The Origins of evolutionary psychology with Martin Daly
2026-03-31 12:00:00.000 +00:00

David, this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. Boom. Did it be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of David, today we have a guest who needs no introduction, Martin Daly. Martin Daly, uh one of the founders of evolutionary psychology as we know it, though he might quibble with the term evolutionary psychology, he was there at the forefront of the uh origins of this way of thinking, this interdisciplinary uh scholarship that emerged, um, expert on homicide, uh conflict, uh inequality and its effects on conflict. We we covered it all. Uh kangaroo rats. And um and yeah, it was a lovely conversation talking about um where

where the field came from, where it's going. One of the wonderful things about the evolutionary behavioral sciences is that um people like Martin and um Margot Wilson, who unfortunately passed away um too soon, um, and people like um John Chibi, Lita Cosmedys, and also John Pass away. Um, you know, the these wonderful foundational people are just such incredible thinkers. And uh what I loved about this conversation, in addition to sort of hearing the history, is uh we also just get a sense of um Martin Daly is just such a a sharp mind and we get a sample of that thinking even in this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. It was it was a really fun conversation for me to just take part in and I'm sure you'll

enjoy listening to it as well, particularly if you're interested in the origins of evolutionary behavioral science and uh and the history of it all. Without further ado, here is Martin and David and I talking about evolutionary psychology. Enjoy. Well, Martin, thank you so much for being here. Um it's a real honor and pleasure um we we have not had the um really any of the founders of evolutionary psychology yet on is that true it is i'm surprised i know yes um i mean darwin's been dead for quite a while yeah i know it's been hard to book darwin it's yeah he's despite david's best attempts um yeah i know but yeah, David would love to talk to Darwin. We talked about that recently. So Martin, thank you so much for being here.

There's a lot to talk about, but for me at least, I get to selfishly ask you um a question I've always wanted to ask, which is I was a student of Lita's and John's, um, and they there was always a lore of the origins of evolutionary psychology. And I appreciate the fact that saying that there's even an origin to evolutionary psychology is somewhat problematic because of course the ideas, right? The expression of the emotions in man and animals is always my start point. There you go. Yeah. Exactly. So can you? I mean, I don't know if you've ever gotten this question, if you get it a lot, but the the simple question, just put simply, is from my perspective, you are one of the important people that were there when evolutionary psychology started.

Many of our listeners are younger people, like David and I, our generation are even younger, who may have only indirectly heard what that backstory was. If you had a chance to tell these academic grandchildren and great-grandchildren, in essence, um uh the the story as you see what is important for them to know, um what would you tell them? Well, I I guess first of all, I'd say I I like to think of the study of evolution and human behavior as a very interdisciplinary field. The human behavior and evolution society was initially dominated by anthropologists and biologists with a very with a minority smattering of psychologists. Um and and the anthropologists were often the best psychologists. I mean, that's been true for a long time.

You know, we can think of Golan and Fessler, who edited the journal, are both anthropologists. You think of Clark Barrett and Ed Hagan and Elizabeth Cashton, who've all been presidents of the society. They're all anthropologists, they're all very psychological. So I never like to talk about evolutionary psychology as if it's a branch of psychology when it's you know been a much more interdisciplinary agenda. I became a keen Darwinian, I guess, um, more as a postdoc than younger. Um, I was an animal behavior guy, non-human animal behavior, studying small mammals, and as a postdoc, I joined a research group in the UK, John Crook's research group. If anybody's ever heard of John, John was the founder of what was then called

socioecology, the business of trying to study a group of related species and attribute their social differences to something ecological, which usually meant to the distribution of their food and their predators and whether females would aggregate because of the distribution of their food and predators and that sort of thing. And there were people working on birds, there were people working on ungulates. I went there in 1971, after I finished my PhD with intent to become a field worker and do this kind of work on rodents. And I did for decades, although in a way it was a very stupid decision because I mean you can't really watch rodents doing anything in the wild. They're mostly nocturnal, they mostly live in burrows.

Um, you know, so like observational studies of these animals was a mistake. But in any case, it was a great research group. Um, and Crook was in the psych department. Um You've probably heard of some of the people who were postdocs there at the same time I was. Richard Rangham was, Robin Dunbar, I guess was a graduate student there, did his PhD work on Jelata baboons in the Ethiopian highlands. And that was sort of the point at which I became a rabid Darwinian. Then after I came back to North America and uh got attached to Margot Wilson, my late spouse and partner, we were running a seminar on the subject of sociobiology right after Ed Wilson's book came out in 1976. I guess we were running this seminar.

And a couple of graduate students kind of raising questions about Homo sapiens, which we knew nothing about and cared less about, kind of moved us into the human research area. I'm trying to think when I first met John and Lita, I I think it was 1979, I think. I gave a research talk at Harvard, and I think, were they still graduate students then? Maybe. Because I don't think they were. I was at the 1976 AAA meetings, American Anthropological Association meetings. And in some ways, that's a that's an interesting starting point because although it's an anthropology meeting, there were two human sociobiology sessions at that meeting. And the reason is because Irv de Boer at Harvard and Napoleon Shagnon

and Bill Irons from Michigan and Northwestern had separately proposed a set of talks by mostly their students in human sociobiology. And then when the program committee saw this, they put them in touch with each other, and the two were sort of amalgamated. And that was an event that uh brought together a lot of, I mean, I I first met Sarah Hurdy there, I first met Shagnon and Irons there, I first met Dick Alexander there, um, I first met Bob Trivers there, I think. Yeah. Um so although it was a it was an anthropology meeting, but there were a lot of biologists there, there were some psychologists there, well me anyway, um, and uh and and it was kind of a foundational event for what I think of as this

field. Uh 1976, why then? Why why did this happen then? Yeah. Any guests, yeah. Yeah, that that's a great question. I mean, um there were two centers in the US where something was crystallizing in anthropology. One was Harvard. Um, I mean Irv Devor had been a baboom researcher, and then he'd he'd become involved in the uh Kalahari San um research, and several of the people who I think were his students or affiliates anyway, Mel Connor, Pat Draper, um, Nadim Peacock, a whole bunch of these people have been going there and doing behavior research, let's cash them for that matter, um, and were bringing a kind of evolution, well, bringing a strongly evolution-minded perspective to bear on their observations there.

And at the same time, Shagnon, who had got his PhD at Michigan, I think, and then had moved to Penn State briefly, and then to Northwestern. There was a little circle revolving around Dick Alexander at Michigan. And Alexander wrote this paper on the evolution of social behavior. I don't know if you've ever read it. It was in the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics in 1974. So it appeared the year before Ed Wilson's book. And what's nice about it, it was not mostly about people. It was mostly about well, Dixon was the curator of insects at the University of Michigan. It was most more about insects than any other animal group. But he had a bunch of thoughts towards the end about Cousin marriage and asymmetries and cousin relations and human beings that he sort of laid out,

and he was he was kind of a focal person for the graduate students in anthropology who's worked with Shagnon and others who got interested in evolution. Mark Flynn, Paul Turk, and Laura Betzig, um several other people whose names should come to mind but don't. Um they all kind of congealed around Alexander. And we'd have these annual meetings. Uh Margot and I were part of this for reasons that actually sort of escaped me. I do remember now, but I won't go into it. But anyway, we we uh we had these little annual meetings from 1981 until the foundation of HBES in 89. And we'd have them in either Ann Arbor or in Evanston, Illinois, for the you know, where Northwestern was and where Bill and Napa both established themselves.

And there were a lot of student papers, but one thing that really made it work and made it come together was right from square one, we had the support and enthusiastic participation, even of Bill Hamilton and George Williams, and Alexander, who were sort of, in many people's minds, the three leading theoretical biologists, certainly Hamilton and Williams anyway, thinking about evolution of behavior. And they were wholeheartedly in favor of taking this to Homo sapiens and coming to the meetings and being there and interacting with the graduate students and telling them what they thought they should also do next time they went to the field. And it really made everybody feel like this was a legitimate enterprise.

You know, Lita reminds me, we've been exchanging emails recently. She wants to remind me of how much flack the uh evolution and human behavior approach used to get, and the hostility of the Goulds and Lewontins and so on. And that's true, but uh but I always felt like there was a big supportive environment in evolutionary biology that was that was in our corner as well. And another guy is John Alcock, actually, who wrote the leading textbook in animal behavior that went through like eight editions. It was the best-selling textbook in animal behavior for edition after edition after edition for decades. And he always had a bit of human stuff in there and was always supportive too, although he wasn't somebody who came to those meetings.

Um, so you know I never felt like we were that besieged. I felt much more like it was it was a supported enterprise. Now, in a way, none of this is terribly psychological. Um Margo and I were the only psychologists, I think, on the uh founding committee of the of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, or whatever steering committee is it was called originally. Um, and we're both crappy psychologists in some way. I mean, I mean, Margot was a was a behavioral endocrinologist who castrated monkeys, and uh and I was a guy who followed rodents with little microtransmitters in them around the desert. Um so neither of us was a very good psychologist. We got involved in human research anyway, obviously, but um it wasn't very

psychological initially, but it's the same field to my mind. It's still the same field to my mind. I I know I piss off some anthropologists when I say that uh you know it's the same field because oh no, we do human behavioral ecology and that's different. And it's like, come on, you know, if you're interested in human decision processes, we could call that psychology. You know, um don't get bent out of shape. And again, it's it's all one field to me. And it was sort of coming together in the late 70s and then throughout the 80s. Well, another seminal event actually was again Dick Alexander in nineteen seventy-eight. He and Don Tinkle at Michigan hosted a meeting on the evolution of behavior that drew a big crowd.

