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David, this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

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Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists.

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Boom.

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Did it

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

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guest who needs no introduction, Martin Daly.

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

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

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

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

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uh inequality and its effects on conflict.

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We we covered it all.

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Uh kangaroo rats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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incredible thinkers.

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

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

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sample of that thinking even in this conversation.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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Enjoy.

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

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

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the um really any of the founders of evolutionary

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

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

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

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to Darwin.

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We talked about that recently.

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So Martin, thank you so much for being here.

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

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

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there was always a lore of the origins of evolutionary

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psychology.

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

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

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

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There you go.

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Yeah.

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Exactly.

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So can you?

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

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

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important people that were there when evolutionary psychology started.

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

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even younger, who may have only indirectly heard what that

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backstory was.

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If you had a chance to tell these academic grandchildren and

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

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

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

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behavior as a very interdisciplinary field.

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

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biologists with a very with a minority smattering of psychologists.

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Um and and the anthropologists were often the best

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psychologists.

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

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

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anthropologists.

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

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of the society.

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

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

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

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agenda.

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I became a keen Darwinian, I guess, um,

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more as a postdoc than younger.

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

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

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John Crook's research group.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Um, and Crook was in the psych department.

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

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was.

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

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

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

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rabid Darwinian.

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Then after I came back to North America and uh got

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attached to Margot Wilson, my late spouse and partner,

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

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Wilson's book came out in 1976.

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I guess we were running this seminar.

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

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

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research area.

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

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it was 1979, I think.

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

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Maybe.

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Because I don't think they were.

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

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

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

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

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and Bill Irons from Michigan and Northwestern had separately

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proposed a set of talks by mostly their students in human

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sociobiology.

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

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the two were sort of amalgamated.

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And that was an event that uh

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

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

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there, I think.

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Yeah.

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

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

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

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field.

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Uh 1976, why then?

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Why why did this happen then?

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Yeah.

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Any guests, yeah.

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Yeah, that that's a great question.

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

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was crystallizing in anthropology.

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One was Harvard.

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

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become involved in the uh Kalahari San um research,

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

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anyway, Mel Connor, Pat Draper, um,

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

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

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

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observations there.

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

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

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to Northwestern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Michigan.

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

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

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

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

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

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evolution.

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

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whose names should come to mind but don't.

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Um they all kind of congealed around Alexander.

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And we'd have these annual meetings.

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

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

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

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1981 until the foundation of HBES in

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89.

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

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

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

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

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enthusiastic participation, even of Bill Hamilton and George Williams,

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

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three leading theoretical biologists, certainly Hamilton

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and Williams anyway, thinking about evolution of behavior.

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

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

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

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

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

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She wants to remind me of how much flack the uh

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

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Lewontins and so on.

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

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

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

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animal behavior that went through like eight editions.

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

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for decades.

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

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wasn't somebody who came to those meetings.

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

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

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

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Um Margo and I were the

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

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

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originally.

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

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

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

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microtransmitters in them around the desert.

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Um so neither of us was a very good psychologist.

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

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

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It's still the same field to my mind.

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

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

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

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processes, we could call that psychology.

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

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

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

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

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seventy-eight.

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

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behavior that drew a big crowd.

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

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

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

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

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of my course notes?

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

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things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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And uh who else?

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There was another human talk.

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

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

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

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behavior.

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And uh and we got a good reception there.

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I mean, you didn't run into anybody saying it's preposterous that you're taking this

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approach with Homo sapiens, the cultural and thoughtful animal, or some stupid thing.

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Um, nobody said that.

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Do you do you think um anything has changed since the

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founding of the field?

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I mean, you mentioned that it had the support of luminaries in uh biological theory

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like Hamilton uh and Travers uh and Williams.

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Um do you think that uh we continue to have that support

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or has has it dwindled?

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Uh it's an interesting question.

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I mean you know Hamilton's death was a painful blow at George's George Williams's was

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another um I don't think we need the support of

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evolutionary biologists in the same way.

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I mean, you know, certain people, Lita and John among them, David Buss, Doug

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Kenrick, fought the good fight of submitting evolution-minded

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papers to the goddamn psychological journals until they took them.

00:18:26.740 --> 00:18:31.850
There were years and years and years where you know evolution mindedness was beyond the

00:18:31.850 --> 00:18:35.290
pale and the journal of personality and social psychology.

00:18:35.370 --> 00:18:36.890
And then it wasn't anymore.

00:18:37.050 --> 00:18:42.570
And every issue at least contains a paper or two by somebody who's thinking evolutionarily,

00:18:42.730 --> 00:18:44.730
usually reasonably sophisticatedly.

00:18:44.890 --> 00:18:48.170
So yeah, things have changed in that regard.

00:18:49.050 --> 00:18:54.960
I think most psychologists Have wrapped their mind around the idea that sure

00:18:55.040 --> 00:18:57.520
evolution must have something to do with the psyche.

00:18:57.600 --> 00:19:03.360
I mean, that, you know, maybe I, you know, I don't I don't see why it's relevant to my

00:19:03.360 --> 00:19:09.280
particular interest in, you know, some whatever, but uh, but

00:19:09.280 --> 00:19:14.850
that it has, you know, legitimate relevance to psychology, I think, is

00:19:15.010 --> 00:19:16.690
pretty widely accepted now.

00:19:16.850 --> 00:19:17.250
I think.

00:19:17.410 --> 00:19:18.290
I hope.

00:19:18.530 --> 00:19:20.290
Maybe I don't travel enough.

00:19:20.850 --> 00:19:21.810
Definitely more so.

00:19:22.050 --> 00:19:23.650
There's you know definite definite progress.

00:19:23.890 --> 00:19:28.930
I'd like to see more acceptance and integration of evolutionary perspectives.

00:19:29.010 --> 00:19:34.210
But yeah, there's definitely it's it's become more accepted, more mainstream, more um or

00:19:34.370 --> 00:19:36.050
less, less controversial.

00:19:36.500 --> 00:19:36.980
Yeah.

00:19:37.220 --> 00:19:37.540
Yeah.

00:19:37.700 --> 00:19:43.620
I mean psychology, well, there are whole fields of psychology that all of us

00:19:43.620 --> 00:19:49.060
don't pay any attention to, but I mean scientific psychology um

00:19:49.700 --> 00:19:52.100
was never our problem.

00:19:52.260 --> 00:19:57.620
I mean the the battles are harder for the cultural anthropologists um or have been.

00:19:57.700 --> 00:20:01.700
There's been more outright antipathy um to

00:20:03.070 --> 00:20:08.830
biology there than but you know geez still to this day I

00:20:08.830 --> 00:20:13.870
marvel at the fact that there were and are people like

00:20:15.950 --> 00:20:18.830
well no longer are in the case of Stephen J.

00:20:18.990 --> 00:20:23.870
Gould, but you know biologists who, you know, the minute you talk about Homo sapiens,

00:20:24.030 --> 00:20:28.190
you're obviously some kind of fascist or some you know evil person.

00:20:29.470 --> 00:20:34.580
I I I can't figure out what's going on between their ears, what their problem is.

00:20:35.860 --> 00:20:39.220
So in no so we're at 1978.

00:20:39.540 --> 00:20:43.700
Um is the oh yeah, sorry, Martin, go ahead.

00:20:44.660 --> 00:20:46.340
Uh oh you're okay, great.

00:20:46.420 --> 00:20:48.340
Um so we're at 1978.

00:20:49.780 --> 00:20:55.770
What is the what what what where so H human behavioral ecology, HBE,

00:20:55.930 --> 00:21:01.210
and evolutionary psychology for for my generation, which is a generation after

00:21:01.210 --> 00:21:07.050
Clark, um, you know, I grew up in the aftermath of sort of Rob Boyd and John Tuby

00:21:07.290 --> 00:21:08.650
being at loggerheads.

00:21:08.810 --> 00:21:14.330
Um, and we sort of joke about that amongst the my generation of students of theirs, you

00:21:14.330 --> 00:21:17.290
know, like uh Christina Moyenna, I joke about that.

00:21:17.530 --> 00:21:22.440
Um that's a that's my way of expressing.

00:21:23.160 --> 00:21:28.680
I grew up in a a world where evolutionary psychology and human

00:21:28.680 --> 00:21:34.680
behavioral ecology were were slightly pitted against each other, but I

00:21:34.680 --> 00:21:40.600
realize as you're saying they're the same field, and I think my generation

00:21:40.600 --> 00:21:42.440
sort of feels the same way.

