WEBVTT 00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:01.280 I'm David Pensoff. 00:00:01.520 --> 00:00:02.000 I'm David P. 00:00:02.160 --> 00:00:02.960 Trozicsky. 00:00:03.280 --> 00:00:07.680 And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast, actual evolutionary psychology. 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:10.800 By actual evolutionary psychologists. 00:00:21.600 --> 00:00:25.600 Today we have a really impressive and wonderful guest, Sarah Matthew. 00:00:25.680 --> 00:00:30.450 She is a professor at the School of Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State 00:00:30.450 --> 00:00:30.930 University. 00:00:31.090 --> 00:00:31.330 Yeah. 00:00:31.490 --> 00:00:33.170 Um we talked about that. 00:00:33.250 --> 00:00:37.090 That that uh that it's a really cool uh interdisciplinary institution. 00:00:37.250 --> 00:00:40.370 But even more interesting, this was a riveting episode, David. 00:00:40.450 --> 00:00:41.250 Uh yeah. 00:00:41.490 --> 00:00:43.010 This was uh honestly one of my favorites. 00:00:43.090 --> 00:00:46.610 So yeah, we start out talking about interdisciplinarity and and research and how it gets 00:00:46.610 --> 00:00:52.040 done, and then we get into Sarah's amazing work and her uh pioneering 00:00:52.200 --> 00:00:57.240 perspective on cultural evolution uh and the cultural evolution of warfare. 00:00:57.400 --> 00:01:03.240 Uh, we get into so many fascinating topics like reciprocity, killing PTSD, um 00:01:03.560 --> 00:01:08.040 uh and just talking about with her work with the Turkana, where you know, she's really with 00:01:08.200 --> 00:01:14.150 with folks, really, you know, doing um uh doing violence um and h why that 00:01:14.150 --> 00:01:14.550 exists. 00:01:14.630 --> 00:01:19.670 But then also people not n not uh people who are you're not violent towards and why those 00:01:19.670 --> 00:01:20.790 rules persist. 00:01:21.030 --> 00:01:25.190 Um and the psychology of war and the consequences of killing. 00:01:25.430 --> 00:01:27.350 Um it just just incredible. 00:01:27.670 --> 00:01:32.790 Yeah, really wonderful stuff and we get into cooperation, self interest, uh and and just 00:01:32.790 --> 00:01:38.550 the the level of of detail that you get just being, you know, up close and 00:01:38.550 --> 00:01:42.940 personal with a group where half literally half the men are dying in warfare. 00:01:43.020 --> 00:01:47.740 And just familiarizing yourself with the cultural context there and just learning from her 00:01:47.900 --> 00:01:50.300 was just uh so fascinating. 00:01:50.460 --> 00:01:54.540 Um uh really recommend listening through uh to the end for for this episode. 00:01:54.620 --> 00:01:55.740 So it's a it's a banger. 00:01:55.980 --> 00:01:57.260 Yeah, enjoy. 00:01:58.380 --> 00:01:59.340 Here we go. 00:02:00.620 --> 00:02:05.660 Um so today we're I'm really excited to have uh Sarah Matthew on uh the podcast. 00:02:05.820 --> 00:02:10.860 Um Sarah is at uh ASU in the anthropology department. 00:02:11.020 --> 00:02:16.230 Um And Sarah, how long have you been at the in the anthropology department, ESU now? 00:02:17.350 --> 00:02:22.950 So since uh 2013, but I will have to correct you on the anthropology 00:02:23.190 --> 00:02:28.870 department because we are actually in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change 00:02:29.190 --> 00:02:31.030 and the Institute of Human Origins. 00:02:31.110 --> 00:02:35.880 And both of those programs are actually an interdisciplinary research group. 00:02:35.960 --> 00:02:41.160 It includes anthropologists, but it also includes sociologists, um, you know, 00:02:41.400 --> 00:02:44.280 psychology, even applied math people. 00:02:44.440 --> 00:02:47.800 So we are a we are an interdisciplinary group. 00:02:48.120 --> 00:02:49.400 That is a wonderful correction. 00:02:49.480 --> 00:02:51.560 And I remember looking at ASU. 00:02:51.640 --> 00:02:57.240 And was that something that Rob uh and Joan wrote Rob Boyd and Joan Silk started or helped 00:02:57.230 --> 00:02:57.550 found? 00:02:57.790 --> 00:03:03.390 Um, so the reorganization of ASU into these interdisciplinary schools 00:03:03.390 --> 00:03:05.710 started with President Michael Crowe. 00:03:05.870 --> 00:03:11.070 So when he started, when he took over as president of ASU, there was a huge 00:03:11.070 --> 00:03:16.830 reorganization into becoming a transdisciplinary school, like at its 00:03:16.830 --> 00:03:22.670 core, not like you know, you have Department of Anthropologies and then you make them talk 00:03:22.670 --> 00:03:22.990 together. 00:03:23.150 --> 00:03:29.120 No, it was just like break down all of old departments and disciplines and put like, 00:03:29.200 --> 00:03:32.240 you know, new new groups of people together. 00:03:32.400 --> 00:03:37.200 So we have the School of Sustainability, we have the School of Global Futures, School of 00:03:37.200 --> 00:03:42.880 Human Evolution and Social Change, and School of Family Dynamics, School of Transborder 00:03:42.880 --> 00:03:43.280 Studies. 00:03:43.360 --> 00:03:48.800 And these are all, you know, these are the main kind of academic communities 00:03:49.280 --> 00:03:50.110 here at ASCII. 00:03:50.510 --> 00:03:51.790 It's a very special place. 00:03:52.030 --> 00:03:52.910 Yeah, that's fantastic. 00:03:52.990 --> 00:03:56.910 So is it that literally like the physical building, the people that you see in the hall, 00:03:56.990 --> 00:04:01.950 the people that you're like spreading into or having meetings with, they're all they're all 00:04:01.950 --> 00:04:03.470 in these different disciplines. 00:04:03.790 --> 00:04:04.110 Yeah. 00:04:04.270 --> 00:04:08.990 So our faculty meetings, for instance, are, you know, all of the School of Human Evolution 00:04:08.990 --> 00:04:10.510 and Social Change faculty. 00:04:10.670 --> 00:04:13.310 And there's about 60 or 70 of us. 00:04:13.390 --> 00:04:14.670 So it's it's pretty big. 00:04:14.830 --> 00:04:20.480 But uh yeah, we're not um, we don't have a sub-community of 00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:22.320 anthropologists within that. 00:04:22.720 --> 00:04:28.160 We often have different programs, there's different kinds of you know collaborations 00:04:28.960 --> 00:04:34.480 within and across these schools, but yeah, we're sitting around with people 00:04:34.800 --> 00:04:39.590 who who are have um bought into the idea of of 00:04:39.590 --> 00:04:41.110 transdisciplinarity. 00:04:41.510 --> 00:04:42.870 That sounds fantastic. 00:04:43.510 --> 00:04:49.270 Do you find that um it works or are the barriers kind of hardier than you would like them 00:04:49.270 --> 00:04:49.590 to be? 00:04:49.670 --> 00:04:52.790 Because I often, you know, sometimes talking with people of different differ different 00:04:52.790 --> 00:04:58.150 disciplines, you have different vocabularies, uh different methodologies, it's it's hard to 00:04:58.390 --> 00:04:59.190 meet in the middle. 00:04:59.270 --> 00:05:00.710 It's hard to have collaborations. 00:05:00.870 --> 00:05:03.990 Uh they have different expectations about you know publishing in different journals. 00:05:04.230 --> 00:05:10.060 I remember um I think it was Jerry Fodor who who said uh that the best interdisciplinary 00:05:10.220 --> 00:05:13.660 uh work is done within one's own skull. 00:05:16.540 --> 00:05:21.900 Uh you know, the idea there being like uh it's it's good to avail yourself of different 00:05:21.900 --> 00:05:25.820 perspectives in different disciplines, but as soon as you have to sort of, you know, work 00:05:25.820 --> 00:05:30.090 things out with someone in a in a different community, things get kind of difficult. 00:05:30.330 --> 00:05:35.610 So do you buy the the Fodorian uh perspective that it's it's better to happen within one 00:05:35.690 --> 00:05:40.250 skull, or are you more of an optimist that it really can happen and those bridges really 00:05:40.250 --> 00:05:40.890 can be made? 00:05:41.290 --> 00:05:41.530 Yeah. 00:05:41.690 --> 00:05:46.890 Um, I think I'm an optimist, but I also do agree that actually there's a lot of integration 00:05:46.890 --> 00:05:52.600 that does eventually need to happen within one single individual, but that's aided a lot by 00:05:52.600 --> 00:05:58.280 who we're talking to, the kinds of vocabulary we're exposed to, the kinds of opinions we're 00:05:58.280 --> 00:05:59.000 exposed to. 00:05:59.240 --> 00:06:03.800 So I think that it has actually worked out pretty well. 00:06:04.280 --> 00:06:09.320 It is true that, you know, you will tend to um, you know, 00:06:09.560 --> 00:06:14.600 gravitate more towards the people that are talking the same things that you're talking, 00:06:14.760 --> 00:06:15.160 etc. 00:06:15.560 --> 00:06:21.350 But I also have um just noticed that there's just a lot more 00:06:21.350 --> 00:06:27.270 freedom because of this institutional structure to actually just do things 00:06:27.270 --> 00:06:32.470 that you want to do and not be constrained by what your disciplinary 00:06:32.950 --> 00:06:34.070 expectations are. 00:06:34.150 --> 00:06:39.700 So, you know, like you know, for for people coming up for promotion and tenure, it's okay 00:06:39.700 --> 00:06:43.860 that you know you'd got your PhD in anthropology, but you are not publishing in current 00:06:43.860 --> 00:06:48.820 anthropology, you're publishing in you know sustainability journals or conservation 00:06:48.820 --> 00:06:54.580 journals or engineering journals or you know AI journals, like it just simply doesn't 00:06:54.580 --> 00:07:00.550 matter, like you know, uh there isn't a rigid expectation, and that really opens 00:07:00.550 --> 00:07:06.310 up and allows people to kind of explore things that they might have wanted to 00:07:06.310 --> 00:07:10.070 explore in a different setup, but but are not able to. 00:07:10.230 --> 00:07:15.510 And that also means that, you know, the way people evaluated within the university is very 00:07:15.510 --> 00:07:17.350 different and it's very individualized. 00:07:17.430 --> 00:07:22.950 And people kind of make it a lot more upon the individual to make their case of who they 00:07:22.950 --> 00:07:27.020 are, how they're kind of bringing things together and stuff like that, rather than an 00:07:27.020 --> 00:07:32.860 exogenously imposed um uh kind of set requirements type 00:07:32.860 --> 00:07:33.340 of system. 00:07:33.500 --> 00:07:39.260 So yeah, I think the institutionally providing that freedom is um, you know, 00:07:39.580 --> 00:07:44.780 very useful um because otherwise, you know, in people might be interested but are 00:07:44.780 --> 00:07:48.060 constrained by by these factors. 00:07:48.390 --> 00:07:49.030 Yeah, I love this. 00:07:51.350 --> 00:07:57.270 I was just uh curious about if there was any particular project that you were able to get 00:07:57.270 --> 00:08:02.470 off the ground and get excited about uh b because of the absence of these constraints. 00:08:02.630 --> 00:08:07.830 Like um, is there anything that you felt uh liberated to pursue in this environment that 00:08:07.830 --> 00:08:09.590 you might have not otherwise pursued? 00:08:09.910 --> 00:08:10.310 Yeah. 00:08:10.550 --> 00:08:11.830 Uh yeah, I think so. 00:08:11.990 --> 00:08:17.780 Um so for I mean I'll start with kind of a little bit more of a standard kind of 00:08:17.780 --> 00:08:22.020 collaboration, which maybe many evolutionary anthropologists do engage in. 00:08:22.180 --> 00:08:27.620 But you know, one of the directions that I took my work in was 00:08:27.940 --> 00:08:33.380 to try to incorporate an understanding also of the genetic population 00:08:33.380 --> 00:08:39.060 structures in Turkana, because I was doing some work on, you know, how does culture shape, 00:08:39.730 --> 00:08:43.810 groups and what's the population structure of cultural variation? 00:08:43.970 --> 00:08:48.050 But then that kind of begs the question: how is that different from the population 00:08:48.050 --> 00:08:49.730 structure of genetic variation? 00:08:49.890 --> 00:08:55.090 And that's a very genetics question, but it needs to kind of be integrated with the 00:08:55.090 --> 00:08:58.370 cultural evolutionary approach too. 00:08:58.530 --> 00:09:04.400 So for that, I've been working with geneticists, so with Ann Stone, who's 00:09:04.400 --> 00:09:10.400 an uh geneticist from the anthropology side, but Melissa Wilson, who's a, you know, 00:09:10.560 --> 00:09:16.160 a bioinformatics, genomics person who is very much in the school of life sciences and not 00:09:16.160 --> 00:09:18.400 at all connected with anthropology. 00:09:18.560 --> 00:09:24.550 And that kind of was a bringing together of um, you know, uh two worlds in 00:09:24.550 --> 00:09:30.390 some ways and very different expectations about also how to work, how to do genetics 00:09:30.390 --> 00:09:36.150 research in small-scale societies, which, you know, when I have a collaborator here at 00:09:36.150 --> 00:09:41.830 ASU who's from the School of Life Sciences, I also know that, you know, they are free to 00:09:41.830 --> 00:09:46.390 like kind of step into the anthropological space and do things the way anthropologists do. 00:09:46.550 --> 00:09:51.200 So working genetics work in small-scale societies goes much slower. 00:09:51.360 --> 00:09:57.040 There's a lot, lot more need to like, you know, dialogue with the community, to like 00:09:57.200 --> 00:10:02.560 do different things, like not, you know, share the make the data publicly accessible for 00:10:02.560 --> 00:10:06.880 anybody to like do work because the communities haven't consented to that. 00:10:07.040 --> 00:10:12.480 So it's like it's a really different kind of beast for a genomics person to like 00:10:12.800 --> 00:10:16.170 work with an anthropologist working in a small scale society. 00:10:16.410 --> 00:10:22.090 But because they are here, everybody's used to this idea that 00:10:22.570 --> 00:10:26.410 you don't have to be constrained by the way your discipline does things. 00:10:26.490 --> 00:10:31.930 You can work with anthropologists, you can slow down, you can um, you know, you can say no 00:10:31.930 --> 00:10:37.770 to some things that might be expected in the genetics community, such as you know, putting 00:10:37.770 --> 00:10:43.420 up um the um uh the your your data 00:10:43.420 --> 00:10:45.180 publicly um etc. 00:10:45.740 --> 00:10:51.660 so it's um so that's one example um another um is that 00:10:51.820 --> 00:10:57.580 you know i am working with um a legal scholar um now 00:10:58.060 --> 00:11:03.580 and um you know that project initially started with working on norms and that's kind of 00:11:03.580 --> 00:11:09.270 close to like what i'm working um, I'm I'm used to, but you know, it has kind 00:11:09.270 --> 00:11:14.870 of also drawn us into, you know, working, thinking about how to build 00:11:14.870 --> 00:11:20.710 normativity into AI systems, because she's somebody who works as a legal 00:11:20.710 --> 00:11:21.110 scholar. 00:11:21.190 --> 00:11:26.070 She's worked on like how institutions, legal institutions need to change in order to 00:11:26.070 --> 00:11:27.350 accommodate new technology. 00:11:27.430 --> 00:11:29.430 And AI is like a big technology. 00:11:29.590 --> 00:11:34.100 So this is Jillian Hadfield, who's at Johns Hopkins University. 00:11:34.260 --> 00:11:39.700 And so now, you know, just about a couple months ago, we organized a workshop here at 00:11:39.700 --> 00:11:45.140 ASU in which we had cultural evolution folks, so very anthropology and psych 00:11:45.460 --> 00:11:50.340 people, but together with people from Google Deep Mind and 00:11:51.620 --> 00:11:53.540 people who are working on AI. 00:11:54.180 --> 00:11:59.130 And like I just feel that wherever your research kind of takes you, wherever your 00:11:59.130 --> 00:12:04.410 collaborations take you, and whatever feels interesting, that's that's the next step. 00:12:04.650 --> 00:12:10.010 Um, another project that I'm doing is working with people who are in disease 00:12:10.010 --> 00:12:10.970 ecology. 00:12:11.210 --> 00:12:17.130 Um, so you know, to study zoonosis, because one of the things that we learned when we 00:12:17.130 --> 00:12:23.130 were working as anthropologists in the Turkana is that you know, the Tricana eat meat 00:12:23.290 --> 00:12:28.940 that is um even when they find the animal dead, 00:12:29.580 --> 00:12:31.500 they will eat the meat. 00:12:32.140 --> 00:12:37.980 And so that in a public health kind of outlook kind of is considered 00:12:37.980 --> 00:12:41.420 a very risky type of meat consumption. 00:12:42.060 --> 00:12:47.930 Yet in our observation, we're not seeing people get sick when they 00:12:47.930 --> 00:12:48.490 eat that. 00:12:48.650 --> 00:12:54.170 They eat meat of animals that are dying of certain diseases, like close to death from 00:12:54.330 --> 00:12:56.730 diseases and disease epidemics. 