Um Margot and I had just written the book Sex Evolution and Behavior, and it had landed on Dick's desk, And I was told by one of his students later that Alexander's reaction to it, although I had met him in 76, I don't think he remembered his reaction to it was allegedly, who the hell are these people and how did they get a hold of my course notes? Um because it was so much up the same alley as the way he was thinking about a lot of things. But anyway, so he phoned me up and invited me to this meeting. So I mean Margo to this meeting, and so we gave a talk there. Mildred Dijkman, whose name you may or may not know, gave a talk there. She she was an anthropologist at Sonoma State University who had written some cool stuff on

hypergyne, on upward marriage in India and China, especially in India, and you know, sort of what people were trying to do in marrying their kids up. And uh who else? There was another human talk. There was a anyway, there were just like three or four human talks and a whole bunch of non human talks, all at this same meeting, with like 600 people in the audience, including Hamilton and Williams, and you know, a a lot of the top people in animal behavior. And uh and we got a good reception there. I mean, you didn't run into anybody saying it's preposterous that you're taking this approach with Homo sapiens, the cultural and thoughtful animal, or some stupid thing. Um, nobody said that. Do you do you think um anything has changed since the

founding of the field? I mean, you mentioned that it had the support of luminaries in uh biological theory like Hamilton uh and Travers uh and Williams. Um do you think that uh we continue to have that support or has has it dwindled? Uh it's an interesting question. I mean you know Hamilton's death was a painful blow at George's George Williams's was another um I don't think we need the support of evolutionary biologists in the same way. I mean, you know, certain people, Lita and John among them, David Buss, Doug Kenrick, fought the good fight of submitting evolution-minded papers to the goddamn psychological journals until they took them. There were years and years and years where you know evolution mindedness was beyond the

pale and the journal of personality and social psychology. And then it wasn't anymore. And every issue at least contains a paper or two by somebody who's thinking evolutionarily, usually reasonably sophisticatedly. So yeah, things have changed in that regard. I think most psychologists Have wrapped their mind around the idea that sure evolution must have something to do with the psyche. I mean, that, you know, maybe I, you know, I don't I don't see why it's relevant to my particular interest in, you know, some whatever, but uh, but that it has, you know, legitimate relevance to psychology, I think, is pretty widely accepted now. I think. I hope. Maybe I don't travel enough. Definitely more so.

There's you know definite definite progress. I'd like to see more acceptance and integration of evolutionary perspectives. But yeah, there's definitely it's it's become more accepted, more mainstream, more um or less, less controversial. Yeah. Yeah. I mean psychology, well, there are whole fields of psychology that all of us don't pay any attention to, but I mean scientific psychology um was never our problem. I mean the the battles are harder for the cultural anthropologists um or have been. There's been more outright antipathy um to biology there than but you know geez still to this day I marvel at the fact that there were and are people like well no longer are in the case of Stephen J. Gould, but you know biologists who, you know, the minute you talk about Homo sapiens,

you're obviously some kind of fascist or some you know evil person. I I I can't figure out what's going on between their ears, what their problem is. So in no so we're at 1978. Um is the oh yeah, sorry, Martin, go ahead. Uh oh you're okay, great. Um so we're at 1978. What is the what what what where so H human behavioral ecology, HBE, and evolutionary psychology for for my generation, which is a generation after Clark, um, you know, I grew up in the aftermath of sort of Rob Boyd and John Tuby being at loggerheads. Um, and we sort of joke about that amongst the my generation of students of theirs, you know, like uh Christina Moyenna, I joke about that. Um that's a that's my way of expressing. I grew up in a a world where evolutionary psychology and human

behavioral ecology were were slightly pitted against each other, but I realize as you're saying they're the same field, and I think my generation sort of feels the same way. And in 1978, what was uh um where was there the beginning of a tension between those two or where did that come from that yeah that's a that's a really interesting question i if there was i wasn't picking up on it um but there may have been um you know the the earliest glimmers i can sort of remember was when Margot and I were editing the journal Evolution in Human Behavior, which didn't, which was only beginning in 1996, I think, to 2006, we we did the editing and then other people took over. At that time, it was certainly on the

table. Like I remember going to HBES meetings and a number of anthropologists were sort of this this society's becoming dominated by psychologists. We need a different society. We don't want any part of this. Um and the ones who were sticking around were sometimes um just as critical and difficult. I mean, we would every year we would have to trot out the editor's report from the past year of what submissions we've had, what the acceptance rates were and stuff. And you had to fight this prejudice that, oh, you know, it's it's the journal is full of psych because it's got psychological editors. And you say, well, you know, actually the acceptance rate is higher for papers from anthropologists than from psychologists, and it always was.

And I mean, for year after year after year it wasn't. I don't think it's because we were biased in favor of the anthropologists. I think it's because you got more small, quick and dirty stuff from psychologists than you get from anthropologists. Yeah. The costs of doing psychological research are much lower than doing fieldwork. And a lot a lot of people thought, man, I can dash off a paper from you know what I farted last week. Um you know, and then those would get rejected. But in any case, you know, we had this business of like, how many times do I have to tell Ruth Mace that the editorial board is not discriminating against anthropologists? Um, and here are the data, you know, and and that that would come up a

lot. Um and yeah, so so certainly by the nine by the mid-90s, late 90s, that was becoming visible to me. I don't think I was aware of it much earlier. Yeah. A lot of the young anthropologists who were involved at the time that HBES was founded had trouble getting jobs in the field. there's different periods of freeze of availability of positions in different disciplines a bit. But uh you know, so so the people who were enthusiasts in the first few years of of um HBES, the anthropological enthusiasts mostly didn't get jobs. Laura Betzig never got a job. Paul Turk didn't get a job and went back to medical school and became a pediatrician. Um Nancy Bertet didn't get a job. There were there were lots of good, there were lots of Mark Flynn did, and that was like a

big deal. Um so that may have fueled some sense of resentment. I don't know, but I still always sort of think of you know, most of the anthropologists I knew. Well, oh, the other event that's interesting in this regard is gonna say most of the anthropologists I knew were were quite favorable to psychology, but maybe that's because that's why I knew them, maybe. Um, in that, you know, I think of Don Simons in particular. Um and Don made a number of enemies within anthropology by criticizing what he called Darwinian anthropology. And what he was really after was he was criticizing primarily the notion that the acid test of an evolution-minded hypothesis is to count reproductive output. Um and you know that that that's the way you had to test things.

And and he was highly critical of that. And some people were highly critical of him. Not all of them anthropologists, Dick Alexander was really pissed off at him for that, not so much because he disagreed as because he thought it was unfair that Don trotted out people like Laura Betzig, who were looking for jobs as prime examples of this fallacy, this fallacious approach. And he thought, you know, pick on someone your own size was was sort of his complaint. But uh yeah, there was there was that kind of tension. But it I didn't see it as the human behavior ecology. We do human behavioral ecology and we are different from psychologists, and we are insulted by you calling us psychologists. I didn't see it until later.

I'm trying to remember what year Margot and I wrote a paper in animal behavior that was a sort of review paper, an invited paper, um human behavior as animal behavior, we called it. And uh and was just sort of, you know, bringing the same approach to bear on Homo sapiens as you do on other critters, um, the same conceptual approach, and to some extent the same methodological approach. And in that, um, we made some allusion to evolutionary psychology and we said, you know, which which we which is a term for present purposes we're going to use more broadly than um is often done to include anything that involves addressing psychological questions from an evolutionary perspective, regardless of discipline.

Like if like if you're interested in foraging decisions and you're taking an evolution-minded approach, then you're doing evolutionary psychology as we're defining it here. And Kim Hill and Monique Borgerhoff, Mulder, and who else, somebody else got really bent out of shape. Oh, Eric Alden Smith of all people. The three of them got all bent out of shape about this. And, you know, damn it, we're not doing evolutionary psychology, we're doing something different, human behavioral ecology. And maybe that was 1990, and that was maybe the first glimmer I had that that, you know, there was a problem here, that there was some antipathy, some hostility within what I thought of as one field. Yeah. And there there's a bit of a tension uh what I'm hearing is that

I imagine the people that were not taking an evolutionary approach or even a biological approach to psychology, my understanding of that literature was it was not ecological at all, right? It was not bringing the ecology in. And, you know, with the ethologists that was starting, but then you know, the World War II happened. But it sounds like, you know, the the kind of education you were getting and the the ecology came back and you were now applying ecology to human thinking in a way that um yeah. I guess so. I mean there was there was a field, I forget what the hell they did call it ecological psychology. Um I mean I actually tried to read some of it, but it's gone now from my mind. I feel like that comes in.