00:21:43.320 --> 00:21:49.150
And in 1978, what was uh um where was

00:21:49.150 --> 00:21:54.990
there the beginning of a tension between those two or where did that come from

00:21:55.710 --> 00:22:01.310
that yeah that's a that's a really interesting question i if there was i

00:22:01.310 --> 00:22:06.430
wasn't picking up on it um but there may have been um

00:22:07.070 --> 00:22:13.070
you know the the earliest glimmers i can sort of remember

00:22:13.880 --> 00:22:19.160
was when Margot and I were editing the journal Evolution in Human Behavior, which didn't,

00:22:19.320 --> 00:22:25.080
which was only beginning in 1996, I think, to 2006,

00:22:25.160 --> 00:22:28.680
we we did the editing and then other people took over.

00:22:30.920 --> 00:22:36.600
At that time, it was certainly on the

00:22:36.600 --> 00:22:37.240
table.

00:22:38.120 --> 00:22:43.310
Like I remember going to HBES meetings and a number of

00:22:43.310 --> 00:22:48.430
anthropologists were sort of this this society's becoming dominated by psychologists.

00:22:48.510 --> 00:22:49.630
We need a different society.

00:22:49.710 --> 00:22:51.230
We don't want any part of this.

00:22:51.470 --> 00:22:56.830
Um and the ones who were sticking around were sometimes um just as

00:22:56.830 --> 00:22:58.430
critical and difficult.

00:22:58.670 --> 00:23:04.400
I mean, we would every year we would have to trot out the

00:23:04.400 --> 00:23:10.320
editor's report from the past year of what submissions we've had, what the acceptance rates

00:23:10.320 --> 00:23:11.200
were and stuff.

00:23:11.440 --> 00:23:17.360
And you had to fight this prejudice that, oh, you know, it's it's the

00:23:17.360 --> 00:23:23.120
journal is full of psych because it's got psychological editors.

00:23:23.680 --> 00:23:28.150
And you say, well, you know, actually the acceptance rate is higher for papers from

00:23:28.150 --> 00:23:31.590
anthropologists than from psychologists, and it always was.

00:23:31.910 --> 00:23:34.390
And I mean, for year after year after year it wasn't.

00:23:34.550 --> 00:23:37.270
I don't think it's because we were biased in favor of the anthropologists.

00:23:37.350 --> 00:23:42.310
I think it's because you got more small, quick and dirty stuff from psychologists than you

00:23:42.310 --> 00:23:43.350
get from anthropologists.

00:23:43.510 --> 00:23:43.590
Yeah.

00:23:44.390 --> 00:23:48.070
The costs of doing psychological research are much lower than doing fieldwork.

00:23:48.710 --> 00:23:54.220
And a lot a lot of people thought, man, I can dash off a paper from you know what I

00:23:54.220 --> 00:23:55.500
farted last week.

00:23:55.660 --> 00:23:59.740
Um you know, and then those would get rejected.

00:23:59.820 --> 00:24:05.340
But in any case, you know, we had this business of like, how many times do I have to tell

00:24:05.340 --> 00:24:10.140
Ruth Mace that the editorial board is not discriminating against

00:24:10.140 --> 00:24:11.420
anthropologists?

00:24:11.660 --> 00:24:17.660
Um, and here are the data, you know, and and that that would come up a

00:24:17.660 --> 00:24:17.980
lot.

00:24:18.220 --> 00:24:23.750
Um and yeah, so so certainly by the nine by the

00:24:23.750 --> 00:24:29.030
mid-90s, late 90s, that was becoming visible to me.

00:24:29.270 --> 00:24:32.390
I don't think I was aware of it much earlier.

00:24:32.630 --> 00:24:32.950
Yeah.

00:24:34.950 --> 00:24:40.070
A lot of the young anthropologists who were involved at the time that HBES was founded had

00:24:40.070 --> 00:24:42.390
trouble getting jobs in the field.

00:24:45.960 --> 00:24:51.800
there's different periods of freeze of availability of positions in

00:24:51.800 --> 00:24:53.720
different disciplines a bit.

00:24:54.040 --> 00:24:59.720
But uh you know, so so the people who were enthusiasts in the first few years of

00:24:59.960 --> 00:25:05.720
of um HBES, the anthropological enthusiasts mostly didn't get

00:25:05.720 --> 00:25:06.200
jobs.

00:25:06.360 --> 00:25:08.520
Laura Betzig never got a job.

00:25:08.760 --> 00:25:14.040
Paul Turk didn't get a job and went back to medical school and became a pediatrician.

00:25:14.200 --> 00:25:17.850
Um Nancy Bertet didn't get a job.

00:25:17.930 --> 00:25:23.290
There were there were lots of good, there were lots of Mark Flynn did, and that was like a

00:25:23.290 --> 00:25:24.170
big deal.

00:25:24.410 --> 00:25:30.250
Um so that may have fueled some sense

00:25:30.250 --> 00:25:34.010
of resentment.

00:25:34.170 --> 00:25:39.770
I don't know, but I still always sort of think of you know, most of the anthropologists I

00:25:39.770 --> 00:25:40.650
knew.

00:25:41.360 --> 00:25:45.120
Well, oh, the other event that's interesting in this regard is gonna say most of the

00:25:45.120 --> 00:25:50.800
anthropologists I knew were were quite favorable to psychology, but maybe that's because

00:25:50.880 --> 00:25:52.400
that's why I knew them, maybe.

00:25:52.480 --> 00:25:56.320
Um, in that, you know, I think of Don Simons in particular.

00:25:56.480 --> 00:26:02.160
Um and Don made a number of

00:26:02.160 --> 00:26:07.760
enemies within anthropology by criticizing what he called Darwinian anthropology.

00:26:07.920 --> 00:26:13.770
And what he was really after was he was criticizing primarily the

00:26:13.770 --> 00:26:19.770
notion that the acid test of an evolution-minded hypothesis is to count reproductive

00:26:19.770 --> 00:26:20.490
output.

00:26:20.570 --> 00:26:24.570
Um and you know that that that's the way you had to test things.

00:26:24.730 --> 00:26:27.370
And and he was highly critical of that.

00:26:27.690 --> 00:26:31.290
And some people were highly critical of him.

00:26:32.020 --> 00:26:37.940
Not all of them anthropologists, Dick Alexander was really pissed off at him for that, not

00:26:37.940 --> 00:26:43.460
so much because he disagreed as because he thought it was unfair that

00:26:44.980 --> 00:26:50.660
Don trotted out people like Laura Betzig, who were looking for jobs as prime

00:26:50.660 --> 00:26:54.180
examples of this fallacy, this fallacious approach.

00:26:54.260 --> 00:26:59.490
And he thought, you know, pick on someone your own size was was sort of his

00:26:59.490 --> 00:27:00.370
complaint.

00:27:00.930 --> 00:27:06.450
But uh yeah, there was there was that kind of tension.

00:27:08.210 --> 00:27:12.290
But it I didn't see it as the human behavior ecology.

00:27:12.370 --> 00:27:17.010
We do human behavioral ecology and we are different from psychologists, and we are insulted

00:27:17.010 --> 00:27:18.930
by you calling us psychologists.

00:27:19.090 --> 00:27:21.380
I didn't see it until later.

00:27:21.780 --> 00:27:27.620
I'm trying to remember what year Margot and I wrote a paper in animal behavior that

00:27:27.620 --> 00:27:33.540
was a sort of review paper, an invited paper, um human behavior

00:27:33.540 --> 00:27:35.620
as animal behavior, we called it.

00:27:35.860 --> 00:27:41.460
And uh and was just sort of, you know, bringing the same approach to bear on Homo sapiens

00:27:41.700 --> 00:27:47.060
as you do on other critters, um, the same conceptual approach, and to some extent the same

00:27:47.060 --> 00:27:48.820
methodological approach.

00:27:49.140 --> 00:27:55.130
And in that, um, we made some allusion

00:27:55.130 --> 00:28:00.330
to evolutionary psychology and we said, you know, which which we which is a term for

00:28:00.330 --> 00:28:06.250
present purposes we're going to use more broadly than um is often done to

00:28:06.250 --> 00:28:11.290
include anything that involves addressing psychological questions from an evolutionary

00:28:11.290 --> 00:28:13.210
perspective, regardless of discipline.

