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David, this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

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Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists.

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Boom.

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Did it

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be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of David, today we have a

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guest who needs no introduction, Martin Daly.

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Martin Daly, uh one of the founders of evolutionary psychology as we know it, though he

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might quibble with the term evolutionary psychology, he was there at the forefront of the

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uh origins of this way of thinking, this interdisciplinary uh scholarship

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that emerged, um, expert on homicide, uh conflict,

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uh inequality and its effects on conflict.

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We we covered it all.

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Uh kangaroo rats.

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And um and yeah, it was a lovely conversation talking about um where

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where the field came from, where it's going.

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One of the wonderful things about the evolutionary behavioral sciences is that um people

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like Martin and um Margot Wilson, who unfortunately passed away um too

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soon, um, and people like um John Chibi, Lita Cosmedys, and also John Pass away.

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Um, you know, the these wonderful foundational people are just such

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incredible thinkers.

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And uh what I loved about this conversation, in addition to sort of hearing the history, is

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uh we also just get a sense of um Martin Daly is just such a a sharp mind and we get a

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sample of that thinking even in this conversation.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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It was it was a really fun conversation for me to just take part in and I'm sure you'll

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enjoy listening to it as well, particularly if you're interested in the origins of

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evolutionary behavioral science and uh and the history of it all.

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Without further ado, here is Martin and David and I talking about evolutionary psychology.

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Enjoy.

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Well, Martin, thank you so much for being here.

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Um it's a real honor and pleasure um we we have not had

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the um really any of the founders of evolutionary

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psychology yet on is that true it is i'm surprised i know yes um

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i mean darwin's been dead for quite a while yeah i know it's been hard to book darwin it's

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yeah he's despite david's best attempts um yeah i know but yeah, David would love to talk

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to Darwin.

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We talked about that recently.

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So Martin, thank you so much for being here.

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There's a lot to talk about, but for me at least, I get to selfishly ask you um a question

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I've always wanted to ask, which is I was a student of Lita's and John's, um, and they

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there was always a lore of the origins of evolutionary

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psychology.

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And I appreciate the fact that saying that there's even an origin to evolutionary

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psychology is somewhat problematic because of course the ideas, right?

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The expression of the emotions in man and animals is always my start point.

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There you go.

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Yeah.

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Exactly.

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So can you?

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I mean, I don't know if you've ever gotten this question, if you get it a lot, but the the

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simple question, just put simply, is from my perspective, you are one of the

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important people that were there when evolutionary psychology started.

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Many of our listeners are younger people, like David and I, our generation are

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even younger, who may have only indirectly heard what that

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backstory was.

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If you had a chance to tell these academic grandchildren and

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great-grandchildren, in essence, um uh the the story as you

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see what is important for them to know, um what would you tell them?

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Well, I I guess first of all, I'd say I I like to think of the study of evolution and human

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behavior as a very interdisciplinary field.

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The human behavior and evolution society was initially dominated by anthropologists and

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biologists with a very with a minority smattering of psychologists.

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Um and and the anthropologists were often the best

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psychologists.

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I mean, that's been true for a long time.

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You know, we can think of Golan and Fessler, who edited the journal, are both

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anthropologists.

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You think of Clark Barrett and Ed Hagan and Elizabeth Cashton, who've all been presidents

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of the society.

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They're all anthropologists, they're all very psychological.

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So I never like to talk about evolutionary psychology as if it's a branch of

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psychology when it's you know been a much more interdisciplinary

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agenda.

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I became a keen Darwinian, I guess, um,

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more as a postdoc than younger.

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Um, I was an animal behavior guy, non-human animal behavior, studying small mammals,

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and as a postdoc, I joined a research group in the UK,

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John Crook's research group.

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If anybody's ever heard of John, John was the founder of what was then called

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socioecology, the business of trying to study a group of related species and

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attribute their social differences to something ecological, which usually meant to the

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distribution of their food and their predators and whether females would aggregate because

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of the distribution of their food and predators and that sort of thing.

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And there were people working on birds, there were people working on ungulates.

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I went there in 1971, after I finished my PhD with

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intent to become a field worker and do this kind of work on rodents.

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And I did for decades, although in a way it was a very stupid decision because I mean you

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can't really watch rodents doing anything in the wild.

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They're mostly nocturnal, they mostly live in burrows.

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Um, you know, so like observational studies of these animals was a mistake.

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But in any case, it was a great research group.

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Um, and Crook was in the psych department.

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Um You've probably heard of some of the people who were postdocs there at the same time I

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was.

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Richard Rangham was, Robin Dunbar, I guess was a graduate

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student there, did his PhD work on Jelata baboons in the Ethiopian highlands.

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And that was sort of the point at which I became a

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rabid Darwinian.

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Then after I came back to North America and uh got

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attached to Margot Wilson, my late spouse and partner,

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we were running a seminar on the subject of sociobiology right after Ed

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Wilson's book came out in 1976.

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I guess we were running this seminar.

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And a couple of graduate students kind of raising questions about Homo

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sapiens, which we knew nothing about and cared less about, kind of moved us into the human

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research area.

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I'm trying to think when I first met John and Lita, I I think

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it was 1979, I think.

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I gave a research talk at Harvard, and I think, were they still graduate students then?

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Maybe.

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Because I don't think they were.

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I was at the 1976 AAA meetings, American Anthropological Association meetings.

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And in some ways, that's a that's an interesting starting point because although it's an

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anthropology meeting, there were two human sociobiology sessions at that meeting.

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And the reason is because Irv de Boer at Harvard and Napoleon Shagnon

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and Bill Irons from Michigan and Northwestern had separately

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proposed a set of talks by mostly their students in human

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sociobiology.

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And then when the program committee saw this, they put them in touch with each other, and

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the two were sort of amalgamated.

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And that was an event that uh

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brought together a lot of, I mean, I I first met Sarah Hurdy there, I first met Shagnon and

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Irons there, I first met Dick Alexander there, um, I first met Bob Trivers

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there, I think.

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Yeah.

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Um so although it was a it was an anthropology meeting, but there were a lot of biologists

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there, there were some psychologists there, well me anyway, um, and uh and and it

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was kind of a foundational event for what I think of as this

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field.

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Uh 1976, why then?

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Why why did this happen then?

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Yeah.

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Any guests, yeah.

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Yeah, that that's a great question.

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I mean, um there were two centers in the US where something

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was crystallizing in anthropology.

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One was Harvard.

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Um, I mean Irv Devor had been a baboom researcher, and then he'd he'd

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become involved in the uh Kalahari San um research,

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and several of the people who I think were his students or affiliates

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anyway, Mel Connor, Pat Draper, um,

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Nadim Peacock, a whole bunch of these people have been going there and doing behavior

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research, let's cash them for that matter, um, and were bringing a kind

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of evolution, well, bringing a strongly evolution-minded perspective to bear on their

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observations there.

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And at the same time, Shagnon, who had got his PhD at

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Michigan, I think, and then had moved to Penn State briefly, and then

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to Northwestern.

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There was a little circle revolving around Dick Alexander at Michigan.

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And Alexander wrote this paper on the evolution of social behavior.

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I don't know if you've ever read it.

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It was in the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics in 1974.

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So it appeared the year before Ed Wilson's book.

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And what's nice about it, it was not mostly about people.

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It was mostly about well, Dixon was the curator of insects at the University of

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Michigan.

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It was most more about insects than any other animal group.

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But he had a bunch of thoughts towards the end about Cousin

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marriage and asymmetries and cousin relations and human beings that he sort of laid out,

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and he was he was kind of a focal person for the graduate students in

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anthropology who's worked with Shagnon and others who got interested in

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evolution.

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Mark Flynn, Paul Turk, and Laura Betzig, um several other people

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whose names should come to mind but don't.

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Um they all kind of congealed around Alexander.

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And we'd have these annual meetings.

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Uh Margot and I were part of this for reasons that actually sort of escaped me.

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I do remember now, but I won't go into it.

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But anyway, we we uh we had these little annual meetings from

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1981 until the foundation of HBES in

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89.

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And we'd have them in either Ann Arbor or in Evanston, Illinois, for

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the you know, where Northwestern was and where Bill and Napa both established themselves.

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And there were a lot of student papers, but one thing that really made

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it work and made it come together was right from square one, we had the support and

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enthusiastic participation, even of Bill Hamilton and George Williams,

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and Alexander, who were sort of, in many people's minds, the

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three leading theoretical biologists, certainly Hamilton

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and Williams anyway, thinking about evolution of behavior.

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And they were wholeheartedly in favor of taking this to Homo sapiens

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and coming to the meetings and being there and interacting with the graduate students and

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telling them what they thought they should also do next time they went to the field.

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And it really made everybody feel like this was a legitimate enterprise.

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You know, Lita reminds me, we've been exchanging emails recently.

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She wants to remind me of how much flack the uh

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evolution and human behavior approach used to get, and the hostility of the Goulds and

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Lewontins and so on.

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And that's true, but uh but I always felt like there was a big supportive

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environment in evolutionary biology that was that was in our corner as well.

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And another guy is John Alcock, actually, who wrote the leading textbook in

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animal behavior that went through like eight editions.

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It was the best-selling textbook in animal behavior for edition after edition after edition

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for decades.

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And he always had a bit of human stuff in there and was always supportive too, although he

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wasn't somebody who came to those meetings.

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Um, so you know I never felt like we were that besieged.

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I felt much more like it was it was a supported enterprise.

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Now, in a way, none of this is terribly psychological.

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Um Margo and I were the

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only psychologists, I think, on the uh founding committee of the of the

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Human Behavior and Evolution Society, or whatever steering committee is it was called

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originally.

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Um, and we're both crappy psychologists in some way.

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I mean, I mean, Margot was a was a behavioral endocrinologist who castrated

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monkeys, and uh and I was a guy who followed rodents with little

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microtransmitters in them around the desert.

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Um so neither of us was a very good psychologist.

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We got involved in human research anyway, obviously, but um it wasn't very

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psychological initially, but it's the same field to my mind.

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It's still the same field to my mind.

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I I know I piss off some anthropologists when I say that uh you know it's the same field

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because oh no, we do human behavioral ecology and that's different.

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And it's like, come on, you know, if you're interested in human decision

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processes, we could call that psychology.

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You know, um don't get bent out of shape.

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And again, it's it's all one field to me.

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And it was sort of coming together in the late 70s and then throughout the 80s.

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Well, another seminal event actually was again Dick Alexander in nineteen

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seventy-eight.

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He and Don Tinkle at Michigan hosted a meeting on the evolution of

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behavior that drew a big crowd.

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Um Margot and I had just written the book Sex Evolution and Behavior, and it had

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landed on Dick's desk, And I was told by one of his students later

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that Alexander's reaction to it, although I had met him in 76, I don't think he remembered

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his reaction to it was allegedly, who the hell are these people and how did they get a hold

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of my course notes?

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Um because it was so much up the same alley as the way he was thinking about a lot of

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things.

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But anyway, so he phoned me up and invited me to this meeting.

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So I mean Margo to this meeting, and so we gave a talk there.

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Mildred Dijkman, whose name you may or may not know, gave a talk there.

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She she was an anthropologist at Sonoma State University who had written some cool stuff on

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hypergyne, on upward marriage in India and China, especially in

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India, and you know, sort of what people were trying to do in marrying their kids up.

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And uh who else?

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There was another human talk.

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There was a anyway, there were just like three or four human talks and a whole bunch of non

238
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human talks, all at this same meeting, with like 600 people in the audience,

239
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including Hamilton and Williams, and you know, a a lot of the top people in animal

240
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behavior.

241
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And uh and we got a good reception there.

242
00:17:10,610 --> 00:17:15,740
I mean, you didn't run into anybody saying it's preposterous that you're taking this

243
00:17:15,740 --> 00:17:20,940
approach with Homo sapiens, the cultural and thoughtful animal, or some stupid thing.

244
00:17:21,100 --> 00:17:22,780
Um, nobody said that.

245
00:17:24,620 --> 00:17:30,060
Do you do you think um anything has changed since the

246
00:17:30,380 --> 00:17:31,740
founding of the field?

247
00:17:31,900 --> 00:17:37,820
I mean, you mentioned that it had the support of luminaries in uh biological theory

248
00:17:37,980 --> 00:17:42,630
like Hamilton uh and Travers uh and Williams.

249
00:17:43,110 --> 00:17:48,870
Um do you think that uh we continue to have that support

250
00:17:48,950 --> 00:17:50,790
or has has it dwindled?

251
00:17:51,110 --> 00:17:53,510
Uh it's an interesting question.

252
00:17:53,670 --> 00:17:59,510
I mean you know Hamilton's death was a painful blow at George's George Williams's was

253
00:17:59,510 --> 00:18:04,900
another um I don't think we need the support of

254
00:18:04,900 --> 00:18:07,220
evolutionary biologists in the same way.

255
00:18:07,300 --> 00:18:12,740
I mean, you know, certain people, Lita and John among them, David Buss, Doug

256
00:18:12,740 --> 00:18:18,580
Kenrick, fought the good fight of submitting evolution-minded

257
00:18:18,580 --> 00:18:22,340
papers to the goddamn psychological journals until they took them.

258
00:18:26,740 --> 00:18:31,850
There were years and years and years where you know evolution mindedness was beyond the

259
00:18:31,850 --> 00:18:35,290
pale and the journal of personality and social psychology.

260
00:18:35,370 --> 00:18:36,890
And then it wasn't anymore.

261
00:18:37,050 --> 00:18:42,570
And every issue at least contains a paper or two by somebody who's thinking evolutionarily,

262
00:18:42,730 --> 00:18:44,730
usually reasonably sophisticatedly.

263
00:18:44,890 --> 00:18:48,170
So yeah, things have changed in that regard.

264
00:18:49,050 --> 00:18:54,960
I think most psychologists Have wrapped their mind around the idea that sure

265
00:18:55,040 --> 00:18:57,520
evolution must have something to do with the psyche.

266
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I mean, that, you know, maybe I, you know, I don't I don't see why it's relevant to my

267
00:19:03,360 --> 00:19:09,280
particular interest in, you know, some whatever, but uh, but

268
00:19:09,280 --> 00:19:14,850
that it has, you know, legitimate relevance to psychology, I think, is

269
00:19:15,010 --> 00:19:16,690
pretty widely accepted now.

270
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I think.

271
00:19:17,410 --> 00:19:18,290
I hope.

272
00:19:18,530 --> 00:19:20,290
Maybe I don't travel enough.

273
00:19:20,850 --> 00:19:21,810
Definitely more so.

274
00:19:22,050 --> 00:19:23,650
There's you know definite definite progress.

275
00:19:23,890 --> 00:19:28,930
I'd like to see more acceptance and integration of evolutionary perspectives.

276
00:19:29,010 --> 00:19:34,210
But yeah, there's definitely it's it's become more accepted, more mainstream, more um or

277
00:19:34,370 --> 00:19:36,050
less, less controversial.

278
00:19:36,500 --> 00:19:36,980
Yeah.

279
00:19:37,220 --> 00:19:37,540
Yeah.

280
00:19:37,700 --> 00:19:43,620
I mean psychology, well, there are whole fields of psychology that all of us

281
00:19:43,620 --> 00:19:49,060
don't pay any attention to, but I mean scientific psychology um

282
00:19:49,700 --> 00:19:52,100
was never our problem.

283
00:19:52,260 --> 00:19:57,620
I mean the the battles are harder for the cultural anthropologists um or have been.

284
00:19:57,700 --> 00:20:01,700
There's been more outright antipathy um to

285
00:20:03,070 --> 00:20:08,830
biology there than but you know geez still to this day I

286
00:20:08,830 --> 00:20:13,870
marvel at the fact that there were and are people like

287
00:20:15,950 --> 00:20:18,830
well no longer are in the case of Stephen J.

288
00:20:18,990 --> 00:20:23,870
Gould, but you know biologists who, you know, the minute you talk about Homo sapiens,

289
00:20:24,030 --> 00:20:28,190
you're obviously some kind of fascist or some you know evil person.

290
00:20:29,470 --> 00:20:34,580
I I I can't figure out what's going on between their ears, what their problem is.

291
00:20:35,860 --> 00:20:39,220
So in no so we're at 1978.

292
00:20:39,540 --> 00:20:43,700
Um is the oh yeah, sorry, Martin, go ahead.

293
00:20:44,660 --> 00:20:46,340
Uh oh you're okay, great.

294
00:20:46,420 --> 00:20:48,340
Um so we're at 1978.

295
00:20:49,780 --> 00:20:55,770
What is the what what what where so H human behavioral ecology, HBE,

296
00:20:55,930 --> 00:21:01,210
and evolutionary psychology for for my generation, which is a generation after

297
00:21:01,210 --> 00:21:07,050
Clark, um, you know, I grew up in the aftermath of sort of Rob Boyd and John Tuby

298
00:21:07,290 --> 00:21:08,650
being at loggerheads.

299
00:21:08,810 --> 00:21:14,330
Um, and we sort of joke about that amongst the my generation of students of theirs, you

300
00:21:14,330 --> 00:21:17,290
know, like uh Christina Moyenna, I joke about that.

301
00:21:17,530 --> 00:21:22,440
Um that's a that's my way of expressing.

302
00:21:23,160 --> 00:21:28,680
I grew up in a a world where evolutionary psychology and human

303
00:21:28,680 --> 00:21:34,680
behavioral ecology were were slightly pitted against each other, but I

304
00:21:34,680 --> 00:21:40,600
realize as you're saying they're the same field, and I think my generation

305
00:21:40,600 --> 00:21:42,440
sort of feels the same way.

306
00:21:43,320 --> 00:21:49,150
And in 1978, what was uh um where was

307
00:21:49,150 --> 00:21:54,990
there the beginning of a tension between those two or where did that come from

308
00:21:55,710 --> 00:22:01,310
that yeah that's a that's a really interesting question i if there was i

309
00:22:01,310 --> 00:22:06,430
wasn't picking up on it um but there may have been um

310
00:22:07,070 --> 00:22:13,070
you know the the earliest glimmers i can sort of remember

311
00:22:13,880 --> 00:22:19,160
was when Margot and I were editing the journal Evolution in Human Behavior, which didn't,

312
00:22:19,320 --> 00:22:25,080
which was only beginning in 1996, I think, to 2006,

313
00:22:25,160 --> 00:22:28,680
we we did the editing and then other people took over.

314
00:22:30,920 --> 00:22:36,600
At that time, it was certainly on the

315
00:22:36,600 --> 00:22:37,240
table.

316
00:22:38,120 --> 00:22:43,310
Like I remember going to HBES meetings and a number of

317
00:22:43,310 --> 00:22:48,430
anthropologists were sort of this this society's becoming dominated by psychologists.

318
00:22:48,510 --> 00:22:49,630
We need a different society.

319
00:22:49,710 --> 00:22:51,230
We don't want any part of this.

320
00:22:51,470 --> 00:22:56,830
Um and the ones who were sticking around were sometimes um just as

321
00:22:56,830 --> 00:22:58,430
critical and difficult.

322
00:22:58,670 --> 00:23:04,400
I mean, we would every year we would have to trot out the

323
00:23:04,400 --> 00:23:10,320
editor's report from the past year of what submissions we've had, what the acceptance rates

324
00:23:10,320 --> 00:23:11,200
were and stuff.

325
00:23:11,440 --> 00:23:17,360
And you had to fight this prejudice that, oh, you know, it's it's the

326
00:23:17,360 --> 00:23:23,120
journal is full of psych because it's got psychological editors.

327
00:23:23,680 --> 00:23:28,150
And you say, well, you know, actually the acceptance rate is higher for papers from

328
00:23:28,150 --> 00:23:31,590
anthropologists than from psychologists, and it always was.

329
00:23:31,910 --> 00:23:34,390
And I mean, for year after year after year it wasn't.

330
00:23:34,550 --> 00:23:37,270
I don't think it's because we were biased in favor of the anthropologists.

331
00:23:37,350 --> 00:23:42,310
I think it's because you got more small, quick and dirty stuff from psychologists than you

332
00:23:42,310 --> 00:23:43,350
get from anthropologists.

333
00:23:43,510 --> 00:23:43,590
Yeah.

334
00:23:44,390 --> 00:23:48,070
The costs of doing psychological research are much lower than doing fieldwork.