But I but I I'm not quite sure what they meant by ecological, but but they meant something about c context and environment. Right. Um anyway, no, I mean as I say, I've I got I got as a postdoc involved in a group of so-called socioecologists, and uh that was largely a minority thing within animal behavior. I mean, the Animal Behavior Society was my annual meeting. I'd never been to a psych meeting. Um I've been to about three ever in my life. You know, I'm assuming that the human behavior and evolution society is not yet called a psychology meeting, even though, to my great annoyance, if you Google the journal, it says the topic is evolutionary psychology. The topic of the journal, Evolution and Human Behavior, is Evolutionary Psychology, which

bugs me. but yeah, no, I mean I I I'm just coming from outside psychology to and in a way I'm still a crappy psychologist. I mean, most of the research that I've done on human beings and that I'm known for is more epidemiological. It's you know, it's not not there's no human subjects involved. It's it's working from you know databases. Um Demographic epidemiological kind of research, rather. So, in a way, I mean, Margot and I used to go to criminology meetings. Um, and most of the other criminologists there were actually sociologists. And they thought we were weird if we give them any detail at all about the sort of evolutionary rationales for some of our hypotheses, but they were interested in the same

phenomena we were. Um, so you could, you know, you could talk and make friends. And I still have some good friends who are who are sociologists. Um, whereas the number who are psychologists is more limited. I guess. Well, I mean, you're calling yourself crappy uh psychologists, but I think that I mean there's an argument that you are very prescient in the sense, and I think you know you're uh we'll obviously get to homicide at some point. But I mean, for me, my first exposure to you and Margot was, oh my good, my thought was this is a brilliant insight, which is you foresaw the replication crisis or the triviality of experimental effects long before many other psychologists. And you were looking at and saying, look, here is here's a phenomenon out in the world we

have good data for. There's not reporting bias. Um so I mean, without going fully into homicide, I would just I would like to correct the record of you saying you're crappy psychologists. Okay, what I mean is I'm not a mainstream psychologist, and I've I've seldom been interested in the psyche. I mean, most of the almost all the experimental work I've done has been with rodents. Um I've done a little bit, mostly at Margot's instigation. We did a little bit of human human subjects research in the lab, the lab. Right. Um, but yeah. I would I would even I would even disagree there. I mean, just re reading your work, I think there's a lot of psychological sophistication in your work. I mean, it would have been very easy to caricature the stuff going on inside the head uh

after looking at at some of these results from homicide data, Right. It would have been very easy to say, you know, we have a drive to murder non-related offspring or any other silly idea like that. But that, you know, you you didn't take that road. You took a much more nuanced, sophisticated take where, you know, these are these are not adaptations we're dealing with. These are byproducts of other systems in the mind that have different functions. And these outcomes sometimes emerge as a byproduct of of the normal workings of those systems. And so I I saw a lot of of nuance into the the psychology in your in your work. Well thank you. Yeah, no I mean you and you're right. We were thinking about the mind.

I mean, you know, it's just that I'm I'm never quite sure what to do with some of the constructs that I think are actually central both to our work and to actual human minds, like you know, male sexual proprietariness was one of Margot's fave terms. Um discriminative parental solicitude is another catchphrase that we're known for a bit. And uh I guess, well, Dave has uh criticized the concept of modularity. And um I I I was never fond of it either. I mean I I could never I I get it. I believe that there are, you know, I don't know what the right word is, channels in the mind, that there are things that connect up readily to other things. Yeah, and that they do so for reasons that's of past selection.

Um, but uh, but I I've still no very good idea of what the right language for talking about that stuff is, and I confess I haven't paid a lot of attention to efforts to find it. You know. Um it's funny, John and Lita and Dava Bus and Margot and I spent a year in 1990-91, I guess it was, at the Center for Advanced Study at at Stanford. Um, and actually Lita and John proposed a group there, and it would have, it was those five people: them, Margot and me, and David Bus, and Don Simons in their proposal. But whoever runs the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, Nick's Simons. And I think they did so on the basis of the fact that he just didn't have that many publications, which was dumb.

But anyway, the original fantasy when we had this thing was that we would somehow collaborate on writing a book about, you know, a sort of agenda-setting book for Ev Psych. And then we had endless discussions where we disagreed on silly things that that wouldn't get like Margot and I just wouldn't have the use of the word instinct or innate. You know, we didn't like it. We come out of an animal behavior background and had undergone all this um criticism for what we consider good reasons. Um decades earlier. Why are why are we resonating, why are we resurrecting um this concept of innateness? We didn't like it. John Alita thought it was absolutely essential. I don't know what Bus thought. He basically basically just vacated himself from these conversations after a while and went

to his own cubicle and wrote papers. Um, but uh but anyway, this never happened. On the other hand, I mean the book, The Adaptive Mind, got largely hatched during that year. So um there were things accomplished, and some of them were collaborative among us all, but uh but it was funny that uh you know we couldn't get off the ground on sort of low level concepts like okay, so we all believe evolution is somehow central to thinking properly about psychology. But how the hell do we lay this out? And we never we never arrived at a consensual perspective on that. Yeah. I don't know what people have since. Yeah. Well w at that time was the idea that you were coming from this larger meeting of the evolutionary behavioral sciences, and you were

still part of it, but you wanted to start talking to psychologists who weren't taking an evolutionary approach? Or was it that there was dissatisfaction with that meeting in that it wasn't psychological enough? Or is that an ill-posed question? That may have been the case for Lita and John, that there was a feeling that, you know, wanted to get the focus more psychological. I mean, they were quite messianic about, you know, cognitive approach in conjunction with an evolutionary approach is the way to go. And uh and I guess, you know, I'm I'm I'm more sympathetic to that now than I was at the time. At the time it was kind of like, Jesus, did we really need the cognitive revolution? It seemed like a step back from behaviorism sometimes.

Um, as I felt then, as a guy coming out of animal behavior and sort of understanding why the behaviorist revolution against simple minded cognitivism had happened in the first place. Right. Um is this making sense to your audience and you? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'm talking about it. I'm curious, do you no I mean do you do you still um harbor some of those feelings about innateness, instinct, cognitive and computational models? Are those still with you? I do still dislike the concept of innateness. And I dislike it for its for its implication, at least in the minds of most people who hear it, that developmental processes are irrelevant, uninteresting, that there

is, and perhaps even that there is no actual input from anything else during development. I mean that's what it classically meant. And it still sort of sounds that way a lot when people talk about the this instinct or the that instinct. It's just, you know, you know, feed them an appropriate diet and let them grow up and they'll there it'll be. Um and you say, geez, is this helpful? Is is this helpful to leave out um ontogeny because it seems to dis-ontogeny dismiss it as not part of what we're interested in. Yeah. It's I agree. It's it's an unexplained, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's an extremely misleading folk concept uh that I think uh you know, generates more confusion than insight. I I would love to have Dave write a paper against innateness.

I'm sure there are papers out there that that criticize this concept uh and how it's like. I think Annie, Annie wants to. I think Annie and Christina, we actually thought about having Christina Moya and Annie Ortz on as their sort of, I feel like the uh and they have a great paper in behavioral processes about it. Uh I think some of their cont contentful work, but um but yeah, I think the the the the idea innateness. Um I I Martin, I I told David this that when I first encountered evolutionary psychology, I thought it was stupid because I understood it as assigning um known phenomena to latent variables called instincts with no insight beyond that, right? And uh that was my understanding, like language instinct.

Well, we know there's language, it's an instinct. I you know, as an undergrad, that was my first exposure. Yeah. And yeah, actually, you know, of all Steve Binker's books, the language instinct is my favorite. Yeah, me too. No, me too, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. No, once you read it, it's clear that that's not the approach. But yeah, no, just the word itself was was Yes, the word itself didn't didn't do any good. And partly, you know, I'm just I'm just being the animal behavior guy who who was trained in the 70s. I mean, it was like, you know, we had the critiques of Conrad Laurentian instinct theory. Um, and they'd carried the day. Right. Their critiques had carried the day.

Right. Um, and then you know, it just felt like, geez, what what are we resurrecting this concept for? And what was the critique just that the phenotype is a process and contingent, and that the goal of science is to articulate that complex contingency? I guess that's a that's not a bad way to put things. Yeah, I think I think that's that's largely it because the Kutrique was kind of um in fairness, I I don't think it's unfair to say that for Lorenz at least, not for Tim Bergen, but for some of the other early ethologists, invoking instinct was saying that there is no developmental process of interest, right? No developmental process at all. There is a thing in the brain, there is an organ. Um it, you know, like I said before, you know, you just you just feed the baby the

appropriate nutrients and the organ grows. Um and and it it was always framed in nature nurture terms. The you know does the animal know how to do this without learning it? And if the animal knows how to do this without learning it, then you know it's instinct. And I still don't know how to talk about this kind of thing properly. I mean I used to study an animal um sometimes referred to as the fat sand rat, um, a desert rodent that eats the leaves of uh of very salty desert plants. Um and it it belongs to a family gerbils, where everybody else eats seeds or insects and they eat leaves, and they are very specialized for this. And then when I got a job in California, my first academic job was at UC Riverside.