00:12:56.890 --> 00:12:59.770 You know, even I've eaten that meat when I'm there. 00:13:00.970 --> 00:13:06.090 Like we had the Rift Valley fever epidemic going around, like lots and lots of animals were 00:13:06.090 --> 00:13:06.410 dying. 00:13:06.490 --> 00:13:11.820 And so basically, like, you know, just a couple hours before the animal is dead, somebody 00:13:11.820 --> 00:13:15.260 is you know killing them and sharing that meat out. 00:13:15.500 --> 00:13:21.340 Um and uh so yeah, that that question basically was uh well, maybe they 00:13:21.340 --> 00:13:27.020 have cultural knowledge of how to process this meat and how to make it safe to eat, and 00:13:27.020 --> 00:13:32.620 also to recognize when it can't be eaten, when it can be, and also what organs maybe to 00:13:32.620 --> 00:13:37.340 avoid, who should who are who should avoid these things, like you know, maybe pregnant 00:13:37.340 --> 00:13:37.660 women. 00:13:37.870 --> 00:13:41.790 So we don't know that, but we're gonna like delve into that cultural knowledge landscape. 00:13:41.870 --> 00:13:47.710 But we also want to look at the physiological adaptations that maybe the 00:13:47.710 --> 00:13:53.470 tricana have, like either immune or like you know, um genetic adaptations they have 00:13:53.630 --> 00:13:57.710 for like you know this high pathogen load meat. 00:13:58.580 --> 00:14:03.620 and so that requires working with again like people who are interested in public health, 00:14:03.780 --> 00:14:09.140 disease ecology, zoonosis, um and and maybe genetics, 00:14:09.300 --> 00:14:10.180 immunologists. 00:14:10.340 --> 00:14:16.340 So it's um, you know, I feel like my work has kind of just progressed 00:14:16.340 --> 00:14:21.380 in a way where I, you know, I have certain questions that I'm really interested in and that 00:14:21.380 --> 00:14:24.430 keep me you know, on one path. 00:14:24.590 --> 00:14:29.950 But then that path also opens up a lot of like questions that you just stumble upon and 00:14:29.950 --> 00:14:31.710 collaborations that you stumble upon. 00:14:31.790 --> 00:14:37.630 And wherever those lead, I feel free to just, you know, go and be 00:14:37.630 --> 00:14:42.270 supported in every way by the institution and my department. 00:14:44.100 --> 00:14:44.580 I love that. 00:14:44.660 --> 00:14:50.260 And uh one of the throughputs that as I think about your work is um, and I don't know how 00:14:50.260 --> 00:14:55.780 much we've talked about this explicitly, is um as as I think the term you how you put it, 00:14:55.860 --> 00:14:59.540 um, which is sort of group structured cultural selection. 00:14:59.860 --> 00:15:03.860 And that's even a throughput of what we talked about already, which is like ASU has a 00:15:03.860 --> 00:15:05.940 different institutional selective regime. 00:15:06.260 --> 00:15:07.940 And so you're free to do things differently. 00:15:08.020 --> 00:15:12.950 But then even in the Turkana example, uh there might be cultural technology for people who 00:15:12.950 --> 00:15:15.670 may not know what that idea is. 00:15:16.150 --> 00:15:18.070 Um, can you sort of explain that? 00:15:18.150 --> 00:15:22.630 And then maybe I don't know if you the maybe the Turkana example, I mean it's sort of 00:15:22.630 --> 00:15:28.390 simple, but just even, you know, what the idea is refracted through that example of 00:15:28.710 --> 00:15:34.150 uh of, you know, how do you why do they know how to deal with um 00:15:34.470 --> 00:15:38.070 meat that in a way that other plea places might not? 00:15:39.460 --> 00:15:45.060 So, yeah, I guess your question kind of touches on two things that I think are maybe 00:15:45.220 --> 00:15:47.540 useful to kind of separate a little bit. 00:15:47.700 --> 00:15:53.300 So, one is the question of um just culture and cultural learning, 00:15:53.540 --> 00:15:59.220 social learning that produces um cultural knowledge that gets transmitted in humans. 00:15:59.460 --> 00:16:05.410 And there's a large number of people who are trying to understand that in 00:16:05.410 --> 00:16:08.290 the evolutionary human um sciences. 00:16:08.850 --> 00:16:14.610 And you know I think that that is uh 00:16:14.690 --> 00:16:20.530 as as do many people think that that is a very important part of like how humans um became 00:16:20.530 --> 00:16:25.730 very different from other organisms, our extreme reliance on culturally transmitted 00:16:25.730 --> 00:16:27.010 information, social learning. 00:16:27.090 --> 00:16:32.920 And that leads to um Variation between groups 00:16:32.920 --> 00:16:38.840 that might be genetically very similar, but have learned from different people, have had 00:16:38.840 --> 00:16:44.600 different role models in their past, and have been exposed to 00:16:44.600 --> 00:16:49.560 different environmental conditions in the past that have shaped the knowledge and the norms 00:16:49.640 --> 00:16:52.600 and the institutions, and then that gets transmitted, etc. 00:16:53.030 --> 00:16:58.630 So in the Tracana case, for example, yes, why do they know how to look at a 00:16:58.630 --> 00:17:04.070 day-old dead animal and figure out whether they can eat it or not? 00:17:04.230 --> 00:17:08.550 Whereas, you know, if we do, we will just say, no, that's not, right? 00:17:08.630 --> 00:17:14.550 We're both um uh kind of um on the face of it, 00:17:14.630 --> 00:17:20.500 um, should they maybe be able to like reason about those things similarly, but the Turkana 00:17:20.660 --> 00:17:26.340 are able to reason about it in a very different way because of that of the accumulation of 00:17:26.340 --> 00:17:31.380 knowledge that has come from being pastoralists for perhaps the last 5,000 years. 00:17:31.620 --> 00:17:37.140 So one of the characteristics of pastoralists is that a lot of people think 00:17:37.140 --> 00:17:43.010 pastorals eat a lot of meat, but the truth is that pastoralists are 00:17:43.010 --> 00:17:46.530 really good about not killing animals for meat. 00:17:46.770 --> 00:17:52.690 They use, especially like East African pastoralists, they use a lot of their animals 00:17:52.690 --> 00:17:54.210 mostly for milk. 00:17:54.690 --> 00:17:57.410 And milk is a huge form of their sustenance. 00:17:57.570 --> 00:18:01.730 They also consume the blood from the animals, but milk is a big sustenance. 00:18:01.810 --> 00:18:07.570 And they're really, really reluctant to kill an animal, a healthy animal for 00:18:07.570 --> 00:18:08.050 meat. 00:18:08.600 --> 00:18:14.600 They would do that for ceremonies, they do that, you know, like for marriage, um, where 00:18:14.600 --> 00:18:16.440 you have to kind of kill a bull, etc. 00:18:16.680 --> 00:18:20.840 They'll do that for like healing, like somebody is sick, and there's like a healing 00:18:20.840 --> 00:18:24.200 practice that says, you know, kill this kind of animal. 00:18:24.520 --> 00:18:30.410 But um just for food, it's kind of something that is done with a lot of intention 00:18:30.410 --> 00:18:35.130 and thought and very cautiously because you don't want to kill a healthy animal. 00:18:35.290 --> 00:18:40.890 Um, but when an animal is dying, when there's an epidemic going around, an animal is dying, 00:18:40.970 --> 00:18:45.930 then they kind of make use of uh the meat very um the same. 00:18:46.170 --> 00:18:51.130 They don't want to waste uh any part of that um animal if they don't have to. 00:18:51.450 --> 00:18:56.360 Um, they also sometimes find animals who've been killed. 00:18:56.440 --> 00:19:02.440 So when I was there once, there was a camel that was found just maybe a couple 00:19:02.520 --> 00:19:07.880 kilometers outside of the settlement that I was staying in, where my campsite is based. 00:19:08.040 --> 00:19:13.640 And it looked like the camel was maybe killed by a snake bite, because there are like some 00:19:13.970 --> 00:19:18.770 very, very poisonous snakes in the area, something that can't kill a camel. 00:19:19.250 --> 00:19:21.810 Um, and so the camel was found dead. 00:19:22.050 --> 00:19:27.970 Um, but they didn't immediately kind of cut open um the camel and 00:19:27.970 --> 00:19:29.010 start eating the meat. 00:19:29.090 --> 00:19:33.650 They had to find out, you know, who the owner is because the owner could have been it the 00:19:33.810 --> 00:19:39.010 camels wander quite a lot, so the owner might be somebody in like some other settlement. 00:19:39.540 --> 00:19:45.220 And so, you know, it took like maybe half a day to a day to like, you know, find the um 00:19:45.780 --> 00:19:49.700 the owner and then, you know, tell the owner camel's dead, we're killing. 00:19:49.780 --> 00:19:55.700 And then and then the meat, then, you know, in the evening we got a bunch of 00:19:55.700 --> 00:19:58.980 camel meat at our camp and heard the backstory of it. 00:19:59.060 --> 00:20:04.830 And I didn't even, I didn't, you know, even think twice about not eating it because, you 00:20:04.830 --> 00:20:06.110 know, everybody eats it. 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, 00:20:12.190 --> 00:20:15.230 you know, sitting in the heat for too long. 00:20:16.190 --> 00:20:22.110 So they just they just know these things because they've had to deal with 00:20:22.110 --> 00:20:23.790 these challenges in the past. 00:20:23.950 --> 00:20:29.070 That's part of the cultural and subsistence package that they rely on. 00:20:29.400 --> 00:20:34.920 And it's a way of living that has allowed them to survive in habitats that you know 00:20:35.480 --> 00:20:40.600 you and I would not be able to survive in without that knowledge, like a very arid 00:20:40.920 --> 00:20:46.920 environment where agriculture, the crop cultivation is very difficult, except along 00:20:46.920 --> 00:20:48.680 like the riverbeds and stuff. 00:20:49.400 --> 00:20:55.170 And so uh that is how they have um potentially a lot 00:20:55.170 --> 00:20:59.250 of um knowledge that um allows them to do that. 00:20:59.490 --> 00:21:04.530 And then I think your other question related to the culture group structured cultural 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 00:21:09.970 --> 00:21:14.800 go into that phase because uh I'll yeah, no, no, that's wonderful. 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 00:21:19.200 --> 00:21:22.320 like the transmission of knowledge is so important. 00:21:22.400 --> 00:21:28.240 I think about like the is that the Rob um Rob uh and Joan example 00:21:28.400 --> 00:21:33.040 of what was it that there was like you know, colonial travel or something, like traveling 00:21:33.040 --> 00:21:36.080 somewhere and they basically starve to death or almost starve to death. 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 00:21:41.990 --> 00:21:47.670 intro to anthro class at UCLA and uh uh here too and and also 00:21:47.830 --> 00:21:53.750 their textbook um but uh I believe um so yeah that is basically you know the 00:21:53.750 --> 00:21:59.750 thought experiment of if you think that um humans all have a 00:21:59.910 --> 00:22:05.860 um capacity, a psychological disposition, motivations, 00:22:06.100 --> 00:22:12.020 reasoning capabilities, cognitive skills, et cetera, that allow them to that that 00:22:12.020 --> 00:22:17.780 are sufficient for them to extract a living out of all the environments that 00:22:17.780 --> 00:22:23.550 humans currently live in, then your prediction is that uh, well, yeah, like you and I 00:22:23.550 --> 00:22:29.470 could go um to where the Inuit are living, or could go into the Sonoran desert, 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 00:22:35.550 --> 00:22:36.430 make a living. 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. 00:22:41.390 --> 00:22:42.990 What do you think, would you? 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. 00:22:49.120 --> 00:22:49.280 Yeah. 00:22:49.360 --> 00:22:52.320 And I would there's a very likely chance that I wouldn't make it. 00:22:52.400 --> 00:22:52.560 Yes. 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 00:23:00.640 --> 00:23:03.280 Hanks movie with uh the Castaway? 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 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 00:23:12.530 --> 00:23:15.330 because it's really bad, high cost mistakes. 00:23:15.570 --> 00:23:16.290 No, totally. 00:23:16.450 --> 00:23:18.210 No, I mean, you know, um, for sure. 00:23:18.290 --> 00:23:18.450 Yeah. 00:23:23.890 --> 00:23:24.210 For sure. 00:23:24.370 --> 00:23:25.250 Yeah, no, for sure. 00:23:25.410 --> 00:23:26.850 We know how this ends for sure. 00:23:26.930 --> 00:23:27.730 Yes, exactly. 00:23:28.130 --> 00:23:28.450 Yeah. 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 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 00:23:39.720 --> 00:23:45.320 18 19 20 year old is filled with like confidence they've gone they've like 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 00:23:51.240 --> 00:23:56.770 survivalist community where like you know there are people who are like very into being 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. 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 00:24:07.730 --> 00:24:09.330 I actually think they can. 00:24:09.490 --> 00:24:15.250 Um so um they haven't yet been humbled by the experiences of 00:24:15.250 --> 00:24:16.450 um life yet. 00:24:16.610 --> 00:24:21.250 Um, but you know, that's kind of why this thought experiment, this ex this historical 00:24:21.250 --> 00:24:27.020 experiment is a good um illustration of that because when we reflect on ourselves, we 00:24:27.020 --> 00:24:32.940 might be very confident of our capabilities, but we know that there were people, explorers, 00:24:33.020 --> 00:24:38.860 who were actually had a lot of information, just not the local information, but outside 00:24:38.860 --> 00:24:44.140 information, had a lot of technology, but not the local technology, but outside technology. 00:24:44.220 --> 00:24:47.500 And we, you know, some of the technology was really fancy, right? 00:24:47.660 --> 00:24:49.690 Like that the explorers had. 00:24:49.770 --> 00:24:55.130 They came from some of the most powerful and technologically developed countries 00:24:55.850 --> 00:24:56.810 of the time. 00:24:57.050 --> 00:25:00.090 And yet there's just one thing they lacked. 00:25:00.490 --> 00:25:04.410 They lacked the knowledge that somebody who grew up there had. 00:25:04.650 --> 00:25:09.770 And they lacked the kind of much simpler tools and technology that people who lived there 00:25:09.770 --> 00:25:10.090 had. 00:25:10.410 --> 00:25:13.240 And, you know, many of them died. 00:25:14.920 --> 00:25:18.360 It did have that tragic finale part. 00:25:18.840 --> 00:25:24.520 So it is uh it it is really I think a very 00:25:24.840 --> 00:25:27.960 important aspect of humans. 00:25:28.360 --> 00:25:34.280 But that said, you know, I um as somebody who's you know really into um 00:25:35.630 --> 00:25:38.590 taking these cultural aspects seriously. 00:25:38.750 --> 00:25:43.950 I also think that there are kind of, you know, then universal psychological 00:25:44.110 --> 00:25:49.870 predispositions people have that make 00:25:49.870 --> 00:25:52.910 it possible for them to acquire this information. 00:25:53.070 --> 00:25:58.740 So the evolved psychology for social learning is really, really important. 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 00:26:05.140 --> 00:26:11.060 prioritize what information we should be copying, know when to not copy, know 00:26:11.060 --> 00:26:16.820 when to innovate and ignore, know when to be a contrarian, those kinds of things. 00:26:16.900 --> 00:26:19.300 So the evolved psychology is very important. 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 00:26:25.490 --> 00:26:31.090 students which date you feature in oh my goodness star actor there okay 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 00:26:37.650 --> 00:26:43.300 um uh learning experiment that annie words and um you 00:26:43.940 --> 00:26:47.060 had um uh you were as I said, a star. 00:26:47.380 --> 00:26:49.220 I was I was an actor, I was a beautiful face. 00:26:49.940 --> 00:26:50.260 That was it. 00:26:50.340 --> 00:26:51.540 And he was the brains, yeah. 00:26:51.700 --> 00:26:53.460 It was just the I was a prop. 00:26:53.620 --> 00:26:53.860 Yeah. 00:26:54.420 --> 00:27:00.180 I think that's a really uh excellent example of how you can have um yeah, 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 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. 00:27:10.390 --> 00:27:15.510 I really think of the that experiment as one of the um the best 00:27:15.670 --> 00:27:21.030 illustrations of that complexity where it's not like you have um uh 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 00:27:27.430 --> 00:27:33.080 psychology that's prepared to learn that you should 00:27:33.080 --> 00:27:34.520 learn socially, right? 