335
00:23:48,710 --> 00:23:54,220
And a lot a lot of people thought, man, I can dash off a paper from you know what I

336
00:23:54,220 --> 00:23:55,500
farted last week.

337
00:23:55,660 --> 00:23:59,740
Um you know, and then those would get rejected.

338
00:23:59,820 --> 00:24:05,340
But in any case, you know, we had this business of like, how many times do I have to tell

339
00:24:05,340 --> 00:24:10,140
Ruth Mace that the editorial board is not discriminating against

340
00:24:10,140 --> 00:24:11,420
anthropologists?

341
00:24:11,660 --> 00:24:17,660
Um, and here are the data, you know, and and that that would come up a

342
00:24:17,660 --> 00:24:17,980
lot.

343
00:24:18,220 --> 00:24:23,750
Um and yeah, so so certainly by the nine by the

344
00:24:23,750 --> 00:24:29,030
mid-90s, late 90s, that was becoming visible to me.

345
00:24:29,270 --> 00:24:32,390
I don't think I was aware of it much earlier.

346
00:24:32,630 --> 00:24:32,950
Yeah.

347
00:24:34,950 --> 00:24:40,070
A lot of the young anthropologists who were involved at the time that HBES was founded had

348
00:24:40,070 --> 00:24:42,390
trouble getting jobs in the field.

349
00:24:45,960 --> 00:24:51,800
there's different periods of freeze of availability of positions in

350
00:24:51,800 --> 00:24:53,720
different disciplines a bit.

351
00:24:54,040 --> 00:24:59,720
But uh you know, so so the people who were enthusiasts in the first few years of

352
00:24:59,960 --> 00:25:05,720
of um HBES, the anthropological enthusiasts mostly didn't get

353
00:25:05,720 --> 00:25:06,200
jobs.

354
00:25:06,360 --> 00:25:08,520
Laura Betzig never got a job.

355
00:25:08,760 --> 00:25:14,040
Paul Turk didn't get a job and went back to medical school and became a pediatrician.

356
00:25:14,200 --> 00:25:17,850
Um Nancy Bertet didn't get a job.

357
00:25:17,930 --> 00:25:23,290
There were there were lots of good, there were lots of Mark Flynn did, and that was like a

358
00:25:23,290 --> 00:25:24,170
big deal.

359
00:25:24,410 --> 00:25:30,250
Um so that may have fueled some sense

360
00:25:30,250 --> 00:25:34,010
of resentment.

361
00:25:34,170 --> 00:25:39,770
I don't know, but I still always sort of think of you know, most of the anthropologists I

362
00:25:39,770 --> 00:25:40,650
knew.

363
00:25:41,360 --> 00:25:45,120
Well, oh, the other event that's interesting in this regard is gonna say most of the

364
00:25:45,120 --> 00:25:50,800
anthropologists I knew were were quite favorable to psychology, but maybe that's because

365
00:25:50,880 --> 00:25:52,400
that's why I knew them, maybe.

366
00:25:52,480 --> 00:25:56,320
Um, in that, you know, I think of Don Simons in particular.

367
00:25:56,480 --> 00:26:02,160
Um and Don made a number of

368
00:26:02,160 --> 00:26:07,760
enemies within anthropology by criticizing what he called Darwinian anthropology.

369
00:26:07,920 --> 00:26:13,770
And what he was really after was he was criticizing primarily the

370
00:26:13,770 --> 00:26:19,770
notion that the acid test of an evolution-minded hypothesis is to count reproductive

371
00:26:19,770 --> 00:26:20,490
output.

372
00:26:20,570 --> 00:26:24,570
Um and you know that that that's the way you had to test things.

373
00:26:24,730 --> 00:26:27,370
And and he was highly critical of that.

374
00:26:27,690 --> 00:26:31,290
And some people were highly critical of him.

375
00:26:32,020 --> 00:26:37,940
Not all of them anthropologists, Dick Alexander was really pissed off at him for that, not

376
00:26:37,940 --> 00:26:43,460
so much because he disagreed as because he thought it was unfair that

377
00:26:44,980 --> 00:26:50,660
Don trotted out people like Laura Betzig, who were looking for jobs as prime

378
00:26:50,660 --> 00:26:54,180
examples of this fallacy, this fallacious approach.

379
00:26:54,260 --> 00:26:59,490
And he thought, you know, pick on someone your own size was was sort of his

380
00:26:59,490 --> 00:27:00,370
complaint.

381
00:27:00,930 --> 00:27:06,450
But uh yeah, there was there was that kind of tension.

382
00:27:08,210 --> 00:27:12,290
But it I didn't see it as the human behavior ecology.

383
00:27:12,370 --> 00:27:17,010
We do human behavioral ecology and we are different from psychologists, and we are insulted

384
00:27:17,010 --> 00:27:18,930
by you calling us psychologists.

385
00:27:19,090 --> 00:27:21,380
I didn't see it until later.

386
00:27:21,780 --> 00:27:27,620
I'm trying to remember what year Margot and I wrote a paper in animal behavior that

387
00:27:27,620 --> 00:27:33,540
was a sort of review paper, an invited paper, um human behavior

388
00:27:33,540 --> 00:27:35,620
as animal behavior, we called it.

389
00:27:35,860 --> 00:27:41,460
And uh and was just sort of, you know, bringing the same approach to bear on Homo sapiens

390
00:27:41,700 --> 00:27:47,060
as you do on other critters, um, the same conceptual approach, and to some extent the same

391
00:27:47,060 --> 00:27:48,820
methodological approach.

392
00:27:49,140 --> 00:27:55,130
And in that, um, we made some allusion

393
00:27:55,130 --> 00:28:00,330
to evolutionary psychology and we said, you know, which which we which is a term for

394
00:28:00,330 --> 00:28:06,250
present purposes we're going to use more broadly than um is often done to

395
00:28:06,250 --> 00:28:11,290
include anything that involves addressing psychological questions from an evolutionary

396
00:28:11,290 --> 00:28:13,210
perspective, regardless of discipline.

397
00:28:13,440 --> 00:28:18,240
Like if like if you're interested in foraging decisions and you're taking an

398
00:28:18,240 --> 00:28:22,400
evolution-minded approach, then you're doing evolutionary psychology as we're defining it

399
00:28:22,400 --> 00:28:22,640
here.

400
00:28:23,520 --> 00:28:28,720
And Kim Hill and Monique Borgerhoff, Mulder, and who else, somebody else got really bent

401
00:28:28,720 --> 00:28:29,120
out of shape.

402
00:28:29,200 --> 00:28:30,640
Oh, Eric Alden Smith of all people.

403
00:28:30,720 --> 00:28:33,360
The three of them got all bent out of shape about this.

404
00:28:33,600 --> 00:28:37,850
And, you know, damn it, we're not doing evolutionary psychology, we're doing something

405
00:28:37,850 --> 00:28:40,090
different, human behavioral ecology.

406
00:28:40,330 --> 00:28:46,330
And maybe that was 1990, and that was maybe the first glimmer I had that that, you

407
00:28:46,330 --> 00:28:52,330
know, there was a problem here, that there was some antipathy,

408
00:28:52,570 --> 00:28:56,730
some hostility within what I thought of as one field.

409
00:28:57,210 --> 00:28:57,370
Yeah.

410
00:28:57,610 --> 00:29:02,660
And there there's a bit of a tension uh what I'm hearing is that

411
00:29:03,780 --> 00:29:09,300
I imagine the people that were not taking an evolutionary approach or even a biological

412
00:29:09,300 --> 00:29:14,500
approach to psychology, my understanding of that literature was it was not ecological at

413
00:29:14,500 --> 00:29:15,300
all, right?

414
00:29:15,540 --> 00:29:17,940
It was not bringing the ecology in.

415
00:29:18,260 --> 00:29:23,460
And, you know, with the ethologists that was starting, but then you know, the World War II

416
00:29:23,460 --> 00:29:23,780
happened.

417
00:29:23,860 --> 00:29:29,610
But it sounds like, you know, the the kind of education you were getting and the the

418
00:29:29,610 --> 00:29:35,530
ecology came back and you were now applying ecology to human thinking

419
00:29:36,090 --> 00:29:38,010
in a way that um yeah.

420
00:29:38,650 --> 00:29:39,290
I guess so.

421
00:29:39,450 --> 00:29:44,170
I mean there was there was a field, I forget what the hell they did call it ecological

422
00:29:44,170 --> 00:29:45,050
psychology.

423
00:29:46,970 --> 00:29:52,780
Um I mean I actually tried to read some of it, but it's gone now from my

424
00:29:52,780 --> 00:29:53,020
mind.

425
00:29:55,980 --> 00:29:56,700
I feel like that comes in.

426
00:30:00,860 --> 00:30:06,540
But I but I I'm not quite sure what they meant by ecological, but but they meant something

427
00:30:06,540 --> 00:30:08,460
about c context and environment.

428
00:30:08,700 --> 00:30:08,940
Right.

429
00:30:09,180 --> 00:30:15,070
Um anyway, no, I mean as I say, I've I got I got as

430
00:30:15,070 --> 00:30:20,110
a postdoc involved in a group of so-called socioecologists, and uh

431
00:30:20,910 --> 00:30:26,750
that was largely a minority thing within animal behavior.

432
00:30:26,910 --> 00:30:30,350
I mean, the Animal Behavior Society was my annual meeting.

433
00:30:30,830 --> 00:30:33,310
I'd never been to a psych meeting.

434
00:30:33,550 --> 00:30:39,540
Um I've been to about three ever in my life.

435
00:30:43,060 --> 00:30:47,380
You know, I'm assuming that the human behavior and evolution society is not yet called a

436
00:30:47,380 --> 00:30:53,060
psychology meeting, even though, to my great annoyance, if you Google the journal,

437
00:30:53,300 --> 00:30:56,420
it says the topic is evolutionary psychology.

438
00:30:56,580 --> 00:31:00,260
The topic of the journal, Evolution and Human Behavior, is Evolutionary Psychology, which

439
00:31:00,260 --> 00:31:00,980
bugs me.

440
00:31:03,730 --> 00:31:09,650
but yeah, no, I mean I I I'm just coming from outside psychology to and

441
00:31:09,650 --> 00:31:11,730
in a way I'm still a crappy psychologist.

442
00:31:11,810 --> 00:31:15,890
I mean, most of the research that I've done on human beings and that I'm known for is more

443
00:31:15,890 --> 00:31:17,010
epidemiological.

444
00:31:17,170 --> 00:31:20,850
It's you know, it's not not there's no human subjects involved.

445
00:31:20,930 --> 00:31:24,530
It's it's working from you know databases.

446
00:31:24,690 --> 00:31:30,300
Um Demographic epidemiological kind of

447
00:31:30,300 --> 00:31:31,100
research, rather.

448
00:31:31,500 --> 00:31:37,180
So, in a way, I mean, Margot and I used to go to criminology meetings.

449
00:31:37,340 --> 00:31:42,620
Um, and most of the other criminologists there were actually sociologists.

450
00:31:42,860 --> 00:31:48,700
And they thought we were weird if we give them any detail at all about the sort of

451
00:31:48,700 --> 00:31:54,430
evolutionary rationales for some of our hypotheses, but they were interested in the same

452
00:31:54,430 --> 00:31:55,710
phenomena we were.

453
00:31:55,790 --> 00:31:58,510
Um, so you could, you know, you could talk and make friends.

454
00:31:58,590 --> 00:32:04,110
And I still have some good friends who are who are sociologists.

455
00:32:04,350 --> 00:32:09,230
Um, whereas the number who are psychologists is more limited.

456
00:32:10,590 --> 00:32:11,230
I guess.

457
00:32:11,790 --> 00:32:16,460
Well, I mean, you're calling yourself crappy uh psychologists, but I think that I mean

458
00:32:16,540 --> 00:32:22,060
there's an argument that you are very prescient in the sense, and I think you know you're

459
00:32:22,540 --> 00:32:25,660
uh we'll obviously get to homicide at some point.

460
00:32:25,900 --> 00:32:31,420
But I mean, for me, my first exposure to you and Margot was, oh my good,

461
00:32:31,820 --> 00:32:37,330
my thought was this is a brilliant insight, which is you

462
00:32:37,330 --> 00:32:43,330
foresaw the replication crisis or the triviality of experimental effects long before

463
00:32:43,330 --> 00:32:45,250
many other psychologists.

464
00:32:45,410 --> 00:32:50,050
And you were looking at and saying, look, here is here's a phenomenon out in the world we

465
00:32:50,050 --> 00:32:51,170
have good data for.

466
00:32:51,250 --> 00:32:53,170
There's not reporting bias.

467
00:32:53,490 --> 00:32:58,770
Um so I mean, without going fully into homicide, I would just I would like to correct the

468
00:32:58,770 --> 00:33:01,570
record of you saying you're crappy psychologists.

469
00:33:02,340 --> 00:33:07,620
Okay, what I mean is I'm not a mainstream psychologist, and I've I've seldom been

470
00:33:07,860 --> 00:33:12,900
interested in the psyche.

471
00:33:13,220 --> 00:33:18,660
I mean, most of the almost all the experimental work I've done has been with rodents.

472
00:33:19,060 --> 00:33:24,900
Um I've done a little bit, mostly at Margot's instigation.

473
00:33:25,060 --> 00:33:30,830
We did a little bit of human human subjects research in the lab, the

474
00:33:30,830 --> 00:33:31,150
lab.

475
00:33:31,550 --> 00:33:31,870
Right.

476
00:33:32,030 --> 00:33:33,710
Um, but yeah.

477
00:33:34,030 --> 00:33:36,830
I would I would even I would even disagree there.

478
00:33:36,990 --> 00:33:41,550
I mean, just re reading your work, I think there's a lot of psychological sophistication in

479
00:33:41,550 --> 00:33:41,870
your work.

480
00:33:42,030 --> 00:33:46,990
I mean, it would have been very easy to caricature the stuff going on inside the head uh

481
00:33:47,150 --> 00:33:51,500
after looking at at some of these results from homicide data, Right.

482
00:33:51,660 --> 00:33:56,780
It would have been very easy to say, you know, we have a drive to murder non-related

483
00:33:56,780 --> 00:33:59,260
offspring or any other silly idea like that.

484
00:33:59,420 --> 00:34:01,020
But that, you know, you you didn't take that road.

485
00:34:01,100 --> 00:34:05,820
You took a much more nuanced, sophisticated take where, you know, these are these are not

486
00:34:05,820 --> 00:34:07,020
adaptations we're dealing with.

487
00:34:07,100 --> 00:34:11,260
These are byproducts of other systems in the mind that have different functions.

488
00:34:11,500 --> 00:34:16,380
And these outcomes sometimes emerge as a byproduct of of the normal workings of those

489
00:34:16,380 --> 00:34:16,700
systems.

490
00:34:16,860 --> 00:34:22,390
And so I I saw a lot of of nuance into the the psychology in your in your work.

491
00:34:22,710 --> 00:34:23,270
Well thank you.

492
00:34:23,350 --> 00:34:25,750
Yeah, no I mean you and you're right.

493
00:34:25,830 --> 00:34:27,510
We were thinking about the mind.

494
00:34:27,910 --> 00:34:32,710
I mean, you know, it's just that I'm I'm never quite sure what to do with some of the

495
00:34:32,710 --> 00:34:38,550
constructs that I think are actually central both to our work and to actual human

496
00:34:38,550 --> 00:34:44,310
minds, like you know, male sexual proprietariness was one of Margot's

497
00:34:44,320 --> 00:34:45,440
fave terms.

498
00:34:45,520 --> 00:34:51,520
Um discriminative parental solicitude is another catchphrase that we're known for

499
00:34:51,520 --> 00:34:52,080
a bit.

500
00:34:52,240 --> 00:34:58,240
And uh I guess, well, Dave has uh criticized the

501
00:34:58,240 --> 00:34:59,920
concept of modularity.

502
00:35:00,080 --> 00:35:03,120
And um I I I was never fond of it either.

503
00:35:03,280 --> 00:35:07,120
I mean I I could never I I get it.

504
00:35:07,830 --> 00:35:13,750
I believe that there are, you know, I don't know

505
00:35:13,750 --> 00:35:18,230
what the right word is, channels in the mind, that there are things that connect up readily

506
00:35:18,230 --> 00:35:19,030
to other things.

507
00:35:19,190 --> 00:35:23,270
Yeah, and that they do so for reasons that's of past selection.

508
00:35:23,910 --> 00:35:29,430
Um, but uh, but I I've still no very

509
00:35:29,750 --> 00:35:34,950
good idea of what the right language for talking about that stuff is, and I confess I

510
00:35:34,950 --> 00:35:39,320
haven't paid a lot of attention to efforts to find it.

511
00:35:39,800 --> 00:35:40,440
You know.

512
00:35:40,760 --> 00:35:46,680
Um it's funny, John and Lita and Dava Bus

513
00:35:46,760 --> 00:35:52,680
and Margot and I spent a year in 1990-91, I guess it was, at the Center

514
00:35:52,680 --> 00:35:55,720
for Advanced Study at at Stanford.

515
00:35:55,960 --> 00:36:01,710
Um, and actually Lita and John proposed a group there, and it would have, it was those

516
00:36:01,710 --> 00:36:07,150
five people: them, Margot and me, and David Bus, and Don Simons in their proposal.

517
00:36:07,390 --> 00:36:12,430
But whoever runs the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, Nick's

518
00:36:12,670 --> 00:36:13,470
Simons.

519
00:36:14,510 --> 00:36:19,950
And I think they did so on the basis of the fact that he just didn't have that many

520
00:36:19,950 --> 00:36:22,670
publications, which was dumb.

521
00:36:22,830 --> 00:36:28,560
But anyway, the original fantasy when we had this thing was that we would

522
00:36:28,560 --> 00:36:34,560
somehow collaborate on writing a book about, you know, a sort of agenda-setting

523
00:36:34,560 --> 00:36:36,000
book for Ev Psych.

524
00:36:36,720 --> 00:36:42,320
And then we had endless discussions where we disagreed on

525
00:36:42,320 --> 00:36:47,840
silly things that that wouldn't get like Margot and I just wouldn't have the use of the

526
00:36:47,840 --> 00:36:50,000
word instinct or innate.

527
00:36:50,650 --> 00:36:52,570
You know, we didn't like it.

528
00:36:52,650 --> 00:36:58,410
We come out of an animal behavior background and had undergone all this um criticism for

529
00:36:58,410 --> 00:37:00,250
what we consider good reasons.

530
00:37:00,410 --> 00:37:02,650
Um decades earlier.

531
00:37:02,890 --> 00:37:08,650
Why are why are we resonating, why are we resurrecting um this concept of

532
00:37:08,650 --> 00:37:09,290
innateness?

533
00:37:09,370 --> 00:37:10,010
We didn't like it.

534
00:37:10,090 --> 00:37:12,570
John Alita thought it was absolutely essential.

535
00:37:12,890 --> 00:37:14,330
I don't know what Bus thought.

536
00:37:14,490 --> 00:37:18,650
He basically basically just vacated himself from these conversations after a while and went

537
00:37:18,650 --> 00:37:21,740
to his own cubicle and wrote papers.

538
00:37:21,900 --> 00:37:24,700
Um, but uh but anyway, this never happened.

539
00:37:24,780 --> 00:37:30,780
On the other hand, I mean the book, The Adaptive Mind, got largely hatched during

540
00:37:30,780 --> 00:37:31,340
that year.

541
00:37:31,500 --> 00:37:37,420
So um there were things accomplished, and some of them were collaborative among us all,

542
00:37:37,580 --> 00:37:43,340
but uh but it was funny that uh you know we couldn't get off the ground

543
00:37:43,340 --> 00:37:48,540
on sort of low level concepts like okay, so we all believe

544
00:37:48,570 --> 00:37:54,090
evolution is somehow central

545
00:37:54,410 --> 00:37:56,970
to thinking properly about psychology.

546
00:37:57,130 --> 00:37:59,450
But how the hell do we lay this out?

547
00:37:59,690 --> 00:38:05,370
And we never we never arrived at a consensual perspective on that.

548
00:38:05,690 --> 00:38:05,930
Yeah.

549
00:38:06,970 --> 00:38:08,330
I don't know what people have since.