Um, there was a parallel radiation in kangaroo rats. And there was one species, um, microps, dipophomies microps, who does the same thing. They eat plants of the same family, um, they eat the leaves, and all other kangaroo rats, and there's like 28 other species or so, um, eat seeds. And I thought I thought these animals were very interesting. I brought them into the lab, I studied them, and uh, you could feed them on a diet of lettuce and seeds, and they'd thrive, they'd seem to be okay. Um, but then if you have raised one in captivity, when you handed it one of these salt bush leaves for the first time as an adult that had never seen it before, it would drop it and come back to it and drop it and come back to it, and then suddenly pick it up

and do exactly what the adults do with it, which is quite complicated. They stick out their lower jaw like an underbite and they hold the leaf in both hands and drag it down over their lower incisor, scraping off the hypersalina tissue that goes flying in all directions, and then they flip it around and do the same on the other side, and then they eat the interior. And you know, you see an adult do this who has never seen one of these leaves before in its life, and you've handed it to it for the first time, and it goes, What the hell is this? What's this? What's this? Here's what I do with it. What's the way we want to talk about this? Yeah. They have been selected to do this. This is this is their job.

This is their, you know, etc. So okay, I get why people talk about instincts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. I just think that, you know, as soon as you start using the term at all broadly, it becomes unhelpful. Yeah. It's it's very much especially especially when applied to an organ whose very purpose is contingency. Right? It's whole the whole reason it's there is to take in input from the environment and respond intelligently and strategically to that input. The organ you're talking about is the brain. Yeah. Mart Martin, what I am hearing you say too, in in terms of what you're describing, is that your view, and you can correct me if this is wrong, was that the evolutionary sciences and biological sciences, it was sort of taking this idea that we have a

theory that can explain dynamic relationships. So if this selection pressure is true, we should see this distribution here. And even when you something like data from homicides, you know, you can just say, look, the these data should relate to these data here. So what I'm hearing you say is that you're thinking about the mind you're triangulating on what that contingency phenotype is but the data you're using are are these things out in the real world right yeah I mean uh that that brings me to a whole slightly different topic but it's but it it's I'm probably one of the more skeptical people you'll meet about the utility of self-report data. Um I mean, obviously they're used and they are often valuable

and all that, but I think people it's not just that people lie when you ask them questions, they also can't access their own minds very well. And you know, there's decades of research going back to a classic paper by Nisbutton Wilson in 77, showing that when you ask people to explain their preferences or their choices or their behavior in some way, they will immediately spout a sincere, convincing sounding account of why they did what was what they did that experimentally can be demonstrated to be post hot baloney, that they that they uh you know that you can move you can manipulate it and shove it around in ways that they're unaware of. And often they had no explanation until the question was, and then they you know form it on

the spot. So I I have a long history of sort of collaborating with people who were debunking um self-report data in one way or another, showing that they were inconsistent, showing that, you know, people who said something at one time apparently sincerely, two years later, said something that contradicted their past with respect to what that had happened to them, with what they'd seen previously. That people who claim certain kinds of experiences, um, a week later they may have forgotten it and claimed the opposite. And so I've never liked just you know asking people stuff. And I've never been crazy about things like sexual orientation inventories and things like that. Um, I get it's interesting that you get, you know, sex differences that you get correlated

with other stuff. But if you start taking them too much at face value, then uh then then you're being a bit credulous because because people, you know, talk as behavior too, and stuff comes spilling out of people's mouths, and we should, you know, study it with as much detachment as we study anything else. Um so I've never tried working much on human self-report data because I've always been s a bit jaundiced about it, I guess. And uh I get that it's sometimes all you can do. I find it funny that some human behavioral ecologists have sort of critiqued psychologists as depending on you know we study what people do rather than just what they say. You've probably heard that from some human behavioral ecologists too.

And it's like, um, actually, look at any of your bloody studies, and they depend on hearsay too. You know, you asked these people if they've got any children, how many children they've got. You asked them this, you asked them that. You wrote it down, you believed it, you analyzed it. Um what you actually saw was seldom terribly much. Um, you know, admit which is not to diss the people who have, painstakingly followed a hunting group into the forest and measured what they got. But just, you know, everybody is to some degree seducible by, or if you like, just dependent on the utterances of other human beings for their understanding of what those other human beings are up to. Unless you're a human ethologist studying pre-verbal

children. Yeah. I mean what's lovely about the dataset that you work with is that it is um uh not subject to these critiques. Uh there's a wonderful line from uh The Mask of Zorro that I'm remembering uh where uh the the bad guy tracks down Zorro and he's pretending that he's not Zoro. He has like some alter ego. Uh and then he rips off his his shirt and reveals like a bloody sleeve where he got cut and he says, Blood never lies, Zorro. But I think the same is true of of your data. Blood never lies. He's you know uh homicide Homicide was that was actually Margot's brainwave that we should study homicide. I thought she was out of her mind at first. Um we were what was the context? Oh yeah, yeah, we we'd started doing this stuff on um child maltreatment,

um stimulated by a graduate student at Riverside, and then uh you get the criticism that, well, you know, there's reporting biases. Who detects who who detects child maltreatment? Who gets reported? If you find that step parents are more likely to abuse children, it's probably because they're more likely to be reported and recorded. And you know, that might be so. And then geez, how do you get around that? And then we have, well, actually, in these big data sets of abused children, there's a small number who are killed. And those cases, if the step parent effect is even bigger in those cases than the others, then you say, well, gee, that doesn't sit well with the idea that it was due to reporting bias, because there should be the least reporting bias in these most

extreme cases, like lethal ones. That was where we first ever did anything with homicide. And then Margot, we moved to back to Canada, to Southern Ontario in 1978 from California. And somewhere around then, Marg said, you know, we should study homicide more generally. It was like, it's, it should be a great window on human conflicts and human passions. And I was like, what? No. And I didn't get it. And she says, you know, look, just down the road from us is the city of Detroit. At this time, it was true that they have more homicides in Detroit every year than they do in the whole of Canada. And there's a single police force that investigates them. We should see if the Detroit police will let us in for homicide

files. And I was like, wow, what? And anyway, we wrote a letter to the chief of police, and the chief of police was actually a sort of figurehead guy. I can't even remember his name now, but he was somebody who did all the sort of PR stuff in the public meetings. But the guy who actually ran the place was the deputy chief of police, a guy named James Bannon. And so they sent the deputy chief of police. Um the chief sent our letter to the deputy chief. And the deputy chief had a PhD in sociology. He did quantitative research on police-based data himself. I mean, we were incredibly lucky. He says, Oh, this is interesting. Come on down and talk. And so he went down and chatted with him, and he introduced us to the head of the homicide

division. And then we were shortly thereafter, we're sort of sitting in the homicide division listening to them interviewing suspects at the same time as we're rummaging through their case files because they didn't have a lot of space. Um and after we'd rummaged through the case files a bit and sort of looked up what information is collected by the police and the interviews they do and this and it's like this stuff is a goal of mine. This is so interesting. Look, maybe we could do this, maybe we could do that. Um and we we got hooked on it. We got absolutely hooked on it. And to this day, I think I never would have we never we never would have carried on with this research if it hadn't been for the fact that the deputy chief of police in Detroit at

that time was an unusual deputy chief of police. Amazing. Yeah. I have to say the intro uh um chapter of the homicide is I think if if if one were to take all of the foundational work of applying evolution to human behavior uh and stitch it the most eloquent and beautiful writing and if I had new students to read, I think that's one of the one of the the the patches in that quilts is that it's just beautiful and it's so logical. Um it's it's uh it's it in and it's completely evergreen and timeless. It's still as perfectly appropriate today, um, which is not always true for um for work um that you know for for any of our work. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. Um Yeah, no, I'm proud of that book to this day.

I mean, my God, it's thirty-eight years ago now. Um, but uh yeah, no, I'm still I'm still proud of that book. And it it you know, one one thing that's sort of nice to say about the academ about The scientific enterprise broadly, the social scientific enterprise broadly, is as weird as Darwinism was to most criminological researchers, that book got us in that door too. You know, we started going to criminology meetings. People, you know, Marg and I were on the founding editorial board of the journal Homicide Studies when it appeared a few years later. Um, when Marg died, there was a memorial issue of homicide studies to her, and it's the only one they've ever done um in the history of the journal.

Um, and uh, you know, people who are interested in just phenomena. Everybody's a pretty good intuitive evolutionary psychologist, in a way. They, you know, they get that men value status and compete with one another, and that uh being dissed is a problem to which um men often react and that, you know, they don't actually like the alienation of their wives either. And, you know, people and that children are cherished, and that a threat to your child can make you become a much more potent and perhaps even dangerous person than you ever imagined you could. And, you know, people get that. People live among people. They almost they almost can't help it. When you're when you're writing that work, is it that you're are you reminding

are you reminding everybody of what they already know in that sense? In the in the sense of I think an evolutionary approach sort of licenses us to re-see with clarity what we might otherwise want to attribute to some highfalutin ideology. It's sort of the self-report thing, right? Like we make up a narrative that it's about this complicated. Motives and human nature and what excites and interests people. And you know, a lot of people have been conned into believing that somehow having been raised in a particular place made them care about all the things that everybody everywhere cares about. And so there's an element of that. And of course, there, I mean, there are surprises. There are things that you just never thought through in advance.