00:27:35.160 --> 00:27:35.640 Right. 00:27:35.960 --> 00:27:41.400 So that I think is maybe this 00:27:41.400 --> 00:27:46.840 area where evolutionary psychology has taken 00:27:47.560 --> 00:27:53.160 a slightly different take on this than maybe people in human behavior 00:27:53.320 --> 00:27:59.170 ecology, cultural evolution, etc., where I think early on there was more of 00:27:59.170 --> 00:28:02.850 a resistance to how important culture was. 00:28:03.890 --> 00:28:09.410 But then, you know, that uh in some ways evolutionary psychologists were pushing back 00:28:09.410 --> 00:28:14.770 against an older model of witness in which there was no kind of 00:28:15.010 --> 00:28:20.530 preparation that the brain needed and it was um just this big container that could be 00:28:20.530 --> 00:28:21.730 filled with anything. 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 00:28:28.200 --> 00:28:33.880 doing more of the kind of sophisticated experiments that you start in and and really kind 00:28:33.880 --> 00:28:39.800 of parse out what is the evolved psychology 00:28:39.960 --> 00:28:45.160 and where is it much more open to taking in cultural information, 00:28:46.200 --> 00:28:51.800 and where is it more kind of you know canalized into learning 00:28:52.170 --> 00:28:58.090 certain things a little bit more rigidly and you know how how does that structure come 00:28:58.090 --> 00:29:03.930 about that's another question that I think is open and um I uh feel 00:29:03.930 --> 00:29:09.850 like a lot of my early exposure to this uh to these ideas of modularity and 00:29:09.850 --> 00:29:15.700 prepared learning um Came from the from you know UCSB, from 00:29:15.700 --> 00:29:20.420 like um John and Lita's work and from Clark Barrett and Dan Fessler. 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, 00:29:26.820 --> 00:29:32.820 as I've started working now with people in AI and cognitive science, I 00:29:32.820 --> 00:29:38.710 see a perspective where they are talking about how you can get these, yeah you 00:29:38.710 --> 00:29:44.550 know like for instance how neural networks are are um learning etc it 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 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 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 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 00:30:07.380 --> 00:30:11.140 to like uh already function? 00:30:11.540 --> 00:30:11.780 Right. 00:30:12.020 --> 00:30:17.300 And it it actually seems interesting to me that maybe like uh artificial 00:30:17.300 --> 00:30:22.980 intelligence um research can give us a little bit of insight into what is 00:30:22.980 --> 00:30:28.930 possible here because it seemed like for long it was a 00:30:28.930 --> 00:30:34.850 discussion between cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, folks that 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 00:30:40.690 --> 00:30:46.240 same ways that you can kind of design a 00:30:46.240 --> 00:30:48.880 brain, like what the AI people are doing. 00:30:49.200 --> 00:30:50.640 Yeah, I yeah, I think that's great. 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 00:30:55.520 --> 00:30:56.880 chapter about AI and EvSec. 00:30:57.120 --> 00:30:59.120 I think that's a really wonderful uh thing. 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 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 00:31:08.800 --> 00:31:12.770 there's problems in the world, uh, real world problems, right? 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 00:31:16.610 --> 00:31:20.290 evolutionarily relevant problems, but still real world problems and analyzing them, doing a 00:31:20.290 --> 00:31:22.770 task analysis and saying what machinery do you need? 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 00:31:29.490 --> 00:31:31.650 think it's answering sort of two separate questions. 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 00:31:37.570 --> 00:31:43.480 discussion of what's the what's the sort of like full content architecture in 00:31:43.480 --> 00:31:48.200 the mind that's actually making doing the day-to-day stuff possible? 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 00:31:53.880 --> 00:31:56.360 genetic and developmental content? 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 00:32:02.760 --> 00:32:06.680 that's sort of asking how can we build the representations? 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 00:32:11.550 --> 00:32:13.230 that there's structure in the environment? 00:32:13.470 --> 00:32:15.550 And this is how development works already. 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 00:32:20.990 --> 00:32:26.830 amount of information, or even better yet, sort of like chemistry in a developmental 00:32:26.830 --> 00:32:32.270 little packet such that it reliably interacts with the regularities in the environment to 00:32:32.270 --> 00:32:33.710 produce a whole body, right? 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 00:32:39.540 --> 00:32:40.020 necessary. 00:32:40.180 --> 00:32:42.180 And I think that's true for even the mind too. 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 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 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 00:32:57.060 --> 00:33:02.910 particular domain to extract a much ripper representation that isn't coded sort of 00:33:02.910 --> 00:33:05.470 by hand, or in this case, maybe in the genes, right? 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 00:33:10.830 --> 00:33:12.190 the thing gets represented. 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 00:33:16.510 --> 00:33:17.870 asking two different questions. 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? 00:33:22.670 --> 00:33:22.910 Yeah. 00:33:23.070 --> 00:33:26.750 And then this stuff is sort of how do you get there in a minimal perspective? 00:33:26.910 --> 00:33:27.070 Yeah. 00:33:27.230 --> 00:33:27.870 Yeah. 00:33:28.380 --> 00:33:28.780 Yeah. 00:33:28.940 --> 00:33:34.860 So yeah, that that is um a a useful distinction for me to 00:33:34.860 --> 00:33:40.700 also get in my um mind because I think early on when I was um kind 00:33:40.700 --> 00:33:46.460 of absorbing the eb psych um view of modularity and stuff, I 00:33:46.700 --> 00:33:49.820 think I kind of just lumped those two things together more. 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 00:33:55.670 --> 00:34:01.510 structure that emerges early on that there has to be more content that is 00:34:01.510 --> 00:34:04.630 programmed into the genetic machinery for it. 00:34:04.870 --> 00:34:09.270 But I think you've separated it um it's an interesting point Dave. 00:34:09.350 --> 00:34:13.990 I mean is is the distinction between the uh the the phenotype or the developmental 00:34:13.990 --> 00:34:19.700 phenotype and the way that the developmental phenotype gets Yeah, exactly. 00:34:20.020 --> 00:34:23.300 And that the the feet yeah, and so there are different the phenotype could be highly 00:34:23.300 --> 00:34:27.940 modular, and yet the way that that modular phenotype gets produced and interacts with the 00:34:27.940 --> 00:34:31.380 environment could be very minimalistic in terms of genetic context. 00:34:31.940 --> 00:34:32.100 Correct. 00:34:32.180 --> 00:34:32.340 Yeah. 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 00:34:36.260 --> 00:34:37.380 psychology too. 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 00:34:42.660 --> 00:34:47.230 stuff between sort of what the quote unquote nativists and sort of empiricists in 00:34:47.230 --> 00:34:48.750 developmental psychology. 00:34:48.990 --> 00:34:50.910 And I actually think honestly it's the same thing. 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 00:34:54.350 --> 00:34:58.670 talking past each other because they're talking about the the process versus the outcome in 00:34:58.670 --> 00:34:59.870 a lot of cases. 00:35:00.590 --> 00:35:01.150 Mm-hmm. 00:35:01.710 --> 00:35:02.190 Yeah. 00:35:02.590 --> 00:35:03.230 Um yeah. 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 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 00:35:14.920 --> 00:35:16.200 cultural information. 00:35:16.440 --> 00:35:22.440 But then you'd also asked me about group structured cultural selection processes. 00:35:22.760 --> 00:35:27.880 And I think this is actually a space where 00:35:28.920 --> 00:35:34.840 I have um it's actually what drew me into the field of cultural evolution 00:35:35.000 --> 00:35:40.830 was because you know when I was doing my undergrad um in ecology and evolutionary biology. 00:35:41.230 --> 00:35:46.910 That was as an undergrad was the first time I was actually like really getting introduced 00:35:46.910 --> 00:35:48.750 to evolutionary biology. 00:35:49.070 --> 00:35:54.830 But I just kind of really fell in love with the 00:35:54.830 --> 00:35:59.550 idea that you can explain so much about the world through through the through this 00:35:59.550 --> 00:36:00.430 framework. 00:36:00.750 --> 00:36:06.670 And the idea of like cooperation kind of stood out as something 00:36:06.670 --> 00:36:12.580 that is just, you know, uh counterintuitive but still can be explained and 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 00:36:18.340 --> 00:36:24.180 kind of a little bit not fully within the what you would expect but then 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 00:36:29.460 --> 00:36:34.030 interested in like um sociality in ants and stuff like that. 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 00:36:40.190 --> 00:36:45.710 uh potential here to think about humans, but nobody seems to want to do it. 00:36:45.870 --> 00:36:50.670 Like, you know, it's about bio evolutionary biology departments. 00:36:50.830 --> 00:36:53.870 We're still very focused on drawing the line. 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 00:37:00.340 --> 00:37:02.900 and weird and we don't know what's going on. 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 00:37:09.460 --> 00:37:15.380 cooperation question and I read um um Robin Pete's 1985 book, Culture and 00:37:15.380 --> 00:37:16.660 Evolutionary Process. 00:37:17.140 --> 00:37:22.810 And um, you know, the this idea of um culture 00:37:23.770 --> 00:37:29.210 allowing for a pathway by which you can get 00:37:29.530 --> 00:37:34.570 selective processes that are otherwise unavailable to genetic 00:37:35.210 --> 00:37:39.290 populations and genetic systems was really very 00:37:41.050 --> 00:37:46.460 intriguing because I always felt like, you know when you think about human 00:37:46.460 --> 00:37:52.460 cooperation it's so it stands out in so many regards it's not just that 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 00:37:57.980 --> 00:38:03.100 that oh we cooperate in large groups in transient interactions with strangers so that is 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 00:38:09.070 --> 00:38:13.310 scale seems to not be constrained by the number of people, right? 00:38:13.470 --> 00:38:19.310 Like it has gone, it has changed from something that might be like 50, 60, 100 00:38:19.310 --> 00:38:25.150 people to something that can scale up to like thousands and potentially millions of people. 00:38:25.230 --> 00:38:30.360 So the fact that that scale is something that can be moved so like quickly 00:38:31.080 --> 00:38:35.080 is very unusual in the animal kingdom, right? 00:38:35.240 --> 00:38:40.840 Like we usually have a lot more constant selection 00:38:40.840 --> 00:38:46.760 produces a constant kind of social scale at which the cooperation is 00:38:46.760 --> 00:38:48.600 happening to these other mechanisms. 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 00:38:54.350 --> 00:39:00.270 scale cooperation in humans is also really different from small scale cooperation in other 00:39:00.270 --> 00:39:00.910 animals. 00:39:01.390 --> 00:39:07.310 So we cooperate way more with kin, we cooperate way 00:39:07.310 --> 00:39:13.150 more in reciprocal interactions than other animals that have many of 00:39:13.150 --> 00:39:19.150 these pathways of you know kin based kin selection reciprocity available to 00:39:19.150 --> 00:39:19.310 them. 00:39:19.390 --> 00:39:24.440 So if you think about it, you know, uh animals that live in stable social 00:39:24.600 --> 00:39:29.960 groups have a lot of opportunity for repeated 00:39:29.960 --> 00:39:30.920 interactions. 00:39:31.480 --> 00:39:37.240 And you know, you there can be, I I I am of the view that 00:39:37.240 --> 00:39:43.000 the benefits of cooperation are potentially there in a lot of different ecologies, like 00:39:43.080 --> 00:39:48.600 there's turntaking, there's possibility for food sharing, for collective child care, 00:39:48.920 --> 00:39:54.290 for group defense, for collective uh predation, um, etc. 00:39:54.850 --> 00:40:00.210 So, but you are not getting the kind of intense 00:40:00.690 --> 00:40:06.450 um reciprocal cooperation that actually traverses reciprocity theory 00:40:06.610 --> 00:40:12.130 predicts, which is you know, like WB greater than C is the condition for 00:40:12.130 --> 00:40:13.490 reciprocity to evolve. 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 00:40:19.380 --> 00:40:22.260 times, you should be cooperating like your full siblings. 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. 00:40:28.420 --> 00:40:29.540 We're not seeing it. 00:40:29.780 --> 00:40:35.700 We're instead evaluating whether reciprocity theory is uh 00:40:35.700 --> 00:40:41.470 supported by saying, okay, conditioned on the fact that we are seeing cooperation, 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 00:40:47.950 --> 00:40:49.550 kind of contingency going on? 00:40:49.630 --> 00:40:54.270 That's how we are evaluating the theory empirically, but we're not addressing one big 00:40:54.270 --> 00:40:58.270 problem, which is that you know, by conditioning it on cooperation that's already 00:40:58.270 --> 00:41:02.830 happening, we're not evaluating all those cases where cooperation is not happening when it 00:41:02.830 --> 00:41:04.590 should be, according to theory. 00:41:05.630 --> 00:41:10.940 But in humans, we engage in just an intense amount of reciprocal 00:41:10.940 --> 00:41:11.660 cooperation. 00:41:11.820 --> 00:41:17.740 And like we we do treat friends in ways that are comparable to how we 00:41:17.740 --> 00:41:18.620 treat kin. 00:41:18.860 --> 00:41:24.780 And even among um within families, there are people that we 00:41:24.780 --> 00:41:27.820 will share a lot more with because they're sharing back with us. 00:41:27.980 --> 00:41:30.460 And there are people family members will ignore. 00:41:30.700 --> 00:41:36.470 So uh and you know, just stepping into like the Turkana land again, Uh 00:41:36.710 --> 00:41:42.470 people have friends that, you know, like people are still walking many kilometers 00:41:42.470 --> 00:41:43.830 to go places. 00:41:43.910 --> 00:41:45.030 They don't have vehicles. 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, 00:41:49.430 --> 00:41:50.470 30 kilometers away. 00:41:50.550 --> 00:41:52.390 And you ask them, like, where are you going? 00:41:52.710 --> 00:41:55.030 They stop by like our uh camp. 00:41:55.190 --> 00:41:58.260 Um and they're like, oh, I'm gonna say hi to my friend. 00:41:58.500 --> 00:42:02.660 He's like, you know, another 30, 40 kilometers down that way. 00:42:02.820 --> 00:42:08.260 So like somebody is just walking, um, you know, like three days or so. 00:42:08.660 --> 00:42:11.460 And his claim is he's gonna say hi to his friend. 00:42:11.540 --> 00:42:13.380 Now he's gonna say more than hi to his friend. 00:42:13.460 --> 00:42:15.140 He's gonna say hi to his friend. 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 00:42:20.100 --> 00:42:21.710 potentially come back. 00:42:22.510 --> 00:42:22.910 Right. 00:42:23.470 --> 00:42:28.830 But it's like this level of investment in maintaining 00:42:29.070 --> 00:42:34.990 close friends in places that are far and wide and that you can then trust your 00:42:34.990 --> 00:42:40.190 animals with to like, you know, kind of hedge your pets, spread your risk, 00:42:40.910 --> 00:42:43.390 to call when you're going on a raid. 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. 00:42:48.590 --> 00:42:54.480 Um and uh I sent this person all the way to that settlement to tell 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. 00:42:58.560 --> 00:43:02.320 I'd like him to come and to meet me, you know, here. 00:43:02.800 --> 00:43:08.320 So the friendship uh and and even on the raids, they stay together with their friends. 00:43:08.480 --> 00:43:10.160 They're not staying with their family. 