550
00:38:08,570 --> 00:38:08,810
Yeah.

551
00:38:08,970 --> 00:38:14,920
Well w at that time was the idea that you were coming from

552
00:38:14,920 --> 00:38:20,920
this larger meeting of the evolutionary behavioral sciences, and you were

553
00:38:20,920 --> 00:38:25,480
still part of it, but you wanted to start talking to psychologists who weren't taking an

554
00:38:25,560 --> 00:38:26,920
evolutionary approach?

555
00:38:27,240 --> 00:38:33,010
Or was it that there was dissatisfaction with that meeting in that it

556
00:38:33,010 --> 00:38:34,370
wasn't psychological enough?

557
00:38:34,530 --> 00:38:37,010
Or is that an ill-posed question?

558
00:38:38,210 --> 00:38:43,330
That may have been the case for Lita and John, that there was a feeling that, you know,

559
00:38:43,570 --> 00:38:45,730
wanted to get the focus more psychological.

560
00:38:45,890 --> 00:38:49,330
I mean, they were quite messianic about, you know,

561
00:38:51,330 --> 00:38:57,250
cognitive approach in conjunction with an evolutionary approach is the way

562
00:38:57,250 --> 00:38:57,890
to go.

563
00:38:58,370 --> 00:39:04,280
And uh and I guess, you know, I'm I'm I'm more sympathetic to that

564
00:39:04,280 --> 00:39:05,320
now than I was at the time.

565
00:39:05,400 --> 00:39:09,640
At the time it was kind of like, Jesus, did we really need the cognitive revolution?

566
00:39:09,720 --> 00:39:13,000
It seemed like a step back from behaviorism sometimes.

567
00:39:13,240 --> 00:39:19,080
Um, as I felt then, as a guy coming out of animal behavior and sort of understanding

568
00:39:19,400 --> 00:39:25,160
why the behaviorist revolution against simple minded cognitivism had

569
00:39:25,160 --> 00:39:26,200
happened in the first place.

570
00:39:26,360 --> 00:39:26,600
Right.

571
00:39:26,920 --> 00:39:31,210
Um is this making sense to your audience and you?

572
00:39:31,610 --> 00:39:32,570
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

573
00:39:32,890 --> 00:39:33,450
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

574
00:39:33,610 --> 00:39:33,690
Yeah.

575
00:39:33,930 --> 00:39:34,570
Maybe I'm talking about it.

576
00:39:34,810 --> 00:39:40,570
I'm curious, do you no I mean do you do you still um harbor

577
00:39:40,810 --> 00:39:46,250
some of those feelings about innateness, instinct, cognitive and computational models?

578
00:39:46,410 --> 00:39:47,130
Are those still with you?

579
00:39:51,850 --> 00:39:57,100
I do still dislike the concept of innateness.

580
00:39:57,900 --> 00:40:03,660
And I dislike it for its for its

581
00:40:04,220 --> 00:40:08,620
implication, at least in the minds of most people who hear it, that

582
00:40:09,580 --> 00:40:15,420
developmental processes are irrelevant, uninteresting, that there

583
00:40:15,420 --> 00:40:21,340
is, and perhaps even that there is no actual input from anything else during development.

584
00:40:21,610 --> 00:40:23,690
I mean that's what it classically meant.

585
00:40:23,850 --> 00:40:29,850
And it still sort of sounds that way a lot when people talk about the this instinct

586
00:40:29,850 --> 00:40:30,970
or the that instinct.

587
00:40:31,050 --> 00:40:35,770
It's just, you know, you know, feed them an appropriate diet and let them grow up and

588
00:40:35,770 --> 00:40:37,290
they'll there it'll be.

589
00:40:37,450 --> 00:40:41,770
Um and you say, geez, is this helpful?

590
00:40:41,930 --> 00:40:46,960
Is is this helpful to leave out um

591
00:40:47,280 --> 00:40:53,040
ontogeny because it seems to dis-ontogeny dismiss it

592
00:40:53,360 --> 00:40:56,800
as not part of what we're interested in.

593
00:40:57,200 --> 00:40:57,440
Yeah.

594
00:40:57,680 --> 00:40:58,720
It's I agree.

595
00:40:58,800 --> 00:41:00,400
It's it's an unexplained, yeah, yeah.

596
00:41:00,720 --> 00:41:00,960
Yeah.

597
00:41:01,120 --> 00:41:06,630
It's an extremely misleading folk concept uh that I think uh you know,

598
00:41:06,870 --> 00:41:08,710
generates more confusion than insight.

599
00:41:08,790 --> 00:41:11,350
I I would love to have Dave write a paper against innateness.

600
00:41:11,510 --> 00:41:15,110
I'm sure there are papers out there that that criticize this concept uh and how it's like.

601
00:41:15,350 --> 00:41:16,630
I think Annie, Annie wants to.

602
00:41:16,790 --> 00:41:20,230
I think Annie and Christina, we actually thought about having Christina Moya and Annie Ortz

603
00:41:20,310 --> 00:41:25,270
on as their sort of, I feel like the uh and they have a great paper in behavioral processes

604
00:41:25,270 --> 00:41:25,670
about it.

605
00:41:25,750 --> 00:41:31,430
Uh I think some of their cont contentful work, but um but yeah, I think the the

606
00:41:31,590 --> 00:41:34,680
the the idea innateness.

607
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:41,000
Um I I Martin, I I told David this that when I first encountered evolutionary psychology, I

608
00:41:41,000 --> 00:41:47,000
thought it was stupid because I understood it as assigning um known phenomena

609
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:52,440
to latent variables called instincts with no insight beyond that, right?

610
00:41:52,600 --> 00:41:54,680
And uh that was my understanding, like language instinct.

611
00:41:54,760 --> 00:41:56,680
Well, we know there's language, it's an instinct.

612
00:41:56,920 --> 00:41:59,800
I you know, as an undergrad, that was my first exposure.

613
00:41:59,880 --> 00:42:00,200
Yeah.

614
00:42:00,600 --> 00:42:06,130
And yeah, actually, you know, of all Steve Binker's books, the language instinct is my

615
00:42:06,130 --> 00:42:06,450
favorite.

616
00:42:06,770 --> 00:42:07,330
Yeah, me too.

617
00:42:07,490 --> 00:42:08,370
No, me too, for sure.

618
00:42:08,530 --> 00:42:09,090
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

619
00:42:09,170 --> 00:42:09,730
No, absolutely.

620
00:42:09,810 --> 00:42:09,970
Yeah.

621
00:42:10,050 --> 00:42:12,530
No, once you read it, it's clear that that's not the approach.

622
00:42:12,690 --> 00:42:17,490
But yeah, no, just the word itself was was Yes, the word itself didn't didn't do any good.

623
00:42:17,570 --> 00:42:23,330
And partly, you know, I'm just I'm just being the animal behavior guy who who was trained

624
00:42:23,330 --> 00:42:24,130
in the 70s.

625
00:42:24,210 --> 00:42:29,740
I mean, it was like, you know, we had the critiques of

626
00:42:29,740 --> 00:42:33,020
Conrad Laurentian instinct theory.

627
00:42:33,500 --> 00:42:36,300
Um, and they'd carried the day.

628
00:42:36,540 --> 00:42:36,700
Right.

629
00:42:36,940 --> 00:42:38,780
Their critiques had carried the day.

630
00:42:39,020 --> 00:42:39,260
Right.

631
00:42:39,580 --> 00:42:45,500
Um, and then you know, it just felt like, geez, what what are we

632
00:42:45,500 --> 00:42:47,260
resurrecting this concept for?

633
00:42:47,660 --> 00:42:52,940
And what was the critique just that the phenotype is a process and contingent, and that the

634
00:42:52,940 --> 00:42:57,100
goal of science is to articulate that complex contingency?

635
00:42:57,990 --> 00:43:00,470
I guess that's a that's not a bad way to put things.

636
00:43:00,630 --> 00:43:05,590
Yeah, I think I think that's that's largely it because the Kutrique was kind of

637
00:43:06,390 --> 00:43:12,390
um in fairness, I I don't think it's unfair to say that for Lorenz at

638
00:43:12,390 --> 00:43:17,270
least, not for Tim Bergen, but for some of the other early ethologists,

639
00:43:17,830 --> 00:43:23,430
invoking instinct was saying that there is no developmental process of

640
00:43:23,430 --> 00:43:24,310
interest, right?

641
00:43:24,640 --> 00:43:26,640
No developmental process at all.

642
00:43:26,800 --> 00:43:29,200
There is a thing in the brain, there is an organ.

643
00:43:29,600 --> 00:43:34,720
Um it, you know, like I said before, you know, you just you just feed the baby the

644
00:43:34,720 --> 00:43:37,040
appropriate nutrients and the organ grows.

645
00:43:37,280 --> 00:43:43,040
Um and and it it was always framed in nature nurture

646
00:43:43,600 --> 00:43:44,000
terms.

647
00:43:44,240 --> 00:43:48,960
The you know does the animal know how to do this without learning it?

648
00:43:49,200 --> 00:43:54,590
And if the animal knows how to do this without learning it, then you know it's

649
00:43:54,590 --> 00:43:55,470
instinct.

650
00:43:55,710 --> 00:43:58,830
And I still don't know how to talk about this kind of thing properly.

651
00:43:58,910 --> 00:44:02,430
I mean I used to study an animal um

652
00:44:04,510 --> 00:44:08,270
sometimes referred to as the fat sand rat, um, a

653
00:44:10,510 --> 00:44:15,230
desert rodent that eats the leaves of uh of

654
00:44:16,510 --> 00:44:18,990
very salty desert plants.

655
00:44:19,070 --> 00:44:24,820
Um and it it belongs to a family gerbils, where everybody

656
00:44:24,820 --> 00:44:30,100
else eats seeds or insects and they eat leaves, and they are very

657
00:44:30,100 --> 00:44:31,300
specialized for this.

658
00:44:31,540 --> 00:44:36,820
And then when I got a job in California, my first academic job was at UC Riverside.

659
00:44:36,980 --> 00:44:40,580
Um, there was a parallel radiation in kangaroo rats.

660
00:44:41,620 --> 00:44:47,620
And there was one species, um, microps, dipophomies microps, who does the same

661
00:44:47,620 --> 00:44:47,780
thing.

662
00:44:47,860 --> 00:44:53,510
They eat plants of the same family, um, they eat the leaves, and all other kangaroo rats,

663
00:44:53,590 --> 00:44:59,030
and there's like 28 other species or so, um, eat seeds.

664
00:44:59,350 --> 00:45:03,350
And I thought I thought these animals were very interesting.

665
00:45:03,430 --> 00:45:08,230
I brought them into the lab, I studied them, and uh, you could feed them on a diet of

666
00:45:08,230 --> 00:45:13,190
lettuce and seeds, and they'd thrive, they'd seem to be okay.

667
00:45:13,430 --> 00:45:19,360
Um, but then if you have raised one in captivity, when you handed it one of these salt bush

668
00:45:19,440 --> 00:45:24,400
leaves for the first time as an adult that had never seen it before, it would

669
00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:30,400
drop it and come back to it and drop it and come back to it, and then suddenly pick it up

670
00:45:30,400 --> 00:45:34,400
and do exactly what the adults do with it, which is quite complicated.

671
00:45:34,560 --> 00:45:40,320
They stick out their lower jaw like an underbite and they hold the leaf in both hands and

672
00:45:40,320 --> 00:45:45,680
drag it down over their lower incisor, scraping off the hypersalina

673
00:45:46,070 --> 00:45:50,150
tissue that goes flying in all directions, and then they flip it around and do the same on

674
00:45:50,150 --> 00:45:51,830
the other side, and then they eat the interior.

675
00:45:52,470 --> 00:45:57,030
And you know, you see an adult do this who has never seen one of these leaves before in its

676
00:45:57,030 --> 00:46:00,870
life, and you've handed it to it for the first time, and it goes, What the hell is this?

677
00:46:00,950 --> 00:46:01,270
What's this?

678
00:46:01,350 --> 00:46:01,750
What's this?

679
00:46:01,830 --> 00:46:02,790
Here's what I do with it.

680
00:46:04,230 --> 00:46:05,830
What's the way we want to talk about this?

681
00:46:05,990 --> 00:46:06,310
Yeah.

682
00:46:06,950 --> 00:46:08,870
They have been selected to do this.

683
00:46:09,030 --> 00:46:10,870
This is this is their job.

684
00:46:11,030 --> 00:46:12,710
This is their, you know, etc.

685
00:46:13,180 --> 00:46:16,060
So okay, I get why people talk about instincts.

686
00:46:16,300 --> 00:46:16,540
Yeah.

687
00:46:16,700 --> 00:46:17,020
Yeah.

688
00:46:17,100 --> 00:46:17,420
Yeah.

689
00:46:17,660 --> 00:46:18,300
I get it.

690
00:46:18,460 --> 00:46:24,460
I just think that, you know, as soon as you start using the term at all broadly, it becomes

691
00:46:24,460 --> 00:46:25,420
unhelpful.

692
00:46:26,140 --> 00:46:26,460
Yeah.

693
00:46:26,940 --> 00:46:32,780
It's it's very much especially especially when applied to an organ whose very purpose

694
00:46:32,780 --> 00:46:33,900
is contingency.

695
00:46:34,220 --> 00:46:34,700
Right?

696
00:46:35,290 --> 00:46:39,930
It's whole the whole reason it's there is to take in input from the environment and respond

697
00:46:39,930 --> 00:46:42,490
intelligently and strategically to that input.

698
00:46:42,890 --> 00:46:45,050
The organ you're talking about is the brain.

699
00:46:49,450 --> 00:46:49,530
Yeah.

700
00:46:49,690 --> 00:46:55,210
Mart Martin, what I am hearing you say too, in in terms of what you're describing, is that

701
00:46:55,210 --> 00:47:00,940
your view, and you can correct me if this is wrong, was that the evolutionary sciences

702
00:47:00,940 --> 00:47:06,620
and biological sciences, it was sort of taking this idea that we have a

703
00:47:06,620 --> 00:47:09,820
theory that can explain dynamic relationships.

704
00:47:09,980 --> 00:47:14,780
So if this selection pressure is true, we should see this distribution here.

705
00:47:14,940 --> 00:47:20,140
And even when you something like data from homicides, you know, you can just say, look, the

706
00:47:20,300 --> 00:47:23,100
these data should relate to these data here.

707
00:47:23,340 --> 00:47:28,890
So what I'm hearing you say is that you're thinking about the mind you're triangulating on

708
00:47:28,890 --> 00:47:34,730
what that contingency phenotype is but the data you're using are

709
00:47:35,850 --> 00:47:41,370
are these things out in the real world right yeah I mean uh

710
00:47:42,410 --> 00:47:48,330
that that brings me to a whole slightly different topic but it's but it it's

711
00:47:48,840 --> 00:47:54,200
I'm probably one of the more skeptical people you'll meet about the utility of

712
00:47:54,200 --> 00:47:55,640
self-report data.

713
00:47:56,120 --> 00:48:01,880
Um I mean, obviously they're used and they are often valuable

714
00:48:01,880 --> 00:48:07,800
and all that, but I think people it's

715
00:48:07,800 --> 00:48:13,690
not just that people lie when you ask them questions, they also can't access their

716
00:48:13,690 --> 00:48:15,130
own minds very well.

717
00:48:15,290 --> 00:48:20,330
And you know, there's decades of research going back to a classic paper by Nisbutton Wilson

718
00:48:20,410 --> 00:48:26,410
in 77, showing that when you ask people to explain their preferences

719
00:48:26,410 --> 00:48:31,850
or their choices or their behavior in some way, they will immediately spout a

720
00:48:31,850 --> 00:48:37,820
sincere, convincing sounding account of why they did what was what

721
00:48:37,820 --> 00:48:43,740
they did that experimentally can be demonstrated to be post hot baloney,

722
00:48:43,900 --> 00:48:48,380
that they that they uh you know that you can move you can manipulate it and shove it around

723
00:48:48,380 --> 00:48:50,060
in ways that they're unaware of.

724
00:48:51,340 --> 00:48:57,340
And often they had no explanation until the question was, and then they you know form it on

725
00:48:57,340 --> 00:48:57,900
the spot.

726
00:48:58,140 --> 00:49:03,630
So I I have a long history of sort of

727
00:49:03,630 --> 00:49:07,870
collaborating with people who were debunking um

728
00:49:09,150 --> 00:49:14,430
self-report data in one way or another, showing that they were inconsistent,

729
00:49:14,590 --> 00:49:19,310
showing that, you know, people who said something at one time

730
00:49:20,750 --> 00:49:26,190
apparently sincerely, two years later, said something that contradicted their

731
00:49:26,460 --> 00:49:31,100
past with respect to what that had happened to them, with what they'd seen previously.

732
00:49:33,500 --> 00:49:39,260
That people who claim certain kinds of experiences, um,

733
00:49:39,580 --> 00:49:42,860
a week later they may have forgotten it and claimed the opposite.

734
00:49:43,100 --> 00:49:48,780
And so I've never liked just you know asking people

735
00:49:48,780 --> 00:49:49,740
stuff.

736
00:49:49,980 --> 00:49:55,430
And I've never been crazy about things like sexual

737
00:49:55,590 --> 00:49:57,990
orientation inventories and things like that.

738
00:49:58,150 --> 00:50:03,830
Um, I get it's interesting that you get, you know, sex differences that you get correlated

739
00:50:03,830 --> 00:50:04,630
with other stuff.

740
00:50:04,790 --> 00:50:09,990
But if you start taking them too much at face value, then uh then then you're

741
00:50:10,630 --> 00:50:16,500
being a bit credulous because because people, you know,

742
00:50:16,740 --> 00:50:21,140
talk as behavior too, and stuff comes spilling out of people's mouths, and we should, you

743
00:50:21,140 --> 00:50:27,060
know, study it with as much detachment as we study

744
00:50:27,060 --> 00:50:28,020
anything else.

745
00:50:28,260 --> 00:50:33,780
Um so I've never tried working much

746
00:50:34,420 --> 00:50:40,340
on human self-report data because I've always been s a bit jaundiced about it, I

747
00:50:40,340 --> 00:50:40,740
guess.

748
00:50:40,980 --> 00:50:46,830
And uh I get that it's sometimes all you can

749
00:50:46,830 --> 00:50:47,150
do.

750
00:50:47,870 --> 00:50:53,150
I find it funny that some human behavioral ecologists have sort of critiqued

751
00:50:53,150 --> 00:50:57,790
psychologists as depending on you know we study what people do rather than just what they

752
00:50:57,790 --> 00:50:58,030
say.

753
00:51:00,430 --> 00:51:04,110
You've probably heard that from some human behavioral ecologists too.

754
00:51:04,190 --> 00:51:09,860
And it's like, um, actually, look at any of your bloody studies, and they depend on

755
00:51:09,860 --> 00:51:10,980
hearsay too.

756
00:51:11,140 --> 00:51:17,140
You know, you asked these people if they've got any children, how many children

757
00:51:17,140 --> 00:51:17,540
they've got.

758
00:51:17,620 --> 00:51:19,460
You asked them this, you asked them that.

759
00:51:19,620 --> 00:51:22,500
You wrote it down, you believed it, you analyzed it.

760
00:51:22,660 --> 00:51:27,380
Um what you actually saw was seldom terribly much.

761
00:51:27,780 --> 00:51:33,060
Um, you know, admit which is not to diss the people who have,

762
00:51:34,030 --> 00:51:39,790
painstakingly followed a hunting group into the forest and measured what they got.

763
00:51:40,670 --> 00:51:46,350
But just, you know, everybody is to some degree

764
00:51:46,590 --> 00:51:52,510
seducible by, or if you like, just dependent on the utterances of other human beings

765
00:51:52,510 --> 00:51:56,030
for their understanding of what those other human beings are up to.

766
00:51:58,750 --> 00:52:04,060
Unless you're a human ethologist studying pre-verbal

767
00:52:04,060 --> 00:52:04,780
children.

768
00:52:08,300 --> 00:52:08,700
Yeah.

769
00:52:08,940 --> 00:52:14,860
I mean what's lovely about the dataset that you work with is that it

770
00:52:14,860 --> 00:52:19,900
is um uh not subject to these critiques.