You know, you sort of say, well, you know, here's a rationale for thinking that the risk to children as a function of their age at the hands of their parents will be different at the hands of the father than the mother. And we can collect the data to see if that is so. And we had an a priori rationale for thinking it. And you know, here it is. And there's certainly lots of stuff like that that's you know a little more in the realm of you know, we don't already know this. Yeah. Um you know, uh subsequently, I mean, after Margot's death, I I wrote one more homicide book on um that's much more up the alley of the things that sociologists were traditionally interested in, namely, why are homicide rates so variable

between different countries or places? And um, and I want to pin it overwhelmingly on inequitable access to resources and the ensuing competitiveness that comes from inequitable access to resources. And the more unequal, the worse the violence tends to be. And uh there are aspects of that that, well, they're still being argued. I mean, you know, there are I've had any number of people who don't want to believe, now this is partly funded by the people who are beneficiaries of extreme inequality, but they don't want to believe that inequality per se creates any problems. The real problems come from the fact that, you know, when there's high inequality, there happen to be a bunch of poor people.

And being poor is bad, yeah. But you know, um if you know if we give even more money to Jeff Bezos, then no one will be poor. Um, you know, there's there's that sort of mentality um still out there. So you still fight fights with people that you know believe the data will come out a different way if we do X than I suspect they will. And uh you know, I I think I am winning those battles, but there are people who um will fight me on that. So it's certain certainly not just, you know, well, really everybody knows this and here it is. Oh yeah, no no no for sometimes there's elements of that. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean we I don't think we would any be doing this if it wasn't a deductive logic. I mean that's why we, you know, for David and I, that's uh why we it's helpful, right?

If you're interested in something, it gives you teeth and meaningful deductive logic for predicting things or yeah. Hypotheses. Yes. Science. Which God help us, you might actually test against reality. Yes, exactly. Um, maybe inequality is a way into this, but um the the the most recent thing, um I think people might be wondering, well, how does an organism know it's an an in unequal environment? Yeah. That's a great question. And I think there's been too little work on it. I mean, no, you know, in the sense of how does inequality get under the skin? When does it get under the skin? Does you know inequality? I mean, one window on this kind of thing is the time lags of the effects of inequality on behavior.

If you can show that inequality is predictive in like cross national or cross city or whatever studies of some behavioral outcome. Time lags might be informative as regards whether well ex did experience any experiencing inequality in childhood matter? Is experiencing recent inequality matter? Is there the cumulative consequences of inequality over decades matter? In a highly unequal society, are there even transmittable effects from mom, whether in her womb or from her experience? You know, I mean, those all those questions can be asked, and there's a little bit of effort to ask them, but not enough, as far as I'm concerned. Um, you know, if you accept at all that there's toxic effects of inequality, um how

does that work exactly? It is an underexplored question for sure. It's an underexplored question in the health field, too. People have their hypotheses. There's some people who are strongly convinced that the health effects of inequality, the negative health effects of inequality, are all mediated by stress hormones, and there's other people who don't. But yeah, I mean there's a crap load of great questions to be asked about. So how does that work? Yeah. Exactly. And sometimes people accuse evolutionary psychologists with a little bit of fairness of not being interested in that. Of just, you know, I can see a logic by which this variable should be predictive of that variable. And yeah, here it is.

And yeah, but how how does that work and how is it mediated is well worth splitting and often highly relevant to ameliorating any negative consequences. Yeah. Although in in our defense, I think there's a there's a Marvin Minsky quote is you can't look for something till you have the idea of it. And so if somebody's criticism is uh well, yeah, but how does that work? That's great. That's the next step. Exactly. Yes. You psychologists step in. Ideally, yeah. Have you thought about the different dimensions of inequality? Because certainly inequality of wealth or resources is deeply intertwined with inequality in power. And certainly one leads to the other, such that if some people have disproportionate access

to designing the rules of the game, they will design the rules uh so as to privilege them and and get themselves more stuff and prevent other people from from from taking that stuff, right? 50-50 could go the other way. Could go the other way. Sure. Um so I'm wondering uh do you see this more as um inequality of resources per se, or whether inequality of power is more at the heart of it, such that if people see that the only way to get ahead is to be connected to the right people and otherwise you're screwed, then they might be more inclined to take more of a risky, violent strategy because that's really one of the only options they have of getting ahead if if they view themselves as being shut out of an unfair system.

Do you view the the power aspect of it as more um relevant than the resource aspect? Possibly, yeah. No, that's that's that's that's a fair way to put it. And not just power, but you know, there's resources and resources. You know, often all the measures you've got are economic, but the economic may not be everything that matters. There's been a little bit of a fuss about that because uh a couple of criminologists a number of years ago made the claim that inequality matters in modern societies, but it doesn't matter in open quotes primitive close quote societies, um, in with huh in predicting violence. And uh I mean their basis for this argument was crap, but uh but they didn't sort of think of inequality as being instantiated in any interesting manner other than

economic inequality. And it's like, you know, a highly unequal system. Like if one guy's got six wives and five guys are bachelors, that's more unequal than where everybody, and maybe it's more unequal in a more fundamentally important way, even than the dollars in the pocket. Um, and you know that there's interesting issues there. What exactly is the inequality that people are sensitive to? how you apprehend the concept of inequality of power. Like sometimes it just takes the form of, geez, a lot of people around here make it out like bandits, and it doesn't include me. Um you know, because because often if you lack power, you also lack a great deal of knowledge of how anything works around here, other than the you know.

other people are seem to be set in the agenda. Um and yeah, I think that's absolutely central to why some people become highly risk prone and potentially dangerous if they um have the wherewithal to do so. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because you know, the more that um resources become captured by the political process, um, the more resources turn turn into a zero-sum game. Um, because you know, competition for political power is zero sum. Whereas in theory, uh you could uh have a win-win relationship where we both get richer by exchanging and creating wealth together. Um but if how much wealth you have depends on your connections, and there are limited opportunities for win-win gains and for social mobility, then it it may be that

violence becomes a more rational strategy. So it may be that there's something about the zero-sumness of the social context as well. Yeah, and and and I think you're quite right. And it's interesting to uh to highlight the fact that both go on. That is to say, there are there are um positive sum games and zero sum games being played all around us all the time. Um there, you know, the idea of gains for trade isn't just propaganda from some free trader. It's yeah, it really exists. And at the same time, yeah, as you say, there's you know, only so many people can get to set the agenda for a group that you happen to belong to or or maybe only one person. Um yeah. Unequal. I mean, I'm how do you conceptualize power, do you think, ideally?

Um Yeah, I mean it's it's it's a tricky question. I'm not sure. Um or operationalized, I guess I I should say power. I mean in a in a sort of open quotes natural close quotes ecology where um you're not talking about strong institutions and but you're just talking about differential power in social groups and social interaction and families even um yeah i mean i i i wish i had a good answer to that question yeah on that kind of thing like differential attention structures, you know who is always looked to whenever there's a behavioral decision to be made. All that kind of stuff. Yeah, that would be Brenda Brenda that would be Brenda Bowser and John Patton's uh answer. I mean there's also I think a thing of there's you know there's people who have power, but

there's also then sort of where the rubber hits the road where is there a conflict or are you getting screwed over? Right. So there might be asymmetries in power, but I feel like if I have a need, I have a conflict, I've got a problem, my child is sick, or you know, I if it gets resolved, that's different than if the power is making it so that I can't feed my kids, or you know, my child is sick, but the other kids are fine. And it's because power is preventing that from happening. So I think like the the on the ground cues of I'm getting screwed over is sort of that's the kind of power that we should care about, especially in the sense of that's why this unequal, it's the unequal treatment of sort of feeling like you're there's really a bad fitness relevant situation

here. Um that uh um that is socially caused and it's not just sort of an act of God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is sort of what I meant by saying, you know, the mindset of some people who become dangerous or people who carry a weapon and are ready to use it is somebody's make it out like a bandit around here and an ape me. Um you know that's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah and then it's a social solution. Yeah it's somebody is their the solution to this really bad situation is changing the social structure. Yeah. Yeah redistribution of power preferably in my direction. Exactly. Yeah. It makes sense. It makes sense. Having a gun is the is the fastest ticket to power. Stick with the same social system and just put me on top.

Yeah exactly Yeah. Usually if you're near the bottom, that is not a realistic hope. I I'm curious, with with these trends you're finding um the between inequality and violence, is are is it just of violence in general? Is it uh within class or between class? Is it you know aggression from uh the have nots against the haves, or is it more of a generalized uh strategy of violence? no, much much more of again among the have nots against the have not other have nots than against the haves. And interesting some people have have trotted that fact out as kind of a criticism for the idea that it's got anything to do with inequality. It's like well if the people at the bottom were really, you know, upset about being at the

bottom, then they'd, you know, that they'd seek out and kill the top. And you say, well, that would actually be kind of a dumb strategy. Nothing leads to more certain negative consequences than going after someone much more powerful than yourself. I mean, if you if hierarchy matters, the people you most have to worry about are the people just below you and the people who you most want to inflict some costs on are the people just above you. Um I mean I think people seem to react that way to who their conflicts are. Not to and of course it's also largely just that they're in the same universe neighborhood in your face. But uh but yeah no it's again this there's really interesting questions that have never been addressed.