00:28:13.440 --> 00:28:18.240
Like if like if you're interested in foraging decisions and you're taking an

00:28:18.240 --> 00:28:22.400
evolution-minded approach, then you're doing evolutionary psychology as we're defining it

00:28:22.400 --> 00:28:22.640
here.

00:28:23.520 --> 00:28:28.720
And Kim Hill and Monique Borgerhoff, Mulder, and who else, somebody else got really bent

00:28:28.720 --> 00:28:29.120
out of shape.

00:28:29.200 --> 00:28:30.640
Oh, Eric Alden Smith of all people.

00:28:30.720 --> 00:28:33.360
The three of them got all bent out of shape about this.

00:28:33.600 --> 00:28:37.850
And, you know, damn it, we're not doing evolutionary psychology, we're doing something

00:28:37.850 --> 00:28:40.090
different, human behavioral ecology.

00:28:40.330 --> 00:28:46.330
And maybe that was 1990, and that was maybe the first glimmer I had that that, you

00:28:46.330 --> 00:28:52.330
know, there was a problem here, that there was some antipathy,

00:28:52.570 --> 00:28:56.730
some hostility within what I thought of as one field.

00:28:57.210 --> 00:28:57.370
Yeah.

00:28:57.610 --> 00:29:02.660
And there there's a bit of a tension uh what I'm hearing is that

00:29:03.780 --> 00:29:09.300
I imagine the people that were not taking an evolutionary approach or even a biological

00:29:09.300 --> 00:29:14.500
approach to psychology, my understanding of that literature was it was not ecological at

00:29:14.500 --> 00:29:15.300
all, right?

00:29:15.540 --> 00:29:17.940
It was not bringing the ecology in.

00:29:18.260 --> 00:29:23.460
And, you know, with the ethologists that was starting, but then you know, the World War II

00:29:23.460 --> 00:29:23.780
happened.

00:29:23.860 --> 00:29:29.610
But it sounds like, you know, the the kind of education you were getting and the the

00:29:29.610 --> 00:29:35.530
ecology came back and you were now applying ecology to human thinking

00:29:36.090 --> 00:29:38.010
in a way that um yeah.

00:29:38.650 --> 00:29:39.290
I guess so.

00:29:39.450 --> 00:29:44.170
I mean there was there was a field, I forget what the hell they did call it ecological

00:29:44.170 --> 00:29:45.050
psychology.

00:29:46.970 --> 00:29:52.780
Um I mean I actually tried to read some of it, but it's gone now from my

00:29:52.780 --> 00:29:53.020
mind.

00:29:55.980 --> 00:29:56.700
I feel like that comes in.

00:30:00.860 --> 00:30:06.540
But I but I I'm not quite sure what they meant by ecological, but but they meant something

00:30:06.540 --> 00:30:08.460
about c context and environment.

00:30:08.700 --> 00:30:08.940
Right.

00:30:09.180 --> 00:30:15.070
Um anyway, no, I mean as I say, I've I got I got as

00:30:15.070 --> 00:30:20.110
a postdoc involved in a group of so-called socioecologists, and uh

00:30:20.910 --> 00:30:26.750
that was largely a minority thing within animal behavior.

00:30:26.910 --> 00:30:30.350
I mean, the Animal Behavior Society was my annual meeting.

00:30:30.830 --> 00:30:33.310
I'd never been to a psych meeting.

00:30:33.550 --> 00:30:39.540
Um I've been to about three ever in my life.

00:30:43.060 --> 00:30:47.380
You know, I'm assuming that the human behavior and evolution society is not yet called a

00:30:47.380 --> 00:30:53.060
psychology meeting, even though, to my great annoyance, if you Google the journal,

00:30:53.300 --> 00:30:56.420
it says the topic is evolutionary psychology.

00:30:56.580 --> 00:31:00.260
The topic of the journal, Evolution and Human Behavior, is Evolutionary Psychology, which

00:31:00.260 --> 00:31:00.980
bugs me.

00:31:03.730 --> 00:31:09.650
but yeah, no, I mean I I I'm just coming from outside psychology to and

00:31:09.650 --> 00:31:11.730
in a way I'm still a crappy psychologist.

00:31:11.810 --> 00:31:15.890
I mean, most of the research that I've done on human beings and that I'm known for is more

00:31:15.890 --> 00:31:17.010
epidemiological.

00:31:17.170 --> 00:31:20.850
It's you know, it's not not there's no human subjects involved.

00:31:20.930 --> 00:31:24.530
It's it's working from you know databases.

00:31:24.690 --> 00:31:30.300
Um Demographic epidemiological kind of

00:31:30.300 --> 00:31:31.100
research, rather.

00:31:31.500 --> 00:31:37.180
So, in a way, I mean, Margot and I used to go to criminology meetings.

00:31:37.340 --> 00:31:42.620
Um, and most of the other criminologists there were actually sociologists.

00:31:42.860 --> 00:31:48.700
And they thought we were weird if we give them any detail at all about the sort of

00:31:48.700 --> 00:31:54.430
evolutionary rationales for some of our hypotheses, but they were interested in the same

00:31:54.430 --> 00:31:55.710
phenomena we were.

00:31:55.790 --> 00:31:58.510
Um, so you could, you know, you could talk and make friends.

00:31:58.590 --> 00:32:04.110
And I still have some good friends who are who are sociologists.

00:32:04.350 --> 00:32:09.230
Um, whereas the number who are psychologists is more limited.

00:32:10.590 --> 00:32:11.230
I guess.

00:32:11.790 --> 00:32:16.460
Well, I mean, you're calling yourself crappy uh psychologists, but I think that I mean

00:32:16.540 --> 00:32:22.060
there's an argument that you are very prescient in the sense, and I think you know you're

00:32:22.540 --> 00:32:25.660
uh we'll obviously get to homicide at some point.

00:32:25.900 --> 00:32:31.420
But I mean, for me, my first exposure to you and Margot was, oh my good,

00:32:31.820 --> 00:32:37.330
my thought was this is a brilliant insight, which is you

00:32:37.330 --> 00:32:43.330
foresaw the replication crisis or the triviality of experimental effects long before

00:32:43.330 --> 00:32:45.250
many other psychologists.

00:32:45.410 --> 00:32:50.050
And you were looking at and saying, look, here is here's a phenomenon out in the world we

00:32:50.050 --> 00:32:51.170
have good data for.

00:32:51.250 --> 00:32:53.170
There's not reporting bias.

00:32:53.490 --> 00:32:58.770
Um so I mean, without going fully into homicide, I would just I would like to correct the

00:32:58.770 --> 00:33:01.570
record of you saying you're crappy psychologists.

00:33:02.340 --> 00:33:07.620
Okay, what I mean is I'm not a mainstream psychologist, and I've I've seldom been

00:33:07.860 --> 00:33:12.900
interested in the psyche.

00:33:13.220 --> 00:33:18.660
I mean, most of the almost all the experimental work I've done has been with rodents.

00:33:19.060 --> 00:33:24.900
Um I've done a little bit, mostly at Margot's instigation.

00:33:25.060 --> 00:33:30.830
We did a little bit of human human subjects research in the lab, the

00:33:30.830 --> 00:33:31.150
lab.

00:33:31.550 --> 00:33:31.870
Right.

00:33:32.030 --> 00:33:33.710
Um, but yeah.

00:33:34.030 --> 00:33:36.830
I would I would even I would even disagree there.

00:33:36.990 --> 00:33:41.550
I mean, just re reading your work, I think there's a lot of psychological sophistication in

00:33:41.550 --> 00:33:41.870
your work.

00:33:42.030 --> 00:33:46.990
I mean, it would have been very easy to caricature the stuff going on inside the head uh

00:33:47.150 --> 00:33:51.500
after looking at at some of these results from homicide data, Right.

00:33:51.660 --> 00:33:56.780
It would have been very easy to say, you know, we have a drive to murder non-related

00:33:56.780 --> 00:33:59.260
offspring or any other silly idea like that.

00:33:59.420 --> 00:34:01.020
But that, you know, you you didn't take that road.

00:34:01.100 --> 00:34:05.820
You took a much more nuanced, sophisticated take where, you know, these are these are not

00:34:05.820 --> 00:34:07.020
adaptations we're dealing with.

00:34:07.100 --> 00:34:11.260
These are byproducts of other systems in the mind that have different functions.