771
00:52:20,060 --> 00:52:26,050
Uh there's a wonderful line from uh The Mask of Zorro that I'm remembering uh where uh

772
00:52:26,370 --> 00:52:30,050
the the bad guy tracks down Zorro and he's pretending that he's not Zoro.

773
00:52:30,290 --> 00:52:31,490
He has like some alter ego.

774
00:52:31,650 --> 00:52:35,970
Uh and then he rips off his his shirt and reveals like a bloody sleeve where he got cut and

775
00:52:35,970 --> 00:52:38,610
he says, Blood never lies, Zorro.

776
00:52:40,290 --> 00:52:42,130
But I think the same is true of of your data.

777
00:52:42,290 --> 00:52:43,330
Blood never lies.

778
00:52:43,650 --> 00:52:49,520
He's you know uh homicide Homicide was that was

779
00:52:49,600 --> 00:52:52,240
actually Margot's brainwave that we should study homicide.

780
00:52:52,320 --> 00:52:54,000
I thought she was out of her mind at first.

781
00:52:54,160 --> 00:52:58,080
Um we were what was the context?

782
00:52:58,240 --> 00:53:03,920
Oh yeah, yeah, we we'd started doing this stuff on um child maltreatment,

783
00:53:04,080 --> 00:53:08,400
um stimulated by a graduate student at Riverside, and then uh

784
00:53:10,770 --> 00:53:16,050
you get the criticism that, well, you know, there's reporting biases.

785
00:53:16,130 --> 00:53:18,610
Who detects who who detects child maltreatment?

786
00:53:18,770 --> 00:53:19,730
Who gets reported?

787
00:53:19,890 --> 00:53:24,210
If you find that step parents are more likely to abuse children, it's probably because

788
00:53:24,210 --> 00:53:26,450
they're more likely to be reported and recorded.

789
00:53:26,610 --> 00:53:27,970
And you know, that might be so.

790
00:53:28,050 --> 00:53:29,890
And then geez, how do you get around that?

791
00:53:29,970 --> 00:53:34,960
And then we have, well, actually, in these big data sets of abused children, there's a

792
00:53:34,960 --> 00:53:36,480
small number who are killed.

793
00:53:36,720 --> 00:53:42,640
And those cases, if the step parent effect is even bigger in those

794
00:53:42,640 --> 00:53:47,600
cases than the others, then you say, well, gee, that doesn't sit well with the idea that it

795
00:53:47,600 --> 00:53:51,280
was due to reporting bias, because there should be the least reporting bias in these most

796
00:53:51,280 --> 00:53:53,840
extreme cases, like lethal ones.

797
00:53:54,000 --> 00:53:56,960
That was where we first ever did anything with homicide.

798
00:53:57,200 --> 00:54:03,010
And then Margot, we moved to back to Canada, to Southern

799
00:54:03,010 --> 00:54:06,050
Ontario in 1978 from California.

800
00:54:06,450 --> 00:54:12,450
And somewhere around then, Marg said, you know, we should study homicide more generally.

801
00:54:12,610 --> 00:54:18,610
It was like, it's, it should be a great window on human conflicts and human passions.

802
00:54:18,960 --> 00:54:20,480
And I was like, what?

803
00:54:20,960 --> 00:54:21,280
No.

804
00:54:22,080 --> 00:54:24,000
And I didn't get it.

805
00:54:24,240 --> 00:54:29,440
And she says, you know, look, just down the road from us is the city of Detroit.

806
00:54:29,760 --> 00:54:35,120
At this time, it was true that they have more homicides in Detroit every year than they do

807
00:54:35,120 --> 00:54:36,480
in the whole of Canada.

808
00:54:36,640 --> 00:54:39,600
And there's a single police force that investigates them.

809
00:54:39,840 --> 00:54:44,190
We should see if the Detroit police will let us in for homicide

810
00:54:45,390 --> 00:54:46,030
files.

811
00:54:46,590 --> 00:54:47,870
And I was like, wow, what?

812
00:54:48,670 --> 00:54:54,670
And anyway, we wrote a letter to the chief of police, and the chief of police was

813
00:54:54,750 --> 00:54:56,350
actually a sort of figurehead guy.

814
00:54:56,430 --> 00:55:00,030
I can't even remember his name now, but he was somebody who did all the sort of PR stuff in

815
00:55:00,030 --> 00:55:01,070
the public meetings.

816
00:55:01,230 --> 00:55:05,230
But the guy who actually ran the place was the deputy chief of police, a guy named James

817
00:55:05,230 --> 00:55:05,870
Bannon.

818
00:55:06,030 --> 00:55:08,590
And so they sent the deputy chief of police.

819
00:55:08,750 --> 00:55:12,670
Um the chief sent our letter to the deputy chief.

820
00:55:12,820 --> 00:55:17,700
And the deputy chief had a PhD in sociology.

821
00:55:18,340 --> 00:55:22,900
He did quantitative research on police-based data himself.

822
00:55:23,060 --> 00:55:24,900
I mean, we were incredibly lucky.

823
00:55:25,140 --> 00:55:26,900
He says, Oh, this is interesting.

824
00:55:27,060 --> 00:55:28,260
Come on down and talk.

825
00:55:28,500 --> 00:55:32,420
And so he went down and chatted with him, and he introduced us to the head of the homicide

826
00:55:32,420 --> 00:55:32,820
division.

827
00:55:32,900 --> 00:55:38,030
And then we were shortly thereafter, we're sort of sitting in the homicide division

828
00:55:38,270 --> 00:55:42,430
listening to them interviewing suspects at the same time as we're rummaging through their

829
00:55:42,430 --> 00:55:45,150
case files because they didn't have a lot of space.

830
00:55:45,390 --> 00:55:51,070
Um and after we'd rummaged through the case files a bit and sort of looked up what

831
00:55:52,030 --> 00:55:56,670
information is collected by the police and the interviews they do and this and it's like

832
00:55:56,750 --> 00:55:58,030
this stuff is a goal of mine.

833
00:55:58,350 --> 00:55:59,630
This is so interesting.

834
00:55:59,870 --> 00:56:02,670
Look, maybe we could do this, maybe we could do that.

835
00:56:02,990 --> 00:56:05,720
Um and we we got hooked on it.

836
00:56:05,880 --> 00:56:07,240
We got absolutely hooked on it.

837
00:56:07,320 --> 00:56:11,880
And to this day, I think I never would have we never we never would have carried on with

838
00:56:11,880 --> 00:56:16,120
this research if it hadn't been for the fact that the deputy chief of police in Detroit at

839
00:56:16,120 --> 00:56:19,160
that time was an unusual deputy chief of police.

840
00:56:20,680 --> 00:56:21,480
Amazing.

841
00:56:21,720 --> 00:56:21,960
Yeah.

842
00:56:22,360 --> 00:56:27,410
I have to say the intro uh um chapter of the

843
00:56:27,410 --> 00:56:33,330
homicide is I think if if if one were to take all of the

844
00:56:33,650 --> 00:56:39,330
foundational work of applying evolution to human

845
00:56:39,330 --> 00:56:45,250
behavior uh and stitch it the most eloquent and beautiful writing and

846
00:56:45,250 --> 00:56:50,770
if I had new students to read, I think that's one of the one of the the the

847
00:56:50,770 --> 00:56:55,740
patches in that quilts is that it's just beautiful and it's so logical.

848
00:56:56,140 --> 00:57:01,260
Um it's it's uh it's it in and it's completely evergreen and timeless.

849
00:57:01,340 --> 00:57:07,020
It's still as perfectly appropriate today, um, which is not always true for

850
00:57:07,260 --> 00:57:12,380
um for work um that you know for for any of our work.

851
00:57:12,460 --> 00:57:13,100
Yeah.

852
00:57:13,470 --> 00:57:13,950
Yeah.

853
00:57:14,110 --> 00:57:14,910
Well, thank you.

854
00:57:14,990 --> 00:57:16,510
I really appreciate that.

855
00:57:16,750 --> 00:57:20,830
Um Yeah, no, I'm proud of that book to this day.

856
00:57:21,070 --> 00:57:24,430
I mean, my God, it's thirty-eight years ago now.

857
00:57:24,670 --> 00:57:28,350
Um, but uh yeah, no, I'm still I'm still proud of that book.

858
00:57:28,430 --> 00:57:34,270
And it it you know, one one thing

859
00:57:34,270 --> 00:57:39,720
that's sort of nice to say about the academ about The scientific

860
00:57:39,720 --> 00:57:45,240
enterprise broadly, the social scientific enterprise broadly, is as

861
00:57:45,240 --> 00:57:51,160
weird as Darwinism was to most criminological

862
00:57:51,160 --> 00:57:57,000
researchers, that book got

863
00:57:57,000 --> 00:57:58,760
us in that door too.

864
00:57:59,480 --> 00:58:01,690
You know, we started going to criminology meetings.

865
00:58:01,850 --> 00:58:05,930
People, you know, Marg and I were on the founding editorial board of the journal Homicide

866
00:58:05,930 --> 00:58:08,090
Studies when it appeared a few years later.

867
00:58:08,330 --> 00:58:14,170
Um, when Marg died, there was a memorial issue of homicide studies to her, and

868
00:58:14,170 --> 00:58:18,010
it's the only one they've ever done um in the history of the journal.

869
00:58:18,250 --> 00:58:23,290
Um, and uh, you know, people who are

870
00:58:24,180 --> 00:58:26,740
interested in just phenomena.

871
00:58:28,420 --> 00:58:34,260
Everybody's a pretty good intuitive evolutionary psychologist, in a

872
00:58:34,260 --> 00:58:34,500
way.

873
00:58:34,660 --> 00:58:39,780
They, you know, they get that men value

874
00:58:40,340 --> 00:58:44,180
status and compete with one another, and that uh

875
00:58:46,100 --> 00:58:51,860
being dissed is a problem to which um men often react and

876
00:58:52,990 --> 00:58:57,870
that, you know, they don't actually like the alienation of their wives either.

877
00:58:57,950 --> 00:59:03,870
And, you know, people and that children

878
00:59:03,870 --> 00:59:09,550
are cherished, and that a threat to your child can make you

879
00:59:10,190 --> 00:59:15,790
become a much more potent and perhaps even dangerous person than you ever

880
00:59:15,790 --> 00:59:16,990
imagined you could.

881
00:59:17,230 --> 00:59:20,040
And, you know, people get that.

882
00:59:22,120 --> 00:59:25,560
People live among people.

883
00:59:26,360 --> 00:59:28,840
They almost they almost can't help it.

884
00:59:29,480 --> 00:59:34,920
When you're when you're writing that work, is it that you're are you reminding

885
00:59:35,880 --> 00:59:39,320
are you reminding everybody of what they already know in that sense?

886
00:59:39,480 --> 00:59:44,680
In the in the sense of I think an evolutionary approach sort of licenses us to re-see with

887
00:59:44,680 --> 00:59:50,610
clarity what we might otherwise want to attribute to some highfalutin ideology.

888
00:59:50,850 --> 00:59:52,530
It's sort of the self-report thing, right?

889
00:59:52,610 --> 00:59:54,850
Like we make up a narrative that it's about this complicated.

890
01:00:11,680 --> 01:00:17,360
Motives and human nature and what excites and interests people.

891
01:00:18,320 --> 01:00:23,920
And you know, a lot of people have been conned into believing that somehow

892
01:00:23,920 --> 01:00:28,960
having been raised in a particular place made them care about all the things that everybody

893
01:00:28,960 --> 01:00:30,640
everywhere cares about.

894
01:00:31,680 --> 01:00:34,480
And so there's an element of that.

895
01:00:34,800 --> 01:00:37,150
And of course, there, I mean, there are surprises.

896
01:00:37,310 --> 01:00:39,870
There are things that you just never thought through in advance.

897
01:00:40,030 --> 01:00:45,230
You know, you sort of say, well, you know, here's a rationale for thinking that

898
01:00:46,510 --> 01:00:51,950
the risk to children as a function of their age at the hands of their parents will be

899
01:00:51,950 --> 01:00:54,430
different at the hands of the father than the mother.

900
01:00:54,750 --> 01:00:58,060
And we can collect the data to see if that is so.

901
01:00:58,140 --> 01:01:01,260
And we had an a priori rationale for thinking it.

902
01:01:01,500 --> 01:01:03,340
And you know, here it is.

903
01:01:03,420 --> 01:01:07,740
And there's certainly lots of stuff like that that's you know a little more

904
01:01:09,820 --> 01:01:14,140
in the realm of you know, we don't already know this.

905
01:01:14,300 --> 01:01:14,620
Yeah.

906
01:01:14,780 --> 01:01:20,380
Um you know, uh subsequently, I mean, after Margot's death, I I wrote one more

907
01:01:20,380 --> 01:01:26,010
homicide book on um that's much more up the alley of the things that

908
01:01:26,010 --> 01:01:30,970
sociologists were traditionally interested in, namely, why are homicide rates so variable

909
01:01:30,970 --> 01:01:33,210
between different countries or places?

910
01:01:33,770 --> 01:01:39,050
And um, and I want to pin it overwhelmingly on

911
01:01:39,050 --> 01:01:44,970
inequitable access to resources and the ensuing competitiveness that

912
01:01:44,970 --> 01:01:46,970
comes from inequitable access to resources.

913
01:01:47,050 --> 01:01:51,420
And the more unequal, the worse the violence tends to be.

914
01:01:51,660 --> 01:01:57,260
And uh there are aspects of that that, well, they're still being argued.

915
01:01:57,420 --> 01:02:03,180
I mean, you know, there are I've had any number of people who don't want to believe, now

916
01:02:03,260 --> 01:02:08,700
this is partly funded by the people who are beneficiaries of extreme inequality, but they

917
01:02:08,700 --> 01:02:12,460
don't want to believe that inequality per se creates any problems.

918
01:02:12,700 --> 01:02:17,190
The real problems come from the fact that, you know, when there's high inequality, there

919
01:02:17,190 --> 01:02:18,390
happen to be a bunch of poor people.

920
01:02:18,470 --> 01:02:19,990
And being poor is bad, yeah.

921
01:02:20,070 --> 01:02:25,830
But you know, um if you know if we give even more money to Jeff Bezos,

922
01:02:26,070 --> 01:02:27,110
then no one will be poor.

923
01:02:27,270 --> 01:02:32,230
Um, you know, there's there's that sort of mentality um still out there.

924
01:02:32,390 --> 01:02:38,200
So you still fight fights with people that you know believe the data will

925
01:02:38,200 --> 01:02:42,600
come out a different way if we do X than I suspect they will.

926
01:02:43,000 --> 01:02:49,000
And uh you know, I I think I am winning those battles, but there are people who

927
01:02:49,160 --> 01:02:51,480
um will fight me on that.

928
01:02:53,400 --> 01:02:59,070
So it's certain certainly not just, you know, well, really

929
01:02:59,230 --> 01:03:01,470
everybody knows this and here it is.

930
01:03:01,790 --> 01:03:04,830
Oh yeah, no no no for sometimes there's elements of that.

931
01:03:05,150 --> 01:03:05,550
Yeah, yeah.

932
01:03:05,630 --> 01:03:09,630
No, I mean we I don't think we would any be doing this if it wasn't a deductive logic.

933
01:03:09,790 --> 01:03:14,750
I mean that's why we, you know, for David and I, that's uh why we it's helpful, right?

934
01:03:14,830 --> 01:03:19,950
If you're interested in something, it gives you teeth and meaningful deductive logic for

935
01:03:19,950 --> 01:03:21,310
predicting things or yeah.

936
01:03:21,800 --> 01:03:22,520
Hypotheses.

937
01:03:24,360 --> 01:03:24,680
Yes.

938
01:03:24,920 --> 01:03:25,240
Science.

939
01:03:27,160 --> 01:03:30,600
Which God help us, you might actually test against reality.

940
01:03:30,920 --> 01:03:31,640
Yes, exactly.

941
01:03:31,800 --> 01:03:37,720
Um, maybe inequality is a way into this, but um the the the most recent

942
01:03:37,720 --> 01:03:43,000
thing, um I think people might be wondering, well, how does an organism know it's an an in

943
01:03:43,160 --> 01:03:45,640
unequal environment?

944
01:03:46,040 --> 01:03:46,360
Yeah.

945
01:03:47,010 --> 01:03:48,290
That's a great question.

946
01:03:48,370 --> 01:03:50,530
And I think there's been too little work on it.

947
01:03:50,690 --> 01:03:56,690
I mean, no, you know, in the sense of how does inequality

948
01:03:56,690 --> 01:03:57,570
get under the skin?

949
01:03:57,730 --> 01:03:59,250
When does it get under the skin?

950
01:03:59,410 --> 01:04:01,570
Does you know inequality?

951
01:04:01,650 --> 01:04:07,090
I mean, one window on this kind of thing is the time lags of the effects of

952
01:04:07,090 --> 01:04:09,170
inequality on behavior.

953
01:04:09,410 --> 01:04:15,200
If you can show that inequality is predictive in like cross national or

954
01:04:15,200 --> 01:04:20,320
cross city or whatever studies of some behavioral outcome.

955
01:04:20,800 --> 01:04:26,000
Time lags might be informative as regards whether well ex did experience any

956
01:04:26,560 --> 01:04:29,680
experiencing inequality in childhood matter?

957
01:04:29,920 --> 01:04:32,160
Is experiencing recent inequality matter?

958
01:04:32,320 --> 01:04:37,600
Is there the cumulative consequences of inequality over decades

959
01:04:37,840 --> 01:04:38,400
matter?

960
01:04:39,040 --> 01:04:44,710
In a highly unequal society, are there even transmittable

961
01:04:44,710 --> 01:04:49,430
effects from mom, whether in her womb or from her experience?

962
01:04:50,070 --> 01:04:56,070
You know, I mean, those all those questions can be asked, and there's a little bit

963
01:04:56,070 --> 01:04:59,590
of effort to ask them, but not enough, as far as I'm concerned.

964
01:04:59,750 --> 01:05:05,270
Um, you know, if you accept at all that there's toxic effects of inequality, um how

965
01:05:05,460 --> 01:05:07,060
does that work exactly?

966
01:05:07,220 --> 01:05:09,540
It is an underexplored question for sure.

967
01:05:09,620 --> 01:05:12,500
It's an underexplored question in the health field, too.

968
01:05:13,300 --> 01:05:15,140
People have their hypotheses.

969
01:05:15,300 --> 01:05:20,900
There's some people who are strongly convinced that the health effects of

970
01:05:20,900 --> 01:05:24,980
inequality, the negative health effects of inequality, are all mediated by stress hormones,

971
01:05:25,060 --> 01:05:26,660
and there's other people who don't.

972
01:05:27,380 --> 01:05:32,500
But yeah, I mean there's a crap load of great questions to be asked about.

973
01:05:32,790 --> 01:05:34,150
So how does that work?

974
01:05:34,630 --> 01:05:35,270
Yeah.

975
01:05:36,150 --> 01:05:36,870
Exactly.

976
01:05:38,710 --> 01:05:43,590
And sometimes people accuse evolutionary psychologists with a little bit of fairness of not

977
01:05:43,590 --> 01:05:44,790
being interested in that.

978
01:05:44,950 --> 01:05:50,790
Of just, you know, I can see a logic by which this variable should

979
01:05:50,790 --> 01:05:52,950
be predictive of that variable.

980
01:05:53,190 --> 01:05:55,350
And yeah, here it is.

981
01:05:55,590 --> 01:06:00,020
And yeah, but how how does that work and how is it mediated is

982
01:06:02,420 --> 01:06:08,260
well worth splitting and often highly relevant to ameliorating any

983
01:06:08,260 --> 01:06:09,460
negative consequences.

984
01:06:09,780 --> 01:06:10,100
Yeah.

985
01:06:10,260 --> 01:06:15,060
Although in in our defense, I think there's a there's a Marvin Minsky quote is you can't

986
01:06:15,060 --> 01:06:16,900
look for something till you have the idea of it.

987
01:06:16,980 --> 01:06:21,780
And so if somebody's criticism is uh well, yeah, but how does that work?

988
01:06:22,180 --> 01:06:23,060
That's great.

989
01:06:23,170 --> 01:06:23,970
That's the next step.

990
01:06:24,530 --> 01:06:24,850
Exactly.