One is um that's related to what you're talking about is stuff like if let me get let me gather my thoughts for a second. If inequality leads to greater violence. Does inequality at the top matter at all, or is it all inequality at the bottom? You can partition inequality across, say, an income distribution. And you can ask, you know, there are even measures for doing this. You can ask, is the homicide rate heavily dependent upon inequality at the bottom, but unaffected by inequality at the top? Um or is it somewhat affected by inequality at the top? Nobody's done it. Nobody's done it. That's just a great question because I think uh you know the fact does the fact that there are billionaires fuel resentment at the bottom or does nobody care that there are

billionaires? Or does it fuel yeah does it does it fuel resentment among the millionaires? Yeah well that's an interesting question. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean d does it fuel resentment that actually turns into violence or just like nobody cares about their being billionaires if they redistributed their wealth so that there were you know a whole bunch of hundred millionaires instead of some billionaires and other millionaires. Um that wouldn't matter, or would it? Does it does knowing does knowing that somebody's that rich have anything to do with why um the poor are disgruntled. Right. Yeah. As opposed to just saying out loud, as opposed to that is also a a consequence of a structure where if your kid gets cancer, you might lose your home.

So like you you got to tease these apart, right? Like if you the the the two by two cell of that's a reality versus not a reality versus there's a millionaire with that reality versus there's a billionaire with that reality, there's a billionaire with with that not happening. Do people care the same or or is it all driven by the billionaire or the cancer? Um I mean it's it's and and relatedly, there's the whole issue of does knowing all this weird stuff about people you don't actually know, how much does it affect your mental models? This is really important in a in an internet age. Yeah. You know, you think maybe the human mind is well adapted to responding reasonably appropriately to social information from a universe of

known persons and encountered not very well known persons. But uh but in a world where everybody seems to be paying attention to people they don't know and knows a lot about a lot of them. Um what the hell does that do to their mental models of society and appropriate sociality and stuff? Um those are interesting questions. I guess really I am actually interested in psychology. Turns out, yeah. Yeah. I mean, is is the model you're working with, would it make different predictions about inequality at the bottom versus the top? Because I know there's work on what's called fractal inequality, where if you look at like the Giny coefficient among rich people, it turns out that the gap between millionaires and

billionaires like is just as big as the gap between poor people and middle class people. But if you zoom in on any part of the wealth distribution, you'll get similar uh gaps between rich and poor, no matter which part of the distribution you zoom in on. So that there is vast e inequality even among billionaires, even among millionaires. Um and would you predict that the inequality you see, say, at the top, would also correlate with more risky aggressive strategy, like would you maybe more white collar uh crime um in among the the richer part of the distribution or something like that? Or would you or is this specific to the bottom end of the distribution where the stakes are much higher if you fall to the bottom?

Well there's desperation. There is the issue of of um you know what have I got to lose? You know, um, you know, there's a little line from a Bob Dylan song, Well, you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. Um, and uh so you know, you wade into social circumstance. I remember Rob Boyd, you mentioned Rob Boyd, saying to me that uh he was a keen rock climber. And when they had their first kid, suddenly it stopped seeming thrilling and started seeming stupid. Yeah. Um to to free to freehand hold climb on places where you could really do yourself some damage. Yeah. And uh, you know, when you got something to lose, maybe your attitude to risk changes a lot. Yeah. In which case being rock bottom is really where the action is as

regards becoming crazy dangerous. Yeah. And that I mean that and that comes out of even just, you know, risk-sensitive foraging theory to bring it back to the um evolutionary biology, right? It does indeed. Interesting. Um zooming out a bit, um, as you've you know witnessed the story of evolutionary psychology evolve, um have you been um pleased by how the field has changed over the years? Have you been displeased? Are there trends that you think have gone in a positive direction or in a negative direction? How do you how do you view the overall story and and change that you've lived through? I wasn't expecting this question. It takes me a second to sort of gather my thoughts on it. But you know, there are things are that are disappointments.

Um I'm disappointed by the extent to which one group of evolutionists sometimes becomes alienated from another group of evolutionists for what seem like petty reasons. Yeah. Um and uh The usual sort of problems with anything that you know with sort of disappointing to the point of heartbreaking sometimes that there's infighting among people who ought to be allies. Um I'm heartened by the um breadth of acceptance of evolutionary approaches, but uh slightly horrified by the antipathy that still comes from a surprisingly large number of literalist religious people, um, not just here. They have Darwin Day in Iran. They celebrate Darwin Day in Iran, a small group in Tehran does. They have a meeting every year.

Um I spoke at it last year. Um I wasn't in Tehran, I spoke at it remotely. Um and they were a great bunch. They're mostly psychologists and philosophers actually who who do Darwin Day and Tehran. And they you know they were they asked good questions. It was a great session. I actually forged a collaboration with a couple of young Iranians who have been doing some, you know. Gretchen and I um had a in the talk we gave a little tangent about cousin marriage and the interesting fact that cousin marriage could have all sorts of unexplored effects on what we were mainly talking about, which was the matrilateral bias and investment, investing more in your daughter's kids than your son's kids. And some Iranians in the audience were like, yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of

cousin marriage in Iran still. There's there's all different kinds of cousin marriage, all Although some are more common than others, and we can investigate this with questionnaire studies, which I thought was just fine. And we notwithstanding my previous remarks. Anyway, Darwin Day in Iran had to be canceled this year because of the events in Iran. I mean, Darwin Day was last week, February 12th. And they were gonna celebrate this year, it's 2026. They were gonna make the central theme of this year's meeting be the 50th anniversary of Richard Dawkins's book, The Selfish Genes, publication. I guess it was pretty widely read and translated, perhaps more than most other things that we think of as seminal, and you know, had had an influence on people

in Iran and elsewhere. Um, and that was going to be the central theme for this year's meeting, but this year's meeting had to be canceled. Now that's not a religious crackdown on Darwinists, and it's actually sort of a surprise. I hadn't realized this before, but within Islam, the uh the division that the Iranian clerics belong to is much more accepting of evolution than the other main division, which is Shiites, which is Sunnis anyway. They're the Shiites, right? Yeah. They're much more accepting of evolution than the Sunnis are apparently, but that you know there are religions and God help us they're in the USOA too, in which evolution is evil and wrong. And some of them may even have influence over the future of educational policy in the US

and the near future of educational policy in the US. That's terrifying and disappointing and crazy. I guess I used to believe that we the progress was more nearly linear or at least monotonic than it is. And some of the setbacks to the agenda of just not evolutionary psychology, but science, medical research, everything can be pretty shocking. Those are things to be disappointed about in a larger scale. Evpsych itself, I think, is pretty robust. I used to say, and I still sort of believe, that you know, the day we know We've succeeded is the day you just drop the evolutionary from the from what you're from the label. You know, you're doing psychology. Well, of course, if you're doing psychology, you're doing it half decently.

You better know a bit about Darwinism, um, and and have thought a bit about the relevance of past selection to whatever the hell you're interested in. Of course. And and you know, I think I think we we will get there. Yeah. Do you um in in terms of the evolutionary biology and anthropology parts, um, how are those parts doing? I wish I knew. Um, I mean my My best friends among evolutionary biologists, my closest acquaintances. Um Are deceased. Um George Williams was a close friend. Bill Hamilton was a friend. They're long gone. But uh the people I know like it, the university I'm an emeritus professor at who pursue their various biological interests, I mean, they're doing fine. Um, the evolution minded study of the behavior of non human animals

is doing fine. I think John Alcock's book, The Triumph of Sociobiology, was not premature, actually. And it's God knows how long ago now. But that, you know, there was the sociobiology controversy cooked up by some biologists and the socio-biological approach, that is to say, the evolution-minded approach to the or the selectionist, if you like, approach to the study of behavior prevailed and it's over. You know, um, and the opposition is gone, and that's good. Um, I don't know what an anthropologist would say. I mean, certainly, again, we all know a lot of evolutionary anthropologists who seem to be busy in a thriving field, but the extent to which it's a subfielder still encounters hostility, I don't know.

Yeah. One question is, and you talked about the the the friends that you had, somebody like um George Williams, my understanding was that his adaptation natural selection book was sort of righteous anger. about an issue, right? And I think even like the adapted mind was also in the spirit of righteous anger. Um and as a student of people, a descendant of these people in Don Simons, too, right? Like I think um these were people who who looked in the looked at the world and they they had righteous anger about um something they thought didn't make sense and they they had a mission and they wanted to do it. And I I sometimes w wonder as as the students generations go down, sometimes if the students lose that either that

feeling or that mission or that broad perspective. And and I wanna w I'm asking, um I guess my question is, is that a fair characterization that that these were people who uh yeah, is that a fair characterization? Um yeah. Sure, I think so. I mean, you know, your friend Lita Cosmodes is certainly capable of some righteous anger. I've told Lita that myself. I said one of the r I told I I tell Lita this all the time. It's one of the reasons I love Lita. Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. I mean John Tuby was was much more willing to just sort of accept The fact that different people thought different stuff, and in fact, he was open to every crackpot theory you could think of. But uh but Leto was much more damn it, there's right answers to

these things, and these idiots have got them wrong. Um but uh yeah, no, you're right. I mean, it's funny, George Williams is a very soft-spoken and gentle guy who is never like mean to anybody. But if you you've read Adaptation and Natural Selection, right at the beginning he talks about having listened to this lecture by who was it, Emerson, one of the Alley group. Um that was an implicitly or maybe explicitly group selectionist lecture and and being just so peeved about it. And then he says he berated his wife, poor Doris, all the way home after the thing about what was wrong with the lecture, as if Doris would have stood up for it, which she wouldn't. Um But yeah, so righteous anger indeed.