00:34:11.500 --> 00:34:16.380
And these outcomes sometimes emerge as a byproduct of of the normal workings of those

00:34:16.380 --> 00:34:16.700
systems.

00:34:16.860 --> 00:34:22.390
And so I I saw a lot of of nuance into the the psychology in your in your work.

00:34:22.710 --> 00:34:23.270
Well thank you.

00:34:23.350 --> 00:34:25.750
Yeah, no I mean you and you're right.

00:34:25.830 --> 00:34:27.510
We were thinking about the mind.

00:34:27.910 --> 00:34:32.710
I mean, you know, it's just that I'm I'm never quite sure what to do with some of the

00:34:32.710 --> 00:34:38.550
constructs that I think are actually central both to our work and to actual human

00:34:38.550 --> 00:34:44.310
minds, like you know, male sexual proprietariness was one of Margot's

00:34:44.320 --> 00:34:45.440
fave terms.

00:34:45.520 --> 00:34:51.520
Um discriminative parental solicitude is another catchphrase that we're known for

00:34:51.520 --> 00:34:52.080
a bit.

00:34:52.240 --> 00:34:58.240
And uh I guess, well, Dave has uh criticized the

00:34:58.240 --> 00:34:59.920
concept of modularity.

00:35:00.080 --> 00:35:03.120
And um I I I was never fond of it either.

00:35:03.280 --> 00:35:07.120
I mean I I could never I I get it.

00:35:07.830 --> 00:35:13.750
I believe that there are, you know, I don't know

00:35:13.750 --> 00:35:18.230
what the right word is, channels in the mind, that there are things that connect up readily

00:35:18.230 --> 00:35:19.030
to other things.

00:35:19.190 --> 00:35:23.270
Yeah, and that they do so for reasons that's of past selection.

00:35:23.910 --> 00:35:29.430
Um, but uh, but I I've still no very

00:35:29.750 --> 00:35:34.950
good idea of what the right language for talking about that stuff is, and I confess I

00:35:34.950 --> 00:35:39.320
haven't paid a lot of attention to efforts to find it.

00:35:39.800 --> 00:35:40.440
You know.

00:35:40.760 --> 00:35:46.680
Um it's funny, John and Lita and Dava Bus

00:35:46.760 --> 00:35:52.680
and Margot and I spent a year in 1990-91, I guess it was, at the Center

00:35:52.680 --> 00:35:55.720
for Advanced Study at at Stanford.

00:35:55.960 --> 00:36:01.710
Um, and actually Lita and John proposed a group there, and it would have, it was those

00:36:01.710 --> 00:36:07.150
five people: them, Margot and me, and David Bus, and Don Simons in their proposal.

00:36:07.390 --> 00:36:12.430
But whoever runs the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, Nick's

00:36:12.670 --> 00:36:13.470
Simons.

00:36:14.510 --> 00:36:19.950
And I think they did so on the basis of the fact that he just didn't have that many

00:36:19.950 --> 00:36:22.670
publications, which was dumb.

00:36:22.830 --> 00:36:28.560
But anyway, the original fantasy when we had this thing was that we would

00:36:28.560 --> 00:36:34.560
somehow collaborate on writing a book about, you know, a sort of agenda-setting

00:36:34.560 --> 00:36:36.000
book for Ev Psych.

00:36:36.720 --> 00:36:42.320
And then we had endless discussions where we disagreed on

00:36:42.320 --> 00:36:47.840
silly things that that wouldn't get like Margot and I just wouldn't have the use of the

00:36:47.840 --> 00:36:50.000
word instinct or innate.

00:36:50.650 --> 00:36:52.570
You know, we didn't like it.

00:36:52.650 --> 00:36:58.410
We come out of an animal behavior background and had undergone all this um criticism for

00:36:58.410 --> 00:37:00.250
what we consider good reasons.

00:37:00.410 --> 00:37:02.650
Um decades earlier.

00:37:02.890 --> 00:37:08.650
Why are why are we resonating, why are we resurrecting um this concept of

00:37:08.650 --> 00:37:09.290
innateness?

00:37:09.370 --> 00:37:10.010
We didn't like it.

00:37:10.090 --> 00:37:12.570
John Alita thought it was absolutely essential.

00:37:12.890 --> 00:37:14.330
I don't know what Bus thought.

00:37:14.490 --> 00:37:18.650
He basically basically just vacated himself from these conversations after a while and went

00:37:18.650 --> 00:37:21.740
to his own cubicle and wrote papers.

00:37:21.900 --> 00:37:24.700
Um, but uh but anyway, this never happened.

00:37:24.780 --> 00:37:30.780
On the other hand, I mean the book, The Adaptive Mind, got largely hatched during

00:37:30.780 --> 00:37:31.340
that year.

00:37:31.500 --> 00:37:37.420
So um there were things accomplished, and some of them were collaborative among us all,

00:37:37.580 --> 00:37:43.340
but uh but it was funny that uh you know we couldn't get off the ground

00:37:43.340 --> 00:37:48.540
on sort of low level concepts like okay, so we all believe

00:37:48.570 --> 00:37:54.090
evolution is somehow central

00:37:54.410 --> 00:37:56.970
to thinking properly about psychology.

00:37:57.130 --> 00:37:59.450
But how the hell do we lay this out?

00:37:59.690 --> 00:38:05.370
And we never we never arrived at a consensual perspective on that.

00:38:05.690 --> 00:38:05.930
Yeah.

00:38:06.970 --> 00:38:08.330
I don't know what people have since.

00:38:08.570 --> 00:38:08.810
Yeah.

00:38:08.970 --> 00:38:14.920
Well w at that time was the idea that you were coming from

00:38:14.920 --> 00:38:20.920
this larger meeting of the evolutionary behavioral sciences, and you were

00:38:20.920 --> 00:38:25.480
still part of it, but you wanted to start talking to psychologists who weren't taking an

00:38:25.560 --> 00:38:26.920
evolutionary approach?

00:38:27.240 --> 00:38:33.010
Or was it that there was dissatisfaction with that meeting in that it

00:38:33.010 --> 00:38:34.370
wasn't psychological enough?

00:38:34.530 --> 00:38:37.010
Or is that an ill-posed question?

00:38:38.210 --> 00:38:43.330
That may have been the case for Lita and John, that there was a feeling that, you know,

00:38:43.570 --> 00:38:45.730
wanted to get the focus more psychological.

00:38:45.890 --> 00:38:49.330
I mean, they were quite messianic about, you know,

00:38:51.330 --> 00:38:57.250
cognitive approach in conjunction with an evolutionary approach is the way

00:38:57.250 --> 00:38:57.890
to go.

00:38:58.370 --> 00:39:04.280
And uh and I guess, you know, I'm I'm I'm more sympathetic to that

00:39:04.280 --> 00:39:05.320
now than I was at the time.

00:39:05.400 --> 00:39:09.640
At the time it was kind of like, Jesus, did we really need the cognitive revolution?

00:39:09.720 --> 00:39:13.000
It seemed like a step back from behaviorism sometimes.

00:39:13.240 --> 00:39:19.080
Um, as I felt then, as a guy coming out of animal behavior and sort of understanding

00:39:19.400 --> 00:39:25.160
why the behaviorist revolution against simple minded cognitivism had

00:39:25.160 --> 00:39:26.200
happened in the first place.

00:39:26.360 --> 00:39:26.600
Right.

00:39:26.920 --> 00:39:31.210
Um is this making sense to your audience and you?

00:39:31.610 --> 00:39:32.570
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:39:32.890 --> 00:39:33.450
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:33.610 --> 00:39:33.690
Yeah.

00:39:33.930 --> 00:39:34.570
Maybe I'm talking about it.

00:39:34.810 --> 00:39:40.570
I'm curious, do you no I mean do you do you still um harbor

00:39:40.810 --> 00:39:46.250
some of those feelings about innateness, instinct, cognitive and computational models?

00:39:46.410 --> 00:39:47.130
Are those still with you?

00:39:51.850 --> 00:39:57.100
I do still dislike the concept of innateness.

00:39:57.900 --> 00:40:03.660
And I dislike it for its for its

00:40:04.220 --> 00:40:08.620
implication, at least in the minds of most people who hear it, that

00:40:09.580 --> 00:40:15.420
developmental processes are irrelevant, uninteresting, that there

00:40:15.420 --> 00:40:21.340
is, and perhaps even that there is no actual input from anything else during development.