991
01:06:25,090 --> 01:06:25,330
Yes.

992
01:06:28,610 --> 01:06:30,450
You psychologists step in.

993
01:06:31,650 --> 01:06:32,770
Ideally, yeah.

994
01:06:33,570 --> 01:06:37,570
Have you thought about the different dimensions of inequality?

995
01:06:37,650 --> 01:06:42,690
Because certainly inequality of wealth or resources is deeply intertwined with inequality

996
01:06:42,690 --> 01:06:43,330
in power.

997
01:06:43,490 --> 01:06:48,690
And certainly one leads to the other, such that if some people have disproportionate access

998
01:06:48,690 --> 01:06:54,580
to designing the rules of the game, they will design the rules uh so as to privilege them

999
01:06:54,580 --> 01:07:00,500
and and get themselves more stuff and prevent other people from from from taking that

1000
01:07:00,500 --> 01:07:01,140
stuff, right?

1001
01:07:01,700 --> 01:07:03,220
50-50 could go the other way.

1002
01:07:03,380 --> 01:07:03,940
Could go the other way.

1003
01:07:09,780 --> 01:07:10,180
Sure.

1004
01:07:10,340 --> 01:07:16,110
Um so I'm wondering uh do you see this more as um inequality of resources per se,

1005
01:07:16,190 --> 01:07:21,950
or whether inequality of power is more at the heart of it, such that if people see that the

1006
01:07:21,950 --> 01:07:26,190
only way to get ahead is to be connected to the right people and otherwise you're screwed,

1007
01:07:26,430 --> 01:07:31,230
then they might be more inclined to take more of a risky, violent strategy because that's

1008
01:07:31,230 --> 01:07:35,390
really one of the only options they have of getting ahead if if they view themselves as

1009
01:07:35,390 --> 01:07:37,150
being shut out of an unfair system.

1010
01:07:38,350 --> 01:07:43,790
Do you view the the power aspect of it as more um relevant than the resource aspect?

1011
01:07:44,520 --> 01:07:45,320
Possibly, yeah.

1012
01:07:45,480 --> 01:07:49,560
No, that's that's that's that's a fair way to put it.

1013
01:07:49,640 --> 01:07:53,240
And not just power, but you know, there's resources and resources.

1014
01:07:53,320 --> 01:07:58,520
You know, often all the measures you've got are economic, but the economic may not be

1015
01:07:58,520 --> 01:08:00,040
everything that matters.

1016
01:08:00,280 --> 01:08:05,880
There's been a little bit of a fuss about that because uh a couple of

1017
01:08:05,880 --> 01:08:11,790
criminologists a number of years ago made the claim that inequality matters in modern

1018
01:08:11,790 --> 01:08:16,990
societies, but it doesn't matter in open quotes primitive close quote

1019
01:08:17,150 --> 01:08:21,950
societies, um, in with huh in predicting violence.

1020
01:08:22,190 --> 01:08:28,190
And uh I mean their basis for this argument was crap, but uh but they didn't

1021
01:08:28,190 --> 01:08:33,950
sort of think of inequality as being instantiated in any interesting manner other than

1022
01:08:33,950 --> 01:08:35,230
economic inequality.

1023
01:08:35,310 --> 01:08:39,680
And it's like, you know, a highly unequal system.

1024
01:08:39,760 --> 01:08:45,680
Like if one guy's got six wives and five guys are bachelors, that's more unequal than where

1025
01:08:45,760 --> 01:08:51,040
everybody, and maybe it's more unequal in a more fundamentally important way, even than the

1026
01:08:51,040 --> 01:08:52,640
dollars in the pocket.

1027
01:08:52,880 --> 01:08:58,080
Um, and you know that there's interesting issues there.

1028
01:08:58,240 --> 01:09:02,400
What exactly is the inequality that people are sensitive to?

1029
01:09:02,770 --> 01:09:06,050
how you apprehend the concept of inequality of power.

1030
01:09:06,210 --> 01:09:10,530
Like sometimes it just takes the form of, geez, a lot of people around here make it out

1031
01:09:10,530 --> 01:09:12,690
like bandits, and it doesn't include me.

1032
01:09:13,250 --> 01:09:18,850
Um you know, because because often if you lack power, you also lack a great deal of

1033
01:09:18,850 --> 01:09:23,090
knowledge of how anything works around here, other than the you know.

1034
01:09:24,240 --> 01:09:27,040
other people are seem to be set in the agenda.

1035
01:09:27,760 --> 01:09:33,680
Um and yeah, I think that's absolutely central to why

1036
01:09:33,680 --> 01:09:39,520
some people become highly risk prone and potentially dangerous if they um have the

1037
01:09:39,520 --> 01:09:41,760
wherewithal to do so.

1038
01:09:42,800 --> 01:09:43,200
Yeah.

1039
01:09:43,360 --> 01:09:43,680
Yeah.

1040
01:09:44,400 --> 01:09:50,090
It's interesting because you know, the more that um resources become captured by the

1041
01:09:50,090 --> 01:09:55,610
political process, um, the more resources turn turn into a zero-sum game.

1042
01:09:55,690 --> 01:09:58,890
Um, because you know, competition for political power is zero sum.

1043
01:09:59,050 --> 01:10:04,730
Whereas in theory, uh you could uh have a win-win relationship where we both get richer by

1044
01:10:04,730 --> 01:10:07,130
exchanging and creating wealth together.

1045
01:10:07,290 --> 01:10:13,240
Um but if how much wealth you have depends on your connections, and there

1046
01:10:13,240 --> 01:10:19,000
are limited opportunities for win-win gains and for social mobility, then it it may be that

1047
01:10:19,000 --> 01:10:21,880
violence becomes a more rational strategy.

1048
01:10:23,400 --> 01:10:28,520
So it may be that there's something about the zero-sumness of the social context as well.

1049
01:10:29,640 --> 01:10:33,480
Yeah, and and and I think you're quite right.

1050
01:10:33,640 --> 01:10:38,280
And it's interesting to uh to highlight the fact that both go on.

1051
01:10:38,440 --> 01:10:44,270
That is to say, there are there are um positive sum games and zero sum games

1052
01:10:44,270 --> 01:10:46,350
being played all around us all the time.

1053
01:10:46,590 --> 01:10:51,630
Um there, you know, the idea of gains for trade isn't just propaganda from some free

1054
01:10:51,630 --> 01:10:51,950
trader.

1055
01:10:52,030 --> 01:10:54,510
It's yeah, it really exists.

1056
01:10:54,910 --> 01:11:00,510
And at the same time, yeah, as you say, there's you know, only so

1057
01:11:00,510 --> 01:11:05,790
many people can get to set the agenda for a group that you happen to belong to or or maybe

1058
01:11:05,790 --> 01:11:06,750
only one person.

1059
01:11:06,990 --> 01:11:08,900
Um yeah.

1060
01:11:10,100 --> 01:11:11,300
Unequal.

1061
01:11:11,540 --> 01:11:15,860
I mean, I'm how do you conceptualize power, do you think, ideally?

1062
01:11:16,100 --> 01:11:19,620
Um Yeah, I mean it's it's it's a tricky question.

1063
01:11:19,700 --> 01:11:20,740
I'm not sure.

1064
01:11:20,900 --> 01:11:25,220
Um or operationalized, I guess I I should say power.

1065
01:11:25,460 --> 01:11:30,900
I mean in a in a sort of open quotes natural close quotes

1066
01:11:31,060 --> 01:11:36,830
ecology where um you're not talking about strong institutions and

1067
01:11:37,390 --> 01:11:43,390
but you're just talking about differential power in social groups and social interaction

1068
01:11:43,630 --> 01:11:49,630
and families even um yeah i mean i i i wish

1069
01:11:49,630 --> 01:11:54,960
i had a good answer to that question yeah on that kind of thing like differential attention

1070
01:11:55,280 --> 01:12:01,040
structures, you know who is always looked to whenever there's a behavioral decision to be

1071
01:12:01,040 --> 01:12:01,440
made.

1072
01:12:02,080 --> 01:12:03,040
All that kind of stuff.

1073
01:12:03,440 --> 01:12:07,680
Yeah, that would be Brenda Brenda that would be Brenda Bowser and John Patton's uh answer.

1074
01:12:07,920 --> 01:12:13,870
I mean there's also I think a thing of there's you know there's people who have power, but

1075
01:12:13,870 --> 01:12:17,870
there's also then sort of where the rubber hits the road where is there a conflict or are

1076
01:12:17,870 --> 01:12:18,990
you getting screwed over?

1077
01:12:19,150 --> 01:12:19,390
Right.

1078
01:12:19,470 --> 01:12:24,030
So there might be asymmetries in power, but I feel like if I have a need, I have a

1079
01:12:24,030 --> 01:12:29,710
conflict, I've got a problem, my child is sick, or you know, I if it gets resolved,

1080
01:12:29,870 --> 01:12:35,710
that's different than if the power is making it so that I can't feed my kids, or

1081
01:12:35,790 --> 01:12:38,830
you know, my child is sick, but the other kids are fine.

1082
01:12:38,990 --> 01:12:42,980
And it's because power is preventing that from happening.

1083
01:12:43,140 --> 01:12:49,140
So I think like the the on the ground cues of I'm getting screwed over

1084
01:12:50,020 --> 01:12:55,860
is sort of that's the kind of power that we should care about, especially

1085
01:12:56,180 --> 01:13:02,100
in the sense of that's why this unequal, it's the unequal

1086
01:13:02,100 --> 01:13:07,780
treatment of sort of feeling like you're there's really a bad fitness relevant situation

1087
01:13:07,780 --> 01:13:08,100
here.

1088
01:13:08,420 --> 01:13:14,290
Um that uh um that is socially caused and it's not just sort of an

1089
01:13:14,290 --> 01:13:15,090
act of God.

1090
01:13:15,810 --> 01:13:16,930
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1091
01:13:17,090 --> 01:13:22,850
Which is sort of what I meant by saying, you know, the mindset of some

1092
01:13:23,170 --> 01:13:28,770
people who become dangerous or people who carry a weapon and are ready to use it is

1093
01:13:29,330 --> 01:13:32,850
somebody's make it out like a bandit around here and an ape me.

1094
01:13:33,360 --> 01:13:36,000
Um you know that's exactly what I'm talking about.

1095
01:13:36,240 --> 01:13:37,760
Yeah and then it's a social solution.

1096
01:13:37,840 --> 01:13:43,600
Yeah it's somebody is their the solution to this really bad situation is

1097
01:13:43,600 --> 01:13:45,040
changing the social structure.

1098
01:13:45,200 --> 01:13:45,600
Yeah.

1099
01:13:46,000 --> 01:13:49,520
Yeah redistribution of power preferably in my direction.

1100
01:13:50,320 --> 01:13:50,800
Exactly.

1101
01:13:50,880 --> 01:13:51,120
Yeah.

1102
01:13:53,040 --> 01:13:53,440
It makes sense.

1103
01:13:53,520 --> 01:13:53,920
It makes sense.

1104
01:13:54,400 --> 01:13:56,560
Having a gun is the is the fastest ticket to power.

1105
01:13:57,120 --> 01:13:59,360
Stick with the same social system and just put me on top.

1106
01:13:59,520 --> 01:14:02,930
Yeah exactly Yeah.

1107
01:14:03,010 --> 01:14:05,970
Usually if you're near the bottom, that is not a realistic hope.

1108
01:14:06,610 --> 01:14:11,890
I I'm curious, with with these trends you're finding um the between inequality and

1109
01:14:11,890 --> 01:14:15,490
violence, is are is it just of violence in general?

1110
01:14:15,650 --> 01:14:18,210
Is it uh within class or between class?

1111
01:14:18,370 --> 01:14:24,050
Is it you know aggression from uh the have nots against the haves, or is it more of a

1112
01:14:24,050 --> 01:14:26,530
generalized uh strategy of violence?

1113
01:14:27,540 --> 01:14:33,300
no, much much more of again among the have nots against the have not other have nots

1114
01:14:33,460 --> 01:14:34,420
than against the haves.

1115
01:14:34,500 --> 01:14:39,380
And interesting some people have have trotted that fact out as kind of a criticism for the

1116
01:14:39,380 --> 01:14:42,580
idea that it's got anything to do with inequality.

1117
01:14:42,660 --> 01:14:47,380
It's like well if the people at the bottom were really, you know, upset about being at the

1118
01:14:47,380 --> 01:14:52,390
bottom, then they'd, you know, that they'd seek out and kill the top.

1119
01:14:52,470 --> 01:14:55,030
And you say, well, that would actually be kind of a dumb strategy.

1120
01:14:55,190 --> 01:15:01,190
Nothing leads to more certain negative consequences than going after someone much

1121
01:15:01,190 --> 01:15:02,710
more powerful than yourself.

1122
01:15:02,950 --> 01:15:08,870
I mean, if you if hierarchy matters, the people you most

1123
01:15:08,870 --> 01:15:14,700
have to worry about are the people just below you and the people who you most

1124
01:15:15,260 --> 01:15:18,380
want to inflict some costs on are the people just above you.

1125
01:15:18,540 --> 01:15:24,220
Um I mean I think people seem to react that way to who their conflicts are.

1126
01:15:24,300 --> 01:15:29,740
Not to and of course it's also largely just that they're in the same universe

1127
01:15:30,140 --> 01:15:33,180
neighborhood in your face.

1128
01:15:34,700 --> 01:15:40,610
But uh but yeah no it's again this there's really interesting

1129
01:15:40,610 --> 01:15:42,290
questions that have never been addressed.

1130
01:15:42,450 --> 01:15:48,450
One is um that's related to what you're talking about is stuff like if

1131
01:15:50,770 --> 01:15:54,690
let me get let me gather my thoughts for a second.

1132
01:15:55,330 --> 01:16:01,300
If inequality leads to

1133
01:16:01,460 --> 01:16:03,220
greater violence.

1134
01:16:04,180 --> 01:16:09,460
Does inequality at the top matter at all, or is it all inequality at the bottom?

1135
01:16:09,620 --> 01:16:14,980
You can partition inequality across, say, an income distribution.

1136
01:16:15,300 --> 01:16:19,620
And you can ask, you know, there are even measures for doing this.

1137
01:16:19,700 --> 01:16:25,300
You can ask, is the homicide rate heavily dependent upon

1138
01:16:25,300 --> 01:16:29,060
inequality at the bottom, but unaffected by inequality at the top?

1139
01:16:29,270 --> 01:16:32,630
Um or is it somewhat affected by inequality at the top?

1140
01:16:32,790 --> 01:16:33,670
Nobody's done it.

1141
01:16:33,830 --> 01:16:34,470
Nobody's done it.

1142
01:16:34,710 --> 01:16:39,830
That's just a great question because I think uh you know the fact does the fact that there

1143
01:16:39,830 --> 01:16:45,750
are billionaires fuel resentment at the bottom or does nobody care that there are

1144
01:16:45,750 --> 01:16:46,150
billionaires?

1145
01:16:46,950 --> 01:16:50,630
Or does it fuel yeah does it does it fuel resentment among the millionaires?

1146
01:16:51,190 --> 01:16:52,790
Yeah well that's an interesting question.

1147
01:16:53,030 --> 01:16:53,270
Yeah.

1148
01:16:53,510 --> 01:16:53,990
Yeah.

1149
01:16:54,310 --> 01:16:59,080
But I mean d does it fuel resentment that actually turns into violence or just like nobody

1150
01:16:59,080 --> 01:17:03,240
cares about their being billionaires if they redistributed their wealth so that there were

1151
01:17:03,880 --> 01:17:08,280
you know a whole bunch of hundred millionaires instead of some billionaires and other

1152
01:17:08,280 --> 01:17:08,920
millionaires.

1153
01:17:09,320 --> 01:17:12,360
Um that wouldn't matter, or would it?

1154
01:17:12,440 --> 01:17:18,360
Does it does knowing does knowing that somebody's that rich have anything to

1155
01:17:18,360 --> 01:17:22,390
do with why um the poor are disgruntled.

1156
01:17:23,030 --> 01:17:23,270
Right.

1157
01:17:23,430 --> 01:17:23,750
Yeah.

1158
01:17:23,990 --> 01:17:29,110
As opposed to just saying out loud, as opposed to that is also a a consequence of a

1159
01:17:29,110 --> 01:17:33,190
structure where if your kid gets cancer, you might lose your home.

1160
01:17:33,830 --> 01:17:36,070
So like you you got to tease these apart, right?

1161
01:17:36,150 --> 01:17:42,070
Like if you the the the two by two cell of that's a reality versus not a reality versus

1162
01:17:42,070 --> 01:17:45,990
there's a millionaire with that reality versus there's a billionaire with that reality,

1163
01:17:46,150 --> 01:17:49,160
there's a billionaire with with that not happening.

1164
01:17:49,480 --> 01:17:55,480
Do people care the same or or is it all driven by the billionaire or the cancer?

1165
01:17:55,720 --> 01:18:01,480
Um I mean it's it's and and relatedly, there's the whole issue of does

1166
01:18:01,480 --> 01:18:07,160
knowing all this weird stuff about people you don't actually know, how much does it affect

1167
01:18:07,160 --> 01:18:07,960
your mental models?

1168
01:18:08,120 --> 01:18:10,920
This is really important in a in an internet age.

1169
01:18:11,160 --> 01:18:11,400
Yeah.

1170
01:18:11,640 --> 01:18:16,610
You know, you think maybe the human mind is well adapted

1171
01:18:17,570 --> 01:18:23,570
to responding reasonably appropriately to social information from a universe of

1172
01:18:23,570 --> 01:18:27,810
known persons and encountered not very well known persons.

1173
01:18:28,050 --> 01:18:33,940
But uh but in a world where everybody seems to be

1174
01:18:33,940 --> 01:18:38,980
paying attention to people they don't know and knows a lot about a lot of them.

1175
01:18:39,220 --> 01:18:44,820
Um what the hell does that do to their mental models of society and appropriate

1176
01:18:44,820 --> 01:18:46,100
sociality and stuff?

1177
01:18:46,340 --> 01:18:48,420
Um those are interesting questions.

1178
01:18:48,500 --> 01:18:51,380
I guess really I am actually interested in psychology.

1179
01:18:52,900 --> 01:18:54,020
Turns out, yeah.

1180
01:18:54,260 --> 01:18:54,580
Yeah.

1181
01:18:54,820 --> 01:18:58,830
I mean, is is the model you're working with, would it make different predictions about

1182
01:18:58,830 --> 01:19:00,990
inequality at the bottom versus the top?

1183
01:19:01,150 --> 01:19:04,430
Because I know there's work on what's called fractal inequality, where if you look at like

1184
01:19:04,510 --> 01:19:09,230
the Giny coefficient among rich people, it turns out that the gap between millionaires and

1185
01:19:09,230 --> 01:19:12,750
billionaires like is just as big as the gap between poor people and middle class people.

1186
01:19:12,830 --> 01:19:18,190
But if you zoom in on any part of the wealth distribution, you'll get similar uh gaps

1187
01:19:18,190 --> 01:19:21,950
between rich and poor, no matter which part of the distribution you zoom in on.

1188
01:19:22,190 --> 01:19:26,430
So that there is vast e inequality even among billionaires, even among millionaires.

1189
01:19:26,820 --> 01:19:32,020
Um and would you predict that the inequality you see, say, at the top, would also correlate

1190
01:19:32,020 --> 01:19:38,020
with more risky aggressive strategy, like would you maybe more white collar uh crime um in

1191
01:19:38,340 --> 01:19:40,980
among the the richer part of the distribution or something like that?

1192
01:19:41,140 --> 01:19:45,700
Or would you or is this specific to the bottom end of the distribution where the stakes are

1193
01:19:45,700 --> 01:19:47,860
much higher if you fall to the bottom?

1194
01:19:48,500 --> 01:19:49,700
Well there's desperation.

1195
01:19:49,780 --> 01:19:55,710
There is the issue of of um you know what have I got

1196
01:19:55,710 --> 01:19:56,430
to lose?

1197
01:19:56,670 --> 01:20:00,830
You know, um, you know, there's a little line from a Bob Dylan song, Well, you got nothing,

1198
01:20:00,910 --> 01:20:02,270
you got nothing to lose.