I mean, it's funny because I've never seen, I never saw George seeming angry. But yeah. Whereas I have seen Lady B seeming angry. But but anyway, yeah, is it gone? Is it gone? Is it gone? I'm old and I'm less angry than I used to be, I guess. I don't know if I'm less angry than I used to be, actually. Um is it I don't know about young people. I know people I know a lot of people are angry about the state of the academy for reasons that are a little bit different. They have to do more with the withdrawal of funding and the corporatization and you know the lesser openness of the people in charge of some major universities to um curiosity based research. Um yeah. Yeah. Do you need deliverables and uh uh profitability and yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And uh that bothers me too. I mean it's it it's bad news and it's widespread. It ain't just an American phenomenon, that's for sure. I've seen it in Canada, I've seen it in New Zealand and I've heard about it in Europe. Um So there's that to be angry about, but what do you do with that anger? You you fight different battles. I mean if you're if you're if you know if if you're trying to act on that anger, then you're acting on it within the setting of the academy rather than within the setting of your you know your field of specialization. Yeah. And that's not that's not where we want the anger to be directed. I mean ideally it could be channeled into, you know, something that we can all appreciate,

something productive, you know, uh a new set of things. Well I mean if if if if yeah if it can actually begin to effectively counter the corporatization of the university, for example, then that is very much where we want it directed. But but yeah I take your point. I mean within a discipline this this ain't um doing our particular discipline any great service, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I I'm sure there are angry young evolutionary psychologists, aren't there? Yeah, I mean a bit I I feel I feel like fear is more the emotion than anger. Yeah. Yeah I don't I yeah I don't know. I I think it's um I think every every generation you sort of feel you look around and you're like, what's going on and what do we do?

Um and I think it's it's always different in the superficials, but I think in the deep structure that's always the same problem, right? And I think just to make percent, I mean I keep thinking about what you said about George Williams being writing adaptation and natural flex to the state of righteous anger. And it's like okay, here's a guy who's thoughtful and smart, and says a prevailing scarcely examined world view is screwing with biology. Yeah. Um, and it needs to be explicitly confronted and countered. Yeah. And maybe those kinds of opportunities are rare to see clearly that a prevailing view in your discipline is wrong and why it's wrong and how to go about explaining why it's wrong to everybody else.

Maybe those kinds of opportunities are vanishingly rare. I don't know. Or the people an alternative appro idea is that they're everywhere, but the kind of people who are willing to do that and see it are rare. maybe yeah no that's a good that's a grim thought I don't know if they're everywhere. I mean for one thing maybe there are no prevailing ideas anymore. Yeah we're just drowning in data and uh I know exactly in not exactly conflicting but different models. Um there's a lot of that there's a lot of that yeah I've I've got angry in the past when I think about it. I mean I was angry at social psychology for being the social psychology of strangers for decades. Um when you know most of what the social psyche is about is

acquaintances and relatives and friends and enemies, not a not strangers, you know, like what a dumb way to investigate fundamental social processes by always doing it where it's a stranger interaction that is the model. That used to drive me crazy about social. There must be other things that one could seize on like that, where you'd say, damn it, this is an outrage, and I'm outraged. I think it's lovely that I because I do think that um, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to work with John and Lita um was because it was very attractive to sort of find people who were willing to just be brave. You know, I think that it takes a certain amount of courage to um especially when it's important things like you know leading to conflict or violence or um uh

or just social processes in general to to sort of say look uh come on let this this this thing that we're assuming or we're ignoring this thing um I mean that takes some courage Yeah, yeah, I guess. I mean, and that's part of what I'm bemoaning about the state of the academy, because the state of the academy um nurtures or squashes courage of the sort you're talking about, too. And uh and I think it's in a little bit more of a squashing than nurturing kind of state now, or at least relatively compared to how it was a couple or three decades ago. And that's Disheartening. Yeah, I often hear from people who are very senior who I very much admire, and they say this to be complimentary, and they'll they'll say, I could have never gotten a job

now. And it is complimentary to us young kids, but it's also a real uh um uh uh uh criticism in the sense of we've we've created a uh selective regime that's going selecting out the rebellious, um uh um subversive minded uh um folks you know there's a there's a lot of sort of I think selection for conformity to existing approaches or assumptions and playing the game as it exists. Um yeah I'm I feel like that's probably been true for a very long time. I'm sure. When I think about like again, when I think about psychology and social psychology, I mean, man, if you didn't do the same experimental social psychology, if you didn't think that, you know, Solomon Ash's experiments were a centerpiece of your the introductory social psych course you were gonna teach, um, then you were not a

candidate. You know, um you were not and and you know, we've had that kind of crap for a long time. Um whether Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what what best nurtures creativity and imagination. Um We used to have a much better granting system in Canada than we do now, and I think actually it was good for this purpose. Um, basically, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada used to award reasonably small grants to a very large proportion of its applicants. And so when I arrived at McMaster University, well, no, actually, when I arrived, there were a few Deadwood people, but then they retired. Six or eight years after I arrived, they're in a department of 25 people. 24 of them had external research grants, and the 25th taught 3,000 students

introductory psych every year. And you know, that ceased to be possible because the success rates went down and down and down. And I used to fight that battle a bit because keeping in my field anyway, which was then animal behavior, Keeping grants small, but giving out a lot of them actually gave you more good research for your dollar than concentrating them in a smaller number of hands. And that was a demonstrable fact. I mean, you could analyze data and show that that was the case, both trends within countries and between countries. You know, Sweden and Canada punched way above their weight because they didn't give big grants, but they gave grants to a large proportion of the applicants. And you know that that's been

the move towards: well, we've got a limited budget, we better put most of it in the hands of a small number of people who we think are potential or are stars already, perhaps past it stars already. think that has done some damage and is something that one would like to see reversed. And it's done some damage to spontaneity and creativity on the part of the younger scientists. Because the idea that, you know, if you had an idea and you managed to publish a couple of papers a year, then hell yeah, you could have your $25,000 a year and run your lab. Was great. And I think it fostered more creativity than well let's put all the money in the hands of the senior poo bah who surely knows this field

best um that's a change that I'm I guess old guys always think things are getting worse. Speaking of inequality, right? The why did that happen do you know? Why did the I don't know. Why did why did the Canadian granting agencies get NSF envy and why did NSF do that in the first place? Why did NSF do that in the first place? But why did other people looking at them think, hey, what a great model? When you could show, hey, we're actually getting more science per dollar, more publishable science, more quality stuff out the door by any by various metrics per dollar than they are by this concentration. Um I don't know. Yeah, John John John uh John Tuby would always joke that it was evidence that aliens were

trying to prevent science from happening because his argument was it was a funding system designed to minimize the amount of science produced and maximize the amount of wasted time in this sort of difficult lottery based system where you have everybody's doing the work and only a few people get the resources out of it. The grant application process became so much more onerous over the last thirty years, more or less continuously, I think, over the last thirty years. Um Yeah. I love that. It's a really comforting way of thinking about uh institutional incompetence and sclerosis to view it as uh designed by exactly leave it to John Design by designed by hostile or at least with a really bad sense of humor.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. I love John's John's humor. I actually wanna I wanna I wanted to ask one question, Martin, which is so there is lore um from John, I think Lita told me this that something about like your kangaroo rat desert like palm spring something some conversation about what to call this field um do you have a memory of um the that we had this conversation while they were visiting us at our field site yes or something like this where where it was literally like the you know it was the analog of the smoking room you know the people sitting around the table being like what are we going to call this field and it was, are we going to call it Darwinian psychology, evolutionary psychology, psychology at all?

Do you have a memory of this or what is the Yeah, yeah. This happened. I'm trying, I don't remember where it's happening. I always, you know, I I'm a pedant. And so I the very phrase evolutionary psychology, I didn't like it so well because I was thinking, it sounds too much like you're going to reconstruct phylogeny, you know, if it's evolutionary. And people say evolutionary researchers, and it's like, what the hell does that mean? I'm just sort of a pedant and using the part of speech in the wrong place or something. So I Don Simons called it Darwinian psychology, and I liked that better. But then I think maybe John and Lita sort of argued persuasively that the trouble with the phrase Darwinian psychology was that

too often people thought, well, they'd say, Well, Darwin didn't know that or didn't believe that or wrote something contrary to that. And you say, Well, no, no, I don't mean whatever the hell Darwin meant, or thought when I say Darwinian psychology, why are you calling it that? And then you're gonna do neo-Darwinian psychology, gag. Um, so evolutionary psychology sort of won out, but yeah I do I do remember those arguments. Yeah. We had a lot of stupid arguments in that uh and they as I say the whole notion that we were somehow going to write a seminal book together or something foundered largely on this kind of pedantic crap. Right. Um Yeah. That feels very human, right? Like, what are we gonna call ourselves?