00:40:21.610 --> 00:40:23.690
I mean that's what it classically meant.

00:40:23.850 --> 00:40:29.850
And it still sort of sounds that way a lot when people talk about the this instinct

00:40:29.850 --> 00:40:30.970
or the that instinct.

00:40:31.050 --> 00:40:35.770
It's just, you know, you know, feed them an appropriate diet and let them grow up and

00:40:35.770 --> 00:40:37.290
they'll there it'll be.

00:40:37.450 --> 00:40:41.770
Um and you say, geez, is this helpful?

00:40:41.930 --> 00:40:46.960
Is is this helpful to leave out um

00:40:47.280 --> 00:40:53.040
ontogeny because it seems to dis-ontogeny dismiss it

00:40:53.360 --> 00:40:56.800
as not part of what we're interested in.

00:40:57.200 --> 00:40:57.440
Yeah.

00:40:57.680 --> 00:40:58.720
It's I agree.

00:40:58.800 --> 00:41:00.400
It's it's an unexplained, yeah, yeah.

00:41:00.720 --> 00:41:00.960
Yeah.

00:41:01.120 --> 00:41:06.630
It's an extremely misleading folk concept uh that I think uh you know,

00:41:06.870 --> 00:41:08.710
generates more confusion than insight.

00:41:08.790 --> 00:41:11.350
I I would love to have Dave write a paper against innateness.

00:41:11.510 --> 00:41:15.110
I'm sure there are papers out there that that criticize this concept uh and how it's like.

00:41:15.350 --> 00:41:16.630
I think Annie, Annie wants to.

00:41:16.790 --> 00:41:20.230
I think Annie and Christina, we actually thought about having Christina Moya and Annie Ortz

00:41:20.310 --> 00:41:25.270
on as their sort of, I feel like the uh and they have a great paper in behavioral processes

00:41:25.270 --> 00:41:25.670
about it.

00:41:25.750 --> 00:41:31.430
Uh I think some of their cont contentful work, but um but yeah, I think the the

00:41:31.590 --> 00:41:34.680
the the idea innateness.

00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:41.000
Um I I Martin, I I told David this that when I first encountered evolutionary psychology, I

00:41:41.000 --> 00:41:47.000
thought it was stupid because I understood it as assigning um known phenomena

00:41:47.000 --> 00:41:52.440
to latent variables called instincts with no insight beyond that, right?

00:41:52.600 --> 00:41:54.680
And uh that was my understanding, like language instinct.

00:41:54.760 --> 00:41:56.680
Well, we know there's language, it's an instinct.

00:41:56.920 --> 00:41:59.800
I you know, as an undergrad, that was my first exposure.

00:41:59.880 --> 00:42:00.200
Yeah.

00:42:00.600 --> 00:42:06.130
And yeah, actually, you know, of all Steve Binker's books, the language instinct is my

00:42:06.130 --> 00:42:06.450
favorite.

00:42:06.770 --> 00:42:07.330
Yeah, me too.

00:42:07.490 --> 00:42:08.370
No, me too, for sure.

00:42:08.530 --> 00:42:09.090
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:09.170 --> 00:42:09.730
No, absolutely.

00:42:09.810 --> 00:42:09.970
Yeah.

00:42:10.050 --> 00:42:12.530
No, once you read it, it's clear that that's not the approach.

00:42:12.690 --> 00:42:17.490
But yeah, no, just the word itself was was Yes, the word itself didn't didn't do any good.

00:42:17.570 --> 00:42:23.330
And partly, you know, I'm just I'm just being the animal behavior guy who who was trained

00:42:23.330 --> 00:42:24.130
in the 70s.

00:42:24.210 --> 00:42:29.740
I mean, it was like, you know, we had the critiques of

00:42:29.740 --> 00:42:33.020
Conrad Laurentian instinct theory.

00:42:33.500 --> 00:42:36.300
Um, and they'd carried the day.

00:42:36.540 --> 00:42:36.700
Right.

00:42:36.940 --> 00:42:38.780
Their critiques had carried the day.

00:42:39.020 --> 00:42:39.260
Right.

00:42:39.580 --> 00:42:45.500
Um, and then you know, it just felt like, geez, what what are we

00:42:45.500 --> 00:42:47.260
resurrecting this concept for?

00:42:47.660 --> 00:42:52.940
And what was the critique just that the phenotype is a process and contingent, and that the

00:42:52.940 --> 00:42:57.100
goal of science is to articulate that complex contingency?

00:42:57.990 --> 00:43:00.470
I guess that's a that's not a bad way to put things.

00:43:00.630 --> 00:43:05.590
Yeah, I think I think that's that's largely it because the Kutrique was kind of

00:43:06.390 --> 00:43:12.390
um in fairness, I I don't think it's unfair to say that for Lorenz at

00:43:12.390 --> 00:43:17.270
least, not for Tim Bergen, but for some of the other early ethologists,

00:43:17.830 --> 00:43:23.430
invoking instinct was saying that there is no developmental process of

00:43:23.430 --> 00:43:24.310
interest, right?

00:43:24.640 --> 00:43:26.640
No developmental process at all.

00:43:26.800 --> 00:43:29.200
There is a thing in the brain, there is an organ.

00:43:29.600 --> 00:43:34.720
Um it, you know, like I said before, you know, you just you just feed the baby the

00:43:34.720 --> 00:43:37.040
appropriate nutrients and the organ grows.

00:43:37.280 --> 00:43:43.040
Um and and it it was always framed in nature nurture

00:43:43.600 --> 00:43:44.000
terms.

00:43:44.240 --> 00:43:48.960
The you know does the animal know how to do this without learning it?

00:43:49.200 --> 00:43:54.590
And if the animal knows how to do this without learning it, then you know it's

00:43:54.590 --> 00:43:55.470
instinct.

00:43:55.710 --> 00:43:58.830
And I still don't know how to talk about this kind of thing properly.

00:43:58.910 --> 00:44:02.430
I mean I used to study an animal um

00:44:04.510 --> 00:44:08.270
sometimes referred to as the fat sand rat, um, a

00:44:10.510 --> 00:44:15.230
desert rodent that eats the leaves of uh of

00:44:16.510 --> 00:44:18.990
very salty desert plants.

00:44:19.070 --> 00:44:24.820
Um and it it belongs to a family gerbils, where everybody

00:44:24.820 --> 00:44:30.100
else eats seeds or insects and they eat leaves, and they are very

00:44:30.100 --> 00:44:31.300
specialized for this.

00:44:31.540 --> 00:44:36.820
And then when I got a job in California, my first academic job was at UC Riverside.

00:44:36.980 --> 00:44:40.580
Um, there was a parallel radiation in kangaroo rats.

00:44:41.620 --> 00:44:47.620
And there was one species, um, microps, dipophomies microps, who does the same

00:44:47.620 --> 00:44:47.780
thing.

00:44:47.860 --> 00:44:53.510
They eat plants of the same family, um, they eat the leaves, and all other kangaroo rats,

00:44:53.590 --> 00:44:59.030
and there's like 28 other species or so, um, eat seeds.

00:44:59.350 --> 00:45:03.350
And I thought I thought these animals were very interesting.

00:45:03.430 --> 00:45:08.230
I brought them into the lab, I studied them, and uh, you could feed them on a diet of

00:45:08.230 --> 00:45:13.190
lettuce and seeds, and they'd thrive, they'd seem to be okay.

00:45:13.430 --> 00:45:19.360
Um, but then if you have raised one in captivity, when you handed it one of these salt bush

00:45:19.440 --> 00:45:24.400
leaves for the first time as an adult that had never seen it before, it would

00:45:26.000 --> 00:45:30.400
drop it and come back to it and drop it and come back to it, and then suddenly pick it up

00:45:30.400 --> 00:45:34.400
and do exactly what the adults do with it, which is quite complicated.

00:45:34.560 --> 00:45:40.320
They stick out their lower jaw like an underbite and they hold the leaf in both hands and

00:45:40.320 --> 00:45:45.680
drag it down over their lower incisor, scraping off the hypersalina

00:45:46.070 --> 00:45:50.150
tissue that goes flying in all directions, and then they flip it around and do the same on

00:45:50.150 --> 00:45:51.830
the other side, and then they eat the interior.

00:45:52.470 --> 00:45:57.030
And you know, you see an adult do this who has never seen one of these leaves before in its

00:45:57.030 --> 00:46:00.870
life, and you've handed it to it for the first time, and it goes, What the hell is this?