1199
01:20:02,430 --> 01:20:07,950
Um, and uh so you know, you wade into social

1200
01:20:08,110 --> 01:20:09,150
circumstance.

1201
01:20:10,510 --> 01:20:16,350
I remember Rob Boyd, you mentioned Rob Boyd, saying to me that uh he was a keen rock

1202
01:20:16,350 --> 01:20:16,990
climber.

1203
01:20:17,630 --> 01:20:23,560
And when they had their first kid, suddenly it stopped seeming thrilling and started

1204
01:20:23,560 --> 01:20:24,360
seeming stupid.

1205
01:20:24,520 --> 01:20:24,840
Yeah.

1206
01:20:25,000 --> 01:20:30,840
Um to to free to freehand hold climb on places where

1207
01:20:30,840 --> 01:20:32,600
you could really do yourself some damage.

1208
01:20:32,760 --> 01:20:33,160
Yeah.

1209
01:20:33,400 --> 01:20:39,320
And uh, you know, when you got something to lose, maybe your attitude to risk

1210
01:20:39,320 --> 01:20:40,680
changes a lot.

1211
01:20:42,250 --> 01:20:42,490
Yeah.

1212
01:20:42,970 --> 01:20:48,890
In which case being rock bottom is really where the action is as

1213
01:20:48,890 --> 01:20:52,170
regards becoming crazy dangerous.

1214
01:20:52,650 --> 01:20:52,890
Yeah.

1215
01:20:53,210 --> 01:20:56,890
And that I mean that and that comes out of even just, you know, risk-sensitive foraging

1216
01:20:56,890 --> 01:21:00,730
theory to bring it back to the um evolutionary biology, right?

1217
01:21:01,210 --> 01:21:02,570
It does indeed.

1218
01:21:03,290 --> 01:21:04,250
Interesting.

1219
01:21:05,200 --> 01:21:11,040
Um zooming out a bit, um, as you've you know witnessed the

1220
01:21:11,040 --> 01:21:16,880
story of evolutionary psychology evolve, um have you

1221
01:21:16,880 --> 01:21:21,360
been um pleased by how the field has changed over the years?

1222
01:21:21,520 --> 01:21:22,480
Have you been displeased?

1223
01:21:22,560 --> 01:21:26,560
Are there trends that you think have gone in a positive direction or in a negative

1224
01:21:26,560 --> 01:21:27,040
direction?

1225
01:21:27,280 --> 01:21:31,760
How do you how do you view the overall story and and change that you've lived through?

1226
01:21:36,490 --> 01:21:38,250
I wasn't expecting this question.

1227
01:21:38,330 --> 01:21:40,810
It takes me a second to sort of gather my thoughts on it.

1228
01:21:40,970 --> 01:21:44,250
But you know, there are things are that are disappointments.

1229
01:21:44,490 --> 01:21:50,170
Um I'm disappointed by the extent to which one group of

1230
01:21:50,170 --> 01:21:54,730
evolutionists sometimes becomes alienated from another group of evolutionists for what seem

1231
01:21:54,810 --> 01:21:56,090
like petty reasons.

1232
01:21:56,250 --> 01:21:56,490
Yeah.

1233
01:21:56,650 --> 01:22:02,600
Um and uh The usual sort of problems with anything

1234
01:22:02,680 --> 01:22:07,960
that you know with sort of disappointing to the point of heartbreaking sometimes that

1235
01:22:07,960 --> 01:22:10,840
there's infighting among people who ought to be allies.

1236
01:22:11,000 --> 01:22:16,120
Um I'm heartened by

1237
01:22:16,760 --> 01:22:22,280
the um breadth of acceptance of evolutionary

1238
01:22:22,280 --> 01:22:28,110
approaches, but uh slightly horrified by the antipathy

1239
01:22:28,110 --> 01:22:32,830
that still comes from a surprisingly large number of

1240
01:22:34,110 --> 01:22:38,590
literalist religious people, um, not just here.

1241
01:22:40,670 --> 01:22:42,670
They have Darwin Day in Iran.

1242
01:22:42,750 --> 01:22:46,590
They celebrate Darwin Day in Iran, a small group in Tehran does.

1243
01:22:46,750 --> 01:22:49,550
They have a meeting every year.

1244
01:22:49,790 --> 01:22:54,180
Um I spoke at it last year.

1245
01:22:54,500 --> 01:22:59,220
Um I wasn't in Tehran, I spoke at it remotely.

1246
01:22:59,460 --> 01:23:02,180
Um and they were a great bunch.

1247
01:23:02,260 --> 01:23:07,780
They're mostly psychologists and philosophers actually who who do Darwin Day and Tehran.

1248
01:23:08,420 --> 01:23:14,030
And they you know they were they asked good

1249
01:23:14,030 --> 01:23:14,510
questions.

1250
01:23:14,670 --> 01:23:16,110
It was a great session.

1251
01:23:16,190 --> 01:23:21,950
I actually forged a collaboration with a couple of young Iranians who have been doing some,

1252
01:23:22,030 --> 01:23:22,270
you know.

1253
01:23:22,430 --> 01:23:28,190
Gretchen and I um had a in the talk we gave a little

1254
01:23:28,510 --> 01:23:34,510
tangent about cousin marriage and the interesting fact that cousin

1255
01:23:34,590 --> 01:23:40,480
marriage could have all sorts of unexplored effects on what we were mainly talking

1256
01:23:40,480 --> 01:23:44,480
about, which was the matrilateral bias and investment, investing more in your daughter's

1257
01:23:44,480 --> 01:23:46,080
kids than your son's kids.

1258
01:23:47,120 --> 01:23:52,720
And some Iranians in the audience were like, yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of

1259
01:23:52,720 --> 01:23:54,240
cousin marriage in Iran still.

1260
01:23:54,400 --> 01:24:00,390
There's there's all different kinds of cousin marriage, all Although some are more

1261
01:24:00,390 --> 01:24:06,310
common than others, and we can investigate this with questionnaire studies, which I thought

1262
01:24:06,310 --> 01:24:07,030
was just fine.

1263
01:24:07,110 --> 01:24:10,470
And we notwithstanding my previous remarks.

1264
01:24:13,350 --> 01:24:19,190
Anyway, Darwin Day in Iran had to be canceled this year because of the events in

1265
01:24:19,190 --> 01:24:19,590
Iran.

1266
01:24:19,670 --> 01:24:23,030
I mean, Darwin Day was last week, February 12th.

1267
01:24:24,710 --> 01:24:29,140
And they were gonna celebrate this year, it's 2026.

1268
01:24:29,300 --> 01:24:33,700
They were gonna make the central theme of this year's meeting be the 50th anniversary of

1269
01:24:33,700 --> 01:24:36,820
Richard Dawkins's book, The Selfish Genes, publication.

1270
01:24:36,980 --> 01:24:42,980
I guess it was pretty widely read and translated, perhaps more than most other

1271
01:24:42,980 --> 01:24:48,710
things that we think of as seminal, and you know, had had an influence on people

1272
01:24:48,710 --> 01:24:50,390
in Iran and elsewhere.

1273
01:24:50,550 --> 01:24:53,990
Um, and that was going to be the central theme for this year's meeting, but this year's

1274
01:24:53,990 --> 01:24:55,190
meeting had to be canceled.

1275
01:24:55,350 --> 01:25:00,790
Now that's not a religious crackdown on Darwinists, and

1276
01:25:01,990 --> 01:25:04,230
it's actually sort of a surprise.

1277
01:25:04,390 --> 01:25:08,630
I hadn't realized this before, but within Islam, the uh

1278
01:25:10,360 --> 01:25:16,120
the division that the Iranian clerics

1279
01:25:16,120 --> 01:25:21,640
belong to is much more accepting of evolution than the other main

1280
01:25:21,800 --> 01:25:24,440
division, which is Shiites, which is Sunnis anyway.

1281
01:25:24,520 --> 01:25:25,800
They're the Shiites, right?

1282
01:25:26,040 --> 01:25:26,680
Yeah.

1283
01:25:27,720 --> 01:25:32,120
They're much more accepting of evolution than the Sunnis are apparently, but that you know

1284
01:25:32,200 --> 01:25:37,890
there are religions and God help us they're in the USOA too,

1285
01:25:38,850 --> 01:25:44,370
in which evolution is evil and wrong.

1286
01:25:45,250 --> 01:25:50,690
And some of them may even have influence over the future of educational policy in the US

1287
01:25:50,770 --> 01:25:53,730
and the near future of educational policy in the US.

1288
01:25:53,970 --> 01:25:57,330
That's terrifying and disappointing and crazy.

1289
01:26:01,890 --> 01:26:07,560
I guess I used to believe that we the progress was

1290
01:26:07,880 --> 01:26:13,560
more nearly linear or at least monotonic

1291
01:26:13,800 --> 01:26:14,760
than it is.

1292
01:26:16,600 --> 01:26:22,120
And some of the setbacks to the agenda of just not

1293
01:26:22,120 --> 01:26:26,610
evolutionary psychology, but science,

1294
01:26:27,970 --> 01:26:33,490
medical research, everything can be pretty shocking.

1295
01:26:33,810 --> 01:26:38,210
Those are things to be disappointed about in a larger scale.

1296
01:26:38,610 --> 01:26:44,210
Evpsych itself, I think, is pretty robust.

1297
01:26:44,530 --> 01:26:49,650
I used to say, and I still sort of believe, that you know, the day we know

1298
01:26:50,580 --> 01:26:55,460
We've succeeded is the day you just drop the evolutionary from the from what you're from

1299
01:26:55,460 --> 01:26:56,020
the label.

1300
01:26:56,100 --> 01:26:57,620
You know, you're doing psychology.

1301
01:26:57,860 --> 01:27:01,780
Well, of course, if you're doing psychology, you're doing it half decently.

1302
01:27:01,940 --> 01:27:07,780
You better know a bit about Darwinism, um, and and have thought a bit about the

1303
01:27:07,780 --> 01:27:11,140
relevance of past selection to whatever the hell you're interested in.

1304
01:27:11,380 --> 01:27:12,420
Of course.

1305
01:27:12,740 --> 01:27:16,820
And and you know, I think I think we we will get there.

1306
01:27:18,770 --> 01:27:19,170
Yeah.

1307
01:27:19,410 --> 01:27:25,090
Do you um in in terms of the evolutionary biology and anthropology

1308
01:27:25,090 --> 01:27:28,930
parts, um, how are those parts doing?

1309
01:27:32,610 --> 01:27:33,730
I wish I knew.

1310
01:27:33,810 --> 01:27:39,730
Um, I mean my My

1311
01:27:39,730 --> 01:27:44,130
best friends among evolutionary biologists, my closest acquaintances.

1312
01:27:44,290 --> 01:27:49,220
Um Are deceased.

1313
01:27:49,620 --> 01:27:52,820
Um George Williams was a close friend.

1314
01:27:52,980 --> 01:27:54,580
Bill Hamilton was a friend.

1315
01:27:54,740 --> 01:27:56,260
They're long gone.

1316
01:27:58,900 --> 01:28:04,740
But uh the people I know like it, the university I'm an emeritus professor

1317
01:28:04,740 --> 01:28:10,020
at who pursue their various biological interests, I mean,

1318
01:28:10,340 --> 01:28:11,860
they're doing fine.

1319
01:28:12,100 --> 01:28:17,970
Um, the evolution minded study of the behavior of non human animals

1320
01:28:18,290 --> 01:28:20,130
is doing fine.

1321
01:28:21,090 --> 01:28:27,090
I think John Alcock's book, The Triumph of Sociobiology, was not premature,

1322
01:28:27,250 --> 01:28:27,810
actually.

1323
01:28:28,290 --> 01:28:30,770
And it's God knows how long ago now.

1324
01:28:31,570 --> 01:28:37,490
But that, you know, there was the sociobiology controversy cooked up

1325
01:28:37,490 --> 01:28:42,680
by some biologists and the socio-biological approach, that is to say, the

1326
01:28:42,680 --> 01:28:47,480
evolution-minded approach to the or the selectionist, if you like, approach to the study of

1327
01:28:47,480 --> 01:28:50,520
behavior prevailed and it's over.

1328
01:28:51,160 --> 01:28:56,120
You know, um, and the opposition is gone, and that's good.

1329
01:28:56,760 --> 01:29:00,360
Um, I don't know what an anthropologist would say.

1330
01:29:00,440 --> 01:29:06,200
I mean, certainly, again, we all know a lot of evolutionary anthropologists who

1331
01:29:06,200 --> 01:29:11,930
seem to be busy in a thriving field, but the

1332
01:29:11,930 --> 01:29:16,730
extent to which it's a subfielder still encounters hostility, I don't know.

1333
01:29:16,970 --> 01:29:17,610
Yeah.

1334
01:29:18,250 --> 01:29:24,090
One question is, and you talked about the the the friends that you had, somebody like

1335
01:29:24,090 --> 01:29:29,850
um George Williams, my understanding was that his adaptation

1336
01:29:30,010 --> 01:29:33,210
natural selection book was sort of righteous anger.

1337
01:29:34,500 --> 01:29:35,700
about an issue, right?

1338
01:29:35,780 --> 01:29:40,260
And I think even like the adapted mind was also in the spirit of righteous anger.

1339
01:29:40,500 --> 01:29:46,420
Um and as a student of people, a descendant of these people in Don

1340
01:29:46,420 --> 01:29:47,540
Simons, too, right?

1341
01:29:47,620 --> 01:29:53,300
Like I think um these were people who who looked in the looked at the world and they

1342
01:29:53,460 --> 01:29:59,300
they had righteous anger about um something they thought didn't make sense and they they

1343
01:29:59,300 --> 01:30:01,380
had a mission and they wanted to do it.

1344
01:30:01,620 --> 01:30:07,210
And I I sometimes w wonder as as the students

1345
01:30:07,370 --> 01:30:13,130
generations go down, sometimes if the students lose that either that

1346
01:30:13,130 --> 01:30:16,330
feeling or that mission or that broad perspective.

1347
01:30:16,490 --> 01:30:21,530
And and I wanna w I'm asking, um I guess my question is, is that a fair

1348
01:30:21,530 --> 01:30:27,210
characterization that that these were people who uh yeah, is that a fair

1349
01:30:27,210 --> 01:30:28,090
characterization?

1350
01:30:28,250 --> 01:30:29,130
Um yeah.

1351
01:30:29,770 --> 01:30:30,890
Sure, I think so.

1352
01:30:31,050 --> 01:30:37,040
I mean, you know, your friend Lita Cosmodes is certainly capable of some

1353
01:30:37,040 --> 01:30:37,680
righteous anger.

1354
01:30:38,080 --> 01:30:39,280
I've told Lita that myself.

1355
01:30:39,360 --> 01:30:42,080
I said one of the r I told I I tell Lita this all the time.

1356
01:30:42,160 --> 01:30:43,520
It's one of the reasons I love Lita.

1357
01:30:43,600 --> 01:30:44,320
Yes, exactly.

1358
01:30:47,840 --> 01:30:49,040
Yes, exactly.

1359
01:30:49,360 --> 01:30:54,400
I mean John Tuby was was much more willing to just sort of accept

1360
01:30:55,310 --> 01:31:00,030
The fact that different people thought different stuff, and in fact, he was open to every

1361
01:31:00,030 --> 01:31:01,790
crackpot theory you could think of.

1362
01:31:01,950 --> 01:31:07,870
But uh but Leto was much more damn it, there's right answers to

1363
01:31:07,870 --> 01:31:10,110
these things, and these idiots have got them wrong.

1364
01:31:10,270 --> 01:31:13,790
Um but uh yeah, no, you're right.

1365
01:31:13,950 --> 01:31:19,550
I mean, it's funny, George Williams is a very soft-spoken and gentle guy who is never like

1366
01:31:19,710 --> 01:31:20,990
mean to anybody.

1367
01:31:21,230 --> 01:31:25,920
But if you you've read Adaptation and Natural Selection, right at the beginning he talks

1368
01:31:25,920 --> 01:31:31,680
about having listened to this lecture by who was it, Emerson, one of the Alley

1369
01:31:32,000 --> 01:31:32,640
group.

1370
01:31:32,800 --> 01:31:38,400
Um that was an implicitly or maybe explicitly group selectionist lecture and and

1371
01:31:38,560 --> 01:31:40,880
being just so peeved about it.

1372
01:31:41,040 --> 01:31:45,600
And then he says he berated his wife, poor Doris, all the way home after the thing about

1373
01:31:45,600 --> 01:31:49,200
what was wrong with the lecture, as if Doris would have stood up for it, which she

1374
01:31:49,200 --> 01:31:49,680
wouldn't.

1375
01:31:49,840 --> 01:31:53,190
Um But yeah, so righteous anger indeed.

1376
01:31:53,350 --> 01:31:57,990
I mean, it's funny because I've never seen, I never saw George seeming angry.

1377
01:31:58,790 --> 01:31:59,670
But yeah.

1378
01:32:01,030 --> 01:32:03,350
Whereas I have seen Lady B seeming angry.

1379
01:32:04,790 --> 01:32:07,030
But but anyway, yeah, is it gone?

1380
01:32:07,190 --> 01:32:07,830
Is it gone?

1381
01:32:07,990 --> 01:32:08,790
Is it gone?

1382
01:32:09,670 --> 01:32:13,030
I'm old and I'm less angry than I used to be, I guess.

1383
01:32:13,270 --> 01:32:15,990
I don't know if I'm less angry than I used to be, actually.

1384
01:32:16,230 --> 01:32:21,300
Um is it I don't know about young people.

1385
01:32:21,460 --> 01:32:26,500
I know people I know a lot of people are angry about the state of the academy for reasons

1386
01:32:26,500 --> 01:32:27,860
that are a little bit different.

1387
01:32:28,420 --> 01:32:34,260
They have to do more with the withdrawal of funding and the corporatization and

1388
01:32:35,140 --> 01:32:40,980
you know the lesser openness of the people in

1389
01:32:40,980 --> 01:32:46,710
charge of some major universities to um curiosity

1390
01:32:46,790 --> 01:32:48,150
based research.

1391
01:32:48,390 --> 01:32:50,310
Um yeah.

1392
01:32:50,550 --> 01:32:50,790
Yeah.

1393
01:32:50,950 --> 01:32:54,950
Do you need deliverables and uh uh profitability and yeah.

1394
01:32:55,350 --> 01:32:56,070
Yeah, yeah.

1395
01:32:56,310 --> 01:32:58,070
And uh that bothers me too.

1396
01:32:58,150 --> 01:33:00,950
I mean it's it it's bad news and it's widespread.

1397
01:33:01,030 --> 01:33:03,750
It ain't just an American phenomenon, that's for sure.

1398
01:33:03,910 --> 01:33:08,310
I've seen it in Canada, I've seen it in New Zealand and I've heard about it in Europe.

1399
01:33:09,350 --> 01:33:15,340
Um So there's that to be angry about, but what do you do with

1400
01:33:15,340 --> 01:33:16,220
that anger?

1401
01:33:17,420 --> 01:33:19,420
You you fight different battles.

1402
01:33:19,500 --> 01:33:23,580
I mean if you're if you're if you know if if you're trying to act on that anger, then

1403
01:33:23,580 --> 01:33:29,180
you're acting on it within the setting of the academy rather than within the setting of

1404
01:33:29,180 --> 01:33:32,780
your you know your field of specialization.

1405
01:33:33,350 --> 01:33:33,510
Yeah.

1406
01:33:33,670 --> 01:33:36,470
And that's not that's not where we want the anger to be directed.

1407
01:33:36,550 --> 01:33:40,950
I mean ideally it could be channeled into, you know, something that we can all appreciate,

1408
01:33:41,110 --> 01:33:43,510
something productive, you know, uh a new set of things.

1409
01:33:43,670 --> 01:33:49,270
Well I mean if if if if yeah if it can actually begin to

1410
01:33:49,270 --> 01:33:53,590
effectively counter the corporatization of the university, for example, then that is very

1411
01:33:53,590 --> 01:33:54,870
much where we want it directed.

1412
01:33:55,110 --> 01:33:56,870
But but yeah I take your point.

1413
01:33:56,950 --> 01:34:02,680
I mean within a discipline this this ain't um doing our

1414
01:34:02,680 --> 01:34:06,280
particular discipline any great service, maybe.

