01:07,390 --> 01:01:10,350
And I can imagine us sneaking up on them and really clobbering them.

835
01:01:10,430 --> 01:01:15,230
You know, it was like uh it's exactly that um uh you know, that sentiment.

836
01:01:15,390 --> 01:01:20,920
Um, so I feel like the this Turkana thing of in in Turkana, in Scare

837
01:01:20,920 --> 01:01:26,040
Quotes sounds like it's just this thing of it's a packet of um

838
01:01:26,360 --> 01:01:32,200
expectations and knowledge and rules that evolved psychology is

839
01:01:32,200 --> 01:01:34,360
sort of digested and used.

840
01:01:34,680 --> 01:01:40,360
And just to fill in the blank, too, the cultural group selection idea

841
01:01:40,680 --> 01:01:45,400
is as you said, we're sort of all selfish, or we all have this evolved psychology.

842
01:01:45,480 --> 01:01:50,930
And there's different sort of trial and error ways as groups of people to sort of stitch

843
01:01:50,930 --> 01:01:51,810
that together.

844
01:01:52,050 --> 01:01:55,890
And you can almost think about it as a metaphor of like building blocks.

845
01:01:55,970 --> 01:01:59,970
Like you try to build something out of a building block in one way or another way.

846
01:02:00,210 --> 01:02:04,450
And then at a certain point, you can kind of smash them together and see which one does

847
01:02:04,450 --> 01:02:05,410
better than the other.

848
01:02:05,650 --> 01:02:05,890
Right.

849
01:02:06,050 --> 01:02:10,370
And it could either be doing better because of conflict or doing better just by simple of

850
01:02:10,370 --> 01:02:15,220
like transmission or competition of just people are like, oh, that looks better than what

851
01:02:15,220 --> 01:02:16,020
I'm doing, right?

852
01:02:16,100 --> 01:02:19,460
Or, or it's, you know, you kill the other group or whatever.

853
01:02:19,700 --> 01:02:25,700
Um, but then the idea is that some of the ways of stitching together the evolved psychology

854
01:02:25,700 --> 01:02:26,660
work better than others.

855
01:02:26,740 --> 01:02:32,020
And this work better means gets extended or transmitted or extends.

856
01:02:32,340 --> 01:02:37,300
Um, and uh, and if if that's the idea, then that it sounds like this Turkana

857
01:02:38,150 --> 01:02:43,110
packet way of dealing with an evolved psychology is doing relatively well.

858
01:02:43,350 --> 01:02:45,590
Um, and it's it's spreading.

859
01:02:45,750 --> 01:02:51,590
Um, and so the answer to the question of why the other, why we it doesn't work

860
01:02:51,670 --> 01:02:57,590
kind of to the other group, is just that what the Turkana is, is

861
01:02:57,590 --> 01:03:03,510
this sort of set of locked in coordination devices that

862
01:03:03,510 --> 01:03:08,880
just that it's really hard to sort of create um from in a

863
01:03:08,880 --> 01:03:10,400
dynamic perspective.

864
01:03:10,960 --> 01:03:13,600
It's just how do you get that dynamic going?

865
01:03:14,560 --> 01:03:19,200
I I that's that's sort of my I I'm I'm sort of recapitulating what you've already said just

866
01:03:19,200 --> 01:03:21,680
in different language, but that's that's what I wanted to interject.

867
01:03:21,760 --> 01:03:22,400
Yeah.

868
01:03:23,120 --> 01:03:23,360
Yeah.

869
01:03:23,680 --> 01:03:28,640
I think that's very much the framework of um how norms work, right?

870
01:03:28,800 --> 01:03:34,190
So it is about solving a particular problem of

871
01:03:34,190 --> 01:03:35,630
common knowledge.

872
01:03:35,870 --> 01:03:40,110
So I know if I'm a Turkana, I know that

873
01:03:41,630 --> 01:03:44,910
you know you expect me to do this.

874
01:03:45,150 --> 01:03:48,270
And you know that I expect you to do this.

875
01:03:48,510 --> 01:03:54,430
And that um uh uh it it it is the fact that you

876
01:03:54,750 --> 01:04:00,520
are um embedded in this kind of shared knowledge that you and you can predict

877
01:04:00,520 --> 01:04:06,440
other people's response to your behaviors that provides the deterrence and the

878
01:04:06,440 --> 01:04:12,280
motivation to do things a certain way, which also gets to my earlier point about

879
01:04:12,280 --> 01:04:16,280
why humans can be so cooperative while still being fundamentally selfish.

880
01:04:16,440 --> 01:04:19,800
It's because when we're following norms, we are being selfish.

881
01:04:20,120 --> 01:04:22,590
We are not being pro-social.

882
01:04:22,750 --> 01:04:26,510
We are simply doing what is in our interest.

883
01:04:27,550 --> 01:04:33,230
That, you know, if I don't do this, then people will do

884
01:04:33,470 --> 01:04:37,230
this or think this of me and might not interact with me, etc.

885
01:04:37,550 --> 01:04:42,670
So I think the norms kind of help you explain, the normative pathway helps you explain how

886
01:04:42,670 --> 01:04:48,080
you can manage to get high levels of cooperation while still being fairly self-interested

887
01:04:48,080 --> 01:04:49,280
psychologically.

888
01:04:50,000 --> 01:04:55,360
But yeah, I think like you know, norms do uh they are about solving this uh big

889
01:04:55,360 --> 01:05:00,800
coordination problem at uh either interpersonally or at a much

890
01:05:00,800 --> 01:05:02,080
wider scale.

891
01:05:02,560 --> 01:05:08,320
And I think the cultural group selection part helps you explain how you can get it at

892
01:05:08,320 --> 01:05:13,970
this really big scale, in which there people can't just sit together and decide, oh, this

893
01:05:13,970 --> 01:05:16,770
is the scale at which we're going to cooperate.

894
01:05:16,930 --> 01:05:19,810
And that we've decided this is a useful scale.

895
01:05:20,050 --> 01:05:26,050
And so nobody has kind of gotten together to like deliberate

896
01:05:26,050 --> 01:05:26,450
on that.

897
01:05:26,610 --> 01:05:29,810
It's it's just kind of growing bottom up.

898
01:05:30,130 --> 01:05:35,900
And so then that growing bottom up is coming through this um these

899
01:05:35,900 --> 01:05:41,500
cultural evolutionary processes and the boundaries of that are being created by when these

900
01:05:41,500 --> 01:05:45,740
different normative systems are then clashing against each other.

901
01:05:45,980 --> 01:05:51,420
And one of them seems to do well, either because they align better with the evolved

902
01:05:51,420 --> 01:05:51,980
psychology.

903
01:05:52,140 --> 01:05:57,980
Maybe, you know, like the norm is one that allows everybody to see some gain

904
01:05:57,980 --> 01:06:01,820
to what they're um what to going along with the system.

905
01:06:02,140 --> 01:06:07,910
And in another system, it's harder to see that you feel more like you're being gypped

906
01:06:08,230 --> 01:06:09,030
or something like that.

907
01:06:09,190 --> 01:06:15,030
So, in that sense, it's what you've said like which package is better at aligning with the

908
01:06:15,030 --> 01:06:15,830
psychology.

909
01:06:15,910 --> 01:06:20,870
But then there's also the other component, which is that which package is better at

910
01:06:20,870 --> 01:06:26,710
extracting resources from the environment, like psychological component, because um

911
01:06:27,030 --> 01:06:33,000
that is so uh in the Turkana case, their normative package does require

912
01:06:33,000 --> 01:06:35,000
men to take some pretty big risks.

913
01:06:35,400 --> 01:06:41,160
That can seem like, you know, not really something that you'd want to

914
01:06:41,160 --> 01:06:41,960
buy into.

915
01:06:42,760 --> 01:06:48,280
But what I think it has persisted because it has allowed them to get these

916
01:06:48,280 --> 01:06:49,480
ecological benefits.

917
01:06:49,640 --> 01:06:55,590
They're able to displace other groups from very scarce dry season pastures

918
01:06:56,150 --> 01:07:01,990
and occupy those areas and as a result kind of start spreading

919
01:07:02,230 --> 01:07:08,070
um their um uh the area of land that they can call turcana

920
01:07:08,230 --> 01:07:13,750
and also just get access to an extremely valuable resource in the dry season which is going

921
01:07:13,750 --> 01:07:19,670
to literally be a huge determinant of population growth um right um

922
01:07:19,830 --> 01:07:24,740
if you don't get pastures in the dry season your animals are dying And

923
01:07:26,340 --> 01:07:32,340
so yeah, I think there's the alignment with the psychology part that's one in many

924
01:07:32,340 --> 01:07:34,820
places, that's why a normative package might work.

925
01:07:34,980 --> 01:07:40,900
But also there's the part about who's better at extracting resources, which package is

926
01:07:40,900 --> 01:07:45,060
allowing you to extract more resources from the ecology or be more competitive in

927
01:07:45,220 --> 01:07:49,940
intergroup contests or attract more people into your cultural group, et cetera.

928
01:07:50,180 --> 01:07:56,170
And um the all of those factors I think can play a role in why a normative

929
01:07:56,170 --> 01:08:00,170
package becomes, you know, what it is.

930
01:08:00,890 --> 01:08:01,450
Or stays.

931
01:08:01,850 --> 01:08:02,650
Fascinating.

932
01:08:03,210 --> 01:08:08,810
I mean, uh so what you're suggesting to me, or what I'm hearing, is a really intriguing

933
01:08:08,810 --> 01:08:12,010
hypothesis about the origins of tribalism.

934
01:08:12,250 --> 01:08:17,850
So Dave and I are both interested in the human propensity to create groups and to um

935
01:08:18,170 --> 01:08:23,700
have conflict with the outgroup, uh, in some cases, uh aggress against the outgroup,

936
01:08:23,860 --> 01:08:25,220
dominate the outgroup.

937
01:08:25,380 --> 01:08:28,580
This is uh a huge part of the human condition.

938
01:08:29,220 --> 01:08:34,900
What you're suggesting is that this tendency toward tribalism, for lack of a better word,

939
01:08:35,220 --> 01:08:40,740
um may in fact be a cultural adaptation rather than a genetic

940
01:08:40,740 --> 01:08:41,380
adaptation.

941
01:08:41,540 --> 01:08:46,340
That is, normative packages that extract more resources from the environment and extract

942
01:08:46,340 --> 01:08:51,870
more resources from other normative packages will by definition spread and proliferate.

943
01:08:51,950 --> 01:08:57,630
And that could very well be the normative package of uh protecting and defending everyone

944
01:08:57,630 --> 01:09:01,790
who shares that normative package and aggressing against and dominating and exploiting

945
01:09:01,790 --> 01:09:04,030
anyone who doesn't share that normative package.

946
01:09:04,270 --> 01:09:10,190
And so the possibility is that uh intergroup animosity, tribalism,

947
01:09:10,270 --> 01:09:12,080
there are lots of words for these things.