00:43:10.240 --> 00:43:14.950 They are um they're not supposed to stay with their fathers and older siblings because 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 00:43:18.390 --> 00:43:19.030 their friends. 00:43:19.350 --> 00:43:25.350 So that part is not that is extremely unusual in humans that we 00:43:25.350 --> 00:43:31.350 are also cooperating much more intensively in small scale interactions, which 00:43:31.510 --> 00:43:36.630 technically theoretically should be supported for a lot of other species, too. 00:43:37.190 --> 00:43:42.680 Um And uh this is uh I think the other 00:43:42.680 --> 00:43:48.600 puzzle is or the other kind of um unusual aspect um is that 00:43:48.920 --> 00:43:54.600 um we are also co able to cooperate to a 00:43:54.600 --> 00:43:59.880 huge extent while still being fundamentally fairly selfish, I would say. 00:44:00.120 --> 00:44:06.030 Like, you know as somebody who studies pro-sociality and cooperative behavior I will say 00:44:06.030 --> 00:44:11.630 that we are a fairly self-interested species um so 00:44:11.630 --> 00:44:17.230 we've managed to solve the problem of cooperation without um 00:44:17.870 --> 00:44:23.230 having to commit to being purely pro-social um 00:44:23.550 --> 00:44:28.960 whereas um ants and you know they're so pro-social that they're just 00:44:29.520 --> 00:44:31.760 becoming obligately sterile. 00:44:33.280 --> 00:44:39.200 And uh so it's just this very um kind of 00:44:39.200 --> 00:44:44.640 contradictory thing where like, you know, we can collaborate to like send people up to the 00:44:44.640 --> 00:44:47.840 moon to manage something like the International Space Station. 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 00:44:53.770 --> 00:44:56.890 be best predicted by what's in our interest. 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, 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, 00:45:08.410 --> 00:45:14.010 you know, uh something about, for instance, economic 00:45:14.010 --> 00:45:19.610 models work really well, actually, like you know, prices go up, um, of wages go up, 00:45:19.850 --> 00:45:25.660 um We can make certain predictions about how people will respond to those 00:45:25.660 --> 00:45:26.620 incentives. 00:45:27.340 --> 00:45:33.180 And people do respond to those incentives to a large extent in those ways. 00:45:33.420 --> 00:45:38.540 So yeah, how do we get so much cooperation while still like not having a 00:45:38.540 --> 00:45:44.450 psychology that is is you know truly actually 00:45:44.610 --> 00:45:47.250 having that level of pro-sociality, right? 00:45:47.490 --> 00:45:50.050 So that that's that's one uh one question. 00:45:50.210 --> 00:45:56.050 Another question uh I think feature is that uh we um unlike a lot 00:45:56.050 --> 00:46:01.810 of cooperative breeders, so uh you know, if you look at um mere cats, 00:46:02.050 --> 00:46:07.330 if you look at cooperative breeding primates, etc., uh they have much more of a hierarchy 00:46:07.330 --> 00:46:08.370 in their cooperation. 00:46:08.450 --> 00:46:14.000 So there's somebody that's amassing the surplus of cooperation, which is the breeding 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 00:46:20.400 --> 00:46:20.800 thing. 00:46:21.920 --> 00:46:24.400 And humans, we do have that too. 00:46:24.560 --> 00:46:28.640 We do have hierarchies that have emerged in the course of cultural evolution. 00:46:28.720 --> 00:46:32.720 We have status differences, um, wealth differences, and all that stuff. 00:46:32.950 --> 00:46:38.950 But it does seem that this idea of um fairness, of equity, and 00:46:38.950 --> 00:46:44.710 egalitarianism is one of the important pathways by which humans have achieved large-scale 00:46:44.710 --> 00:46:45.430 cooperation. 00:46:45.670 --> 00:46:51.030 That's very different from how it's been achieved in eusocial insects and multicellular 00:46:51.030 --> 00:46:56.780 organisms, only the, you know, um The sex cells, the gametes 00:46:56.940 --> 00:47:02.540 are getting getting to really reproduce, everything else is supporting it. 00:47:03.100 --> 00:47:08.620 So you don't really have a very good example of this kind of 00:47:08.940 --> 00:47:14.860 large-scale cooperation that is still built somewhat on the idea that everybody needs 00:47:14.860 --> 00:47:20.620 to get something, that there's ideas about equity, fairness, 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 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 00:47:32.490 --> 00:47:38.010 those things so you know we're intensively cooperative but we're also so 00:47:38.010 --> 00:47:43.290 different um from other organisms in many aspects of our 00:47:43.290 --> 00:47:48.820 cooperation at every scale and um so I think that 00:47:49.060 --> 00:47:54.420 when you have a situation like this, it feels like, well, something really is fundamentally 00:47:54.420 --> 00:47:59.140 very different about the conditions that are amenable to cooperation in humans compared to 00:47:59.140 --> 00:47:59.700 other animals. 00:47:59.860 --> 00:48:04.900 It can't be some, you know, sometimes I see people saying, well, mobility solves 00:48:04.900 --> 00:48:08.820 cooperative dilemmas, but then I'm like, well, zebras can move, right? 00:48:08.980 --> 00:48:13.700 Um so like you we c we need an explanation that really can 00:48:14.610 --> 00:48:20.050 encompass the fact that humans have just a ton of stuff, 00:48:20.370 --> 00:48:23.330 ways of cooperating that other organisms don't have. 00:48:23.570 --> 00:48:29.250 And the explanation should then account for the lack of cooperation in other 00:48:29.250 --> 00:48:29.730 species. 00:48:29.890 --> 00:48:35.730 It shouldn't just account for cooperation in humans, but then if that mechanism is seen 00:48:35.730 --> 00:48:38.690 somewhere else, we should expect that kind of cooperation. 00:48:38.850 --> 00:48:44.740 That's, I think, a type of theoretical precision that we need to be bringing 00:48:44.740 --> 00:48:45.780 to the table. 00:48:46.420 --> 00:48:50.820 And so the idea of culture, I think, is one of the big like, 00:48:53.460 --> 00:48:58.980 you know, it stands out because it is something that 00:48:58.980 --> 00:49:04.510 humans really very much differ from other organisms in the kind of extreme 00:49:04.510 --> 00:49:10.350 reliance on imitation and culture, and the fact that that has led to 00:49:10.350 --> 00:49:16.030 some things like abilities for norms, transmission of norms, variation 00:49:16.190 --> 00:49:21.630 between populations in those norms and institutions that was 00:49:21.630 --> 00:49:27.180 previously you know, not available in genetically structured populations like group 00:49:27.580 --> 00:49:30.140 group level variation, all that stuff. 00:49:30.300 --> 00:49:36.220 So I've been really drawn to this idea that there are various things about culture 00:49:36.460 --> 00:49:42.460 that are uh what is very central to why our 00:49:42.460 --> 00:49:47.900 kind of cooperation is very different from what it looks in other animals. 00:49:48.380 --> 00:49:54.170 And um the idea of cultural group selection has 00:49:54.170 --> 00:49:57.130 been one of the prominent ones. 00:49:57.450 --> 00:50:03.210 And because people don't like to use the word group selection loosely 00:50:03.530 --> 00:50:08.810 in in these contexts, I've kind of tried to resort more to group structured cultural 00:50:08.810 --> 00:50:09.370 selection. 00:50:09.530 --> 00:50:09.610 Right. 00:50:10.120 --> 00:50:15.960 although the term hasn't caught on really so um i'm not really 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 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 00:50:26.040 --> 00:50:31.560 just I know that just spread like wildfire oh yeah yeah so um 00:50:31.800 --> 00:50:37.330 yeah anyway group structured cultural selection it's a bit of a mouthful but um uh 00:50:37.490 --> 00:50:43.490 I think uh that is one big way in which culture 00:50:43.490 --> 00:50:47.250 has changed something in in humans. 00:50:47.410 --> 00:50:52.930 So you know historically we always oh people were drawn to this idea of genetic group 00:50:52.930 --> 00:50:58.450 selection because yeah if you can get groups then you do and those groups are very 00:50:58.850 --> 00:51:04.820 vary, then you know you do get the potential for selection to act on these entities. 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. 00:51:10.260 --> 00:51:13.700 And those could be you know cooperative dispositions. 00:51:13.940 --> 00:51:19.780 But you know the reality proved those people wrong because you just don't get that 00:51:19.780 --> 00:51:22.580 kind of um population structure with genes. 00:51:22.660 --> 00:51:28.180 And we confirmed that in our study with the Tracana and neighboring pastoral groups 00:51:28.580 --> 00:51:34.490 that So when we did our genetics project, we sampled four different pastoral groups in 00:51:34.490 --> 00:51:39.690 the Northwest of Kenya, the Turkana, Samburu, Burana, and Rendili. 00:51:40.330 --> 00:51:45.290 And we sampled them at different social scales, so the scale of clans, 00:51:45.530 --> 00:51:50.700 subterritories, and ethnolinguistic groups, so that we could see whether there's genetic 00:51:50.700 --> 00:51:52.700 variation at any of those scales. 00:51:52.940 --> 00:51:57.820 And no, the level of genetic variation is just really, really low. 00:51:57.900 --> 00:52:03.500 Like it's less than a percent, like even between uh ethnolinguistic groups. 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 00:52:09.260 --> 00:52:12.140 there there's sort of the within group variation, between group variation. 00:52:12.300 --> 00:52:15.660 This is saying that the between group variation is very low compared to the within group. 00:52:16.140 --> 00:52:17.580 Exactly, exactly. 00:52:17.900 --> 00:52:23.750 So um uh it's not and this is actually um 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 00:52:28.790 --> 00:52:30.630 this study, like we know this. 00:52:31.110 --> 00:52:33.270 Um don't waste money on this. 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 00:52:37.590 --> 00:52:37.750 that? 00:52:37.910 --> 00:52:39.990 I mean, I know I know the answer to that. 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 00:52:45.740 --> 00:52:51.100 where the question, the person asking the question almost assumed that that would be a 00:52:51.420 --> 00:52:52.540 thing, yeah. 00:52:52.860 --> 00:52:58.060 Because you know, like clans, for example, are like lineages of people who share a 00:52:58.060 --> 00:53:03.870 relative, and they're sometimes uh endogamy, and actually the tracana even though they 00:53:03.870 --> 00:53:09.710 don't have rules against uh ethnic exogamy most marriages are within ethnic groups 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 00:53:15.070 --> 00:53:20.510 and running into and things like that so but despite this high level of ethnic and 00:53:20.750 --> 00:53:26.660 endogamy it's still the border is kind of non-existent, the genetic border is 00:53:26.660 --> 00:53:29.460 non-existent, but there is a cultural border. 00:53:30.180 --> 00:53:35.860 And we get at the when you look at the cultural variation, you get 00:53:36.900 --> 00:53:39.860 things on the order of like 10 to 15%. 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 00:53:46.420 --> 00:53:47.140 groups. 00:53:47.860 --> 00:53:52.970 So there is something different in how cultural variation and genetic variation 00:53:53.290 --> 00:53:56.650 gets organized in populations. 00:53:56.970 --> 00:54:02.810 And cultural variation does seem more amenable to these kind of group like 00:54:03.450 --> 00:54:04.410 structures. 00:54:05.530 --> 00:54:11.370 And so that I think is a very important premise of group 00:54:11.450 --> 00:54:13.050 structured cultural selection. 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 00:54:18.720 --> 00:54:21.440 populations that kind of showed showed that. 00:54:22.560 --> 00:54:28.480 And to me, it explains some things, not all 00:54:28.480 --> 00:54:34.240 things, but it explains some very important features about human cooperation, 00:54:34.400 --> 00:54:39.600 which is why you get norms that make people want to 00:54:39.600 --> 00:54:45.120 cooperate at these really large scales, and why that scale can be so variable. 00:54:45.630 --> 00:54:51.550 So because of uh what cultural group structured cultural selection is saying is that 00:54:51.630 --> 00:54:57.390 you know the scale of intergroup competition um is going to be 00:54:57.390 --> 00:55:00.590 mostly along the scale of cultural variation. 00:55:01.790 --> 00:55:07.710 You know so um uh it in this case in Northwest Kenya it's going to 00:55:07.710 --> 00:55:13.120 be mostly intergroup competition between ethnolinguistic groups and selection is 00:55:13.440 --> 00:55:19.040 favoring norms and behaviors that then make people do 00:55:19.040 --> 00:55:23.760 things that benefit that cultural group. 00:55:24.320 --> 00:55:30.000 And that can explain, for instance, this really odd thing that you know, like the Tricana 00:55:30.240 --> 00:55:35.120 go on raids to get animals from other groups, but they 00:55:36.240 --> 00:55:41.850 have a norm that says if you go and read another tricana, you're a criminal, 00:55:42.170 --> 00:55:44.170 that's banditry, that's criminal. 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 00:55:49.690 --> 00:55:50.730 you, we don't want you. 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 00:55:55.450 --> 00:55:58.730 stole the animals from, we're gonna make you return those animals. 00:55:59.050 --> 00:56:05.000 So there's the strong norm that is um telling people 00:56:05.240 --> 00:56:10.680 that there is this arbitrary group of people somewhere far down south but who call 00:56:10.680 --> 00:56:16.360 themselves trikana that you need to not harm in order to like bring 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 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 00:56:26.760 --> 00:56:32.190 okay to in in this particular cultural system it's you know praised and and really 00:56:32.510 --> 00:56:38.190 um encouraged and people get a lot of status and um glory from doing that. 00:56:38.350 --> 00:56:44.270 Um so you have to kind of explain that there's a particular scale 00:56:44.270 --> 00:56:50.190 at which that norm is operating and it's providing benefits at this ethnolinguistic scale. 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 00:56:56.100 --> 00:56:59.300 but it's breaking down at another scale, right? 00:56:59.380 --> 00:57:04.820 Like as soon as you step past that Turkana boundary, that's that norm is really 00:57:05.460 --> 00:57:08.980 would be useful, but it's not happening. 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 00:57:14.900 --> 00:57:17.300 mortality is due to warfare. 00:57:18.950 --> 00:57:22.470 And so many people on both sides are dying. 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 00:57:28.630 --> 00:57:33.510 groups would be part of that in-group, everybody would be better off. 00:57:33.910 --> 00:57:36.470 But this is the classic cooperation problem. 00:57:36.630 --> 00:57:42.630 Even if we would both be better off if we both cooperated, if 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 00:57:48.240 --> 00:57:53.600 happens is that unilaterally raiding another group has huge 00:57:53.600 --> 00:57:54.320 benefits. 00:57:54.480 --> 00:57:57.360 So let's say the Turkana say we won't raid the taposa. 00:57:58.080 --> 00:58:03.360 Well, great time for the taposa to like go in and raid the tracana, right? 00:58:03.520 --> 00:58:04.960 Um, and vice versa. 00:58:05.200 --> 00:58:10.800 So you have the classic breakdown of cooperation between at that level that is 00:58:11.040 --> 00:58:16.070 uh causing so much um so much uh 00:58:16.070 --> 00:58:21.430 inefficiency, um, loss of lives, and no, and everybody even knows they don't want this. 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 00:58:27.270 --> 00:58:27.590 problem. 00:58:27.830 --> 00:58:33.590 So uh I think cultural uh group selection is a very good candidate for being 00:58:33.590 --> 00:58:39.510 able to say why you can get the scale of cooperation to be something that's 00:58:39.510 --> 00:58:44.780 pretty big, but can all can also get bigger if like the cultural group just expands. 00:58:44.940 --> 00:58:50.860 Like the Tracana have expanded from like 250,000 people 20, 30 years 00:58:50.860 --> 00:58:56.860 ago to like a million people, but those norms have still persisted that say, you 00:58:56.860 --> 00:59:01.900 know, now this new million people still are ones that we can't harm. 00:59:02.460 --> 00:59:02.860 Right? 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 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 00:59:14.250 --> 00:59:18.010 area and they've occupied this big area, they're about a million people strong. 