1415
01:34:07,480 --> 01:34:08,360
Yeah, I don't know.

1416
01:34:08,440 --> 01:34:14,120
I mean I I'm sure there are angry young evolutionary

1417
01:34:14,120 --> 01:34:15,560
psychologists, aren't there?

1418
01:34:20,440 --> 01:34:24,520
Yeah, I mean a bit I I feel I feel like fear is more the emotion than anger.

1419
01:34:26,440 --> 01:34:27,080
Yeah.

1420
01:34:27,400 --> 01:34:29,240
Yeah I don't I yeah I don't know.

1421
01:34:29,320 --> 01:34:34,510
I I think it's um I think every every generation you sort of feel you look around and

1422
01:34:34,510 --> 01:34:37,070
you're like, what's going on and what do we do?

1423
01:34:37,550 --> 01:34:42,910
Um and I think it's it's always different in the superficials, but I think in the deep

1424
01:34:42,910 --> 01:34:45,150
structure that's always the same problem, right?

1425
01:34:45,230 --> 01:34:48,910
And I think just to make percent, I mean I keep thinking about what you said about George

1426
01:34:48,990 --> 01:34:52,590
Williams being writing adaptation and natural flex to the state of righteous anger.

1427
01:34:52,750 --> 01:34:58,580
And it's like okay, here's a guy who's thoughtful and smart, and says

1428
01:34:58,900 --> 01:35:04,260
a prevailing scarcely examined world

1429
01:35:04,500 --> 01:35:07,540
view is screwing with biology.

1430
01:35:07,700 --> 01:35:08,100
Yeah.

1431
01:35:08,260 --> 01:35:13,700
Um, and it needs to be explicitly confronted and countered.

1432
01:35:13,780 --> 01:35:14,020
Yeah.

1433
01:35:14,260 --> 01:35:20,230
And maybe those kinds of opportunities are rare to see

1434
01:35:20,310 --> 01:35:26,150
clearly that a prevailing view in your discipline is wrong and why it's wrong

1435
01:35:26,230 --> 01:35:30,630
and how to go about explaining why it's wrong to everybody else.

1436
01:35:30,870 --> 01:35:34,310
Maybe those kinds of opportunities are vanishingly rare.

1437
01:35:34,550 --> 01:35:35,430
I don't know.

1438
01:35:36,070 --> 01:35:41,910
Or the people an alternative appro idea is that they're everywhere,

1439
01:35:42,070 --> 01:35:47,110
but the kind of people who are willing to do that and see it are rare.

1440
01:35:48,360 --> 01:35:52,440
maybe yeah no that's a good that's a grim thought I don't know if they're everywhere.

1441
01:35:52,520 --> 01:35:55,720
I mean for one thing maybe there are no prevailing ideas anymore.

1442
01:35:56,360 --> 01:36:00,200
Yeah we're just drowning in data and uh I know exactly

1443
01:36:02,680 --> 01:36:08,360
in not exactly conflicting but different

1444
01:36:08,360 --> 01:36:09,000
models.

1445
01:36:09,560 --> 01:36:14,920
Um there's a lot of that there's a lot of that yeah I've

1446
01:36:15,110 --> 01:36:17,670
I've got angry in the past when I think about it.

1447
01:36:17,910 --> 01:36:23,270
I mean I was angry at social psychology for being the social

1448
01:36:23,350 --> 01:36:26,790
psychology of strangers for decades.

1449
01:36:27,190 --> 01:36:33,030
Um when you know most of what the social psyche is about is

1450
01:36:33,990 --> 01:36:39,960
acquaintances and relatives and friends and enemies, not a not strangers, you know, like

1451
01:36:40,040 --> 01:36:45,480
what a dumb way to investigate fundamental social processes by always

1452
01:36:45,480 --> 01:36:51,000
doing it where it's a stranger interaction that is the model.

1453
01:36:51,320 --> 01:36:52,920
That used to drive me crazy about social.

1454
01:36:53,480 --> 01:36:58,920
There must be other things that one could seize on like that, where you'd say, damn it,

1455
01:36:59,240 --> 01:37:03,320
this is an outrage, and I'm outraged.

1456
01:37:06,170 --> 01:37:10,650
I think it's lovely that I because I do think that um, you know, one of the reasons I

1457
01:37:10,650 --> 01:37:16,650
wanted to work with John and Lita um was because it was very attractive to

1458
01:37:16,650 --> 01:37:20,890
sort of find people who were willing to just be brave.

1459
01:37:20,970 --> 01:37:26,860
You know, I think that it takes a certain amount of courage to um especially when it's

1460
01:37:26,860 --> 01:37:32,460
important things like you know leading to conflict or violence or um uh

1461
01:37:32,620 --> 01:37:38,380
or just social processes in general to to sort of say look uh come

1462
01:37:38,380 --> 01:37:44,380
on let this this this thing that we're assuming or we're ignoring this thing

1463
01:37:44,460 --> 01:37:49,490
um I mean that takes some courage Yeah, yeah, I guess.

1464
01:37:49,730 --> 01:37:54,050
I mean, and that's part of what I'm bemoaning about the state of the academy, because the

1465
01:37:54,050 --> 01:37:59,730
state of the academy um nurtures or squashes

1466
01:37:59,730 --> 01:38:02,130
courage of the sort you're talking about, too.

1467
01:38:02,370 --> 01:38:08,370
And uh and I think it's in a little bit more of a squashing than nurturing kind of state

1468
01:38:08,450 --> 01:38:13,410
now, or at least relatively compared to how it was a couple or three decades ago.

1469
01:38:13,490 --> 01:38:17,500
And that's Disheartening.

1470
01:38:17,820 --> 01:38:23,580
Yeah, I often hear from people who are very senior who I very much admire, and

1471
01:38:23,580 --> 01:38:28,540
they say this to be complimentary, and they'll they'll say, I could have never gotten a job

1472
01:38:28,780 --> 01:38:29,100
now.

1473
01:38:29,660 --> 01:38:35,100
And it is complimentary to us young kids, but it's also

1474
01:38:35,420 --> 01:38:40,330
a real uh um uh uh uh

1475
01:38:40,810 --> 01:38:46,730
criticism in the sense of we've we've created a uh selective regime that's going

1476
01:38:46,970 --> 01:38:52,650
selecting out the rebellious, um uh um subversive minded

1477
01:38:52,810 --> 01:38:58,410
uh um folks you know there's a there's a lot of sort of I think selection for conformity to

1478
01:38:58,730 --> 01:39:02,730
existing approaches or assumptions and playing the game as it exists.

1479
01:39:03,050 --> 01:39:07,450
Um yeah I'm I feel like that's probably been true for a very long time.

1480
01:39:07,800 --> 01:39:08,120
I'm sure.

1481
01:39:09,320 --> 01:39:14,040
When I think about like again, when I think about psychology and social psychology, I mean,

1482
01:39:14,280 --> 01:39:19,080
man, if you didn't do the same experimental social psychology, if you didn't think that,

1483
01:39:19,160 --> 01:39:25,160
you know, Solomon Ash's experiments were a centerpiece

1484
01:39:25,160 --> 01:39:29,800
of your the introductory social psych course you were gonna teach, um, then you were not a

1485
01:39:29,800 --> 01:39:30,440
candidate.

1486
01:39:30,600 --> 01:39:36,270
You know, um you were not and and you know, we've had that kind of

1487
01:39:36,590 --> 01:39:38,990
crap for a long time.

1488
01:39:39,390 --> 01:39:45,230
Um whether Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what what

1489
01:39:47,950 --> 01:39:52,590
best nurtures creativity and imagination.

1490
01:39:53,070 --> 01:39:58,980
Um We used to have a much better granting system in Canada than we do now, and I

1491
01:39:58,980 --> 01:40:01,300
think actually it was good for this purpose.

1492
01:40:01,460 --> 01:40:07,300
Um, basically, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada used to

1493
01:40:07,300 --> 01:40:12,580
award reasonably small grants to a very large proportion of its applicants.

1494
01:40:12,900 --> 01:40:18,580
And so when I arrived at McMaster University,

1495
01:40:18,980 --> 01:40:22,580
well, no, actually, when I arrived, there were a few Deadwood people, but then they

1496
01:40:22,580 --> 01:40:23,460
retired.

1497
01:40:24,310 --> 01:40:28,790
Six or eight years after I arrived, they're in a department of 25 people.

1498
01:40:29,110 --> 01:40:34,790
24 of them had external research grants, and the 25th taught 3,000 students

1499
01:40:34,790 --> 01:40:36,550
introductory psych every year.

1500
01:40:37,830 --> 01:40:43,670
And you know, that ceased to be possible because the success rates went down and down and

1501
01:40:43,670 --> 01:40:43,990
down.

1502
01:40:44,470 --> 01:40:50,310
And I used to fight that battle a bit because keeping in my field anyway,

1503
01:40:50,470 --> 01:40:56,360
which was then animal behavior, Keeping grants small, but giving out

1504
01:40:56,360 --> 01:41:02,360
a lot of them actually gave you more good research for your dollar than concentrating

1505
01:41:02,360 --> 01:41:03,880
them in a smaller number of hands.

1506
01:41:04,040 --> 01:41:05,960
And that was a demonstrable fact.

1507
01:41:06,120 --> 01:41:12,040
I mean, you could analyze data and show that that was the case, both trends within

1508
01:41:12,040 --> 01:41:14,360
countries and between countries.

1509
01:41:14,600 --> 01:41:19,160
You know, Sweden and Canada punched way above their weight because they didn't give big

1510
01:41:19,160 --> 01:41:22,120
grants, but they gave grants to a large proportion of the applicants.

1511
01:41:23,310 --> 01:41:27,870
And you know that that's been

1512
01:41:30,030 --> 01:41:35,950
the move towards: well, we've got a limited budget, we better put most of it in the

1513
01:41:35,950 --> 01:41:41,070
hands of a small number of people who we think are potential or are stars already,

1514
01:41:41,630 --> 01:41:44,270
perhaps past it stars already.

1515
01:41:50,400 --> 01:41:55,520
think that has done some damage and is something that one would like to see reversed.

1516
01:41:55,600 --> 01:42:01,280
And it's done some damage to spontaneity and creativity on the part of the younger

1517
01:42:01,280 --> 01:42:02,240
scientists.

1518
01:42:02,960 --> 01:42:07,040
Because the idea that, you know, if you had an idea and you managed to publish a couple of

1519
01:42:07,040 --> 01:42:10,960
papers a year, then hell yeah, you could have your $25,000 a year and run your lab.

1520
01:42:12,800 --> 01:42:14,080
Was great.

1521
01:42:14,480 --> 01:42:20,210
And I think it fostered more creativity than

1522
01:42:20,850 --> 01:42:25,650
well let's put all the money in the hands of the senior poo bah who surely knows this field

1523
01:42:25,650 --> 01:42:31,570
best um that's a change that I'm I

1524
01:42:31,570 --> 01:42:34,370
guess old guys always think things are getting worse.

1525
01:42:36,050 --> 01:42:37,730
Speaking of inequality, right?

1526
01:42:37,810 --> 01:42:39,650
The why did that happen do you know?

1527
01:42:39,810 --> 01:42:42,450
Why did the I don't know.

1528
01:42:42,610 --> 01:42:48,200
Why did why did the Canadian granting agencies get NSF envy and

1529
01:42:49,000 --> 01:42:51,000
why did NSF do that in the first place?

1530
01:42:51,400 --> 01:42:53,000
Why did NSF do that in the first place?

1531
01:42:53,160 --> 01:42:56,360
But why did other people looking at them think, hey, what a great model?

1532
01:42:56,920 --> 01:43:01,640
When you could show, hey, we're actually getting more science per dollar, more publishable

1533
01:43:01,640 --> 01:43:07,320
science, more quality stuff out the door by any by various metrics

1534
01:43:07,650 --> 01:43:11,330
per dollar than they are by this concentration.

1535
01:43:11,490 --> 01:43:12,610
Um I don't know.

1536
01:43:13,010 --> 01:43:18,450
Yeah, John John John uh John Tuby would always joke that it was evidence that aliens were

1537
01:43:18,450 --> 01:43:23,730
trying to prevent science from happening because his argument was it was a funding system

1538
01:43:23,730 --> 01:43:29,480
designed to minimize the amount of science produced and maximize the amount of wasted time

1539
01:43:29,720 --> 01:43:35,000
in this sort of difficult lottery based system where you have everybody's doing the work

1540
01:43:35,000 --> 01:43:37,240
and only a few people get the resources out of it.

1541
01:43:37,640 --> 01:43:43,400
The grant application process became so much more onerous over the last

1542
01:43:43,400 --> 01:43:47,160
thirty years, more or less continuously, I think, over the last thirty years.

1543
01:43:47,400 --> 01:43:49,730
Um Yeah.

1544
01:43:50,130 --> 01:43:50,610
I love that.

1545
01:43:51,890 --> 01:43:56,850
It's a really comforting way of thinking about uh institutional incompetence and sclerosis

1546
01:43:56,930 --> 01:44:02,850
to view it as uh designed by exactly leave it to John Design by designed

1547
01:44:02,850 --> 01:44:06,770
by hostile or at least with a really bad sense of humor.

1548
01:44:07,250 --> 01:44:07,970
Yes, exactly.

1549
01:44:08,130 --> 01:44:08,450
Exactly.

1550
01:44:08,530 --> 01:44:10,050
I love John's John's humor.

1551
01:44:10,210 --> 01:44:14,850
I actually wanna I wanna I wanted to ask one question, Martin, which is so there is lore um

1552
01:44:15,010 --> 01:44:19,800
from John, I think Lita told me this that something about like your kangaroo rat desert

1553
01:44:19,880 --> 01:44:25,800
like palm spring something some conversation about what to call this field um

1554
01:44:26,120 --> 01:44:32,120
do you have a memory of um the that we had this conversation while they were visiting

1555
01:44:32,120 --> 01:44:36,520
us at our field site yes or something like this where where it was literally like the you

1556
01:44:36,520 --> 01:44:40,360
know it was the analog of the smoking room you know the people sitting around the table

1557
01:44:40,360 --> 01:44:43,470
being like what are we going to call this field and it was, are we going to call it

1558
01:44:43,470 --> 01:44:46,750
Darwinian psychology, evolutionary psychology, psychology at all?

1559
01:44:46,830 --> 01:44:49,870
Do you have a memory of this or what is the Yeah, yeah.

1560
01:44:50,590 --> 01:44:51,310
This happened.

1561
01:44:51,390 --> 01:44:54,270
I'm trying, I don't remember where it's happening.

1562
01:44:54,750 --> 01:44:58,510
I always, you know, I I'm a pedant.

1563
01:44:58,590 --> 01:45:04,430
And so I the very phrase evolutionary psychology, I didn't like it so well because I was

1564
01:45:04,430 --> 01:45:09,560
thinking, it sounds too much like you're going to reconstruct

1565
01:45:09,560 --> 01:45:13,400
phylogeny, you know, if it's evolutionary.

1566
01:45:13,560 --> 01:45:18,200
And people say evolutionary researchers, and it's like, what the hell does that mean?

1567
01:45:20,600 --> 01:45:25,080
I'm just sort of a pedant and using the part of speech in the wrong place or something.

1568
01:45:25,240 --> 01:45:29,720
So I Don Simons called it Darwinian psychology, and I liked that better.

1569
01:45:29,880 --> 01:45:35,090
But then I think maybe John and Lita sort of argued

1570
01:45:35,330 --> 01:45:40,450
persuasively that the trouble with the phrase Darwinian psychology was that

1571
01:45:41,330 --> 01:45:46,770
too often people thought, well, they'd say, Well, Darwin didn't know that or didn't believe

1572
01:45:46,770 --> 01:45:48,610
that or wrote something contrary to that.

1573
01:45:48,690 --> 01:45:53,010
And you say, Well, no, no, I don't mean whatever the hell Darwin meant, or thought when I

1574
01:45:53,010 --> 01:45:55,330
say Darwinian psychology, why are you calling it that?

1575
01:45:55,570 --> 01:45:59,170
And then you're gonna do neo-Darwinian psychology, gag.

1576
01:45:59,570 --> 01:46:05,460
Um, so evolutionary psychology sort of won out, but yeah

1577
01:46:05,460 --> 01:46:07,380
I do I do remember those arguments.

1578
01:46:07,460 --> 01:46:07,620
Yeah.

1579
01:46:07,860 --> 01:46:13,540
We had a lot of stupid arguments in that uh and they as I say the whole notion that we were

1580
01:46:13,540 --> 01:46:19,300
somehow going to write a seminal book together or something foundered

1581
01:46:19,300 --> 01:46:21,300
largely on this kind of pedantic crap.

1582
01:46:21,460 --> 01:46:21,780
Right.

1583
01:46:21,940 --> 01:46:22,580
Um Yeah.

1584
01:46:22,970 --> 01:46:24,330
That feels very human, right?

1585
01:46:24,570 --> 01:46:26,170
Like, what are we gonna call ourselves?

1586
01:46:26,330 --> 01:46:27,450
What are the bylaws?

1587
01:46:27,530 --> 01:46:28,730
Yeah, no, exactly.

1588
01:46:29,130 --> 01:46:29,530
Yes.

1589
01:46:29,610 --> 01:46:29,770
Yeah.

1590
01:46:30,250 --> 01:46:31,370
How about the monkeys?

1591
01:46:33,530 --> 01:46:37,930
I I asked John once, uh, where did Don Simons come from?

1592
01:46:38,410 --> 01:46:40,330
Um, and I want to ask you that.

1593
01:46:40,410 --> 01:46:46,410
Uh, and there's lots of ways to take that, but for me, he just sort of sprang

1594
01:46:46,410 --> 01:46:52,400
forth in the sense of being design-minded in a in an intellectual tradition

1595
01:46:52,560 --> 01:46:55,840
that was maybe unfairly not.

1596
01:46:56,400 --> 01:46:57,520
Maybe this is false.

1597
01:46:57,680 --> 01:46:59,040
But I I'm just always curious.

1598
01:46:59,120 --> 01:47:02,240
I just read Don Simons and I think he's so design-minded.

1599
01:47:02,400 --> 01:47:03,760
Where did he come from?

1600
01:47:04,480 --> 01:47:05,120
Yeah, yeah.

1601
01:47:05,200 --> 01:47:07,360
No, that's a that's that's a great question.

1602
01:47:07,440 --> 01:47:08,560
I'm not sure the answer.

1603
01:47:08,640 --> 01:47:12,160
I mean, his early research was on Rhesus Monkeys.

1604
01:47:12,400 --> 01:47:13,760
Play him Reesus Monkeys.

1605
01:47:13,840 --> 01:47:19,210
He wrote a monograph on that, which I think was based on his PhD thesis work, I think.

1606
01:47:19,530 --> 01:47:24,810
So he was in an animal behavior-y mindset

1607
01:47:24,970 --> 01:47:25,690
somewhere.

1608
01:47:25,930 --> 01:47:29,290
I mean, when you read, you know, what's it called?

1609
01:47:29,450 --> 01:47:33,770
The Evolution of Human Sexuality, his or whatever, his 78 book.

1610
01:47:34,170 --> 01:47:35,050
Yeah, it's a great book.

1611
01:47:35,130 --> 01:47:35,290
Yeah.

1612
01:47:35,610 --> 01:47:37,050
Um, it's a great book.

1613
01:47:37,210 --> 01:47:43,000
And uh and it's clear that he is extremely

1614
01:47:43,000 --> 01:47:48,680
broadly read in cultural anthropology and other and humanities.

1615
01:47:48,840 --> 01:47:54,680
Um and so you sort of forget that, well, he did come out of an animal

1616
01:47:54,680 --> 01:47:57,080
behavior background somehow as well.

1617
01:47:57,640 --> 01:48:00,520
Um but that's a that's a good question.

1618
01:48:00,680 --> 01:48:01,880
I don't know his prehistory.

1619
01:48:01,960 --> 01:48:07,030
I don't Yeah, I don't know how when

1620
01:48:07,750 --> 01:48:13,430
with you know with what colleagues or supervisor or whatever he did his racist work.

1621
01:48:13,590 --> 01:48:13,910
I don't know.

1622
01:48:14,070 --> 01:48:14,230
Yeah.