948
01:09:12,240 --> 01:09:13,520
We're all familiar with them.

949
01:09:13,920 --> 01:09:19,040
This could be a cultural adaptation, and that cultures that have these properties will, by

950
01:09:19,040 --> 01:09:24,640
definition, displace uh other cultures that lack these properties and will grow over time

951
01:09:24,800 --> 01:09:27,760
and will, in some cases, scale up as the group expands.

952
01:09:27,920 --> 01:09:32,400
As the normative package expands, the pool of cooperation and mutual protection and defense

953
01:09:32,400 --> 01:09:36,570
will expand, and you get larger and larger uh normative packages, and with larger and

954
01:09:36,570 --> 01:09:40,650
larger normative packages comes competition with other larger and larger normative

955
01:09:40,650 --> 01:09:45,130
packages, which creates more and more scaling, and you get larger and larger groups of of

956
01:09:45,130 --> 01:09:46,250
collaborating humans.

957
01:09:46,490 --> 01:09:50,810
Um I number one, am I getting um this this view correct?

958
01:09:50,970 --> 01:09:56,330
And number two, uh are are you are you in fact making that argument that um the origins of

959
01:09:56,410 --> 01:10:01,770
of of intergroup animosity tribalism are better viewed as a cultural adaptation than a

960
01:10:01,770 --> 01:10:02,810
genetic adaptation?

961
01:10:03,180 --> 01:10:08,860
Yeah, so um I think your description of this process was nicely done, better than you know,

962
01:10:08,940 --> 01:10:10,140
I can visualize it.

963
01:10:10,300 --> 01:10:12,460
Um, so I appreciated that.

964
01:10:12,620 --> 01:10:18,380
Um, so whether it is um, you know, uh cultural or genetic,

965
01:10:18,620 --> 01:10:24,140
I think that there's definitely a big cultural part to it, but whether it's happening

966
01:10:24,140 --> 01:10:29,430
completely in the absence of any psychological bias towards an

967
01:10:29,430 --> 01:10:35,430
ethnic psychology or an in-group psychology or a tribal psychology, I think that's

968
01:10:35,430 --> 01:10:38,550
more of an open question because it is possible.

969
01:10:38,710 --> 01:10:43,510
So, for instance, one way in which that could happen is simply that if cultural group

970
01:10:43,510 --> 01:10:48,390
selection like processes have been happening for a long period of evolutionary history,

971
01:10:48,710 --> 01:10:54,580
then you should uh be getting a prepared psychology that is expecting um

972
01:10:54,820 --> 01:11:00,020
something like that and um so you can get the kind of gene culture

973
01:11:00,020 --> 01:11:06,020
coevolution of a genetically um um uh specified

974
01:11:06,020 --> 01:11:11,990
tribal psychology but i think we don't i uh i am uh

975
01:11:12,230 --> 01:11:18,070
while I say that that is theoretically possible, I just think that it remains empirically

976
01:11:18,070 --> 01:11:19,510
an open question.

977
01:11:19,750 --> 01:11:25,430
Um and I'm not yet willing to kind of um, you know, take

978
01:11:25,430 --> 01:11:26,470
sides on that.

979
01:11:26,710 --> 01:11:32,470
Um so um, for example, you know, I think uh this is now a paper that

980
01:11:32,470 --> 01:11:38,320
Matt Zafferman and I wrote on um warfare and how group structure cultural

981
01:11:38,320 --> 01:11:40,880
selection can explain human warfare.

982
01:11:41,520 --> 01:11:44,240
We argued about how

983
01:11:47,360 --> 01:11:53,200
potentially one could separate the component that is coming from the genetic psychology

984
01:11:53,520 --> 01:11:59,350
by thinking about, for instance, is it easier to get norms that make people

985
01:11:59,350 --> 01:12:01,350
want to defend their group, right?

986
01:12:01,430 --> 01:12:06,870
So, like we're talking that there's there are normative packages that work and that are

987
01:12:06,870 --> 01:12:07,750
spreading.

988
01:12:09,030 --> 01:12:14,870
But is that normative package that is calling people to kind of favor their in group and

989
01:12:14,870 --> 01:12:16,230
compete against the out group?

990
01:12:16,630 --> 01:12:22,150
Is that normative package partly also doing very well because we also have a

991
01:12:22,150 --> 01:12:27,980
psychology that's telling us that we should expect norms like this to exist

992
01:12:28,140 --> 01:12:32,060
in the world that we are born to and we should be ready to learn those norms.

993
01:12:32,620 --> 01:12:37,100
Or is that norm just like any other norm that kind of can come about?

994
01:12:37,260 --> 01:12:43,100
Are we just as likely to learn a norm about group defense as we are to learn a

995
01:12:43,100 --> 01:12:46,940
norm about, you know, how to use a computer properly?

996
01:12:47,340 --> 01:12:47,740
Right?

997
01:12:47,990 --> 01:12:52,550
So that would be maybe a good experiment that can look at, yeah.

998
01:12:52,630 --> 01:12:58,630
Are we uh going back to where Dave starred in this great movie Unprepared Social

999
01:12:58,630 --> 01:12:58,950
Learning?

1000
01:13:00,630 --> 01:13:06,310
It would be really nice if we could do an experiment that looked at the extent to which

1001
01:13:06,470 --> 01:13:12,240
we are prepared to learn norms that have to do with uh

1002
01:13:12,480 --> 01:13:18,480
in-group um with a tribal psychology or a you know um uh intergroup

1003
01:13:18,480 --> 01:13:24,320
competitive psychology or are all norms many norms kind of equally learnable if we

1004
01:13:24,320 --> 01:13:29,350
get the same inputs um to them does that make sense dave Yeah.

1005
01:13:29,430 --> 01:13:29,670
Yeah.

1006
01:13:29,750 --> 01:13:31,430
And I mean, and also, oh, well, yeah.

1007
01:13:31,510 --> 01:13:34,950
And I also just want to like say it's really interesting and really complicated.

1008
01:13:35,110 --> 01:13:39,190
I want to clarify something too, which is that obviously when we say like as a cultural

1009
01:13:39,190 --> 01:13:45,110
genetic, we're not saying that there isn't, as Sarah already said, a bunch of the evolved

1010
01:13:45,110 --> 01:13:50,630
psychology in people that's constantly evaluating and enabling

1011
01:13:50,950 --> 01:13:53,240
these norms to continue.

1012
01:13:53,720 --> 01:13:56,360
It's just sort of what's tipping the scale, right?

1013
01:13:56,440 --> 01:14:02,200
It's sort of the question of sort of what's necessary or why are we getting um, you know,

1014
01:14:02,280 --> 01:14:05,640
what's the lever, what's the, what's the thing that kind of flips the switch?

1015
01:14:05,800 --> 01:14:11,800
And is it better explained by culture, uh, the call the the content of of what's of the

1016
01:14:11,800 --> 01:14:13,800
norm versus in the rule, right?

1017
01:14:13,880 --> 01:14:19,640
Like so sort of like let's say I'm an American uh right after 2001 and

1018
01:14:19,640 --> 01:14:21,810
I go bomb Afghanistan, right?

1019
01:14:21,890 --> 01:14:26,930
Like, is that because of my evolved psychology, or is it because I'm in an institutional

1020
01:14:26,930 --> 01:14:31,090
structure where somebody told me, you got to go do this.

1021
01:14:31,170 --> 01:14:34,610
And if I don't do it, I I don't get paid, you know, like that, right?

1022
01:14:34,770 --> 01:14:39,170
Like, um, you know, and and and so obviously there's an evolved psychology of a lot, lots

1023
01:14:39,170 --> 01:14:43,170
of things, but then there's a question of sort of um what is that institution?

1024
01:14:43,650 --> 01:14:46,700
Um, what's the cultural institution to?

1025
01:14:47,020 --> 01:14:49,980
Um, I don't know if that's helpful or clarifying.

1026
01:14:50,140 --> 01:14:53,980
I just want to say one other quick thing, which is that even if there is an evolved

1027
01:14:53,980 --> 01:14:59,660
psychology for expecting to be in these situations, to the

1028
01:14:59,660 --> 01:15:05,150
extent it is naturally selected, it might, it's also going to be sort of like, okay, I'm

1029
01:15:05,150 --> 01:15:11,150
somebody, I'm a male who's being told to go possibly die for some for some person

1030
01:15:11,150 --> 01:15:12,110
in power.

1031
01:15:12,830 --> 01:15:17,070
There's gonna be really strong selection pressures on being like, is that a good idea,

1032
01:15:17,150 --> 01:15:17,310
right?

1033
01:15:17,390 --> 01:15:19,390
Or like, what are the cues that that's a good idea?

1034
01:15:19,470 --> 01:15:25,280
And then you would expect cultural institutions to sort of um hijack the

1035
01:15:25,280 --> 01:15:26,320
ones that work, right?

1036
01:15:26,480 --> 01:15:29,200
Hijack the cues that make it seem like it's a good idea.

1037
01:15:29,280 --> 01:15:31,760
Like, oh, our probability of success is very high.

1038
01:15:31,840 --> 01:15:37,040
So let's have lots of parades where I'm just surrounded by incredible amounts of power.

1039
01:15:37,280 --> 01:15:41,040
So I feel like, well, of course it's a good idea for me to go do this because of course

1040
01:15:41,200 --> 01:15:42,320
we're gonna win, right?

1041
01:15:42,480 --> 01:15:48,150
Like, so that's just one other example, too, where um even if there is evolved design, it

1042
01:15:48,150 --> 01:15:51,990
might not be as simple as there's a bias to go do it.

1043
01:15:52,070 --> 01:15:56,470
It might just be that there's evolved design to sort of evaluate it in a really smart way.

1044
01:15:57,110 --> 01:15:57,670
Yeah.

1045
01:15:57,990 --> 01:15:58,390
Yeah.

1046
01:15:58,710 --> 01:16:04,630
I guess that's also that layer that I was talking about of um

1047
01:16:04,790 --> 01:16:09,990
yeah, are we do we come more ready to acquire social

1048
01:16:10,310 --> 01:16:16,300
norms that are in particular domains that have directions.

1049
01:16:16,380 --> 01:16:21,980
So like for instance, if the norm says you know don't fight with these people, is that norm

1050
01:16:22,140 --> 01:16:26,220
easier or harder to learn than a norm that says you can't fight with these people?

1051
01:16:27,260 --> 01:16:32,060
Like or a norm about uh you know getting um

1052
01:16:33,130 --> 01:16:38,890
something arbitrary that's unrelated to group level competitive processes.

1053
01:16:39,050 --> 01:16:44,890
So that's maybe the middle layer, which I thought like, you know, is a good

1054
01:16:44,890 --> 01:16:50,730
space to explore because I really haven't seen any studies about that aspect.