00:59:18.330 --> 00:59:24.170 And uh the norm now just extends to this much larger group of 00:59:24.170 --> 00:59:24.490 people. 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 00:59:30.680 --> 00:59:32.200 particular boundary. 00:59:32.440 --> 00:59:38.440 And uh if we were to think that humans are reasoning about this through their intelligence, 00:59:38.600 --> 00:59:44.040 through their recognition of the mutual benefits to cooperation, by sitting together and 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 00:59:50.040 --> 00:59:51.240 wouldn't have this problem. 00:59:51.400 --> 00:59:57.400 They wouldn't be warring for like the last um 30, 40 years, probably 00:59:57.400 --> 00:59:57.960 longer. 00:59:58.120 --> 01:00:03.970 Um so I um I I I've talked for long, so I'll 01:00:04.050 --> 01:00:07.410 I'll I'll stop talking about interject. 01:00:08.130 --> 01:00:08.370 Yeah. 01:00:08.530 --> 01:00:11.570 I mean, yeah, so so many different threads that I would wanna go down. 01:00:11.730 --> 01:00:14.130 Is there one that you wanna go down most, Dave? 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, 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 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? 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 01:00:34.400 --> 01:00:39.200 is sort of a coordination uh solution, it's a coordination technology of common knowledge 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 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 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 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, 01:00:57.310 --> 01:00:57.470 right? 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 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 01:01:06.830 --> 01:01:07.310 warfare. 01:01:07.390 --> 01:01:10.350 And I can imagine us sneaking up on them and really clobbering them. 01:01:10.430 --> 01:01:15.230 You know, it was like uh it's exactly that um uh you know, that sentiment. 01:01:15.390 --> 01:01:20.920 Um, so I feel like the this Turkana thing of in in Turkana, in Scare 01:01:20.920 --> 01:01:26.040 Quotes sounds like it's just this thing of it's a packet of um 01:01:26.360 --> 01:01:32.200 expectations and knowledge and rules that evolved psychology is 01:01:32.200 --> 01:01:34.360 sort of digested and used. 01:01:34.680 --> 01:01:40.360 And just to fill in the blank, too, the cultural group selection idea 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. 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 01:01:50.930 --> 01:01:51.810 that together. 01:01:52.050 --> 01:01:55.890 And you can almost think about it as a metaphor of like building blocks. 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. 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 01:02:04.450 --> 01:02:05.410 better than the other. 01:02:05.650 --> 01:02:05.890 Right. 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 01:02:10.370 --> 01:02:15.220 like transmission or competition of just people are like, oh, that looks better than what 01:02:15.220 --> 01:02:16.020 I'm doing, right? 01:02:16.100 --> 01:02:19.460 Or, or it's, you know, you kill the other group or whatever. 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 01:02:25.700 --> 01:02:26.660 work better than others. 01:02:26.740 --> 01:02:32.020 And this work better means gets extended or transmitted or extends. 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 01:02:38.150 --> 01:02:43.110 packet way of dealing with an evolved psychology is doing relatively well. 01:02:43.350 --> 01:02:45.590 Um, and it's it's spreading. 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 01:02:51.670 --> 01:02:57.590 kind of to the other group, is just that what the Turkana is, is 01:02:57.590 --> 01:03:03.510 this sort of set of locked in coordination devices that 01:03:03.510 --> 01:03:08.880 just that it's really hard to sort of create um from in a 01:03:08.880 --> 01:03:10.400 dynamic perspective. 01:03:10.960 --> 01:03:13.600 It's just how do you get that dynamic going? 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 01:03:19.200 --> 01:03:21.680 in different language, but that's that's what I wanted to interject. 01:03:21.760 --> 01:03:22.400 Yeah. 01:03:23.120 --> 01:03:23.360 Yeah. 01:03:23.680 --> 01:03:28.640 I think that's very much the framework of um how norms work, right? 01:03:28.800 --> 01:03:34.190 So it is about solving a particular problem of 01:03:34.190 --> 01:03:35.630 common knowledge. 01:03:35.870 --> 01:03:40.110 So I know if I'm a Turkana, I know that 01:03:41.630 --> 01:03:44.910 you know you expect me to do this. 01:03:45.150 --> 01:03:48.270 And you know that I expect you to do this. 01:03:48.510 --> 01:03:54.430 And that um uh uh it it it is the fact that you 01:03:54.750 --> 01:04:00.520 are um embedded in this kind of shared knowledge that you and you can predict 01:04:00.520 --> 01:04:06.440 other people's response to your behaviors that provides the deterrence and the 01:04:06.440 --> 01:04:12.280 motivation to do things a certain way, which also gets to my earlier point about 01:04:12.280 --> 01:04:16.280 why humans can be so cooperative while still being fundamentally selfish. 01:04:16.440 --> 01:04:19.800 It's because when we're following norms, we are being selfish. 01:04:20.120 --> 01:04:22.590 We are not being pro-social. 01:04:22.750 --> 01:04:26.510 We are simply doing what is in our interest. 01:04:27.550 --> 01:04:33.230 That, you know, if I don't do this, then people will do 01:04:33.470 --> 01:04:37.230 this or think this of me and might not interact with me, etc. 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 01:04:42.670 --> 01:04:48.080 you can manage to get high levels of cooperation while still being fairly self-interested 01:04:48.080 --> 01:04:49.280 psychologically. 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 01:04:55.360 --> 01:05:00.800 coordination problem at uh either interpersonally or at a much 01:05:00.800 --> 01:05:02.080 wider scale. 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 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 01:05:13.970 --> 01:05:16.770 is the scale at which we're going to cooperate. 01:05:16.930 --> 01:05:19.810 And that we've decided this is a useful scale. 01:05:20.050 --> 01:05:26.050 And so nobody has kind of gotten together to like deliberate 01:05:26.050 --> 01:05:26.450 on that. 01:05:26.610 --> 01:05:29.810 It's it's just kind of growing bottom up. 01:05:30.130 --> 01:05:35.900 And so then that growing bottom up is coming through this um these 01:05:35.900 --> 01:05:41.500 cultural evolutionary processes and the boundaries of that are being created by when these 01:05:41.500 --> 01:05:45.740 different normative systems are then clashing against each other. 01:05:45.980 --> 01:05:51.420 And one of them seems to do well, either because they align better with the evolved 01:05:51.420 --> 01:05:51.980 psychology. 01:05:52.140 --> 01:05:57.980 Maybe, you know, like the norm is one that allows everybody to see some gain 01:05:57.980 --> 01:06:01.820 to what they're um what to going along with the system. 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 01:06:08.230 --> 01:06:09.030 or something like that. 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 01:06:15.030 --> 01:06:15.830 psychology. 01:06:15.910 --> 01:06:20.870 But then there's also the other component, which is that which package is better at 01:06:20.870 --> 01:06:26.710 extracting resources from the environment, like psychological component, because um 01:06:27.030 --> 01:06:33.000 that is so uh in the Turkana case, their normative package does require 01:06:33.000 --> 01:06:35.000 men to take some pretty big risks. 01:06:35.400 --> 01:06:41.160 That can seem like, you know, not really something that you'd want to 01:06:41.160 --> 01:06:41.960 buy into. 01:06:42.760 --> 01:06:48.280 But what I think it has persisted because it has allowed them to get these 01:06:48.280 --> 01:06:49.480 ecological benefits. 01:06:49.640 --> 01:06:55.590 They're able to displace other groups from very scarce dry season pastures 01:06:56.150 --> 01:07:01.990 and occupy those areas and as a result kind of start spreading 01:07:02.230 --> 01:07:08.070 um their um uh the area of land that they can call turcana 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 01:07:13.750 --> 01:07:19.670 to literally be a huge determinant of population growth um right um 01:07:19.830 --> 01:07:24.740 if you don't get pastures in the dry season your animals are dying And 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 01:07:32.340 --> 01:07:34.820 places, that's why a normative package might work. 01:07:34.980 --> 01:07:40.900 But also there's the part about who's better at extracting resources, which package is 01:07:40.900 --> 01:07:45.060 allowing you to extract more resources from the ecology or be more competitive in 01:07:45.220 --> 01:07:49.940 intergroup contests or attract more people into your cultural group, et cetera. 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 01:07:56.170 --> 01:08:00.170 package becomes, you know, what it is. 01:08:00.890 --> 01:08:01.450 Or stays. 01:08:01.850 --> 01:08:02.650 Fascinating. 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 01:08:08.810 --> 01:08:12.010 hypothesis about the origins of tribalism. 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 01:08:18.170 --> 01:08:23.700 have conflict with the outgroup, uh, in some cases, uh aggress against the outgroup, 01:08:23.860 --> 01:08:25.220 dominate the outgroup. 01:08:25.380 --> 01:08:28.580 This is uh a huge part of the human condition. 01:08:29.220 --> 01:08:34.900 What you're suggesting is that this tendency toward tribalism, for lack of a better word, 01:08:35.220 --> 01:08:40.740 um may in fact be a cultural adaptation rather than a genetic 01:08:40.740 --> 01:08:41.380 adaptation. 01:08:41.540 --> 01:08:46.340 That is, normative packages that extract more resources from the environment and extract 01:08:46.340 --> 01:08:51.870 more resources from other normative packages will by definition spread and proliferate. 01:08:51.950 --> 01:08:57.630 And that could very well be the normative package of uh protecting and defending everyone 01:08:57.630 --> 01:09:01.790 who shares that normative package and aggressing against and dominating and exploiting 01:09:01.790 --> 01:09:04.030 anyone who doesn't share that normative package. 01:09:04.270 --> 01:09:10.190 And so the possibility is that uh intergroup animosity, tribalism, 01:09:10.270 --> 01:09:12.080 there are lots of words for these things. 01:09:12.240 --> 01:09:13.520 We're all familiar with them. 01:09:13.920 --> 01:09:19.040 This could be a cultural adaptation, and that cultures that have these properties will, by 01:09:19.040 --> 01:09:24.640 definition, displace uh other cultures that lack these properties and will grow over time 01:09:24.800 --> 01:09:27.760 and will, in some cases, scale up as the group expands. 01:09:27.920 --> 01:09:32.400 As the normative package expands, the pool of cooperation and mutual protection and defense 01:09:32.400 --> 01:09:36.570 will expand, and you get larger and larger uh normative packages, and with larger and 01:09:36.570 --> 01:09:40.650 larger normative packages comes competition with other larger and larger normative 01:09:40.650 --> 01:09:45.130 packages, which creates more and more scaling, and you get larger and larger groups of of 01:09:45.130 --> 01:09:46.250 collaborating humans. 01:09:46.490 --> 01:09:50.810 Um I number one, am I getting um this this view correct? 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 01:09:56.410 --> 01:10:01.770 of of intergroup animosity tribalism are better viewed as a cultural adaptation than a 01:10:01.770 --> 01:10:02.810 genetic adaptation? 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, 01:10:08.940 --> 01:10:10.140 I can visualize it. 01:10:10.300 --> 01:10:12.460 Um, so I appreciated that. 01:10:12.620 --> 01:10:18.380 Um, so whether it is um, you know, uh cultural or genetic, 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 01:10:24.140 --> 01:10:29.430 completely in the absence of any psychological bias towards an 01:10:29.430 --> 01:10:35.430 ethnic psychology or an in-group psychology or a tribal psychology, I think that's 01:10:35.430 --> 01:10:38.550 more of an open question because it is possible. 01:10:38.710 --> 01:10:43.510 So, for instance, one way in which that could happen is simply that if cultural group 01:10:43.510 --> 01:10:48.390 selection like processes have been happening for a long period of evolutionary history, 01:10:48.710 --> 01:10:54.580 then you should uh be getting a prepared psychology that is expecting um 01:10:54.820 --> 01:11:00.020 something like that and um so you can get the kind of gene culture 01:11:00.020 --> 01:11:06.020 coevolution of a genetically um um uh specified 01:11:06.020 --> 01:11:11.990 tribal psychology but i think we don't i uh i am uh 01:11:12.230 --> 01:11:18.070 while I say that that is theoretically possible, I just think that it remains empirically 01:11:18.070 --> 01:11:19.510 an open question. 01:11:19.750 --> 01:11:25.430 Um and I'm not yet willing to kind of um, you know, take 01:11:25.430 --> 01:11:26.470 sides on that. 01:11:26.710 --> 01:11:32.470 Um so um, for example, you know, I think uh this is now a paper that 01:11:32.470 --> 01:11:38.320 Matt Zafferman and I wrote on um warfare and how group structure cultural 01:11:38.320 --> 01:11:40.880 selection can explain human warfare. 01:11:41.520 --> 01:11:44.240 We argued about how 01:11:47.360 --> 01:11:53.200 potentially one could separate the component that is coming from the genetic psychology 01:11:53.520 --> 01:11:59.350 by thinking about, for instance, is it easier to get norms that make people 01:11:59.350 --> 01:12:01.350 want to defend their group, right? 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 01:12:06.870 --> 01:12:07.750 spreading. 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 01:12:14.870 --> 01:12:16.230 compete against the out group? 01:12:16.630 --> 01:12:22.150 Is that normative package partly also doing very well because we also have a 01:12:22.150 --> 01:12:27.980 psychology that's telling us that we should expect norms like this to exist 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. 01:12:32.620 --> 01:12:37.100 Or is that norm just like any other norm that kind of can come about? 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 01:12:43.100 --> 01:12:46.940 norm about, you know, how to use a computer properly? 01:12:47.340 --> 01:12:47.740 Right? 01:12:47.990 --> 01:12:52.550 So that would be maybe a good experiment that can look at, yeah. 01:12:52.630 --> 01:12:58.630 Are we uh going back to where Dave starred in this great movie Unprepared Social 01:12:58.630 --> 01:12:58.950 Learning? 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 01:13:06.470 --> 01:13:12.240 we are prepared to learn norms that have to do with uh 01:13:12.480 --> 01:13:18.480 in-group um with a tribal psychology or a you know um uh intergroup 01:13:18.480 --> 01:13:24.320 competitive psychology or are all norms many norms kind of equally learnable if we 01:13:24.320 --> 01:13:29.350 get the same inputs um to them does that make sense dave Yeah. 01:13:29.430 --> 01:13:29.670 Yeah. 01:13:29.750 --> 01:13:31.430 And I mean, and also, oh, well, yeah. 01:13:31.510 --> 01:13:34.950 And I also just want to like say it's really interesting and really complicated. 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 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 01:13:45.110 --> 01:13:50.630 psychology in people that's constantly evaluating and enabling 01:13:50.950 --> 01:13:53.240 these norms to continue. 01:13:53.720 --> 01:13:56.360 It's just sort of what's tipping the scale, right? 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, 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? 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 01:14:11.800 --> 01:14:13.800 norm versus in the rule, right? 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 01:14:19.640 --> 01:14:21.810 I go bomb Afghanistan, right? 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 01:14:26.930 --> 01:14:31.090 structure where somebody told me, you got to go do this. 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? 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 01:14:39.170 --> 01:14:43.170 of things, but then there's a question of sort of um what is that institution? 01:14:43.650 --> 01:14:46.700 Um, what's the cultural institution to? 01:14:47.020 --> 01:14:49.980 Um, I don't know if that's helpful or clarifying. 