1623
01:48:14,310 --> 01:48:19,270
I mean, I guess another way of asking it is like what um, and I only I spent a little bit

1624
01:48:19,270 --> 01:48:22,310
of time with him when I was a graduate student at UCSB, very little though.

1625
01:48:22,470 --> 01:48:24,390
I mean, he was sort of gone and retiring.

1626
01:48:24,470 --> 01:48:26,390
I actually inherited part of his library.

1627
01:48:26,470 --> 01:48:27,910
Um, I told David this.

1628
01:48:28,070 --> 01:48:33,920
I have a copy of the Richard Alexander um The biology of moral systems with markups of Don

1629
01:48:33,920 --> 01:48:35,520
Simon's writing.

1630
01:48:35,680 --> 01:48:40,480
Um and he sort of loves, he loves Richard Alexander Alexander, he loves him, but he'll

1631
01:48:40,560 --> 01:48:45,680
he'll still sort of say this is baby counting in the margins some places, you know.

1632
01:48:45,840 --> 01:48:49,040
So it's a lovely artifact of like the real time thing.

1633
01:48:49,200 --> 01:48:55,200
But what in in sort of real time or any of these people, um for any of these people for

1634
01:48:55,200 --> 01:49:00,090
us who who weren't there, you know, was Don Simons, I mean, the cartoonish view would be

1635
01:49:00,090 --> 01:49:02,810
sort of, it's like, you know, he wakes up in the morning, he's like, you're not being

1636
01:49:02,810 --> 01:49:04,970
design minded enough to like his colleagues.

1637
01:49:05,210 --> 01:49:06,810
Is that is that a caricature?

1638
01:49:06,970 --> 01:49:12,650
Is that too, you know, was he just concerned about getting evolution generally into human

1639
01:49:12,650 --> 01:49:13,210
behavior?

1640
01:49:13,370 --> 01:49:16,490
You know, what I don't know.

1641
01:49:17,050 --> 01:49:17,770
It's a great question.

1642
01:49:17,850 --> 01:49:19,850
I mean, I didn't have enough interaction with Don.

1643
01:49:19,930 --> 01:49:20,650
I had some.

1644
01:49:20,970 --> 01:49:26,960
Um, he was the main person who sort of got on our case about try to be more

1645
01:49:26,960 --> 01:49:28,640
explicitly psychological.

1646
01:49:29,360 --> 01:49:35,280
You know what is it, what is it that you're imagining are the

1647
01:49:35,280 --> 01:49:40,880
psychological phenomena, processes, entities that underlie

1648
01:49:41,200 --> 01:49:45,040
the things that you're thinking are good intuitive hypotheses.

1649
01:49:45,920 --> 01:49:51,760
He pushed that hard at me anyway, um and uh

1650
01:49:52,480 --> 01:49:54,750
I presume at others as well.

1651
01:49:54,990 --> 01:49:58,350
Um he was a bit of a recluse though.

1652
01:49:58,590 --> 01:50:01,390
Um he didn't come to AH Best meetings much.

1653
01:50:01,550 --> 01:50:07,390
He came to the one we had here in Canada, in Southern Ontario, in 1991, which was the

1654
01:50:07,390 --> 01:50:08,350
third meeting.

1655
01:50:08,510 --> 01:50:11,630
And I don't know if he ever attended another after that.

1656
01:50:11,790 --> 01:50:13,630
Um, if he did, it was like one.

1657
01:50:14,030 --> 01:50:19,820
Um I remember him saying when I was trying to urge him to go maybe to

1658
01:50:19,820 --> 01:50:22,060
an overseas meeting or something.

1659
01:50:22,220 --> 01:50:24,540
Um he said, I live in Santa Barbara.

1660
01:50:24,620 --> 01:50:27,420
Why would anybody ever leave Santa Barbara to go anywhere?

1661
01:50:28,060 --> 01:50:30,380
It is a problem, yes, no, no for sure.

1662
01:50:30,540 --> 01:50:31,340
Yes, exactly.

1663
01:50:31,500 --> 01:50:33,820
Especially in the winter, yes, exactly.

1664
01:50:34,460 --> 01:50:35,890
Um yeah.

1665
01:50:36,370 --> 01:50:37,970
And and he loved that.

1666
01:50:38,050 --> 01:50:39,890
I mean, he loved his orchids.

1667
01:50:40,210 --> 01:50:43,250
He Yeah, he was a funny guy.

1668
01:50:43,490 --> 01:50:49,010
Um I hadn't seen him for a long, long time until I saw him at at the Tubi Memorial.

1669
01:50:49,170 --> 01:50:49,490
Yeah.

1670
01:50:49,730 --> 01:50:55,570
And unfortunately he was um cancer that he knew at that

1671
01:50:55,570 --> 01:51:01,180
time was terminal and he didn't last a great deal longer, but he was seeming to be in sort

1672
01:51:01,180 --> 01:51:03,900
of good spirits and at ease with it all at that time.

1673
01:51:04,140 --> 01:51:04,300
Yeah.

1674
01:51:04,540 --> 01:51:09,820
He was always a very mellow presence in my company.

1675
01:51:09,980 --> 01:51:13,340
He never I never saw him angry.

1676
01:51:13,660 --> 01:51:14,140
Yeah.

1677
01:51:14,460 --> 01:51:16,780
But I didn't see him all that many times.

1678
01:51:18,330 --> 01:51:23,770
Uh but yeah, but is there as we're wrapping up here, you know, do you is there anything

1679
01:51:23,770 --> 01:51:28,650
that you would love to have people either know about any of the people who are gone or is

1680
01:51:28,650 --> 01:51:30,330
there a funny anecdote?

1681
01:51:30,570 --> 01:51:36,090
Um uh and maybe this is sort of too trite to ask that kind of question, or just um

1682
01:51:36,330 --> 01:51:41,940
yeah, what would you want to tell a hungry, eager grad student who's just

1683
01:51:41,940 --> 01:51:47,620
sort of eagerly looking forward to a career in evolutionary behavioral

1684
01:51:47,620 --> 01:51:48,580
sciences.

1685
01:51:51,460 --> 01:51:52,100
Huh.

1686
01:51:52,660 --> 01:51:58,420
We were, I think I said this already, we were uh extremely

1687
01:51:58,420 --> 01:52:02,350
lucky, whether we knew it or not at the time, to have the

1688
01:52:02,990 --> 01:52:07,550
enthusiastic support of Bill Hamilton.

1689
01:52:07,950 --> 01:52:12,110
Although Bill did say that he thought the Human Behavior and Evolution Society that we

1690
01:52:12,110 --> 01:52:13,950
should keep it a secret society.

1691
01:52:15,230 --> 01:52:16,750
That's not a bad idea, actually.

1692
01:52:16,830 --> 01:52:18,990
We can still circle back to that, actually.

1693
01:52:19,630 --> 01:52:21,150
He was the first president.

1694
01:52:22,190 --> 01:52:22,590
That's fine.

1695
01:52:23,150 --> 01:52:27,840
But you know, to have the enthusiastic support of Hamilton and George Williams, Bob

1696
01:52:27,840 --> 01:52:29,600
Trivers, you mentioned, yeah.

1697
01:52:29,760 --> 01:52:33,600
Um, Sewell Wright came to an early pre-meeting.

1698
01:52:33,760 --> 01:52:37,920
And that was really funny because uh he was in his 90s already.

1699
01:52:38,160 --> 01:52:43,280
And I don't know if he'd ever met Bill Hamilton before, but he and Hamilton were, you know,

1700
01:52:43,440 --> 01:52:47,520
just sort of nadering away together a lot whenever they could.

1701
01:52:47,680 --> 01:52:51,680
But he sat in the front row for all these student presentations, asked them all good

1702
01:52:51,680 --> 01:52:54,000
questions, had suggestions for their field work.

1703
01:52:54,650 --> 01:52:56,010
He was wonderful.

1704
01:52:57,130 --> 01:53:02,730
And you know, the sense that significant

1705
01:53:02,730 --> 01:53:08,730
figures in evolutionary biology and the people who are formulating the big general

1706
01:53:08,730 --> 01:53:13,690
theories that weren't human specific thought that what you were doing was worthwhile and

1707
01:53:13,690 --> 01:53:15,370
interesting was huge.

1708
01:53:15,610 --> 01:53:16,890
It was absolutely huge.

1709
01:53:17,050 --> 01:53:22,300
I don't know if there's anything quite like that available

1710
01:53:23,180 --> 01:53:23,500
now.

1711
01:53:28,460 --> 01:53:29,820
There must be.

1712
01:53:30,460 --> 01:53:31,100
Yeah.

1713
01:53:32,540 --> 01:53:38,460
Yeah, I wish I wish there were more of that, of just applying theories that you know apply

1714
01:53:38,460 --> 01:53:40,940
to to all animals and just applying them to humans.

1715
01:53:41,020 --> 01:53:45,210
I mean, that's the beauty of uh of the evolutionary approach and part of what attracted me

1716
01:53:45,210 --> 01:53:50,250
to the field is you know ideas like reciprocal altruism, parent offspring conflict, uh

1717
01:53:50,410 --> 01:53:56,170
biological markets, signaling theory, like all these ideas apply to, you know, uh animals

1718
01:53:56,170 --> 01:54:01,850
across the animal kingdom, and they give you the additional insight of uh

1719
01:54:02,090 --> 01:54:03,450
how human beings work.

1720
01:54:04,490 --> 01:54:10,410
Yeah, and and and I I I guess I would still say to uh to a young person interested

1721
01:54:10,410 --> 01:54:15,560
in this field is get the to the lab

1722
01:54:16,200 --> 01:54:21,400
of somebody studying some non-human animal and do a project with them.

1723
01:54:21,560 --> 01:54:27,080
Um, I think I think having a research background in the study of non-human animals, and to

1724
01:54:27,080 --> 01:54:31,240
some extent actually having an anthropological background, provides the same thing, which

1725
01:54:31,240 --> 01:54:36,520
is a bit more of a comparative perspective, a bit less hazard of

1726
01:54:36,840 --> 01:54:42,670
thinking, you know, in weirdly ethnocentric or anthropocentric ways.

1727
01:54:43,950 --> 01:54:49,950
And you know, some of the best, some of the best evolutionary psychologists

1728
01:54:49,950 --> 01:54:55,950
early on, whether they called themselves psychologists or not, um did come from studying

1729
01:54:55,950 --> 01:54:56,910
other animals.

1730
01:54:57,390 --> 01:54:59,870
Surprising amount of entomology in there, actually.

1731
01:55:02,350 --> 01:55:07,380
And uh and I always felt that that was useful.

1732
01:55:07,540 --> 01:55:12,900
It just sort of made a deep

1733
01:55:13,060 --> 01:55:18,420
comparative mindset part of what they brought to the table.

1734
01:55:18,580 --> 01:55:24,500
And that sometimes some of the most embarrassingly bad evolutionary psychology has

1735
01:55:24,500 --> 01:55:29,620
come from people who have never given a thought to any other creature than Homo sapiens.

1736
01:55:30,180 --> 01:55:35,870
So uh so that would be one little bit of advice is to uh become involved,

1737
01:55:35,950 --> 01:55:41,870
even just you know, as a sort of secondary project on route to your master's or PhD

1738
01:55:42,110 --> 01:55:47,470
in some sort of non human animal research, it will it will do you good, I think.

1739
01:55:48,430 --> 01:55:48,830
Yeah.

1740
01:55:49,470 --> 01:55:50,110
That's great advice.

1741
01:55:50,430 --> 01:55:51,230
Yeah, that's fantastic.

1742
01:55:51,390 --> 01:55:56,750
I'm also hearing the advice is maybe for middle or even later career folks to also

1743
01:55:56,750 --> 01:56:02,460
encourage young students and give your support to them because that can mean a lot more

1744
01:56:02,460 --> 01:56:04,700
to them than you might think.

1745
01:56:05,660 --> 01:56:07,020
Yes, obviously.

1746
01:56:07,180 --> 01:56:11,100
I mean, anybody who's a half-decent teacher Sardo knows that, but yes.

1747
01:56:11,500 --> 01:56:13,100
It's easy to forget though, I think.

1748
01:56:13,180 --> 01:56:19,020
And you know, I think I've I've heard people um talk, and

1749
01:56:19,020 --> 01:56:24,380
even just as you said, I mean, very famous people, at least in our orbit, you know, Sewell

1750
01:56:24,460 --> 01:56:29,870
Wright, um, going to students' talks in in a way that you it's it's

1751
01:56:29,870 --> 01:56:34,910
remarkable, not in the um exaggerative way, but just that it's notable, right?

1752
01:56:35,070 --> 01:56:40,830
Going to posters, talking to students, early career students, that that is a virtue, yeah,

1753
01:56:41,150 --> 01:56:42,190
I'm hearing you say.

1754
01:56:42,350 --> 01:56:42,750
Yeah.

1755
01:56:43,230 --> 01:56:45,150
Yes, yes, yes, indeed.

1756
01:56:45,390 --> 01:56:51,070
Um students are an enthusiastic bunch sometimes, if you you know, if you

1757
01:56:51,920 --> 01:56:53,840
play play them properly.

1758
01:56:54,400 --> 01:57:00,160
They they they seem like a bunch of blasse somethings that are you know that their faces

1759
01:57:00,320 --> 01:57:02,640
off their phones, but yes, exactly.

1760
01:57:03,120 --> 01:57:06,720
There can be a surprising amount of enthusiasm from young students.

1761
01:57:08,080 --> 01:57:09,440
That's fantastic.

1762
01:57:09,680 --> 01:57:11,920
Uh David, it looked like you were gonna ask something.

1763
01:57:12,350 --> 01:57:15,150
No, I I think uh we're just about approaching the end.

1764
01:57:15,230 --> 01:57:17,790
It was really wonderful uh talking to you, Martin.

1765
01:57:17,950 --> 01:57:20,670
This was a fascinating and and lovely conversation.

1766
01:57:20,990 --> 01:57:23,950
Yeah, no, lovely talking to you guys, and it's nice to meet you, David.

1767
01:57:25,870 --> 01:57:26,030
Yeah.

1768
01:57:27,230 --> 01:57:28,830
I think it used to be because I've met him before.

1769
01:57:29,310 --> 01:57:29,950
Yeah, no, exactly.

1770
01:57:30,030 --> 01:57:31,710
I think yes, I think yeah.

1771
01:57:31,870 --> 01:57:35,630
Um should we have asked you anything really quickly before we leave?

1772
01:57:35,870 --> 01:57:37,310
It's our compulsory question.

1773
01:57:37,470 --> 01:57:40,030
We only have one ever, and that's that's the one.

1774
01:57:40,990 --> 01:57:42,740
It's a hard, hard probably.

1775
01:57:43,060 --> 01:57:43,460
Yeah.

1776
01:57:43,700 --> 01:57:45,220
That's a great answer.

1777
01:57:45,540 --> 01:57:48,740
That's that's the best answer I think we have so far.

1778
01:57:49,540 --> 01:57:51,940
Undoubtedly, probably, yes, exactly.

1779
01:57:52,100 --> 01:57:53,300
Well, Martin, it was a pleasure.

1780
01:57:53,380 --> 01:57:53,940
Thank you so much.

1781
01:57:54,100 --> 01:57:54,660
Really appreciate it.

1782
01:57:54,980 --> 01:57:55,460
Thank you guys.

1783
01:57:55,540 --> 01:57:55,700
Yeah.

1784
01:57:55,940 --> 01:57:56,580
Thank you guys.

1785
01:57:56,660 --> 01:57:57,460
Have a pleasant day.

1786
01:57:57,780 --> 01:57:59,380
Yeah, you too, and stay warm in Ontario.

1787
01:58:00,340 --> 01:58:00,980
Evening for me.

1788
01:58:01,220 --> 01:58:02,660
Yes, exactly.

1789
01:58:05,140 --> 01:58:07,130
Oh, that was wonderful conversation.

1790
01:58:07,290 --> 01:58:08,010
Really enjoyed it.

1791
01:58:08,090 --> 01:58:12,330
David, I want to remind everyone that you do the wonderful music for the podcast too.

1792
01:58:12,410 --> 01:58:13,850
I think people don't always know that.

1793
01:58:14,330 --> 01:58:14,890
That is true.

1794
01:58:14,970 --> 01:58:16,810
I'm an amateur composer.

1795
01:58:16,970 --> 01:58:19,290
I composed that uh little bit of music.

1796
01:58:19,450 --> 01:58:23,210
Um it was uh do you use a keyboard with a MIDI uh connection?

1797
01:58:23,530 --> 01:58:24,010
No actually.

1798
01:58:24,170 --> 01:58:27,530
Um I just drag the notes with my mouse.

1799
01:58:27,930 --> 01:58:28,250
Really?

1800
01:58:28,650 --> 01:58:29,130
Yeah, yeah.

1801
01:58:29,530 --> 01:58:31,290
Just cop copy and paste notes and yeah.

1802
01:58:32,440 --> 01:58:34,040
I think I think Mozart did that too.

1803
01:58:34,280 --> 01:58:35,160
Or was it Beethoven?

1804
01:58:35,400 --> 01:58:41,160
It was one of those Yeah, I'm following in uh Beethoven's

1805
01:58:41,160 --> 01:58:41,560
footsteps.

1806
01:58:41,880 --> 01:58:46,360
Which wait, um I I even I went to one of their houses when I was living in Europe.

1807
01:58:46,440 --> 01:58:48,920
Which one was the one that was doing stuff when they were like five?

1808
01:58:49,080 --> 01:58:50,920
Was that uh Beethoven?

1809
01:58:51,400 --> 01:58:53,400
One maybe both, maybe I don't remember.

1810
01:58:53,640 --> 01:58:56,440
I feel like they're uh they all have wait which one was Amadeus?

1811
01:58:56,520 --> 01:58:57,240
That was Mozart.

1812
01:58:57,480 --> 01:58:58,200
That's Mozart, yeah.

1813
01:58:58,440 --> 01:58:59,720
Yeah, Mozart is the one I'm thinking.

1814
01:58:59,800 --> 01:59:01,320
He's the one in Austria, yeah.

1815
01:59:01,730 --> 01:59:02,610
Yeah, that's right.

1816
01:59:02,690 --> 01:59:06,450
Oh, by the way, Amadeus is a great movie, wonderful movie about uh envy envy.

1817
01:59:06,610 --> 01:59:07,250
Oh, yes.

1818
01:59:07,410 --> 01:59:09,090
Very psychology of envy, yeah.

1819
01:59:09,410 --> 01:59:10,530
Yes, yes, yeah.

1820
01:59:11,330 --> 01:59:15,570
That's our that's our this this episode is sponsored by the Omnismooth.

1821
01:59:15,810 --> 01:59:17,570
That's our go go watch Amadeus.

1822
01:59:17,890 --> 01:59:22,690
Yeah, it's a great yeah, it's a great slice of human nature, uh, and beautifully acted.

1823
01:59:22,770 --> 01:59:28,530
And um um there's nothing it's a lovely virtuosity and proje

1824
01:59:29,010 --> 01:59:31,010
prejudicity, is that a word?

1825
01:59:31,720 --> 01:59:33,000
Prodigiousness, maybe.

1826
01:59:33,080 --> 01:59:33,320
Yeah.

1827
01:59:33,560 --> 01:59:34,440
Prodigicity.

1828
01:59:35,000 --> 01:59:35,720
Prodigiocity.

1829
01:59:35,880 --> 01:59:36,120
I don't know.

1830
01:59:36,200 --> 01:59:36,440
I don't know.

1831
01:59:36,920 --> 01:59:37,800
I guess as good as mine.

1832
01:59:38,120 --> 01:59:40,840
Well we're we were clearly prodigious at using the word prodigious.

1833
01:59:41,480 --> 01:59:45,000
Yeah, I don't know how we got there, but uh we took a journey.

1834
01:59:45,320 --> 01:59:47,800
Yeah, but anyway, uh everyone, thank you for listening.

1835
01:59:47,880 --> 01:59:50,360
Uh please support the podcast in the usual ways.

1836
01:59:50,440 --> 01:59:53,240
And David, I'll I guess I'll see you next week.

1837
01:59:53,560 --> 01:59:54,760
Yeah, sounds great.

1838
01:59:55,000 --> 01:59:55,950
Okay, you guys.