1055
01:16:50,890 --> 01:16:56,490
You know, it's it's either like, okay, are we kind of biased towards tribal psychology

1056
01:16:56,730 --> 01:17:02,520
or is it just the norm, but not is there, are we biased towards a learning

1057
01:17:02,520 --> 01:17:08,440
a norm that will tell us to do X over a that tells us to do Y?

1058
01:17:08,840 --> 01:17:09,000
Yeah.

1059
01:17:09,400 --> 01:17:10,680
That's a really great I love that.

1060
01:17:10,760 --> 01:17:12,040
Yeah, like it's what's sticky.

1061
01:17:12,280 --> 01:17:13,000
That's a great question.

1062
01:17:13,080 --> 01:17:14,120
Yeah, that's that's great.

1063
01:17:14,200 --> 01:17:14,760
Yeah.

1064
01:17:15,080 --> 01:17:15,480
Yeah.

1065
01:17:15,720 --> 01:17:21,320
I mean, it's interesting that in so many intergroup conflicts,

1066
01:17:21,670 --> 01:17:27,270
um, the outgroup is demonized as being anti-social or exploitative or

1067
01:17:27,270 --> 01:17:28,550
dangerous, right?

1068
01:17:28,630 --> 01:17:30,470
Or, you know, dirty, well, whatever.

1069
01:17:30,630 --> 01:17:35,110
Any we have this rich psychology of partner choice where we're evaluating with whom we

1070
01:17:35,110 --> 01:17:35,990
should cooperate.

1071
01:17:36,150 --> 01:17:41,190
And when we look at the narratives that are uh engineered about the outgroup, you just go

1072
01:17:41,190 --> 01:17:45,750
down the list of everything that is bad in a social partner, the outgroup has, right?

1073
01:17:46,310 --> 01:17:49,190
Uh and that can't be a coincidence.

1074
01:17:49,270 --> 01:17:54,640
W and so if it were um purely um

1075
01:17:55,840 --> 01:18:00,160
it almost speaks to in favor of the of the of the cultural view.

1076
01:18:00,320 --> 01:18:05,600
Where if we had a genetic uh disposition to aggress against outgroups, we wouldn't need

1077
01:18:05,600 --> 01:18:06,960
those narratives, right?

1078
01:18:07,040 --> 01:18:09,600
They're they're in the outgroup, let's just kill them and dominate them and exploit them.

1079
01:18:09,680 --> 01:18:12,640
It doesn't matter how good they're maybe maybe even if they're better than us, we that's

1080
01:18:12,720 --> 01:18:15,440
that's a better reason for us to attack them, right?

1081
01:18:15,840 --> 01:18:16,960
So it shouldn't it shouldn't matter.

1082
01:18:17,040 --> 01:18:21,550
We shouldn't need those narratives if it's if it's a purely genetic disposition to uh

1083
01:18:21,550 --> 01:18:23,150
attack outgroups, right?

1084
01:18:23,310 --> 01:18:28,350
But if it's a cultural evolutionary package that that harnesses aspects of our evolved

1085
01:18:28,350 --> 01:18:32,750
psychology in service of intergroup competition, then you would expect that cultural

1086
01:18:32,750 --> 01:18:38,030
package to harness pre-existing features of the psychology that allow uh hatred,

1087
01:18:38,190 --> 01:18:41,310
aggression, uh anger-based bargaining, et cetera.

1088
01:18:41,470 --> 01:18:46,160
And so what it's doing is it's harnessing aspects of our partner choice psychology in

1089
01:18:46,160 --> 01:18:50,400
service of intergroup competition, because the only groups that would have been successful

1090
01:18:50,400 --> 01:18:54,400
in coordinating out-group aggression were the groups that had normative package packages

1091
01:18:54,400 --> 01:18:58,880
and narratives that demonized the outgroup in whatever way was possible.

1092
01:18:59,600 --> 01:18:59,920
I don't know.

1093
01:19:01,840 --> 01:19:02,640
I'm curious what you think.

1094
01:19:03,360 --> 01:19:09,280
So that kind of just made me remember about a very recent paper that um

1095
01:19:09,280 --> 01:19:14,830
Matt Zaperman and I are working on a chapter that will come up in this

1096
01:19:14,830 --> 01:19:20,670
edited volume on essentialism that Christina Moya um

1097
01:19:21,070 --> 01:19:24,910
uh had invited us to um contribute to.

1098
01:19:25,310 --> 01:19:31,150
Uh we looked at um you know the attitudes that the tracana have

1099
01:19:31,150 --> 01:19:37,150
towards the Toposa, the group that they um you know are engaged in very lethal conflict

1100
01:19:37,150 --> 01:19:37,390
with.

1101
01:19:37,550 --> 01:19:42,700
And you know, most Tracana have know somebody who's been killed by a taposa.

1102
01:19:43,100 --> 01:19:48,700
Most tocana, especially in the border area, have know somebody or have personally had their

1103
01:19:48,700 --> 01:19:51,100
animals taken in a raid and stuff like that.

1104
01:19:51,180 --> 01:19:57,180
So you'll fe think that this is a place where maybe this kind of dehumanizing

1105
01:19:57,180 --> 01:20:00,060
kind of uh framework should get mobilized.

1106
01:20:00,140 --> 01:20:06,030
And so, and then when they talk about you know going to raid the taposa, they gather

1107
01:20:06,030 --> 01:20:10,990
together and they talk about you know revenge and like we need to retaliate because they

1108
01:20:10,990 --> 01:20:12,110
came and they took our stuff.

1109
01:20:12,190 --> 01:20:16,190
So it's like building up that anger, um, uh, etc.

1110
01:20:16,910 --> 01:20:19,070
But uh really, really interesting.

1111
01:20:19,230 --> 01:20:24,830
We did the switched at birth task um for uh the tracana and toposas.

1112
01:20:24,910 --> 01:20:29,940
So if a baby is a toposa baby is raised by the trikana, spent all their life in the

1113
01:20:29,940 --> 01:20:32,260
Tracano, would that baby be Toposa or Tracana?

1114
01:20:32,420 --> 01:20:36,180
And vice versa, if a Tracano baby was adopted by the Toposa and grew up there, would it be

1115
01:20:36,180 --> 01:20:37,220
Tracano, Toposa?

1116
01:20:37,860 --> 01:20:43,060
And um can I ask you to guess what you think people would have said?

1117
01:20:43,540 --> 01:20:45,140
People are not essentialistic.

1118
01:20:45,460 --> 01:20:46,500
I guess I gave it away.

1119
01:20:46,980 --> 01:20:51,540
No, but I mean then this is actually because this was my literature though, which is sort

1120
01:20:51,540 --> 01:20:54,660
of that um well no I'll let you I don't yeah yeah.

1121
01:20:55,370 --> 01:20:58,730
I mean, I was personally surprised just at how low it was.

1122
01:20:58,890 --> 01:21:04,810
I knew it wouldn't be potentially that high, but we had only about two

1123
01:21:04,970 --> 01:21:08,810
percent of our subjects um give the essentialist response.

1124
01:21:08,890 --> 01:21:10,330
That was like four subjects.

1125
01:21:10,410 --> 01:21:15,050
Um give the response that a tricana is still a tricana if they're raised by the opposite

1126
01:21:15,050 --> 01:21:16,010
group and and vice versa.

1127
01:21:16,250 --> 01:21:18,570
So they're thinking that if you're raised in that group, you're a member of that group.

1128
01:21:18,650 --> 01:21:19,050
That's who you are.

1129
01:21:19,290 --> 01:21:24,760
And if a toposa baby is raised by us, uh baby's a tricana and not a

1130
01:21:24,760 --> 01:21:25,480
taposa.

1131
01:21:26,520 --> 01:21:31,160
And so we kind of delved a little bit into the literature on

1132
01:21:32,280 --> 01:21:34,520
ethnic essentializing beliefs.

1133
01:21:34,680 --> 01:21:40,440
And it does uh some people have argued that it's those beliefs that can allow you to more

1134
01:21:40,440 --> 01:21:46,040
easily dehumanize the the outgroup because they are they're different from you.

1135
01:21:46,200 --> 01:21:51,430
They're not, they don't have the same things you have, the essence that you have, and the

1136
01:21:51,430 --> 01:21:56,870
prejudice, hostilities and and dehumanization kind of is more easy in that

1137
01:21:56,870 --> 01:21:57,590
context.

1138
01:21:57,830 --> 01:22:02,790
But um yeah, we see uh literally like no um

1139
01:22:04,070 --> 01:22:09,910
uh yeah I I would say you know close to zero um essentializing beliefs.

1140
01:22:09,990 --> 01:22:12,150
Um fascinating fascinating result.

1141
01:22:12,320 --> 01:22:12,480
Yeah.

1142
01:22:12,720 --> 01:22:13,040
Yeah.

1143
01:22:13,200 --> 01:22:18,640
And um we, you know, this was part of the study we did on post-traumatic stress

1144
01:22:18,640 --> 01:22:21,920
disorder in Tracana Warriors with Matt Zefferman.

1145
01:22:22,160 --> 01:22:24,640
Yeah, I wanted to talk about that and make sure we get to that.

1146
01:22:24,720 --> 01:22:25,200
That's fantastic.

1147
01:22:25,280 --> 01:22:26,480
Yeah, but please, yeah, yeah.

1148
01:22:26,800 --> 01:22:32,320
Um, because actually I I think that study also relates a little bit to your question about,

1149
01:22:32,400 --> 01:22:37,760
you know, how the genetic psychology versus norms are playing into warfare, etc.

1150
01:22:38,240 --> 01:22:43,810
So um uh just so just stepping back um a little bit on that question,

1151
01:22:44,050 --> 01:22:49,170
because the trikran are exposed to these really high rates of lethal violence and raids,

1152
01:22:49,410 --> 01:22:55,250
you might yeah, it's a very um important context in which you can ask that question.

1153
01:22:55,490 --> 01:22:58,850
Are warriors having combat-related PTSD?

1154
01:22:59,410 --> 01:23:05,000
And um going into this project, I had very

1155
01:23:05,320 --> 01:23:08,760
I had literally like zero idea of what we will find.

1156
01:23:08,840 --> 01:23:11,640
I would not have been surprised either which way.

1157
01:23:12,760 --> 01:23:18,680
But because uh purely because in like the many, many interviews that I had done

1158
01:23:18,680 --> 01:23:24,280
with people and when people recounted raids that were fairly traumatic, et cetera, nobody

1159
01:23:24,280 --> 01:23:29,870
ever mentioned anything about you know having intrusive thoughts afterwards or anything.

1160
01:23:30,030 --> 01:23:35,550
I mean, I didn't specifically query about it, but it never like spontaneously came up in

1161
01:23:35,550 --> 01:23:37,230
any kind of um thing.

1162
01:23:37,550 --> 01:23:43,310
Um and uh so that that that empirical impression was that maybe this is not a

1163
01:23:43,310 --> 01:23:44,110
thing here.