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 01:14:53.980 --> 01:14:59.660 psychology for expecting to be in these situations, to the 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 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 01:15:11.150 --> 01:15:12.110 in power. 01:15:12.830 --> 01:15:17.070 There's gonna be really strong selection pressures on being like, is that a good idea, 01:15:17.150 --> 01:15:17.310 right? 01:15:17.390 --> 01:15:19.390 Or like, what are the cues that that's a good idea? 01:15:19.470 --> 01:15:25.280 And then you would expect cultural institutions to sort of um hijack the 01:15:25.280 --> 01:15:26.320 ones that work, right? 01:15:26.480 --> 01:15:29.200 Hijack the cues that make it seem like it's a good idea. 01:15:29.280 --> 01:15:31.760 Like, oh, our probability of success is very high. 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. 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 01:15:41.200 --> 01:15:42.320 we're gonna win, right? 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 01:15:48.150 --> 01:15:51.990 might not be as simple as there's a bias to go do it. 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. 01:15:57.110 --> 01:15:57.670 Yeah. 01:15:57.990 --> 01:15:58.390 Yeah. 01:15:58.710 --> 01:16:04.630 I guess that's also that layer that I was talking about of um 01:16:04.790 --> 01:16:09.990 yeah, are we do we come more ready to acquire social 01:16:10.310 --> 01:16:16.300 norms that are in particular domains that have directions. 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 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? 01:16:27.260 --> 01:16:32.060 Like or a norm about uh you know getting um 01:16:33.130 --> 01:16:38.890 something arbitrary that's unrelated to group level competitive processes. 01:16:39.050 --> 01:16:44.890 So that's maybe the middle layer, which I thought like, you know, is a good 01:16:44.890 --> 01:16:50.730 space to explore because I really haven't seen any studies about that aspect. 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 01:16:56.730 --> 01:17:02.520 or is it just the norm, but not is there, are we biased towards a learning 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? 01:17:08.840 --> 01:17:09.000 Yeah. 01:17:09.400 --> 01:17:10.680 That's a really great I love that. 01:17:10.760 --> 01:17:12.040 Yeah, like it's what's sticky. 01:17:12.280 --> 01:17:13.000 That's a great question. 01:17:13.080 --> 01:17:14.120 Yeah, that's that's great. 01:17:14.200 --> 01:17:14.760 Yeah. 01:17:15.080 --> 01:17:15.480 Yeah. 01:17:15.720 --> 01:17:21.320 I mean, it's interesting that in so many intergroup conflicts, 01:17:21.670 --> 01:17:27.270 um, the outgroup is demonized as being anti-social or exploitative or 01:17:27.270 --> 01:17:28.550 dangerous, right? 01:17:28.630 --> 01:17:30.470 Or, you know, dirty, well, whatever. 01:17:30.630 --> 01:17:35.110 Any we have this rich psychology of partner choice where we're evaluating with whom we 01:17:35.110 --> 01:17:35.990 should cooperate. 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 01:17:41.190 --> 01:17:45.750 down the list of everything that is bad in a social partner, the outgroup has, right? 01:17:46.310 --> 01:17:49.190 Uh and that can't be a coincidence. 01:17:49.270 --> 01:17:54.640 W and so if it were um purely um 01:17:55.840 --> 01:18:00.160 it almost speaks to in favor of the of the of the cultural view. 01:18:00.320 --> 01:18:05.600 Where if we had a genetic uh disposition to aggress against outgroups, we wouldn't need 01:18:05.600 --> 01:18:06.960 those narratives, right? 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. 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 01:18:12.720 --> 01:18:15.440 that's a better reason for us to attack them, right? 01:18:15.840 --> 01:18:16.960 So it shouldn't it shouldn't matter. 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 01:18:21.550 --> 01:18:23.150 attack outgroups, right? 01:18:23.310 --> 01:18:28.350 But if it's a cultural evolutionary package that that harnesses aspects of our evolved 01:18:28.350 --> 01:18:32.750 psychology in service of intergroup competition, then you would expect that cultural 01:18:32.750 --> 01:18:38.030 package to harness pre-existing features of the psychology that allow uh hatred, 01:18:38.190 --> 01:18:41.310 aggression, uh anger-based bargaining, et cetera. 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 01:18:46.160 --> 01:18:50.400 service of intergroup competition, because the only groups that would have been successful 01:18:50.400 --> 01:18:54.400 in coordinating out-group aggression were the groups that had normative package packages 01:18:54.400 --> 01:18:58.880 and narratives that demonized the outgroup in whatever way was possible. 01:18:59.600 --> 01:18:59.920 I don't know. 01:19:01.840 --> 01:19:02.640 I'm curious what you think. 01:19:03.360 --> 01:19:09.280 So that kind of just made me remember about a very recent paper that um 01:19:09.280 --> 01:19:14.830 Matt Zaperman and I are working on a chapter that will come up in this 01:19:14.830 --> 01:19:20.670 edited volume on essentialism that Christina Moya um 01:19:21.070 --> 01:19:24.910 uh had invited us to um contribute to. 01:19:25.310 --> 01:19:31.150 Uh we looked at um you know the attitudes that the tracana have 01:19:31.150 --> 01:19:37.150 towards the Toposa, the group that they um you know are engaged in very lethal conflict 01:19:37.150 --> 01:19:37.390 with. 01:19:37.550 --> 01:19:42.700 And you know, most Tracana have know somebody who's been killed by a taposa. 01:19:43.100 --> 01:19:48.700 Most tocana, especially in the border area, have know somebody or have personally had their 01:19:48.700 --> 01:19:51.100 animals taken in a raid and stuff like that. 01:19:51.180 --> 01:19:57.180 So you'll fe think that this is a place where maybe this kind of dehumanizing 01:19:57.180 --> 01:20:00.060 kind of uh framework should get mobilized. 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 01:20:06.030 --> 01:20:10.990 together and they talk about you know revenge and like we need to retaliate because they 01:20:10.990 --> 01:20:12.110 came and they took our stuff. 01:20:12.190 --> 01:20:16.190 So it's like building up that anger, um, uh, etc. 01:20:16.910 --> 01:20:19.070 But uh really, really interesting. 01:20:19.230 --> 01:20:24.830 We did the switched at birth task um for uh the tracana and toposas. 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 01:20:29.940 --> 01:20:32.260 Tracano, would that baby be Toposa or Tracana? 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 01:20:36.180 --> 01:20:37.220 Tracano, Toposa? 01:20:37.860 --> 01:20:43.060 And um can I ask you to guess what you think people would have said? 01:20:43.540 --> 01:20:45.140 People are not essentialistic. 01:20:45.460 --> 01:20:46.500 I guess I gave it away. 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 01:20:51.540 --> 01:20:54.660 of that um well no I'll let you I don't yeah yeah. 01:20:55.370 --> 01:20:58.730 I mean, I was personally surprised just at how low it was. 01:20:58.890 --> 01:21:04.810 I knew it wouldn't be potentially that high, but we had only about two 01:21:04.970 --> 01:21:08.810 percent of our subjects um give the essentialist response. 01:21:08.890 --> 01:21:10.330 That was like four subjects. 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 01:21:15.050 --> 01:21:16.010 group and and vice versa. 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. 01:21:18.650 --> 01:21:19.050 That's who you are. 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 01:21:24.760 --> 01:21:25.480 taposa. 01:21:26.520 --> 01:21:31.160 And so we kind of delved a little bit into the literature on 01:21:32.280 --> 01:21:34.520 ethnic essentializing beliefs. 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 01:21:40.440 --> 01:21:46.040 easily dehumanize the the outgroup because they are they're different from you. 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 01:21:51.430 --> 01:21:56.870 prejudice, hostilities and and dehumanization kind of is more easy in that 01:21:56.870 --> 01:21:57.590 context. 01:21:57.830 --> 01:22:02.790 But um yeah, we see uh literally like no um 01:22:04.070 --> 01:22:09.910 uh yeah I I would say you know close to zero um essentializing beliefs. 01:22:09.990 --> 01:22:12.150 Um fascinating fascinating result. 01:22:12.320 --> 01:22:12.480 Yeah. 01:22:12.720 --> 01:22:13.040 Yeah. 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 01:22:18.640 --> 01:22:21.920 disorder in Tracana Warriors with Matt Zefferman. 01:22:22.160 --> 01:22:24.640 Yeah, I wanted to talk about that and make sure we get to that. 01:22:24.720 --> 01:22:25.200 That's fantastic. 01:22:25.280 --> 01:22:26.480 Yeah, but please, yeah, yeah. 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, 01:22:32.400 --> 01:22:37.760 you know, how the genetic psychology versus norms are playing into warfare, etc. 01:22:38.240 --> 01:22:43.810 So um uh just so just stepping back um a little bit on that question, 01:22:44.050 --> 01:22:49.170 because the trikran are exposed to these really high rates of lethal violence and raids, 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. 01:22:55.490 --> 01:22:58.850 Are warriors having combat-related PTSD? 01:22:59.410 --> 01:23:05.000 And um going into this project, I had very 01:23:05.320 --> 01:23:08.760 I had literally like zero idea of what we will find. 01:23:08.840 --> 01:23:11.640 I would not have been surprised either which way. 01:23:12.760 --> 01:23:18.680 But because uh purely because in like the many, many interviews that I had done 01:23:18.680 --> 01:23:24.280 with people and when people recounted raids that were fairly traumatic, et cetera, nobody 01:23:24.280 --> 01:23:29.870 ever mentioned anything about you know having intrusive thoughts afterwards or anything. 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 01:23:35.550 --> 01:23:37.230 any kind of um thing. 01:23:37.550 --> 01:23:43.310 Um and uh so that that that empirical impression was that maybe this is not a 01:23:43.310 --> 01:23:44.110 thing here. 01:23:44.270 --> 01:23:50.030 Um but then theoretically we were Matt Zaperman and I uh were kind 01:23:50.030 --> 01:23:55.790 of putting on our our hats as well-informed evolutionary behavioral 01:23:55.870 --> 01:24:01.240 um sciences researchers and thinking, you know, what what what what 01:24:01.240 --> 01:24:07.160 does uh everything we know about um human evolution tell us that we should find 01:24:07.160 --> 01:24:07.480 here? 01:24:07.640 --> 01:24:13.080 And we made a we made predictions that basically integrate kind of like these evolved 01:24:13.080 --> 01:24:15.640 psychological dispositions with the norm psychology. 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 01:24:21.710 --> 01:24:27.150 physical danger and protect yourself from that then that is a universal 01:24:27.470 --> 01:24:33.390 threat um and that you know all human populations should have evolved 01:24:33.470 --> 01:24:39.220 uh should have the psychology um the evolved psychology to um to 01:24:39.460 --> 01:24:42.580 protect yourself from that um kind of situation. 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 01:24:48.740 --> 01:24:51.940 actually align with that kind of response. 01:24:52.100 --> 01:24:56.260 So those are called the learning and reacting, we call them the learning and reacting 01:24:56.260 --> 01:25:01.670 symptoms, and these are the symptoms of hypervigilance, startle, um so that 01:25:01.910 --> 01:25:07.590 essentially uh uh acute distress so like you know everything's uh your body is getting 01:25:07.590 --> 01:25:13.590 pumped up um to deal with um this risk and an intrusive thought so you're 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 01:25:17.830 --> 01:25:21.110 seal it in your head that when this happens what I do. 01:25:21.940 --> 01:25:27.940 So we uh we basically predicted that learning and reacting symptoms make 01:25:27.940 --> 01:25:30.820 a lot of sense cross-culturally, universally. 01:25:30.900 --> 01:25:36.180 You know, humans should evolve a psychology that makes them react in this way to physical 01:25:36.180 --> 01:25:36.820 danger. 01:25:37.140 --> 01:25:40.500 So in that sense, the Turkana should have that. 01:25:41.590 --> 01:25:46.150 But there are other symptoms of PTSD that are a little bit more unusual. 01:25:47.190 --> 01:25:52.790 And one group of symptoms are more overlapping with like depressive symptoms. 01:25:52.950 --> 01:25:58.630 So they make people feel, you know, you feel estranged and you 01:25:58.630 --> 01:26:00.950 don't feel like interacting with others. 01:26:01.110 --> 01:26:03.110 It's like a negative mood. 01:26:04.790 --> 01:26:10.310 And these seem more about affecting people's motivation, 01:26:11.080 --> 01:26:13.160 right, to engage in that. 01:26:13.240 --> 01:26:17.880 Um now I know there are many theories of depression, including um from you know 01:26:18.040 --> 01:26:21.880 evolutionary psychologists like I think Ed Hagen, yeah, 01:26:23.880 --> 01:26:27.160 um bargaining, uh yeah, exactly. 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 01:26:33.320 --> 01:26:39.050 the what's uh been said in the literature is that uh depressive symptoms change your 01:26:39.050 --> 01:26:42.170 motivation to engage in that thing. 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 01:26:48.410 --> 01:26:52.330 symptoms that's affecting your um your motivation. 01:26:52.810 --> 01:26:58.490 Um and uh we kind of conjectured that 01:26:58.490 --> 01:27:04.020 those symptoms are going to be something that um that 01:27:04.100 --> 01:27:09.940 plays more uh that that is influenced also not just by the physical risks 01:27:09.940 --> 01:27:15.540 of going to war but the normative landscape that is the social 01:27:15.620 --> 01:27:21.540 rewards and social costs of these actions um and uh 01:27:22.310 --> 01:27:28.230 uh and and uh the reason why we felt that is because 01:27:28.310 --> 01:27:34.070 you know if you think about um humans, one of the things, one of the 01:27:34.070 --> 01:27:39.910 really tricky things about war is that it's making people do something 01:27:39.990 --> 01:27:42.150 in some ways that's very unusual, right? 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 01:27:46.880 --> 01:27:47.360 this person. 01:27:47.520 --> 01:27:52.400 People, you kill somebody even in rage, accident, you can be ostracized from your society, 01:27:52.480 --> 01:27:54.080 the rest of your life's over. 01:27:54.640 --> 01:28:00.160 It's like this really heavy and loaded thing in in a huge normative 01:28:00.160 --> 01:28:00.720 context. 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 01:28:05.200 --> 01:28:08.170 met, then is okay to do. 01:28:09.130 --> 01:28:15.050 And the thing is that in many war contexts, those norms are 01:28:15.050 --> 01:28:17.530 really very, it's a fine line. 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 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 01:28:28.250 --> 01:28:29.610 need to compensate. 01:28:29.930 --> 01:28:35.280 So it's still structured in a normative landscape in many, many societies, like the 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 01:28:40.400 --> 01:28:43.760 targeted to, whether it can be targeted towards women and children. 01:28:43.920 --> 01:28:47.280 What should you do when you know somebody's unarmed? 01:28:47.440 --> 01:28:48.480 Can you take them? 01:28:48.960 --> 01:28:52.320 Can you ambush people when they're not ready for a battle? 01:28:52.480 --> 01:28:54.240 And all those kinds of things. 01:28:54.480 --> 01:29:00.270 Um to what extent can you destroy their property in the course 01:29:00.270 --> 01:29:01.550 of the war. 01:29:01.950 --> 01:29:06.350 And in different societies at different scales, you can have different norms. 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 01:29:11.390 --> 01:29:15.070 ceremonial kind of warfare where we're not inflicting too much damage. 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. 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. 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 01:29:31.320 --> 01:29:32.040 it wrong. 01:29:32.200 --> 01:29:37.640 And so we predicted that, you know, humans, if if you know, combat-related 01:29:37.640 --> 01:29:43.480 PTSD has evolved to deal with human warfare, then it's going to have to 01:29:43.480 --> 01:29:49.320 deal with these kind of normative dangers, the moral risks, uh, because the 01:29:49.560 --> 01:29:54.920 the conditions for war in humans are very much specified by the specific norms. 