00:46:00.950 --> 00:46:01.270
What's this?

00:46:01.350 --> 00:46:01.750
What's this?

00:46:01.830 --> 00:46:02.790
Here's what I do with it.

00:46:04.230 --> 00:46:05.830
What's the way we want to talk about this?

00:46:05.990 --> 00:46:06.310
Yeah.

00:46:06.950 --> 00:46:08.870
They have been selected to do this.

00:46:09.030 --> 00:46:10.870
This is this is their job.

00:46:11.030 --> 00:46:12.710
This is their, you know, etc.

00:46:13.180 --> 00:46:16.060
So okay, I get why people talk about instincts.

00:46:16.300 --> 00:46:16.540
Yeah.

00:46:16.700 --> 00:46:17.020
Yeah.

00:46:17.100 --> 00:46:17.420
Yeah.

00:46:17.660 --> 00:46:18.300
I get it.

00:46:18.460 --> 00:46:24.460
I just think that, you know, as soon as you start using the term at all broadly, it becomes

00:46:24.460 --> 00:46:25.420
unhelpful.

00:46:26.140 --> 00:46:26.460
Yeah.

00:46:26.940 --> 00:46:32.780
It's it's very much especially especially when applied to an organ whose very purpose

00:46:32.780 --> 00:46:33.900
is contingency.

00:46:34.220 --> 00:46:34.700
Right?

00:46:35.290 --> 00:46:39.930
It's whole the whole reason it's there is to take in input from the environment and respond

00:46:39.930 --> 00:46:42.490
intelligently and strategically to that input.

00:46:42.890 --> 00:46:45.050
The organ you're talking about is the brain.

00:46:49.450 --> 00:46:49.530
Yeah.

00:46:49.690 --> 00:46:55.210
Mart Martin, what I am hearing you say too, in in terms of what you're describing, is that

00:46:55.210 --> 00:47:00.940
your view, and you can correct me if this is wrong, was that the evolutionary sciences

00:47:00.940 --> 00:47:06.620
and biological sciences, it was sort of taking this idea that we have a

00:47:06.620 --> 00:47:09.820
theory that can explain dynamic relationships.

00:47:09.980 --> 00:47:14.780
So if this selection pressure is true, we should see this distribution here.

00:47:14.940 --> 00:47:20.140
And even when you something like data from homicides, you know, you can just say, look, the

00:47:20.300 --> 00:47:23.100
these data should relate to these data here.

00:47:23.340 --> 00:47:28.890
So what I'm hearing you say is that you're thinking about the mind you're triangulating on

00:47:28.890 --> 00:47:34.730
what that contingency phenotype is but the data you're using are

00:47:35.850 --> 00:47:41.370
are these things out in the real world right yeah I mean uh

00:47:42.410 --> 00:47:48.330
that that brings me to a whole slightly different topic but it's but it it's

00:47:48.840 --> 00:47:54.200
I'm probably one of the more skeptical people you'll meet about the utility of

00:47:54.200 --> 00:47:55.640
self-report data.

00:47:56.120 --> 00:48:01.880
Um I mean, obviously they're used and they are often valuable

00:48:01.880 --> 00:48:07.800
and all that, but I think people it's

00:48:07.800 --> 00:48:13.690
not just that people lie when you ask them questions, they also can't access their

00:48:13.690 --> 00:48:15.130
own minds very well.

00:48:15.290 --> 00:48:20.330
And you know, there's decades of research going back to a classic paper by Nisbutton Wilson

00:48:20.410 --> 00:48:26.410
in 77, showing that when you ask people to explain their preferences

00:48:26.410 --> 00:48:31.850
or their choices or their behavior in some way, they will immediately spout a

00:48:31.850 --> 00:48:37.820
sincere, convincing sounding account of why they did what was what

00:48:37.820 --> 00:48:43.740
they did that experimentally can be demonstrated to be post hot baloney,

00:48:43.900 --> 00:48:48.380
that they that they uh you know that you can move you can manipulate it and shove it around

00:48:48.380 --> 00:48:50.060
in ways that they're unaware of.

00:48:51.340 --> 00:48:57.340
And often they had no explanation until the question was, and then they you know form it on

00:48:57.340 --> 00:48:57.900
the spot.

00:48:58.140 --> 00:49:03.630
So I I have a long history of sort of

00:49:03.630 --> 00:49:07.870
collaborating with people who were debunking um

00:49:09.150 --> 00:49:14.430
self-report data in one way or another, showing that they were inconsistent,

00:49:14.590 --> 00:49:19.310
showing that, you know, people who said something at one time

00:49:20.750 --> 00:49:26.190
apparently sincerely, two years later, said something that contradicted their

00:49:26.460 --> 00:49:31.100
past with respect to what that had happened to them, with what they'd seen previously.

00:49:33.500 --> 00:49:39.260
That people who claim certain kinds of experiences, um,

00:49:39.580 --> 00:49:42.860
a week later they may have forgotten it and claimed the opposite.

00:49:43.100 --> 00:49:48.780
And so I've never liked just you know asking people

00:49:48.780 --> 00:49:49.740
stuff.

00:49:49.980 --> 00:49:55.430
And I've never been crazy about things like sexual

00:49:55.590 --> 00:49:57.990
orientation inventories and things like that.

00:49:58.150 --> 00:50:03.830
Um, I get it's interesting that you get, you know, sex differences that you get correlated

00:50:03.830 --> 00:50:04.630
with other stuff.

00:50:04.790 --> 00:50:09.990
But if you start taking them too much at face value, then uh then then you're

00:50:10.630 --> 00:50:16.500
being a bit credulous because because people, you know,

00:50:16.740 --> 00:50:21.140
talk as behavior too, and stuff comes spilling out of people's mouths, and we should, you

00:50:21.140 --> 00:50:27.060
know, study it with as much detachment as we study

00:50:27.060 --> 00:50:28.020
anything else.

00:50:28.260 --> 00:50:33.780
Um so I've never tried working much

00:50:34.420 --> 00:50:40.340
on human self-report data because I've always been s a bit jaundiced about it, I

00:50:40.340 --> 00:50:40.740
guess.

00:50:40.980 --> 00:50:46.830
And uh I get that it's sometimes all you can

00:50:46.830 --> 00:50:47.150
do.

00:50:47.870 --> 00:50:53.150
I find it funny that some human behavioral ecologists have sort of critiqued

00:50:53.150 --> 00:50:57.790
psychologists as depending on you know we study what people do rather than just what they

00:50:57.790 --> 00:50:58.030
say.

00:51:00.430 --> 00:51:04.110
You've probably heard that from some human behavioral ecologists too.

00:51:04.190 --> 00:51:09.860
And it's like, um, actually, look at any of your bloody studies, and they depend on

00:51:09.860 --> 00:51:10.980
hearsay too.

00:51:11.140 --> 00:51:17.140
You know, you asked these people if they've got any children, how many children

00:51:17.140 --> 00:51:17.540
they've got.

00:51:17.620 --> 00:51:19.460
You asked them this, you asked them that.

00:51:19.620 --> 00:51:22.500
You wrote it down, you believed it, you analyzed it.

00:51:22.660 --> 00:51:27.380
Um what you actually saw was seldom terribly much.

00:51:27.780 --> 00:51:33.060
Um, you know, admit which is not to diss the people who have,

00:51:34.030 --> 00:51:39.790
painstakingly followed a hunting group into the forest and measured what they got.

00:51:40.670 --> 00:51:46.350
But just, you know, everybody is to some degree

00:51:46.590 --> 00:51:52.510
seducible by, or if you like, just dependent on the utterances of other human beings

00:51:52.510 --> 00:51:56.030
for their understanding of what those other human beings are up to.

00:51:58.750 --> 00:52:04.060
Unless you're a human ethologist studying pre-verbal

00:52:04.060 --> 00:52:04.780
children.

00:52:08.300 --> 00:52:08.700
Yeah.

00:52:08.940 --> 00:52:14.860
I mean what's lovely about the dataset that you work with is that it

00:52:14.860 --> 00:52:19.900
is um uh not subject to these critiques.

00:52:20.060 --> 00:52:26.050
Uh there's a wonderful line from uh The Mask of Zorro that I'm remembering uh where uh

00:52:26.370 --> 00:52:30.050
the the bad guy tracks down Zorro and he's pretending that he's not Zoro.