1164
01:23:44,270 --> 01:23:50,030
Um but then theoretically we were Matt Zaperman and I uh were kind

1165
01:23:50,030 --> 01:23:55,790
of putting on our our hats as well-informed evolutionary behavioral

1166
01:23:55,870 --> 01:24:01,240
um sciences researchers and thinking, you know, what what what what

1167
01:24:01,240 --> 01:24:07,160
does uh everything we know about um human evolution tell us that we should find

1168
01:24:07,160 --> 01:24:07,480
here?

1169
01:24:07,640 --> 01:24:13,080
And we made a we made predictions that basically integrate kind of like these evolved

1170
01:24:13,080 --> 01:24:15,640
psychological dispositions with the norm psychology.

1171
01:24:15,800 --> 01:24:21,710
So what we said was that, well, you know, if PTSD is about learning to respond to

1172
01:24:21,710 --> 01:24:27,150
physical danger and protect yourself from that then that is a universal

1173
01:24:27,470 --> 01:24:33,390
threat um and that you know all human populations should have evolved

1174
01:24:33,470 --> 01:24:39,220
uh should have the psychology um the evolved psychology to um to

1175
01:24:39,460 --> 01:24:42,580
protect yourself from that um kind of situation.

1176
01:24:42,820 --> 01:24:48,740
And if you look at the PTSD symptoms, um there are 20 of them, but only a few of them

1177
01:24:48,740 --> 01:24:51,940
actually align with that kind of response.

1178
01:24:52,100 --> 01:24:56,260
So those are called the learning and reacting, we call them the learning and reacting

1179
01:24:56,260 --> 01:25:01,670
symptoms, and these are the symptoms of hypervigilance, startle, um so that

1180
01:25:01,910 --> 01:25:07,590
essentially uh uh acute distress so like you know everything's uh your body is getting

1181
01:25:07,590 --> 01:25:13,590
pumped up um to deal with um this risk and an intrusive thought so you're

1182
01:25:13,590 --> 01:25:17,830
like learning about it and thinking about it even after the event so that you can kind of

1183
01:25:17,830 --> 01:25:21,110
seal it in your head that when this happens what I do.

1184
01:25:21,940 --> 01:25:27,940
So we uh we basically predicted that learning and reacting symptoms make

1185
01:25:27,940 --> 01:25:30,820
a lot of sense cross-culturally, universally.

1186
01:25:30,900 --> 01:25:36,180
You know, humans should evolve a psychology that makes them react in this way to physical

1187
01:25:36,180 --> 01:25:36,820
danger.

1188
01:25:37,140 --> 01:25:40,500
So in that sense, the Turkana should have that.

1189
01:25:41,590 --> 01:25:46,150
But there are other symptoms of PTSD that are a little bit more unusual.

1190
01:25:47,190 --> 01:25:52,790
And one group of symptoms are more overlapping with like depressive symptoms.

1191
01:25:52,950 --> 01:25:58,630
So they make people feel, you know, you feel estranged and you

1192
01:25:58,630 --> 01:26:00,950
don't feel like interacting with others.

1193
01:26:01,110 --> 01:26:03,110
It's like a negative mood.

1194
01:26:04,790 --> 01:26:10,310
And these seem more about affecting people's motivation,

1195
01:26:11,080 --> 01:26:13,160
right, to engage in that.

1196
01:26:13,240 --> 01:26:17,880
Um now I know there are many theories of depression, including um from you know

1197
01:26:18,040 --> 01:26:21,880
evolutionary psychologists like I think Ed Hagen, yeah,

1198
01:26:23,880 --> 01:26:27,160
um bargaining, uh yeah, exactly.

1199
01:26:27,320 --> 01:26:33,320
Um, but you know, essentially one way to think about this, and that does overlap with with

1200
01:26:33,320 --> 01:26:39,050
the what's uh been said in the literature is that uh depressive symptoms change your

1201
01:26:39,050 --> 01:26:42,170
motivation to engage in that thing.

1202
01:26:42,490 --> 01:26:48,410
And so that's kind of the framework we adopted is saying that so there is another class of

1203
01:26:48,410 --> 01:26:52,330
symptoms that's affecting your um your motivation.

1204
01:26:52,810 --> 01:26:58,490
Um and uh we kind of conjectured that

1205
01:26:58,490 --> 01:27:04,020
those symptoms are going to be something that um that

1206
01:27:04,100 --> 01:27:09,940
plays more uh that that is influenced also not just by the physical risks

1207
01:27:09,940 --> 01:27:15,540
of going to war but the normative landscape that is the social

1208
01:27:15,620 --> 01:27:21,540
rewards and social costs of these actions um and uh

1209
01:27:22,310 --> 01:27:28,230
uh and and uh the reason why we felt that is because

1210
01:27:28,310 --> 01:27:34,070
you know if you think about um humans, one of the things, one of the

1211
01:27:34,070 --> 01:27:39,910
really tricky things about war is that it's making people do something

1212
01:27:39,990 --> 01:27:42,150
in some ways that's very unusual, right?

1213
01:27:42,310 --> 01:27:46,880
Like by and large, people are told, you know, you can't harm this person, you can't kill

1214
01:27:46,880 --> 01:27:47,360
this person.

1215
01:27:47,520 --> 01:27:52,400
People, you kill somebody even in rage, accident, you can be ostracized from your society,

1216
01:27:52,480 --> 01:27:54,080
the rest of your life's over.

1217
01:27:54,640 --> 01:28:00,160
It's like this really heavy and loaded thing in in a huge normative

1218
01:28:00,160 --> 01:28:00,720
context.

1219
01:28:00,880 --> 01:28:05,200
But then there's this kind of normative context where it says if this these conditions are

1220
01:28:05,200 --> 01:28:08,170
met, then is okay to do.

1221
01:28:09,130 --> 01:28:15,050
And the thing is that in many war contexts, those norms are

1222
01:28:15,050 --> 01:28:17,530
really very, it's a fine line.

1223
01:28:17,690 --> 01:28:23,210
Like if you look at clan warfare, for instance, there are rules about how much damage you

1224
01:28:23,210 --> 01:28:28,250
can inflict on this other clan and like what kind of weapons you can use, and like how you

1225
01:28:28,250 --> 01:28:29,610
need to compensate.

1226
01:28:29,930 --> 01:28:35,280
So it's still structured in a normative landscape in many, many societies, like the

1227
01:28:35,280 --> 01:28:40,400
violence that is allowed, the extent to which it's allowed, and exactly who it can be

1228
01:28:40,400 --> 01:28:43,760
targeted to, whether it can be targeted towards women and children.

1229
01:28:43,920 --> 01:28:47,280
What should you do when you know somebody's unarmed?

1230
01:28:47,440 --> 01:28:48,480
Can you take them?

1231
01:28:48,960 --> 01:28:52,320
Can you ambush people when they're not ready for a battle?

1232
01:28:52,480 --> 01:28:54,240
And all those kinds of things.

1233
01:28:54,480 --> 01:29:00,270
Um to what extent can you destroy their property in the course

1234
01:29:00,270 --> 01:29:01,550
of the war.

1235
01:29:01,950 --> 01:29:06,350
And in different societies at different scales, you can have different norms.

1236
01:29:06,510 --> 01:29:11,390
Like, okay, if it's another clan in your same ethnic group, maybe there is like more of a

1237
01:29:11,390 --> 01:29:15,070
ceremonial kind of warfare where we're not inflicting too much damage.

1238
01:29:15,230 --> 01:29:20,270
But if we go a little further away towards these other people, we can go all out, etc.

1239
01:29:20,590 --> 01:29:25,950
So that moral landscape is a kind of like walking through a moral landmine in some ways.

1240
01:29:26,110 --> 01:29:31,320
Like there is a way to walk and do it right, but there's also many ways in which you can do

1241
01:29:31,320 --> 01:29:32,040
it wrong.

1242
01:29:32,200 --> 01:29:37,640
And so we predicted that, you know, humans, if if you know, combat-related

1243
01:29:37,640 --> 01:29:43,480
PTSD has evolved to deal with human warfare, then it's going to have to

1244
01:29:43,480 --> 01:29:49,320
deal with these kind of normative dangers, the moral risks, uh, because the

1245
01:29:49,560 --> 01:29:54,920
the conditions for war in humans are very much specified by the specific norms.

1246
01:29:55,230 --> 01:29:59,390
And so we kind of predicted that it's these moral

1247
01:30:00,350 --> 01:30:05,950
violations, either as victims of violation or as perpetrators of violations, that

1248
01:30:05,950 --> 01:30:10,590
should be more strongly associated with the depressive symptoms.

1249
01:30:10,830 --> 01:30:13,390
And we found that in the Turkana, that is the case.

1250
01:30:13,550 --> 01:30:18,540
Now, the tri well, the one first thing we found is that first, you know a third of the

1251
01:30:18,540 --> 01:30:24,300
warriors in our sample did have um sufficient symptom severity that would

1252
01:30:24,300 --> 01:30:28,060
qualify them for a provisional PTSD diagnosis here in the West.

1253
01:30:28,620 --> 01:30:33,180
Some of them were describing symptoms that you know you wouldn't be able to tell apart if

1254
01:30:33,180 --> 01:30:39,100
it was a tricana or an American um soldier talking about like the hypervigilance like

1255
01:30:39,180 --> 01:30:41,420
and and startle and things like that.

1256
01:30:41,900 --> 01:30:47,870
There was one person who talked about how he just heard a sound um put put at night and

1257
01:30:47,870 --> 01:30:53,550
just woke up, took his gun and fired, and it was he shot a donkey that was just

1258
01:30:53,550 --> 01:30:54,030
walking.

1259
01:30:54,510 --> 01:30:54,910
Right.

1260
01:30:55,790 --> 01:31:01,710
So um so there's a lot of cultural parallels, which does speak

1261
01:31:01,710 --> 01:31:06,750
to this kind of like a universal evolved psychology for this kind of physical danger

1262
01:31:06,750 --> 01:31:07,310
response.

1263
01:31:07,550 --> 01:31:12,320
Because the really interesting thing about Turkana is that they have they don't have a

1264
01:31:12,320 --> 01:31:14,720
concept of this set of symptoms.

1265
01:31:14,800 --> 01:31:20,240
They don't have a name for this condition of what um uh that that

1266
01:31:20,240 --> 01:31:21,920
embodies these set of symptoms.

1267
01:31:22,000 --> 01:31:27,840
So it's not that because they know it, they are they match their this thing with that

1268
01:31:27,840 --> 01:31:28,960
cultural framework.

1269
01:31:29,120 --> 01:31:33,440
When we asked people, we're like uh a lot of people were talking about these symptoms, but

1270
01:31:33,440 --> 01:31:37,280
they were like, Yeah, I told my friend, and my friend was like, just forget about it, just

1271
01:31:37,360 --> 01:31:38,240
don't think about it.