01:29:55.230 --> 01:29:59.390 And so we kind of predicted that it's these moral 01:30:00.350 --> 01:30:05.950 violations, either as victims of violation or as perpetrators of violations, that 01:30:05.950 --> 01:30:10.590 should be more strongly associated with the depressive symptoms. 01:30:10.830 --> 01:30:13.390 And we found that in the Turkana, that is the case. 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 01:30:18.540 --> 01:30:24.300 warriors in our sample did have um sufficient symptom severity that would 01:30:24.300 --> 01:30:28.060 qualify them for a provisional PTSD diagnosis here in the West. 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 01:30:33.180 --> 01:30:39.100 it was a tricana or an American um soldier talking about like the hypervigilance like 01:30:39.180 --> 01:30:41.420 and and startle and things like that. 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 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 01:30:53.550 --> 01:30:54.030 walking. 01:30:54.510 --> 01:30:54.910 Right. 01:30:55.790 --> 01:31:01.710 So um so there's a lot of cultural parallels, which does speak 01:31:01.710 --> 01:31:06.750 to this kind of like a universal evolved psychology for this kind of physical danger 01:31:06.750 --> 01:31:07.310 response. 01:31:07.550 --> 01:31:12.320 Because the really interesting thing about Turkana is that they have they don't have a 01:31:12.320 --> 01:31:14.720 concept of this set of symptoms. 01:31:14.800 --> 01:31:20.240 They don't have a name for this condition of what um uh that that 01:31:20.240 --> 01:31:21.920 embodies these set of symptoms. 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 01:31:27.840 --> 01:31:28.960 cultural framework. 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 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 01:31:37.360 --> 01:31:38.240 don't think about it. 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 01:31:44.450 --> 01:31:50.370 this, and this is how we deal with the startle, hyper startle, um, hypervigilance 01:31:50.450 --> 01:31:51.090 of startle. 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 01:31:57.010 --> 01:32:02.450 underlying in the psychology in which you can get such strong convergence between two 01:32:02.450 --> 01:32:07.170 populations that are experiencing very different kinds of warfare, one which is like, you 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 01:32:11.840 --> 01:32:12.720 the same thing. 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. 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 01:32:24.400 --> 01:32:25.040 too. 01:32:25.520 --> 01:32:31.430 Um uh, But when we compared it to the Western sample, we found that 01:32:31.910 --> 01:32:37.830 the US for any particular symptom severity, the US soldiers had more of those 01:32:37.830 --> 01:32:41.030 depressive symptoms compared to like the Tracana warriors. 01:32:41.190 --> 01:32:47.190 So there's more of a cultural difference between these populations on that front than 01:32:47.190 --> 01:32:50.310 there is on the physical danger response front. 01:32:50.550 --> 01:32:56.540 And our hypothesis was that this has to do with exposure to moral 01:32:56.540 --> 01:32:57.100 violations. 01:32:57.180 --> 01:33:02.620 And we found that within the Turkana, people who had more reported more 01:33:02.620 --> 01:33:08.380 exposure to like moral violations and social sanctions as a result of their 01:33:08.380 --> 01:33:14.310 participation had more depressive symptoms than those 01:33:14.310 --> 01:33:14.790 who didn't. 01:33:14.870 --> 01:33:18.070 So at least within the group, we kind of found some support for that. 01:33:18.230 --> 01:33:21.190 But we haven't yet done that with the US sample. 01:33:21.350 --> 01:33:27.270 But one of my graduate students, Michael Baumgarten, who's an a retired Army ranger, is 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 01:33:33.270 --> 01:33:39.190 injury, whether you know, exposure to moral violations specifically has an effect on 01:33:39.190 --> 01:33:43.500 depressive symptoms and not on the other kinds of symptoms. 01:33:43.660 --> 01:33:49.580 Um so I think that that uh work provides um 01:33:50.140 --> 01:33:55.580 some support for this idea that our war psychology is one that is 01:33:55.580 --> 01:34:00.780 prepared to um anticipate moral risks and 01:34:01.420 --> 01:34:06.140 and and and be vigilant about you know the normative landscape, right? 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 01:34:12.370 --> 01:34:17.810 role in shaping how we deal with uh these dangerous 01:34:18.930 --> 01:34:24.130 war-related situations, um, physically dangerous and morally dangerous, 01:34:24.450 --> 01:34:29.170 morally dangerous because of the the normative landscape in which it's happening. 01:34:29.490 --> 01:34:35.200 So I wonder uh you know I it's not directly speaking to the question that 01:34:35.200 --> 01:34:41.200 David you asked, but it is talking, it is, I think, indirectly getting 01:34:41.200 --> 01:34:46.640 at the fact that yes, we do have genetically evolved psychology that is making us 01:34:46.640 --> 01:34:52.080 vigilant to a norm, to the normative complexity 01:34:52.400 --> 01:34:54.000 in in war. 01:34:54.970 --> 01:35:00.890 Um and uh that means that norms have been an important 01:35:01.130 --> 01:35:07.130 part of the EEA of in which warfare evolved um right and 01:35:07.210 --> 01:35:12.970 um or an important part of um the psychology that has shaped 01:35:12.970 --> 01:35:16.280 our motivations Interesting. 01:35:17.960 --> 01:35:19.240 Absolutely fascinating stuff. 01:35:22.040 --> 01:35:27.160 To me, I think that um is supportive of this cultural view of 01:35:27.480 --> 01:35:28.360 warfare. 01:35:28.520 --> 01:35:34.360 Uh, because uh if we had a genetic uh psychological disposition toward 01:35:34.360 --> 01:35:38.360 outgroup aggression, we wouldn't need this convoluted package of robots. 01:35:38.840 --> 01:35:40.120 We'd be like, push the war button. 01:35:40.200 --> 01:35:40.360 Good. 01:35:40.680 --> 01:35:43.000 Yeah, push the war button, let's let's kill the outgroup members. 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 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 01:35:53.010 --> 01:35:55.170 attacking, you know, what what the harm they've done to us. 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 01:35:59.570 --> 01:36:04.130 formidable, like this huge convoluted package of cultural stuff. 01:36:04.530 --> 01:36:09.330 You would not need it if it was a a purely uh a genetically uh uh 01:36:10.840 --> 01:36:13.640 It was purely genetic adaptation for warfare, right? 01:36:14.360 --> 01:36:19.800 The elaborateness of of of the cultural stuff here that is driving warfare 01:36:20.040 --> 01:36:24.920 speaks to adaptation more at the cultural level than at the biological level. 01:36:25.080 --> 01:36:25.640 At least to me. 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 01:36:34.760 --> 01:36:39.320 so yes, war in humans is being made possible by norms. 01:36:40.530 --> 01:36:46.530 But because of a long history of that having played out, we 01:36:46.530 --> 01:36:51.810 are also having a genetically evolved psychology to be prepared to be 01:36:51.810 --> 01:36:55.250 vigilant of when we are committing norm violations. 01:36:56.290 --> 01:37:02.210 And be prepared to like lose our motivation to engage in this action if 01:37:02.240 --> 01:37:06.400 we perceive that we're not getting the social rewards that we anticipated because I mean 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 01:37:10.400 --> 01:37:11.200 rewards, right? 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 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 01:37:23.280 --> 01:37:29.110 know, the driving force, but because of a long history of that, we have 01:37:29.110 --> 01:37:34.950 genetically evolved psychological mechanisms that anticipates there to be 01:37:34.950 --> 01:37:40.790 norms related to how you handle killing of outgroup members and 01:37:40.790 --> 01:37:45.990 be extra vigilant when you are in that context and respond appropriately by 01:37:45.990 --> 01:37:46.950 withdrawing. 01:37:53.500 --> 01:37:59.020 hypervigilance to moral violations in other contexts that are more evolutionarily 01:37:59.020 --> 01:37:59.660 novel. 01:38:00.140 --> 01:38:00.780 Right. 01:38:02.220 --> 01:38:03.020 So I yeah. 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 01:38:07.260 --> 01:38:11.980 symptoms of depression associated with their PTSD, that those were the Turkana that um 01:38:11.980 --> 01:38:17.270 experience social sanctions or disapproval from uh their their groupmates uh about the 01:38:17.270 --> 01:38:17.670 violence. 01:38:17.750 --> 01:38:21.910 And so I'm curious about what those social sanctions consisted in. 01:38:22.070 --> 01:38:27.110 Was it was it sanctions about the participation in the violence itself for being, say, 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 01:38:33.270 --> 01:38:34.630 being cruel enough? 01:38:35.350 --> 01:38:38.390 Yeah, so it it was actually a huge package. 01:38:38.550 --> 01:38:43.880 Uh so we kind of lumped together a all the kind of moral events uh, 01:38:44.040 --> 01:38:47.560 violations as either victims or perpetrators. 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 01:38:53.880 --> 01:38:57.560 it's done in the moral injury literature in in the West. 01:38:57.960 --> 01:39:03.720 Uh, but also it's because sometimes if you ask people directly about perpetration, 01:39:04.120 --> 01:39:09.890 um they uh might feel more resistant to like disclosing it so the 01:39:09.890 --> 01:39:15.890 questions are a little bit phrased like were you um involved in or witnessed 01:39:16.050 --> 01:39:21.570 you know something like this and so we cannot necessarily tease apart whether they were 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 01:39:27.250 --> 01:39:29.810 involved in that moral violation um 01:39:33.820 --> 01:39:37.180 But the the kinds of moral violations span a a range. 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 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 01:39:48.060 --> 01:39:54.060 that um uh this is what happened, and you know, you will literally face like they 01:39:54.060 --> 01:39:59.730 will blame you for having taken their son and come back without him. 01:39:59.970 --> 01:40:05.410 There are people who've had to, when when somebody gets injured on the battlefield, um 01:40:05.730 --> 01:40:11.650 they are sometimes 50 kilometers, uh, they have to walk back, run back 01:40:11.650 --> 01:40:13.090 50 kilometers, right? 01:40:13.250 --> 01:40:17.250 So if somebody is injured, they can't necessarily always transport that person back. 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 01:40:23.180 --> 01:40:24.460 slowly trudge back. 01:40:24.620 --> 01:40:30.220 So many times they make like painful decisions about having to like abandon somebody, a 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 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 01:40:40.620 --> 01:40:42.380 like slowly make his way back home. 01:40:42.460 --> 01:40:44.300 But many of the times these people die. 01:40:44.460 --> 01:40:49.870 There are times where people run out of water, um, uh, and they, you know, 01:40:50.030 --> 01:40:55.870 couldn't share water with uh, you know, they uh maybe they couldn't share their 01:40:55.870 --> 01:40:59.630 bullets or share their water with somebody who needed it because they didn't have. 01:41:00.190 --> 01:41:04.750 So there's many um uh instances like that. 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 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 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 01:41:21.360 --> 01:41:22.960 have a good outcome. 01:41:23.200 --> 01:41:28.080 And um they do all of that, and then you know, things go disastrous, 01:41:28.400 --> 01:41:30.080 catastrophically wrong. 01:41:30.320 --> 01:41:35.040 People get killed, they're ambushed, um, the enemy knew that they were coming, whatever. 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. 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 01:41:45.810 --> 01:41:51.010 prophet who sees So he has no skin in the game from a game theory perspective. 01:41:52.050 --> 01:41:57.410 Um and um 01:41:57.890 --> 01:42:03.090 there are instances where people have come across like young kids who are um 01:42:03.800 --> 01:42:08.440 uh you know unarmed, but sometimes they get killed. 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 01:42:13.560 --> 01:42:14.280 it's not. 01:42:14.760 --> 01:42:20.600 Um uh and so they might be exposed to 01:42:20.600 --> 01:42:26.040 somebody kind of like kidnapping a kid or or shooting a kid, even though they personally 01:42:26.040 --> 01:42:28.200 think that that shouldn't have been done, etc. 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 01:42:34.590 --> 01:42:39.630 we haven't been able to tease apart, like which kind kind of yields this. 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 01:42:44.190 --> 01:42:48.270 people who have had more moral violation-related 01:42:49.470 --> 01:42:54.910 issues have more of the have more depressive symptoms. 01:42:55.200 --> 01:43:01.200 And it could also be cowardice, people being accused of having done something, but they 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 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, 01:43:12.880 --> 01:43:13.120 etc. 01:43:13.760 --> 01:43:19.730 So uh it is um yeah uh we have we haven't 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 01:43:25.650 --> 01:43:31.170 moral violations lead to you know more or less symptoms can i ask a 01:43:31.170 --> 01:43:36.210 clarification question it was david's question and i was thinking along the same lines is 01:43:37.170 --> 01:43:43.140 that um there were cues that the people back at home were 01:43:43.380 --> 01:43:44.500 displeased. 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 01:43:48.980 --> 01:43:49.860 you invited him. 01:43:50.020 --> 01:43:51.540 So obviously that happens. 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 01:43:56.420 --> 01:43:59.780 don't, you know, and like the people I'm with like just kill this kid. 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 01:44:06.370 --> 01:44:08.050 this is a really horrible thing. 01:44:08.210 --> 01:44:09.570 I feel really bad about this. 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 01:44:14.530 --> 01:44:16.130 really badly of me. 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 01:44:22.530 --> 01:44:28.130 because exactly I'm worried about like the social consequences of people knowing that. 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 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 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 01:44:45.600 --> 01:44:48.080 like keep this information away from people. 01:44:48.320 --> 01:44:48.640 Right. 01:44:48.950 --> 01:44:50.230 You know, do you do you see what I'm getting? 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 01:44:55.910 --> 01:44:59.990 socially sanctioned, and actually as a consequence of that, not actually presenting the 01:44:59.990 --> 01:45:00.550 information. 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 01:45:04.710 --> 01:45:05.110 sanctioned. 01:45:05.190 --> 01:45:07.990 But then in other situations, you are socially sanctioned. 01:45:08.230 --> 01:45:09.830 Is that are both things happening? 01:45:10.550 --> 01:45:11.750 Um probably. 01:45:12.230 --> 01:45:18.070 Um, if I understand you correctly, the first part will result in an underreporting 01:45:18.440 --> 01:45:20.520 of moral events. 01:45:20.920 --> 01:45:26.520 Well, maybe not necessarily, but just a thing of I'm actually thinking, like, number one, 01:45:26.680 --> 01:45:30.440 what's the Q structure of I've committed a moral offense? 01:45:30.760 --> 01:45:31.080 Right? 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 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 01:45:40.360 --> 01:45:42.280 the warfare button has been pressed. 01:45:42.440 --> 01:45:43.880 This is all awesome. 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. 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, 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 01:45:59.130 --> 01:45:59.770 something wrong. 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 01:46:04.170 --> 01:46:05.530 sort of moral compass. 01:46:05.770 --> 01:46:11.740 But there's another version where there's already sort of an internalization 01:46:12.060 --> 01:46:17.820 or even an anticipation of sort of like what I think people will react to. 01:46:18.380 --> 01:46:23.900 Um, and consequently, you don't even need to get the reaction from people. 