00:52:30.290 --> 00:52:31.490
He has like some alter ego.

00:52:31.650 --> 00:52:35.970
Uh and then he rips off his his shirt and reveals like a bloody sleeve where he got cut and

00:52:35.970 --> 00:52:38.610
he says, Blood never lies, Zorro.

00:52:40.290 --> 00:52:42.130
But I think the same is true of of your data.

00:52:42.290 --> 00:52:43.330
Blood never lies.

00:52:43.650 --> 00:52:49.520
He's you know uh homicide Homicide was that was

00:52:49.600 --> 00:52:52.240
actually Margot's brainwave that we should study homicide.

00:52:52.320 --> 00:52:54.000
I thought she was out of her mind at first.

00:52:54.160 --> 00:52:58.080
Um we were what was the context?

00:52:58.240 --> 00:53:03.920
Oh yeah, yeah, we we'd started doing this stuff on um child maltreatment,

00:53:04.080 --> 00:53:08.400
um stimulated by a graduate student at Riverside, and then uh

00:53:10.770 --> 00:53:16.050
you get the criticism that, well, you know, there's reporting biases.

00:53:16.130 --> 00:53:18.610
Who detects who who detects child maltreatment?

00:53:18.770 --> 00:53:19.730
Who gets reported?

00:53:19.890 --> 00:53:24.210
If you find that step parents are more likely to abuse children, it's probably because

00:53:24.210 --> 00:53:26.450
they're more likely to be reported and recorded.

00:53:26.610 --> 00:53:27.970
And you know, that might be so.

00:53:28.050 --> 00:53:29.890
And then geez, how do you get around that?

00:53:29.970 --> 00:53:34.960
And then we have, well, actually, in these big data sets of abused children, there's a

00:53:34.960 --> 00:53:36.480
small number who are killed.

00:53:36.720 --> 00:53:42.640
And those cases, if the step parent effect is even bigger in those

00:53:42.640 --> 00:53:47.600
cases than the others, then you say, well, gee, that doesn't sit well with the idea that it

00:53:47.600 --> 00:53:51.280
was due to reporting bias, because there should be the least reporting bias in these most

00:53:51.280 --> 00:53:53.840
extreme cases, like lethal ones.

00:53:54.000 --> 00:53:56.960
That was where we first ever did anything with homicide.

00:53:57.200 --> 00:54:03.010
And then Margot, we moved to back to Canada, to Southern

00:54:03.010 --> 00:54:06.050
Ontario in 1978 from California.

00:54:06.450 --> 00:54:12.450
And somewhere around then, Marg said, you know, we should study homicide more generally.

00:54:12.610 --> 00:54:18.610
It was like, it's, it should be a great window on human conflicts and human passions.

00:54:18.960 --> 00:54:20.480
And I was like, what?

00:54:20.960 --> 00:54:21.280
No.

00:54:22.080 --> 00:54:24.000
And I didn't get it.

00:54:24.240 --> 00:54:29.440
And she says, you know, look, just down the road from us is the city of Detroit.

00:54:29.760 --> 00:54:35.120
At this time, it was true that they have more homicides in Detroit every year than they do

00:54:35.120 --> 00:54:36.480
in the whole of Canada.

00:54:36.640 --> 00:54:39.600
And there's a single police force that investigates them.

00:54:39.840 --> 00:54:44.190
We should see if the Detroit police will let us in for homicide

00:54:45.390 --> 00:54:46.030
files.

00:54:46.590 --> 00:54:47.870
And I was like, wow, what?

00:54:48.670 --> 00:54:54.670
And anyway, we wrote a letter to the chief of police, and the chief of police was

00:54:54.750 --> 00:54:56.350
actually a sort of figurehead guy.

00:54:56.430 --> 00:55:00.030
I can't even remember his name now, but he was somebody who did all the sort of PR stuff in

00:55:00.030 --> 00:55:01.070
the public meetings.

00:55:01.230 --> 00:55:05.230
But the guy who actually ran the place was the deputy chief of police, a guy named James

00:55:05.230 --> 00:55:05.870
Bannon.

00:55:06.030 --> 00:55:08.590
And so they sent the deputy chief of police.

00:55:08.750 --> 00:55:12.670
Um the chief sent our letter to the deputy chief.

00:55:12.820 --> 00:55:17.700
And the deputy chief had a PhD in sociology.

00:55:18.340 --> 00:55:22.900
He did quantitative research on police-based data himself.

00:55:23.060 --> 00:55:24.900
I mean, we were incredibly lucky.

00:55:25.140 --> 00:55:26.900
He says, Oh, this is interesting.

00:55:27.060 --> 00:55:28.260
Come on down and talk.

00:55:28.500 --> 00:55:32.420
And so he went down and chatted with him, and he introduced us to the head of the homicide

00:55:32.420 --> 00:55:32.820
division.

00:55:32.900 --> 00:55:38.030
And then we were shortly thereafter, we're sort of sitting in the homicide division

00:55:38.270 --> 00:55:42.430
listening to them interviewing suspects at the same time as we're rummaging through their

00:55:42.430 --> 00:55:45.150
case files because they didn't have a lot of space.

00:55:45.390 --> 00:55:51.070
Um and after we'd rummaged through the case files a bit and sort of looked up what

00:55:52.030 --> 00:55:56.670
information is collected by the police and the interviews they do and this and it's like

00:55:56.750 --> 00:55:58.030
this stuff is a goal of mine.

00:55:58.350 --> 00:55:59.630
This is so interesting.

00:55:59.870 --> 00:56:02.670
Look, maybe we could do this, maybe we could do that.

00:56:02.990 --> 00:56:05.720
Um and we we got hooked on it.

00:56:05.880 --> 00:56:07.240
We got absolutely hooked on it.

00:56:07.320 --> 00:56:11.880
And to this day, I think I never would have we never we never would have carried on with

00:56:11.880 --> 00:56:16.120
this research if it hadn't been for the fact that the deputy chief of police in Detroit at

00:56:16.120 --> 00:56:19.160
that time was an unusual deputy chief of police.

00:56:20.680 --> 00:56:21.480
Amazing.

00:56:21.720 --> 00:56:21.960
Yeah.

00:56:22.360 --> 00:56:27.410
I have to say the intro uh um chapter of the

00:56:27.410 --> 00:56:33.330
homicide is I think if if if one were to take all of the

00:56:33.650 --> 00:56:39.330
foundational work of applying evolution to human

00:56:39.330 --> 00:56:45.250
behavior uh and stitch it the most eloquent and beautiful writing and

00:56:45.250 --> 00:56:50.770
if I had new students to read, I think that's one of the one of the the the

00:56:50.770 --> 00:56:55.740
patches in that quilts is that it's just beautiful and it's so logical.

00:56:56.140 --> 00:57:01.260
Um it's it's uh it's it in and it's completely evergreen and timeless.

00:57:01.340 --> 00:57:07.020
It's still as perfectly appropriate today, um, which is not always true for

00:57:07.260 --> 00:57:12.380
um for work um that you know for for any of our work.

00:57:12.460 --> 00:57:13.100
Yeah.

00:57:13.470 --> 00:57:13.950
Yeah.

00:57:14.110 --> 00:57:14.910
Well, thank you.

00:57:14.990 --> 00:57:16.510
I really appreciate that.

00:57:16.750 --> 00:57:20.830
Um Yeah, no, I'm proud of that book to this day.

00:57:21.070 --> 00:57:24.430
I mean, my God, it's thirty-eight years ago now.

00:57:24.670 --> 00:57:28.350
Um, but uh yeah, no, I'm still I'm still proud of that book.

00:57:28.430 --> 00:57:34.270
And it it you know, one one thing

00:57:34.270 --> 00:57:39.720
that's sort of nice to say about the academ about The scientific

00:57:39.720 --> 00:57:45.240
enterprise broadly, the social scientific enterprise broadly, is as

00:57:45.240 --> 00:57:51.160
weird as Darwinism was to most criminological

00:57:51.160 --> 00:57:57.000
researchers, that book got

00:57:57.000 --> 00:57:58.760
us in that door too.

00:57:59.480 --> 00:58:01.690
You know, we started going to criminology meetings.

00:58:01.850 --> 00:58:05.930
People, you know, Marg and I were on the founding editorial board of the journal Homicide

00:58:05.930 --> 00:58:08.090
Studies when it appeared a few years later.