1272
01:31:38,480 --> 01:31:44,450
Like it, yeah, there wasn't like a thing that people identified, oh, you're suffering from

1273
01:31:44,450 --> 01:31:50,370
this, and this is how we deal with the startle, hyper startle, um, hypervigilance

1274
01:31:50,450 --> 01:31:51,090
of startle.

1275
01:31:51,410 --> 01:31:57,010
So I think that's a very powerful indication that you know there is there's something

1276
01:31:57,010 --> 01:32:02,450
underlying in the psychology in which you can get such strong convergence between two

1277
01:32:02,450 --> 01:32:07,170
populations that are experiencing very different kinds of warfare, one which is like, you

1278
01:32:07,280 --> 01:32:11,840
know, so familiar with the concept, one which is not, but get them to literally be saying

1279
01:32:11,840 --> 01:32:12,720
the same thing.

1280
01:32:13,040 --> 01:32:18,160
So I thought that was uh that was a very interesting aspect of this work that struck me.

1281
01:32:18,400 --> 01:32:24,160
But um when it came to the depressive symptoms, we found that the tricana do have that

1282
01:32:24,400 --> 01:32:25,040
too.

1283
01:32:25,520 --> 01:32:31,430
Um uh, But when we compared it to the Western sample, we found that

1284
01:32:31,910 --> 01:32:37,830
the US for any particular symptom severity, the US soldiers had more of those

1285
01:32:37,830 --> 01:32:41,030
depressive symptoms compared to like the Tracana warriors.

1286
01:32:41,190 --> 01:32:47,190
So there's more of a cultural difference between these populations on that front than

1287
01:32:47,190 --> 01:32:50,310
there is on the physical danger response front.

1288
01:32:50,550 --> 01:32:56,540
And our hypothesis was that this has to do with exposure to moral

1289
01:32:56,540 --> 01:32:57,100
violations.

1290
01:32:57,180 --> 01:33:02,620
And we found that within the Turkana, people who had more reported more

1291
01:33:02,620 --> 01:33:08,380
exposure to like moral violations and social sanctions as a result of their

1292
01:33:08,380 --> 01:33:14,310
participation had more depressive symptoms than those

1293
01:33:14,310 --> 01:33:14,790
who didn't.

1294
01:33:14,870 --> 01:33:18,070
So at least within the group, we kind of found some support for that.

1295
01:33:18,230 --> 01:33:21,190
But we haven't yet done that with the US sample.

1296
01:33:21,350 --> 01:33:27,270
But one of my graduate students, Michael Baumgarten, who's an a retired Army ranger, is

1297
01:33:27,350 --> 01:33:33,270
for his dissertation work doing a project with the US veterans to kind of test this moral

1298
01:33:33,270 --> 01:33:39,190
injury, whether you know, exposure to moral violations specifically has an effect on

1299
01:33:39,190 --> 01:33:43,500
depressive symptoms and not on the other kinds of symptoms.

1300
01:33:43,660 --> 01:33:49,580
Um so I think that that uh work provides um

1301
01:33:50,140 --> 01:33:55,580
some support for this idea that our war psychology is one that is

1302
01:33:55,580 --> 01:34:00,780
prepared to um anticipate moral risks and

1303
01:34:01,420 --> 01:34:06,140
and and and be vigilant about you know the normative landscape, right?

1304
01:34:06,450 --> 01:34:12,370
And so at least that it has evolved in a in a space in which norms played a big

1305
01:34:12,370 --> 01:34:17,810
role in shaping how we deal with uh these dangerous

1306
01:34:18,930 --> 01:34:24,130
war-related situations, um, physically dangerous and morally dangerous,

1307
01:34:24,450 --> 01:34:29,170
morally dangerous because of the the normative landscape in which it's happening.

1308
01:34:29,490 --> 01:34:35,200
So I wonder uh you know I it's not directly speaking to the question that

1309
01:34:35,200 --> 01:34:41,200
David you asked, but it is talking, it is, I think, indirectly getting

1310
01:34:41,200 --> 01:34:46,640
at the fact that yes, we do have genetically evolved psychology that is making us

1311
01:34:46,640 --> 01:34:52,080
vigilant to a norm, to the normative complexity

1312
01:34:52,400 --> 01:34:54,000
in in war.

1313
01:34:54,970 --> 01:35:00,890
Um and uh that means that norms have been an important

1314
01:35:01,130 --> 01:35:07,130
part of the EEA of in which warfare evolved um right and

1315
01:35:07,210 --> 01:35:12,970
um or an important part of um the psychology that has shaped

1316
01:35:12,970 --> 01:35:16,280
our motivations Interesting.

1317
01:35:17,960 --> 01:35:19,240
Absolutely fascinating stuff.

1318
01:35:22,040 --> 01:35:27,160
To me, I think that um is supportive of this cultural view of

1319
01:35:27,480 --> 01:35:28,360
warfare.

1320
01:35:28,520 --> 01:35:34,360
Uh, because uh if we had a genetic uh psychological disposition toward

1321
01:35:34,360 --> 01:35:38,360
outgroup aggression, we wouldn't need this convoluted package of robots.

1322
01:35:38,840 --> 01:35:40,120
We'd be like, push the war button.

1323
01:35:40,200 --> 01:35:40,360
Good.

1324
01:35:40,680 --> 01:35:43,000
Yeah, push the war button, let's let's kill the outgroup members.

1325
01:35:43,160 --> 01:35:48,690
Who cares, you know, and about but precisely because we need this rich set of norms about

1326
01:35:48,690 --> 01:35:53,010
when to attack, how we attack, who is worth attacking, who is not, uh, why they're

1327
01:35:53,010 --> 01:35:55,170
attacking, you know, what what the harm they've done to us.

1328
01:35:55,250 --> 01:35:59,570
We need these uh elaborate rituals where we get together and dance and and you know feel

1329
01:35:59,570 --> 01:36:04,130
formidable, like this huge convoluted package of cultural stuff.

1330
01:36:04,530 --> 01:36:09,330
You would not need it if it was a a purely uh a genetically uh uh

1331
01:36:10,840 --> 01:36:13,640
It was purely genetic adaptation for warfare, right?

1332
01:36:14,360 --> 01:36:19,800
The elaborateness of of of the cultural stuff here that is driving warfare

1333
01:36:20,040 --> 01:36:24,920
speaks to adaptation more at the cultural level than at the biological level.

1334
01:36:25,080 --> 01:36:25,640
At least to me.

1335
01:36:28,760 --> 01:36:34,280
I think it speaks to that kind of more middle intricate part where it's saying that

1336
01:36:34,760 --> 01:36:39,320
so yes, war in humans is being made possible by norms.

1337
01:36:40,530 --> 01:36:46,530
But because of a long history of that having played out, we

1338
01:36:46,530 --> 01:36:51,810
are also having a genetically evolved psychology to be prepared to be

1339
01:36:51,810 --> 01:36:55,250
vigilant of when we are committing norm violations.

1340
01:36:56,290 --> 01:37:02,210
And be prepared to like lose our motivation to engage in this action if

1341
01:37:02,240 --> 01:37:06,400
we perceive that we're not getting the social rewards that we anticipated because I mean

1342
01:37:06,480 --> 01:37:10,400
it's a big deal to go and like put your life on the line and then not get the social

1343
01:37:10,400 --> 01:37:11,200
rewards, right?

1344
01:37:11,520 --> 01:37:17,360
So it it I feel like it kind of um is getting at that sandwiched layer that I

1345
01:37:17,360 --> 01:37:23,280
keep kind of coming back to where like yes the norms are are l I think, you

1346
01:37:23,280 --> 01:37:29,110
know, the driving force, but because of a long history of that, we have

1347
01:37:29,110 --> 01:37:34,950
genetically evolved psychological mechanisms that anticipates there to be

1348
01:37:34,950 --> 01:37:40,790
norms related to how you handle killing of outgroup members and

1349
01:37:40,790 --> 01:37:45,990
be extra vigilant when you are in that context and respond appropriately by

1350
01:37:45,990 --> 01:37:46,950
withdrawing.

1351
01:37:53,500 --> 01:37:59,020
hypervigilance to moral violations in other contexts that are more evolutionarily

1352
01:37:59,020 --> 01:37:59,660
novel.

1353
01:38:00,140 --> 01:38:00,780
Right.

1354
01:38:02,220 --> 01:38:03,020
So I yeah.

1355
01:38:03,340 --> 01:38:07,260
So I've I have a question about you mentioned that um among the Turkana who did show

1356
01:38:07,260 --> 01:38:11,980
symptoms of depression associated with their PTSD, that those were the Turkana that um

1357
01:38:11,980 --> 01:38:17,270
experience social sanctions or disapproval from uh their their groupmates uh about the

1358
01:38:17,270 --> 01:38:17,670
violence.

1359
01:38:17,750 --> 01:38:21,910
And so I'm curious about what those social sanctions consisted in.

1360
01:38:22,070 --> 01:38:27,110
Was it was it sanctions about the participation in the violence itself for being, say,

1361
01:38:27,350 --> 01:38:33,270
cruel or or or something like that, or was it more about cowardice and and uh not

1362
01:38:33,270 --> 01:38:34,630
being cruel enough?

1363
01:38:35,350 --> 01:38:38,390
Yeah, so it it was actually a huge package.

1364
01:38:38,550 --> 01:38:43,880
Uh so we kind of lumped together a all the kind of moral events uh,

1365
01:38:44,040 --> 01:38:47,560
violations as either victims or perpetrators.

1366
01:38:47,880 --> 01:38:53,880
So that um uh you know part of the reason for doing uh that is because that's how

1367
01:38:53,880 --> 01:38:57,560
it's done in the moral injury literature in in the West.

1368
01:38:57,960 --> 01:39:03,720
Uh, but also it's because sometimes if you ask people directly about perpetration,

1369
01:39:04,120 --> 01:39:09,890
um they uh might feel more resistant to like disclosing it so the

1370
01:39:09,890 --> 01:39:15,890
questions are a little bit phrased like were you um involved in or witnessed

1371
01:39:16,050 --> 01:39:21,570
you know something like this and so we cannot necessarily tease apart whether they were

1372
01:39:21,570 --> 01:39:27,250
involved in as you know um uh so there's a little ambiguity about how they were

1373
01:39:27,250 --> 01:39:29,810
involved in that moral violation um

1374
01:39:33,820 --> 01:39:37,180
But the the kinds of moral violations span a a range.

1375
01:39:37,340 --> 01:39:41,580
One some is that you know you took your friend, you made your friend come with you on the

1376
01:39:41,580 --> 01:39:47,420
raid, and um you came back and friend is friend died in the raid, you go tell your parents

1377
01:39:48,060 --> 01:39:54,060
that um uh this is what happened, and you know, you will literally face like they

1378
01:39:54,060 --> 01:39:59,730
will blame you for having taken their son and come back without him.