01:46:24.140 --> 01:46:24.300 Yeah. 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 01:46:30.540 --> 01:46:33.740 actually brings me to something that I really should have said. 01:46:33.900 --> 01:46:39.490 Uh one of the uh things that we looked at is whether people have been 01:46:39.730 --> 01:46:43.010 had uh killed an enemy in combat, right? 01:46:43.330 --> 01:46:49.250 Um and very interestingly, um I would this is 01:46:49.330 --> 01:46:51.170 definitely went against my prediction. 01:46:51.330 --> 01:46:57.180 I would have predicted that that would not be um a um source 01:46:57.180 --> 01:47:03.180 of a moral violation in the chakana context because they have a lot of cultural 01:47:03.180 --> 01:47:08.620 institutions to actually like reward warriors who have killed in combat. 01:47:08.780 --> 01:47:13.420 They get to scar themselves in a particular way that permanently marks them as like, you 01:47:13.420 --> 01:47:15.980 know, a warrior and be proud of it. 01:47:17.100 --> 01:47:23.030 And uh and but in the US we know that uh there is an association 01:47:23.030 --> 01:47:29.030 between um having killed in combat and having more um higher severity 01:47:29.030 --> 01:47:31.750 of uh mental health uh issues. 01:47:32.630 --> 01:47:38.230 But interestingly, we found that even though it's highly rewarded, um 01:47:38.550 --> 01:47:44.280 people who had killed in combat were more likely to have 01:47:44.280 --> 01:47:48.920 depressive symptoms, had higher depressive symptom severity than those who had it. 01:47:49.000 --> 01:47:51.560 So killing was one of our moral this thing. 01:47:51.640 --> 01:47:55.160 We kept it separate because it's such a salient category. 01:47:55.400 --> 01:48:00.680 Um, but it essentially so then we probed that a little further. 01:48:00.920 --> 01:48:06.350 Um and uh there is a researcher who works in the Samburu, 01:48:06.590 --> 01:48:12.350 Velinda Strait, who has done a lot of work also on the kinds of emotions 01:48:12.350 --> 01:48:17.870 that of haunting that people feel, that Samburu warriors feel when they've 01:48:17.950 --> 01:48:19.710 killed in combat. 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 01:48:25.790 --> 01:48:31.550 described in the Samburu, which is that people, even though this is so culturally rewarded, 01:48:32.260 --> 01:48:37.540 there is a uh people report often feeling haunted by the ghost of the enemy. 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. 01:48:42.740 --> 01:48:48.260 Um, and uh, they have to do cleansing ceremonies in order to like kind of 01:48:48.260 --> 01:48:53.940 help them uh alleviate that uh psychological distress in some 01:48:53.940 --> 01:48:54.500 ways. 01:48:54.660 --> 01:49:00.490 Um, And I think that maybe gets at this fact that killing is just such 01:49:00.490 --> 01:49:03.210 a salient kind of moral violation. 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 01:49:09.290 --> 01:49:15.130 signals of this, because it's I, you know, the main reason is that you know 01:49:15.210 --> 01:49:18.010 killing can't be compensated in some ways, right? 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 01:49:22.810 --> 01:49:25.840 that wrong, like you know, you compensate the family. 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. 01:49:30.320 --> 01:49:34.480 It's a very uh stark kind of moral violation in that way. 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 01:49:40.480 --> 01:49:46.160 chance to kind of rectify that and do differently, do better, signal that you are 01:49:46.160 --> 01:49:52.000 remorseful by, you know, maybe having these depressive symptoms, etc. 01:49:52.480 --> 01:49:58.330 But killing seems uh killing does seem to be special in that sense 01:49:58.890 --> 01:50:04.890 and um I I think that's interesting because it both gets at something that 01:50:04.890 --> 01:50:10.810 can't be overridden by the cultural uh by the cultural institutions but also 01:50:11.050 --> 01:50:16.970 that I think that's an indication of maybe how um morally 01:50:16.970 --> 01:50:21.860 treacherous killing is even in the context of warfare, right? 01:50:22.020 --> 01:50:27.220 Like it's um uh we come very prepared to be very hyper 01:50:27.300 --> 01:50:33.140 vigilant about engaging in that um um in 01:50:33.140 --> 01:50:39.060 the context of war even because yeah like what the truth is that today 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, 01:50:44.370 --> 01:50:45.090 you did that. 01:50:45.250 --> 01:50:46.930 Like, no, we should not be doing that. 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 01:50:52.850 --> 01:50:56.370 were not acceptable conditions for having killed, etc. 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 01:51:02.130 --> 01:51:02.770 made. 01:51:05.860 --> 01:51:06.180 Wow. 01:51:06.340 --> 01:51:11.700 I mean, that's uh uh uh truly fascinating and um sobering 01:51:12.260 --> 01:51:13.060 stuff. 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. 01:51:18.180 --> 01:51:20.260 Do you have any other questions about this, Dave? 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 01:51:23.780 --> 01:51:25.300 swinging back to AI and robots. 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 01:51:28.900 --> 01:51:29.940 are doing the killing, right? 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 01:51:33.430 --> 01:51:35.350 attrition and nobody needs to die in war. 01:51:35.510 --> 01:51:36.790 So yeah. 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 01:51:42.870 --> 01:51:48.470 intergroup violence and intergroup hostility is a kind of cultural technology to overcome 01:51:48.630 --> 01:51:52.710 uh aspects of our psychology that would otherwise be compelled against it. 01:51:52.870 --> 01:51:58.360 Um, that we have these powerful drives to not kill, to not be 01:51:58.360 --> 01:51:59.080 cruel. 01:51:59.320 --> 01:52:04.920 Um and uh it takes a lot of cultural machinery to overcome that. 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 01:52:10.040 --> 01:52:14.520 good or as well adapted, and that might explain why we have higher prevalence of of 01:52:14.520 --> 01:52:17.370 depressive symptoms among our soldiers. 01:52:17.690 --> 01:52:22.250 Whereas in the tricana, their cultural machinery might be a little more well adapted, which 01:52:22.250 --> 01:52:26.170 allows them to overcome some of that depression, but clearly not all of it, because it 01:52:26.170 --> 01:52:28.330 still exists to a significant degree. 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, 01:52:34.170 --> 01:52:38.730 you know, reputation conscious, status conscious, self-interest to humans, and knit them 01:52:38.730 --> 01:52:42.170 together into cooperative groups that can compete with other groups. 01:52:42.330 --> 01:52:46.280 Uh, and there are a lot of barriers to overcome in that in that knitting problem. 01:52:46.680 --> 01:52:49.800 Um and and cultures can evolve over time to solve it. 01:52:49.880 --> 01:52:52.520 But you know, there's only so much that can be solved. 01:52:52.840 --> 01:52:53.160 Yeah. 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 01:52:58.520 --> 01:53:04.520 interdisciplinarity part too is is um like Europe, for example, you know, was just 01:53:04.600 --> 01:53:06.760 it was full of violence forever. 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 01:53:11.720 --> 01:53:16.430 China or anything, you know, it's just like oh my God, so many people dying. 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 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 01:53:28.190 --> 01:53:34.190 groups that succeed are the ones that are extracting resources for the people in 01:53:34.190 --> 01:53:35.230 the groups, right? 01:53:35.550 --> 01:53:41.440 Uh but but you can sort of change the the rules, people can change the rules 01:53:41.440 --> 01:53:42.080 sometimes. 01:53:42.320 --> 01:53:43.920 So something like the EU, right? 01:53:44.000 --> 01:53:49.840 Where all of a sudden it's no longer there's big costs now to uh 01:53:50.080 --> 01:53:55.840 to fighting, to the point where if I'm like a French farmer, it's 01:53:55.840 --> 01:54:01.760 actually better that I'm not shooting at the Germans across the Rhine because actually 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. 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 01:54:12.110 --> 01:54:17.310 of decided maybe we can change sort of the what's what's the selection 01:54:17.310 --> 01:54:20.910 dynamic of the institution in a different way. 01:54:21.070 --> 01:54:26.990 And I think that I hope my hope would be that something 01:54:26.990 --> 01:54:32.060 like I think there, there's always this golden uh million dollar, which is now ridiculous 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 01:54:36.060 --> 01:54:38.380 you, I don't know, a mobile home or something in Santa Barbara. 01:54:38.460 --> 01:54:38.860 I don't know. 01:54:39.020 --> 01:54:43.180 Um, but uh, but like the billion dollar question, the trillions of dollar question is sort 01:54:43.180 --> 01:54:45.180 of how do you reduce war? 01:54:45.980 --> 01:54:51.710 Um and with the like po PTSD, the cultural selection 01:54:51.950 --> 01:54:54.910 is all sort of on the front end in the in America, right? 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 01:55:00.590 --> 01:55:01.070 to war. 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 01:55:07.070 --> 01:55:12.830 clear, but I think the idea would be if we can be mindful or better understand 01:55:13.700 --> 01:55:19.620 the cultural selection of why belligerence happens, for example, 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 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 01:55:30.740 --> 01:55:33.380 not shoot across the river anymore? 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 01:55:38.570 --> 01:55:38.810 that. 01:55:38.970 --> 01:55:40.730 And something like the ASU thing. 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 01:55:45.130 --> 01:55:48.010 consequences, and you have to be really careful about that stuff. 01:55:48.330 --> 01:55:49.850 But um, but I don't know. 01:55:49.930 --> 01:55:55.850 I just I I think the the more we understand why people might be 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 01:56:00.410 --> 01:56:04.330 to maybe make the benefit structure and the environment a bit different. 01:56:05.440 --> 01:56:08.800 That is the optimistic view. 01:56:10.000 --> 01:56:14.560 And uh yeah, I I would hope there's some room for that. 01:56:14.640 --> 01:56:20.480 And we know historically institutions have emerged between like you know, huge units 01:56:20.560 --> 01:56:21.520 like nations. 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 01:56:27.520 --> 01:56:27.760 that. 01:56:28.000 --> 01:56:33.690 Um but yeah, it also seems um It seems like one of the harder 01:56:33.690 --> 01:56:34.490 problems to solve. 01:56:34.650 --> 01:56:37.690 It does get, it does happen. 01:56:38.250 --> 01:56:44.010 So humans have occasionally found these pathways, but they have also often 01:56:44.010 --> 01:56:45.690 not found these pathways. 01:56:45.850 --> 01:56:51.850 And so whether the glass is half full, half empty, that's um whether 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 01:56:58.010 --> 01:56:59.210 the dry desert. 01:56:59.930 --> 01:57:00.570 Yes. 01:57:03.420 --> 01:57:04.140 Exactly. 01:57:04.300 --> 01:57:04.940 Yeah. 01:57:05.500 --> 01:57:05.820 All right. 01:57:05.900 --> 01:57:07.660 Well, this time absolutely flew by. 01:57:07.740 --> 01:57:10.060 Uh this was such a fascinating conversation. 01:57:10.220 --> 01:57:12.300 Um my mind is still spinning. 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. 01:57:17.900 --> 01:57:19.580 Yeah, no, it just goes like that. 01:57:19.660 --> 01:57:19.820 Yeah. 01:57:20.300 --> 01:57:21.260 Yeah, it really flies by. 01:57:21.580 --> 01:57:23.340 Sarah, yeah, no, thank you so much. 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 01:57:27.660 --> 01:57:30.300 um really fascinating, really important work. 01:57:30.460 --> 01:57:32.410 Um, Thank you so much for doing it. 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 01:57:38.970 --> 01:57:41.210 both theoretical work and empirical work. 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 01:57:47.450 --> 01:57:51.450 sort of silly to even give it an adjective, but it's just such wonderful, strong. 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 01:57:56.420 --> 01:57:56.980 sciences. 01:57:57.060 --> 01:57:58.500 So so thank you for doing it. 01:57:58.580 --> 01:58:02.180 It's just, it's just fascinating and um it's so interesting. 01:58:02.260 --> 01:58:06.100 And it's such an important thing about you know war and violence and killing. 01:58:06.180 --> 01:58:08.340 Um what could be more important than that? 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 01:58:13.700 --> 01:58:16.580 anthropologist on, like we should be saying thank you for your service, right? 01:58:16.740 --> 01:58:21.220 Like it's a very difficult um and dangerous you know thing to do. 01:58:21.380 --> 01:58:23.140 So thank you for for doing it. 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 01:58:30.210 --> 01:58:35.890 get to see a different culture and get you know kind of see the 01:58:35.890 --> 01:58:38.850 world through like a different cultural lens. 01:58:39.090 --> 01:58:41.410 I think it's actually really worth it. 01:58:42.770 --> 01:58:45.330 Hard as it is, it's it's totally worth it. 01:58:45.720 --> 01:58:45.960 Yeah. 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. 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. 01:58:55.480 --> 01:58:56.520 Um so yeah. 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 01:59:01.560 --> 01:59:01.800 world. 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 01:59:05.480 --> 01:59:10.590 wonderful perspective shift on the psychology of fairness and egalitarianism. 01:59:10.750 --> 01:59:16.670 That we commonly have a very sunny and idealistic view of these things, but in reality, 01:59:16.750 --> 01:59:21.550 they're just mechanisms for ensuring that everyone's self-interest is is being enhanced. 01:59:21.950 --> 01:59:22.590 Coordinated. 01:59:22.670 --> 01:59:22.830 Yes. 01:59:23.230 --> 01:59:23.950 Yeah, exactly. 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. 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? 01:59:31.390 --> 01:59:31.950 Yeah. 01:59:32.480 --> 01:59:34.800 So it's a wonderful perspective shift. 01:59:34.880 --> 01:59:36.640 Um and uh this is a really great conversation. 01:59:36.720 --> 01:59:37.680 So thank you so much, Sarah. 01:59:37.840 --> 01:59:38.000 Yeah. 01:59:38.160 --> 01:59:43.520 I'm not sure the philosophers would like that take, but well the 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 01:59:47.440 --> 01:59:49.920 unhappy about a lot of science for the next thousand years. 01:59:50.080 --> 01:59:52.810 So All right. 01:59:52.970 --> 01:59:54.250 Thank you, Sarah. 01:59:57.610 --> 02:00:01.450 Well, you're still here listening, um, which means we must be doing something right if 02:00:01.450 --> 02:00:01.850 you're listening. 02:00:02.170 --> 02:00:06.410 Yeah, or or we're uh some of us are doing something right enough. 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. 02:00:10.730 --> 02:00:11.690 Just keep sleeping tools. 02:00:11.850 --> 02:00:12.410 Just keep sleeping. 02:00:13.130 --> 02:00:14.410 Sleep is so important. 02:00:14.730 --> 02:00:16.410 It's so hard to get in this day. 02:00:16.650 --> 02:00:19.130 And if you're driving and sleeping, wake up. 02:00:19.530 --> 02:00:22.040 Yes, because we wouldn't want you to get into an accident. 02:00:22.120 --> 02:00:22.920 That would be bad. 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. 02:00:27.160 --> 02:00:28.280 Yeah, that's true. 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 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 02:00:39.320 --> 02:00:43.270 nice things about us on social media, uh, And you know, reach out to us. 02:00:43.350 --> 02:00:47.030 Send us an email if you have ideas for episodes, possible guests. 02:00:47.110 --> 02:00:48.710 We are open to suggestions. 02:00:49.030 --> 02:00:52.550 I love the idea of a review that whose title isn't might save your life. 02:00:54.390 --> 02:00:54.870 Mm-hmm. 02:00:55.190 --> 02:00:55.990 That's right. 02:00:56.550 --> 02:00:57.590 That's what we're doing here. 02:00:57.670 --> 02:00:58.710 We're saving lives. 02:00:58.950 --> 02:01:00.550 One podcast episode at a time. 02:01:00.870 --> 02:01:01.110 Okay. 02:01:01.190 --> 02:01:02.870 On that note, see you next week. 02:01:03.510 --> 02:01:04.790 See you next week, everybody. 02:01:04.950 --> 02:01:05.270 Okay.