What are the bylaws? Yeah, no, exactly. Yes. Yeah. How about the monkeys? I I asked John once, uh, where did Don Simons come from? Um, and I want to ask you that. Uh, and there's lots of ways to take that, but for me, he just sort of sprang forth in the sense of being design-minded in a in an intellectual tradition that was maybe unfairly not. Maybe this is false. But I I'm just always curious. I just read Don Simons and I think he's so design-minded. Where did he come from? Yeah, yeah. No, that's a that's that's a great question. I'm not sure the answer. I mean, his early research was on Rhesus Monkeys. Play him Reesus Monkeys. He wrote a monograph on that, which I think was based on his PhD thesis work, I think.

So he was in an animal behavior-y mindset somewhere. I mean, when you read, you know, what's it called? The Evolution of Human Sexuality, his or whatever, his 78 book. Yeah, it's a great book. Yeah. Um, it's a great book. And uh and it's clear that he is extremely broadly read in cultural anthropology and other and humanities. Um and so you sort of forget that, well, he did come out of an animal behavior background somehow as well. Um but that's a that's a good question. I don't know his prehistory. I don't Yeah, I don't know how when with you know with what colleagues or supervisor or whatever he did his racist work. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I guess another way of asking it is like what um, and I only I spent a little bit

of time with him when I was a graduate student at UCSB, very little though. I mean, he was sort of gone and retiring. I actually inherited part of his library. Um, I told David this. I have a copy of the Richard Alexander um The biology of moral systems with markups of Don Simon's writing. Um and he sort of loves, he loves Richard Alexander Alexander, he loves him, but he'll he'll still sort of say this is baby counting in the margins some places, you know. So it's a lovely artifact of like the real time thing. But what in in sort of real time or any of these people, um for any of these people for us who who weren't there, you know, was Don Simons, I mean, the cartoonish view would be sort of, it's like, you know, he wakes up in the morning, he's like, you're not being

design minded enough to like his colleagues. Is that is that a caricature? Is that too, you know, was he just concerned about getting evolution generally into human behavior? You know, what I don't know. It's a great question. I mean, I didn't have enough interaction with Don. I had some. Um, he was the main person who sort of got on our case about try to be more explicitly psychological. You know what is it, what is it that you're imagining are the psychological phenomena, processes, entities that underlie the things that you're thinking are good intuitive hypotheses. He pushed that hard at me anyway, um and uh I presume at others as well. Um he was a bit of a recluse though. Um he didn't come to AH Best meetings much.

He came to the one we had here in Canada, in Southern Ontario, in 1991, which was the third meeting. And I don't know if he ever attended another after that. Um, if he did, it was like one. Um I remember him saying when I was trying to urge him to go maybe to an overseas meeting or something. Um he said, I live in Santa Barbara. Why would anybody ever leave Santa Barbara to go anywhere? It is a problem, yes, no, no for sure. Yes, exactly. Especially in the winter, yes, exactly. Um yeah. And and he loved that. I mean, he loved his orchids. He Yeah, he was a funny guy. Um I hadn't seen him for a long, long time until I saw him at at the Tubi Memorial. Yeah. And unfortunately he was um cancer that he knew at that

time was terminal and he didn't last a great deal longer, but he was seeming to be in sort of good spirits and at ease with it all at that time. Yeah. He was always a very mellow presence in my company. He never I never saw him angry. Yeah. But I didn't see him all that many times. Uh but yeah, but is there as we're wrapping up here, you know, do you is there anything that you would love to have people either know about any of the people who are gone or is there a funny anecdote? Um uh and maybe this is sort of too trite to ask that kind of question, or just um yeah, what would you want to tell a hungry, eager grad student who's just sort of eagerly looking forward to a career in evolutionary behavioral

sciences. Huh. We were, I think I said this already, we were uh extremely lucky, whether we knew it or not at the time, to have the enthusiastic support of Bill Hamilton. Although Bill did say that he thought the Human Behavior and Evolution Society that we should keep it a secret society. That's not a bad idea, actually. We can still circle back to that, actually. He was the first president. That's fine. But you know, to have the enthusiastic support of Hamilton and George Williams, Bob Trivers, you mentioned, yeah. Um, Sewell Wright came to an early pre-meeting. And that was really funny because uh he was in his 90s already. And I don't know if he'd ever met Bill Hamilton before, but he and Hamilton were, you know,

just sort of nadering away together a lot whenever they could. But he sat in the front row for all these student presentations, asked them all good questions, had suggestions for their field work. He was wonderful. And you know, the sense that significant figures in evolutionary biology and the people who are formulating the big general theories that weren't human specific thought that what you were doing was worthwhile and interesting was huge. It was absolutely huge. I don't know if there's anything quite like that available now. There must be. Yeah. Yeah, I wish I wish there were more of that, of just applying theories that you know apply to to all animals and just applying them to humans.

I mean, that's the beauty of uh of the evolutionary approach and part of what attracted me to the field is you know ideas like reciprocal altruism, parent offspring conflict, uh biological markets, signaling theory, like all these ideas apply to, you know, uh animals across the animal kingdom, and they give you the additional insight of uh how human beings work. Yeah, and and and I I I guess I would still say to uh to a young person interested in this field is get the to the lab of somebody studying some non-human animal and do a project with them. Um, I think I think having a research background in the study of non-human animals, and to some extent actually having an anthropological background, provides the same thing, which

is a bit more of a comparative perspective, a bit less hazard of thinking, you know, in weirdly ethnocentric or anthropocentric ways. And you know, some of the best, some of the best evolutionary psychologists early on, whether they called themselves psychologists or not, um did come from studying other animals. Surprising amount of entomology in there, actually. And uh and I always felt that that was useful. It just sort of made a deep comparative mindset part of what they brought to the table. And that sometimes some of the most embarrassingly bad evolutionary psychology has come from people who have never given a thought to any other creature than Homo sapiens. So uh so that would be one little bit of advice is to uh become involved,

even just you know, as a sort of secondary project on route to your master's or PhD in some sort of non human animal research, it will it will do you good, I think. Yeah. That's great advice. Yeah, that's fantastic. I'm also hearing the advice is maybe for middle or even later career folks to also encourage young students and give your support to them because that can mean a lot more to them than you might think. Yes, obviously. I mean, anybody who's a half-decent teacher Sardo knows that, but yes. It's easy to forget though, I think. And you know, I think I've I've heard people um talk, and even just as you said, I mean, very famous people, at least in our orbit, you know, Sewell Wright, um, going to students' talks in in a way that you it's it's

remarkable, not in the um exaggerative way, but just that it's notable, right? Going to posters, talking to students, early career students, that that is a virtue, yeah, I'm hearing you say. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, indeed. Um students are an enthusiastic bunch sometimes, if you you know, if you play play them properly. They they they seem like a bunch of blasse somethings that are you know that their faces off their phones, but yes, exactly. There can be a surprising amount of enthusiasm from young students. That's fantastic. Uh David, it looked like you were gonna ask something. No, I I think uh we're just about approaching the end. It was really wonderful uh talking to you, Martin. This was a fascinating and and lovely conversation.

Yeah, no, lovely talking to you guys, and it's nice to meet you, David. Yeah. I think it used to be because I've met him before. Yeah, no, exactly. I think yes, I think yeah. Um should we have asked you anything really quickly before we leave? It's our compulsory question. We only have one ever, and that's that's the one. It's a hard, hard probably. Yeah. That's a great answer. That's that's the best answer I think we have so far. Undoubtedly, probably, yes, exactly. Well, Martin, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you guys. Yeah. Thank you guys. Have a pleasant day. Yeah, you too, and stay warm in Ontario. Evening for me. Yes, exactly. Oh, that was wonderful conversation.

Really enjoyed it. David, I want to remind everyone that you do the wonderful music for the podcast too. I think people don't always know that. That is true. I'm an amateur composer. I composed that uh little bit of music. Um it was uh do you use a keyboard with a MIDI uh connection? No actually. Um I just drag the notes with my mouse. Really? Yeah, yeah. Just cop copy and paste notes and yeah. I think I think Mozart did that too. Or was it Beethoven? It was one of those Yeah, I'm following in uh Beethoven's footsteps. Which wait, um I I even I went to one of their houses when I was living in Europe. Which one was the one that was doing stuff when they were like five? Was that uh Beethoven? One maybe both, maybe I don't remember.

I feel like they're uh they all have wait which one was Amadeus? That was Mozart. That's Mozart, yeah. Yeah, Mozart is the one I'm thinking. He's the one in Austria, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Oh, by the way, Amadeus is a great movie, wonderful movie about uh envy envy. Oh, yes. Very psychology of envy, yeah. Yes, yes, yeah. That's our that's our this this episode is sponsored by the Omnismooth. That's our go go watch Amadeus. Yeah, it's a great yeah, it's a great slice of human nature, uh, and beautifully acted. And um um there's nothing it's a lovely virtuosity and proje prejudicity, is that a word? Prodigiousness, maybe. Yeah. Prodigicity. Prodigiocity. I don't know. I don't know. I guess as good as mine.

Well we're we were clearly prodigious at using the word prodigious. Yeah, I don't know how we got there, but uh we took a journey. Yeah, but anyway, uh everyone, thank you for listening. Uh please support the podcast in the usual ways. And David, I'll I guess I'll see you next week. Yeah, sounds great. Okay, you guys.