1379
01:39:59,970 --> 01:40:05,410
There are people who've had to, when when somebody gets injured on the battlefield, um

1380
01:40:05,730 --> 01:40:11,650
they are sometimes 50 kilometers, uh, they have to walk back, run back

1381
01:40:11,650 --> 01:40:13,090
50 kilometers, right?

1382
01:40:13,250 --> 01:40:17,250
So if somebody is injured, they can't necessarily always transport that person back.

1383
01:40:17,410 --> 01:40:23,180
They would have to carry that person and um and hide or you know, still kind of

1384
01:40:23,180 --> 01:40:24,460
slowly trudge back.

1385
01:40:24,620 --> 01:40:30,220
So many times they make like painful decisions about having to like abandon somebody, a

1386
01:40:30,220 --> 01:40:35,340
friend, um, a group of people will say, No, we can't do this, and they'll like hide this

1387
01:40:35,340 --> 01:40:40,540
person in a bush or so, hope that he doesn't get seen by the enemies, but eventually can

1388
01:40:40,620 --> 01:40:42,380
like slowly make his way back home.

1389
01:40:42,460 --> 01:40:44,300
But many of the times these people die.

1390
01:40:44,460 --> 01:40:49,870
There are times where people run out of water, um, uh, and they, you know,

1391
01:40:50,030 --> 01:40:55,870
couldn't share water with uh, you know, they uh maybe they couldn't share their

1392
01:40:55,870 --> 01:40:59,630
bullets or share their water with somebody who needed it because they didn't have.

1393
01:41:00,190 --> 01:41:04,750
So there's many um uh instances like that.

1394
01:41:04,830 --> 01:41:10,590
There's also instances of people feeling let down by like the diviner, for instance, who is

1395
01:41:10,590 --> 01:41:16,160
so some raids are organized by diviners who say like they had a vision that if you go to

1396
01:41:16,160 --> 01:41:21,360
this place and if you do X, Y, and Z rituals along the way, that you know, we are going to

1397
01:41:21,360 --> 01:41:22,960
have a good outcome.

1398
01:41:23,200 --> 01:41:28,080
And um they do all of that, and then you know, things go disastrous,

1399
01:41:28,400 --> 01:41:30,080
catastrophically wrong.

1400
01:41:30,320 --> 01:41:35,040
People get killed, they're ambushed, um, the enemy knew that they were coming, whatever.

1401
01:41:35,120 --> 01:41:40,880
And then they feel like they were lied to by the the leader in that way, the diviner.

1402
01:41:41,120 --> 01:41:45,810
The diviner doesn't, it's not like he's a general, he doesn't go on a raid, he just is a

1403
01:41:45,810 --> 01:41:51,010
prophet who sees So he has no skin in the game from a game theory perspective.

1404
01:41:52,050 --> 01:41:57,410
Um and um

1405
01:41:57,890 --> 01:42:03,090
there are instances where people have come across like young kids who are um

1406
01:42:03,800 --> 01:42:08,440
uh you know unarmed, but sometimes they get killed.

1407
01:42:08,520 --> 01:42:13,560
Um, like some people think it's okay to kill a kid that's unarmed, some people might think

1408
01:42:13,560 --> 01:42:14,280
it's not.

1409
01:42:14,760 --> 01:42:20,600
Um uh and so they might be exposed to

1410
01:42:20,600 --> 01:42:26,040
somebody kind of like kidnapping a kid or or shooting a kid, even though they personally

1411
01:42:26,040 --> 01:42:28,200
think that that shouldn't have been done, etc.

1412
01:42:28,600 --> 01:42:34,590
So there's a whole range of moral violations that kind of end up in the picture that

1413
01:42:34,590 --> 01:42:39,630
we haven't been able to tease apart, like which kind kind of yields this.

1414
01:42:39,790 --> 01:42:44,190
That we don't have that level of fine-grainedness, but we know that as a package, the

1415
01:42:44,190 --> 01:42:48,270
people who have had more moral violation-related

1416
01:42:49,470 --> 01:42:54,910
issues have more of the have more depressive symptoms.

1417
01:42:55,200 --> 01:43:01,200
And it could also be cowardice, people being accused of having done something, but they

1418
01:43:01,200 --> 01:43:06,800
might feel like, well, I actually was in the wrong place, like I was getting fired at, you

1419
01:43:06,800 --> 01:43:12,720
didn't see, or I was out of bullets, um, etc., and being blamed for um for that,

1420
01:43:12,880 --> 01:43:13,120
etc.

1421
01:43:13,760 --> 01:43:19,730
So uh it is um yeah uh we have we haven't

1422
01:43:19,730 --> 01:43:25,650
been we don't have the kind of data that could tease apart exactly which types of

1423
01:43:25,650 --> 01:43:31,170
moral violations lead to you know more or less symptoms can i ask a

1424
01:43:31,170 --> 01:43:36,210
clarification question it was david's question and i was thinking along the same lines is

1425
01:43:37,170 --> 01:43:43,140
that um there were cues that the people back at home were

1426
01:43:43,380 --> 01:43:44,500
displeased.

1427
01:43:44,580 --> 01:43:48,980
Uh, and obviously, like some of the stories are like you, you, you killed my son because

1428
01:43:48,980 --> 01:43:49,860
you invited him.

1429
01:43:50,020 --> 01:43:51,540
So obviously that happens.

1430
01:43:51,700 --> 01:43:56,420
But I'm wondering, like, in some of these other cases, like where if I'm on the raid and I

1431
01:43:56,420 --> 01:43:59,780
don't, you know, and like the people I'm with like just kill this kid.

1432
01:44:00,340 --> 01:44:06,290
Um uh like that's a situation where like, you know, I'm evaluating that as like

1433
01:44:06,370 --> 01:44:08,050
this is a really horrible thing.

1434
01:44:08,210 --> 01:44:09,570
I feel really bad about this.

1435
01:44:09,730 --> 01:44:14,530
I feel like, I mean, this is not maybe conscious or maybe, you know, people are gonna think

1436
01:44:14,530 --> 01:44:16,130
really badly of me.

1437
01:44:16,610 --> 01:44:22,210
But that may not happen in the sense of I'm designed to not even talk about that

1438
01:44:22,530 --> 01:44:28,130
because exactly I'm worried about like the social consequences of people knowing that.

1439
01:44:28,400 --> 01:44:34,000
Um so d were you able to look at sort of or or I'm just sort of

1440
01:44:34,000 --> 01:44:40,000
wondering like the the and I don't want to hem and ha too much, but I'm wondering sort

1441
01:44:40,000 --> 01:44:45,600
of like the design in each of the people who was feeling depressed is probably to sort of

1442
01:44:45,600 --> 01:44:48,080
like keep this information away from people.

1443
01:44:48,320 --> 01:44:48,640
Right.

1444
01:44:48,950 --> 01:44:50,230
You know, do you do you see what I'm getting?

1445
01:44:50,470 --> 01:44:55,910
So I'm kind of wondering like how much of it is sort of anticipating that I'm gonna be

1446
01:44:55,910 --> 01:44:59,990
socially sanctioned, and actually as a consequence of that, not actually presenting the

1447
01:44:59,990 --> 01:45:00,550
information.

1448
01:45:00,710 --> 01:45:04,710
So you don't necessarily get cues, but you're sort of imagining that you'll be socially

1449
01:45:04,710 --> 01:45:05,110
sanctioned.

1450
01:45:05,190 --> 01:45:07,990
But then in other situations, you are socially sanctioned.

1451
01:45:08,230 --> 01:45:09,830
Is that are both things happening?

1452
01:45:10,550 --> 01:45:11,750
Um probably.

1453
01:45:12,230 --> 01:45:18,070
Um, if I understand you correctly, the first part will result in an underreporting

1454
01:45:18,440 --> 01:45:20,520
of moral events.

1455
01:45:20,920 --> 01:45:26,520
Well, maybe not necessarily, but just a thing of I'm actually thinking, like, number one,

1456
01:45:26,680 --> 01:45:30,440
what's the Q structure of I've committed a moral offense?

1457
01:45:30,760 --> 01:45:31,080
Right?

1458
01:45:31,320 --> 01:45:36,520
Which is sort of you can imagine a situation where it's sort of like you're the I don't

1459
01:45:36,520 --> 01:45:40,200
think this is true, but you can imagine a design of the human psychology where it's like

1460
01:45:40,360 --> 01:45:42,280
the warfare button has been pressed.

1461
01:45:42,440 --> 01:45:43,880
This is all awesome.

1462
01:45:44,170 --> 01:45:48,250
We're doing all these horrible things, but we're in war mode, so it's all fine.

1463
01:45:48,410 --> 01:45:53,530
But then we get back to the village, and then whatever people hear, we just sort of,

1464
01:45:53,610 --> 01:45:59,130
whenever somebody says, Oh, that's actually bad, we're like, oh no, now we're now we did

1465
01:45:59,130 --> 01:45:59,770
something wrong.

1466
01:45:59,850 --> 01:46:04,010
And we're just going to use like the social reaction of the community as our moral comp or

1467
01:46:04,170 --> 01:46:05,530
sort of moral compass.

1468
01:46:05,770 --> 01:46:11,740
But there's another version where there's already sort of an internalization

1469
01:46:12,060 --> 01:46:17,820
or even an anticipation of sort of like what I think people will react to.

1470
01:46:18,380 --> 01:46:23,900
Um, and consequently, you don't even need to get the reaction from people.

1471
01:46:24,140 --> 01:46:24,300
Yeah.

1472
01:46:24,940 --> 01:46:30,540
So I think that actually, yeah, I think there's both going on because there are so it that

1473
01:46:30,540 --> 01:46:33,740
actually brings me to something that I really should have said.

1474
01:46:33,900 --> 01:46:39,490
Uh one of the uh things that we looked at is whether people have been

1475
01:46:39,730 --> 01:46:43,010
had uh killed an enemy in combat, right?

1476
01:46:43,330 --> 01:46:49,250
Um and very interestingly, um I would this is

1477
01:46:49,330 --> 01:46:51,170
definitely went against my prediction.

1478
01:46:51,330 --> 01:46:57,180
I would have predicted that that would not be um a um source

1479
01:46:57,180 --> 01:47:03,180
of a moral violation in the chakana context because they have a lot of cultural

1480
01:47:03,180 --> 01:47:08,620
institutions to actually like reward warriors who have killed in combat.

1481
01:47:08,780 --> 01:47:13,420
They get to scar themselves in a particular way that permanently marks them as like, you

1482
01:47:13,420 --> 01:47:15,980
know, a warrior and be proud of it.

1483
01:47:17,100 --> 01:47:23,030
And uh and but in the US we know that uh there is an association

1484
01:47:23,030 --> 01:47:29,030
between um having killed in combat and having more um higher severity

1485
01:47:29,030 --> 01:47:31,750
of uh mental health uh issues.

1486
01:47:32,630 --> 01:47:38,230
But interestingly, we found that even though it's highly rewarded, um

1487
01:47:38,550 --> 01:47:44,280
people who had killed in combat were more likely to have

1488
01:47:44,280 --> 01:47:48,920
depressive symptoms, had higher depressive symptom severity than those who had it.

1489
01:47:49,000 --> 01:47:51,560
So killing was one of our moral this thing.

1490
01:47:51,640 --> 01:47:55,160
We kept it separate because it's such a salient category.

1491
01:47:55,400 --> 01:48:00,680
Um, but it essentially so then we probed that a little further.

1492
01:48:00,920 --> 01:48:06,350
Um and uh there is a researcher who works in the Samburu,

1493
01:48:06,590 --> 01:48:12,350
Velinda Strait, who has done a lot of work also on the kinds of emotions

1494
01:48:12,350 --> 01:48:17,870
that of haunting that people feel, that Samburu warriors feel when they've

1495
01:48:17,950 --> 01:48:19,710
killed in combat.

1496
01:48:20,030 --> 01:48:25,790
And we found a lot of analogues of that in the tracana, analogues of what she had

1497
01:48:25,790 --> 01:48:31,550
described in the Samburu, which is that people, even though this is so culturally rewarded,

1498
01:48:32,260 --> 01:48:37,540
there is a uh people report often feeling haunted by the ghost of the enemy.

1499
01:48:37,780 --> 01:48:42,580
And that is an intrusive thing, it keeps coming back, they can't get it out of them.

1500
01:48:42,740 --> 01:48:48,260
Um, and uh, they have to do cleansing ceremonies in order to like kind of

1501
01:48:48,260 --> 01:48:53,940
help them uh alleviate that uh psychological distress in some

1502
01:48:53,940 --> 01:48:54,500
ways.

1503
01:48:54,660 --> 01:49:00,490
Um, And I think that maybe gets at this fact that killing is just such

1504
01:49:00,490 --> 01:49:03,210
a salient kind of moral violation.

1505
01:49:03,450 --> 01:49:09,290
And it might have a uh it might be really hard to override it even with these cultural

1506
01:49:09,290 --> 01:49:15,130
signals of this, because it's I, you know, the main reason is that you know

1507
01:49:15,210 --> 01:49:18,010
killing can't be compensated in some ways, right?

1508
01:49:18,170 --> 01:49:22,810
Like, I mean, cultures have come up with ways of compensating and making up for having done

1509
01:49:22,810 --> 01:49:25,840
that wrong, like you know, you compensate the family.

1510
01:49:25,920 --> 01:49:30,240
But there's no like you really can't compensate the individual that that has been killed.

1511
01:49:30,320 --> 01:49:34,480
It's a very uh stark kind of moral violation in that way.

1512
01:49:34,640 --> 01:49:40,480
Whereas other moral violations, I think, are you know, okay, you screwed up, but you have a

1513
01:49:40,480 --> 01:49:46,160
chance to kind of rectify that and do differently, do better, signal that you are

1514
01:49:46,160 --> 01:49:52,000
remorseful by, you know, maybe having these depressive symptoms, etc.

1515
01:49:52,480 --> 01:49:58,330
But killing seems uh killing does seem to be special in that sense

1516
01:49:58,890 --> 01:50:04,890
and um I I think that's interesting because it both gets at something that

1517
01:50:04,890 --> 01:50:10,810
can't be overridden by the cultural uh by the cultural institutions but also

1518
01:50:11,050 --> 01:50:16,970
that I think that's an indication of maybe how um morally

1519
01:50:16,970 --> 01:50:21,860
treacherous killing is even in the context of warfare, right?

1520
01:50:22,020 --> 01:50:27,220
Like it's um uh we come very prepared to be very hyper

1521
01:50:27,300 --> 01:50:33,140
vigilant about engaging in that um um in

1522
01:50:33,140 --> 01:50:39,060
the context of war even because yeah like what the truth is that today

1523
01:50:39,140 --> 01:50:44,210
people might have said it's okay to have killed this person but tomorrow they'll say, Oh,

1524
01:50:44,370 --> 01:50:45,090
you did that.

1525
01:50:45,250 --> 01:50:46,930
Like, no, we should not be doing that.

1526
01:50:47,010 --> 01:50:52,850
We should not be killing uh these people, there's they're one of us, um, or those

1527
01:50:52,850 --> 01:50:56,370
were not acceptable conditions for having killed, etc.

1528
01:50:56,610 --> 01:51:02,130
And there's nothing you can do, the person's gone, there's no reparation that can be

1529
01:51:02,130 --> 01:51:02,770
made.

1530
01:51:05,860 --> 01:51:06,180
Wow.

1531
01:51:06,340 --> 01:51:11,700
I mean, that's uh uh uh truly fascinating and um sobering

1532
01:51:12,260 --> 01:51:13,060
stuff.

1533
01:51:13,300 --> 01:51:18,100
Um I I mean, you I I don't know if there's that much left to say.

1534
01:51:18,180 --> 01:51:20,260
Do you have any other questions about this, Dave?

1535
01:51:20,580 --> 01:51:23,780
I was gonna say hopefully this is well, I mean it's a good and bad thing, but like just

1536
01:51:23,780 --> 01:51:25,300
swinging back to AI and robots.

1537
01:51:25,380 --> 01:51:28,900
This is like all the uh they're building now ro this is why there's gonna be robots that

1538
01:51:28,900 --> 01:51:29,940
are doing the killing, right?

1539
01:51:30,020 --> 01:51:33,430
Uh but maybe the robots will just start killing the other robots and it'll just be robot

1540
01:51:33,430 --> 01:51:35,350
attrition and nobody needs to die in war.

1541
01:51:35,510 --> 01:51:36,790
So yeah.

1542
01:51:36,950 --> 01:51:42,870
I mean, again, this this also sp speaks to me that a lot of the psychology of warfare and

1543
01:51:42,870 --> 01:51:48,470
intergroup violence and intergroup hostility is a kind of cultural technology to overcome

1544
01:51:48,630 --> 01:51:52,710
uh aspects of our psychology that would otherwise be compelled against it.

1545
01:51:52,870 --> 01:51:58,360
Um, that we have these powerful drives to not kill, to not be

1546
01:51:58,360 --> 01:51:59,080
cruel.

1547
01:51:59,320 --> 01:52:04,920
Um and uh it takes a lot of cultural machinery to overcome that.

1548
01:52:05,480 --> 01:52:10,040
Um and it may be that, you know, in the United States, our cultural machinery is not as

1549
01:52:10,040 --> 01:52:14,520
good or as well adapted, and that might explain why we have higher prevalence of of

1550
01:52:14,520 --> 01:52:17,370
depressive symptoms among our soldiers.

1551
01:52:17,690 --> 01:52:22,250
Whereas in the tricana, their cultural machinery might be a little more well adapted, which

1552
01:52:22,250 --> 01:52:26,170
allows them to overcome some of that depression, but clearly not all of it, because it

1553
01:52:26,170 --> 01:52:28,330
still exists to a significant degree.

1554
01:52:28,490 --> 01:52:34,010
And it just speaks to how difficult a challenge it is to knit together these groups of uh,

1555
01:52:34,170 --> 01:52:38,730
you know, reputation conscious, status conscious, self-interest to humans, and knit them

1556
01:52:38,730 --> 01:52:42,170
together into cooperative groups that can compete with other groups.

1557
01:52:42,330 --> 01:52:46,280
Uh, and there are a lot of barriers to overcome in that in that knitting problem.

1558
01:52:46,680 --> 01:52:49,800
Um and and cultures can evolve over time to solve it.

1559
01:52:49,880 --> 01:52:52,520
But you know, there's only so much that can be solved.

1560
01:52:52,840 --> 01:52:53,160
Yeah.

1561
01:52:53,320 --> 01:52:58,520
And I think I want to just swing it back too to like the almost the ASU

1562
01:52:58,520 --> 01:53:04,520
interdisciplinarity part too is is um like Europe, for example, you know, was just

1563
01:53:04,600 --> 01:53:06,760
it was full of violence forever.

1564
01:53:06,840 --> 01:53:11,480
I mean if you watch like these YouTube animations of like or any any area like you know

1565
01:53:11,720 --> 01:53:16,430
China or anything, you know, it's just like oh my God, so many people dying.

1566
01:53:16,590 --> 01:53:22,350
This the colors on the map keep changing, you know, and then yeah, it's and then there's

1567
01:53:22,350 --> 01:53:28,190
a change at some point in and so like the the idea that sort of you know the

1568
01:53:28,190 --> 01:53:34,190
groups that succeed are the ones that are extracting resources for the people in

1569
01:53:34,190 --> 01:53:35,230
the groups, right?

1570
01:53:35,550 --> 01:53:41,440
Uh but but you can sort of change the the rules, people can change the rules

1571
01:53:41,440 --> 01:53:42,080
sometimes.

1572
01:53:42,320 --> 01:53:43,920
So something like the EU, right?

1573
01:53:44,000 --> 01:53:49,840
Where all of a sudden it's no longer there's big costs now to uh

1574
01:53:50,080 --> 01:53:55,840
to fighting, to the point where if I'm like a French farmer, it's

1575
01:53:55,840 --> 01:54:01,760
actually better that I'm not shooting at the Germans across the Rhine because actually

1576
01:54:01,760 --> 01:54:07,520
I'm getting, you know, the food from them, you know, and like it doesn't help me at all.

1577
01:54:07,680 --> 01:54:12,110
Because and so somebody sort of, or or a group of people, big enough group of people, sort

1578
01:54:12,110 --> 01:54:17,310
of decided maybe we can change sort of the what's what's the selection

1579
01:54:17,310 --> 01:54:20,910
dynamic of the institution in a different way.

1580
01:54:21,070 --> 01:54:26,990
And I think that I hope my hope would be that something

1581
01:54:26,990 --> 01:54:32,060
like I think there, there's always this golden uh million dollar, which is now ridiculous

1582
01:54:32,140 --> 01:54:36,060
because you know, we're in we're in, you know, America where a million dollars like buys

1583
01:54:36,060 --> 01:54:38,380
you, I don't know, a mobile home or something in Santa Barbara.

1584
01:54:38,460 --> 01:54:38,860
I don't know.

1585
01:54:39,020 --> 01:54:43,180
Um, but uh, but like the billion dollar question, the trillions of dollar question is sort

1586
01:54:43,180 --> 01:54:45,180
of how do you reduce war?

1587
01:54:45,980 --> 01:54:51,710
Um and with the like po PTSD, the cultural selection

1588
01:54:51,950 --> 01:54:54,910
is all sort of on the front end in the in America, right?

1589
01:54:54,990 --> 01:55:00,590
It's not like we're we're not selecting institutions that sort of like help people not go

1590
01:55:00,590 --> 01:55:01,070
to war.

1591
01:55:01,310 --> 01:55:07,070
You know, it's sort of so I think in in this ASU way, if I'm sort of not being super

1592
01:55:07,070 --> 01:55:12,830
clear, but I think the idea would be if we can be mindful or better understand

1593
01:55:13,700 --> 01:55:19,620
the cultural selection of why belligerence happens, for example,

1594
01:55:19,700 --> 01:55:25,620
like in the Turkana, then there may be ways of of thinking about, well, might there be

1595
01:55:25,620 --> 01:55:30,740
ways to sort of what are the on-the-ground ways to make it in more people's interests to

1596
01:55:30,740 --> 01:55:33,380
not shoot across the river anymore?

1597
01:55:33,620 --> 01:55:38,570
It's a hard question, but I think like this this is starting to get at the tools to do

1598
01:55:38,570 --> 01:55:38,810
that.

1599
01:55:38,970 --> 01:55:40,730
And something like the ASU thing.

1600
01:55:40,890 --> 01:55:45,130
I mean, you can't, you know, that's a lot of social engineering and there can be unintended

1601
01:55:45,130 --> 01:55:48,010
consequences, and you have to be really careful about that stuff.

1602
01:55:48,330 --> 01:55:49,850
But um, but I don't know.

1603
01:55:49,930 --> 01:55:55,850
I just I I think the the more we understand why people might be

1604
01:55:55,850 --> 01:56:00,410
doing this thing in the c the benefits they're getting, then maybe we can think about ways

1605
01:56:00,410 --> 01:56:04,330
to maybe make the benefit structure and the environment a bit different.

1606
01:56:05,440 --> 01:56:08,800
That is the optimistic view.

1607
01:56:10,000 --> 01:56:14,560
And uh yeah, I I would hope there's some room for that.

1608
01:56:14,640 --> 01:56:20,480
And we know historically institutions have emerged between like you know, huge units

1609
01:56:20,560 --> 01:56:21,520
like nations.

1610
01:56:21,680 --> 01:56:27,520
Um and yeah, like you have things like the EU that have norms of war and things like

1611
01:56:27,520 --> 01:56:27,760
that.

1612
01:56:28,000 --> 01:56:33,690
Um but yeah, it also seems um It seems like one of the harder

1613
01:56:33,690 --> 01:56:34,490
problems to solve.

1614
01:56:34,650 --> 01:56:37,690
It does get, it does happen.

1615
01:56:38,250 --> 01:56:44,010
So humans have occasionally found these pathways, but they have also often

1616
01:56:44,010 --> 01:56:45,690
not found these pathways.

1617
01:56:45,850 --> 01:56:51,850
And so whether the glass is half full, half empty, that's um whether

1618
01:56:52,010 --> 01:56:58,010
that's based on whether you live in Santa Barbara and you look over the ocean or into

1619
01:56:58,010 --> 01:56:59,210
the dry desert.

1620
01:56:59,930 --> 01:57:00,570
Yes.

1621
01:57:03,420 --> 01:57:04,140
Exactly.

1622
01:57:04,300 --> 01:57:04,940
Yeah.

1623
01:57:05,500 --> 01:57:05,820
All right.

1624
01:57:05,900 --> 01:57:07,660
Well, this time absolutely flew by.

1625
01:57:07,740 --> 01:57:10,060
Uh this was such a fascinating conversation.

1626
01:57:10,220 --> 01:57:12,300
Um my mind is still spinning.

1627
01:57:12,540 --> 01:57:17,260
Um but it's time for us to ask the uh two hours would be like so long.

1628
01:57:17,900 --> 01:57:19,580
Yeah, no, it just goes like that.

1629
01:57:19,660 --> 01:57:19,820
Yeah.

1630
01:57:20,300 --> 01:57:21,260
Yeah, it really flies by.

1631
01:57:21,580 --> 01:57:23,340
Sarah, yeah, no, thank you so much.

1632
01:57:23,500 --> 01:57:27,580
Uh we will have to have you back on because I mean we really just skimmed the surface, but

1633
01:57:27,660 --> 01:57:30,300
um really fascinating, really important work.

1634
01:57:30,460 --> 01:57:32,410
Um, Thank you so much for doing it.

1635
01:57:32,730 --> 01:57:38,330
The stuff with the the all of the work that you've done in uh with the Turkana and

1636
01:57:38,970 --> 01:57:41,210
both theoretical work and empirical work.

1637
01:57:41,290 --> 01:57:47,290
It's just, it's so it's such a um, I don't even know, it's

1638
01:57:47,450 --> 01:57:51,450
sort of silly to even give it an adjective, but it's just such wonderful, strong.

1639
01:57:51,610 --> 01:57:56,420
I feel like your work is one of the great pillars of like our generation of evolutionary

1640
01:57:56,420 --> 01:57:56,980
sciences.

1641
01:57:57,060 --> 01:57:58,500
So so thank you for doing it.

1642
01:57:58,580 --> 01:58:02,180
It's just, it's just fascinating and um it's so interesting.

1643
01:58:02,260 --> 01:58:06,100
And it's such an important thing about you know war and violence and killing.

1644
01:58:06,180 --> 01:58:08,340
Um what could be more important than that?

1645
01:58:08,500 --> 01:58:13,700
And so uh it's not a and as always, I mean Dave and I always joke like whenever we have an

1646
01:58:13,700 --> 01:58:16,580
anthropologist on, like we should be saying thank you for your service, right?

1647
01:58:16,740 --> 01:58:21,220
Like it's a very difficult um and dangerous you know thing to do.

1648
01:58:21,380 --> 01:58:23,140
So thank you for for doing it.

1649
01:58:24,050 --> 01:58:29,890
It's been one of the most fulfilling aspects of um my academic life has been to like

1650
01:58:30,210 --> 01:58:35,890
get to see a different culture and get you know kind of see the

1651
01:58:35,890 --> 01:58:38,850
world through like a different cultural lens.

1652
01:58:39,090 --> 01:58:41,410
I think it's actually really worth it.

1653
01:58:42,770 --> 01:58:45,330
Hard as it is, it's it's totally worth it.

1654
01:58:45,720 --> 01:58:45,960
Yeah.

1655
01:58:46,040 --> 01:58:50,600
So I love the my leaning my ending thing is here norms are selfish and I love that.

1656
01:58:50,680 --> 01:58:55,400
That's like that will stick with me for following norms is selfish, but that's maybe good.

1657
01:58:55,480 --> 01:58:56,520
Um so yeah.

1658
01:58:56,680 --> 01:59:01,560
So uh I it's a really complicated and sophisticated, mature way to think, I think about the

1659
01:59:01,560 --> 01:59:01,800
world.

1660
01:59:01,960 --> 01:59:05,480
Yeah, it it was a wonderful yeah, that that's another thing that stuck with me is a

1661
01:59:05,480 --> 01:59:10,590
wonderful perspective shift on the psychology of fairness and egalitarianism.

1662
01:59:10,750 --> 01:59:16,670
That we commonly have a very sunny and idealistic view of these things, but in reality,

1663
01:59:16,750 --> 01:59:21,550
they're just mechanisms for ensuring that everyone's self-interest is is being enhanced.

1664
01:59:21,950 --> 01:59:22,590
Coordinated.

1665
01:59:22,670 --> 01:59:22,830
Yes.

1666
01:59:23,230 --> 01:59:23,950
Yeah, exactly.

1667
01:59:24,110 --> 01:59:27,390
So that so that everybody's happy so that people don't blow up the whole deal.

1668
01:59:27,550 --> 01:59:30,750
We got to make sure that everyone's happy, and that's that's just what fairness is, right?

1669
01:59:31,390 --> 01:59:31,950
Yeah.

1670
01:59:32,480 --> 01:59:34,800
So it's a wonderful perspective shift.

1671
01:59:34,880 --> 01:59:36,640
Um and uh this is a really great conversation.

1672
01:59:36,720 --> 01:59:37,680
So thank you so much, Sarah.

1673
01:59:37,840 --> 01:59:38,000
Yeah.

1674
01:59:38,160 --> 01:59:43,520
I'm not sure the philosophers would like that take, but well the

1675
01:59:43,520 --> 01:59:47,440
philosophers are there's gonna be a long there there's gonna be a lot of philosophers

1676
01:59:47,440 --> 01:59:49,920
unhappy about a lot of science for the next thousand years.

1677
01:59:50,080 --> 01:59:52,810
So All right.

1678
01:59:52,970 --> 01:59:54,250
Thank you, Sarah.

1679
01:59:57,610 --> 02:00:01,450
Well, you're still here listening, um, which means we must be doing something right if

1680
02:00:01,450 --> 02:00:01,850
you're listening.

1681
02:00:02,170 --> 02:00:06,410
Yeah, or or we're uh some of us are doing something right enough.

1682
02:00:06,890 --> 02:00:10,570
Yeah, or maybe you just forgot to turn us off and we're just uh talking about it.

1683
02:00:10,730 --> 02:00:11,690
Just keep sleeping tools.

1684
02:00:11,850 --> 02:00:12,410
Just keep sleeping.

1685
02:00:13,130 --> 02:00:14,410
Sleep is so important.

1686
02:00:14,730 --> 02:00:16,410
It's so hard to get in this day.

1687
02:00:16,650 --> 02:00:19,130
And if you're driving and sleeping, wake up.

1688
02:00:19,530 --> 02:00:22,040
Yes, because we wouldn't want you to get into an accident.

1689
02:00:22,120 --> 02:00:22,920
That would be bad.

1690
02:00:23,320 --> 02:00:26,680
I might have just saved I might have just saved somebody's life for all we know.

1691
02:00:27,160 --> 02:00:28,280
Yeah, that's true.

1692
02:00:28,440 --> 02:00:33,720
And if you want us to save more lives by putting us in more people's ears, you can uh

1693
02:00:33,960 --> 02:00:39,320
spread the good word, uh support us on Patreon, write you know, write us a kind review, say

1694
02:00:39,320 --> 02:00:43,270
nice things about us on social media, uh, And you know, reach out to us.

1695
02:00:43,350 --> 02:00:47,030
Send us an email if you have ideas for episodes, possible guests.

1696
02:00:47,110 --> 02:00:48,710
We are open to suggestions.

1697
02:00:49,030 --> 02:00:52,550
I love the idea of a review that whose title isn't might save your life.

1698
02:00:54,390 --> 02:00:54,870
Mm-hmm.

1699
02:00:55,190 --> 02:00:55,990
That's right.

1700
02:00:56,550 --> 02:00:57,590
That's what we're doing here.

1701
02:00:57,670 --> 02:00:58,710
We're saving lives.

1702
02:00:58,950 --> 02:01:00,550
One podcast episode at a time.

1703
02:01:00,870 --> 02:01:01,110
Okay.

1704
02:01:01,190 --> 02:01:02,870
On that note, see you next week.

1705
02:01:03,510 --> 02:01:04,790
See you next week, everybody.

1706
02:01:04,950 --> 02:01:05,270
Okay.