00:58:08.330 --> 00:58:14.170
Um, when Marg died, there was a memorial issue of homicide studies to her, and

00:58:14.170 --> 00:58:18.010
it's the only one they've ever done um in the history of the journal.

00:58:18.250 --> 00:58:23.290
Um, and uh, you know, people who are

00:58:24.180 --> 00:58:26.740
interested in just phenomena.

00:58:28.420 --> 00:58:34.260
Everybody's a pretty good intuitive evolutionary psychologist, in a

00:58:34.260 --> 00:58:34.500
way.

00:58:34.660 --> 00:58:39.780
They, you know, they get that men value

00:58:40.340 --> 00:58:44.180
status and compete with one another, and that uh

00:58:46.100 --> 00:58:51.860
being dissed is a problem to which um men often react and

00:58:52.990 --> 00:58:57.870
that, you know, they don't actually like the alienation of their wives either.

00:58:57.950 --> 00:59:03.870
And, you know, people and that children

00:59:03.870 --> 00:59:09.550
are cherished, and that a threat to your child can make you

00:59:10.190 --> 00:59:15.790
become a much more potent and perhaps even dangerous person than you ever

00:59:15.790 --> 00:59:16.990
imagined you could.

00:59:17.230 --> 00:59:20.040
And, you know, people get that.

00:59:22.120 --> 00:59:25.560
People live among people.

00:59:26.360 --> 00:59:28.840
They almost they almost can't help it.

00:59:29.480 --> 00:59:34.920
When you're when you're writing that work, is it that you're are you reminding

00:59:35.880 --> 00:59:39.320
are you reminding everybody of what they already know in that sense?

00:59:39.480 --> 00:59:44.680
In the in the sense of I think an evolutionary approach sort of licenses us to re-see with

00:59:44.680 --> 00:59:50.610
clarity what we might otherwise want to attribute to some highfalutin ideology.

00:59:50.850 --> 00:59:52.530
It's sort of the self-report thing, right?

00:59:52.610 --> 00:59:54.850
Like we make up a narrative that it's about this complicated.

01:00:11.680 --> 01:00:17.360
Motives and human nature and what excites and interests people.

01:00:18.320 --> 01:00:23.920
And you know, a lot of people have been conned into believing that somehow

01:00:23.920 --> 01:00:28.960
having been raised in a particular place made them care about all the things that everybody

01:00:28.960 --> 01:00:30.640
everywhere cares about.

01:00:31.680 --> 01:00:34.480
And so there's an element of that.

01:00:34.800 --> 01:00:37.150
And of course, there, I mean, there are surprises.

01:00:37.310 --> 01:00:39.870
There are things that you just never thought through in advance.

01:00:40.030 --> 01:00:45.230
You know, you sort of say, well, you know, here's a rationale for thinking that

01:00:46.510 --> 01:00:51.950
the risk to children as a function of their age at the hands of their parents will be

01:00:51.950 --> 01:00:54.430
different at the hands of the father than the mother.

01:00:54.750 --> 01:00:58.060
And we can collect the data to see if that is so.

01:00:58.140 --> 01:01:01.260
And we had an a priori rationale for thinking it.

01:01:01.500 --> 01:01:03.340
And you know, here it is.

01:01:03.420 --> 01:01:07.740
And there's certainly lots of stuff like that that's you know a little more

01:01:09.820 --> 01:01:14.140
in the realm of you know, we don't already know this.

01:01:14.300 --> 01:01:14.620
Yeah.

01:01:14.780 --> 01:01:20.380
Um you know, uh subsequently, I mean, after Margot's death, I I wrote one more

01:01:20.380 --> 01:01:26.010
homicide book on um that's much more up the alley of the things that

01:01:26.010 --> 01:01:30.970
sociologists were traditionally interested in, namely, why are homicide rates so variable

01:01:30.970 --> 01:01:33.210
between different countries or places?

01:01:33.770 --> 01:01:39.050
And um, and I want to pin it overwhelmingly on

01:01:39.050 --> 01:01:44.970
inequitable access to resources and the ensuing competitiveness that

01:01:44.970 --> 01:01:46.970
comes from inequitable access to resources.

01:01:47.050 --> 01:01:51.420
And the more unequal, the worse the violence tends to be.

01:01:51.660 --> 01:01:57.260
And uh there are aspects of that that, well, they're still being argued.

01:01:57.420 --> 01:02:03.180
I mean, you know, there are I've had any number of people who don't want to believe, now

01:02:03.260 --> 01:02:08.700
this is partly funded by the people who are beneficiaries of extreme inequality, but they

01:02:08.700 --> 01:02:12.460
don't want to believe that inequality per se creates any problems.

01:02:12.700 --> 01:02:17.190
The real problems come from the fact that, you know, when there's high inequality, there

01:02:17.190 --> 01:02:18.390
happen to be a bunch of poor people.

01:02:18.470 --> 01:02:19.990
And being poor is bad, yeah.

01:02:20.070 --> 01:02:25.830
But you know, um if you know if we give even more money to Jeff Bezos,

01:02:26.070 --> 01:02:27.110
then no one will be poor.

01:02:27.270 --> 01:02:32.230
Um, you know, there's there's that sort of mentality um still out there.

01:02:32.390 --> 01:02:38.200
So you still fight fights with people that you know believe the data will

01:02:38.200 --> 01:02:42.600
come out a different way if we do X than I suspect they will.

01:02:43.000 --> 01:02:49.000
And uh you know, I I think I am winning those battles, but there are people who

01:02:49.160 --> 01:02:51.480
um will fight me on that.

01:02:53.400 --> 01:02:59.070
So it's certain certainly not just, you know, well, really

01:02:59.230 --> 01:03:01.470
everybody knows this and here it is.

01:03:01.790 --> 01:03:04.830
Oh yeah, no no no for sometimes there's elements of that.

01:03:05.150 --> 01:03:05.550
Yeah, yeah.

01:03:05.630 --> 01:03:09.630
No, I mean we I don't think we would any be doing this if it wasn't a deductive logic.

01:03:09.790 --> 01:03:14.750
I mean that's why we, you know, for David and I, that's uh why we it's helpful, right?

01:03:14.830 --> 01:03:19.950
If you're interested in something, it gives you teeth and meaningful deductive logic for

01:03:19.950 --> 01:03:21.310
predicting things or yeah.

01:03:21.800 --> 01:03:22.520
Hypotheses.

01:03:24.360 --> 01:03:24.680
Yes.

01:03:24.920 --> 01:03:25.240
Science.

01:03:27.160 --> 01:03:30.600
Which God help us, you might actually test against reality.

01:03:30.920 --> 01:03:31.640
Yes, exactly.

01:03:31.800 --> 01:03:37.720
Um, maybe inequality is a way into this, but um the the the most recent

01:03:37.720 --> 01:03:43.000
thing, um I think people might be wondering, well, how does an organism know it's an an in

01:03:43.160 --> 01:03:45.640
unequal environment?

01:03:46.040 --> 01:03:46.360
Yeah.

01:03:47.010 --> 01:03:48.290
That's a great question.

01:03:48.370 --> 01:03:50.530
And I think there's been too little work on it.

01:03:50.690 --> 01:03:56.690
I mean, no, you know, in the sense of how does inequality

01:03:56.690 --> 01:03:57.570
get under the skin?

01:03:57.730 --> 01:03:59.250
When does it get under the skin?

01:03:59.410 --> 01:04:01.570
Does you know inequality?

01:04:01.650 --> 01:04:07.090
I mean, one window on this kind of thing is the time lags of the effects of

01:04:07.090 --> 01:04:09.170
inequality on behavior.

01:04:09.410 --> 01:04:15.200
If you can show that inequality is predictive in like cross national or

01:04:15.200 --> 01:04:20.320
cross city or whatever studies of some behavioral outcome.

01:04:20.800 --> 01:04:26.000
Time lags might be informative as regards whether well ex did experience any

01:04:26.560 --> 01:04:29.680
experiencing inequality in childhood matter?

01:04:29.920 --> 01:04:32.160
Is experiencing recent inequality matter?

01:04:32.320 --> 01:04:37.600
Is there the cumulative consequences of inequality over decades

01:04:37.840 --> 01:04:38.400
matter?

01:04:39.040 --> 01:04:44.710
In a highly unequal society, are there even transmittable

01:04:44.710 --> 01:04:49.430
effects from mom, whether in her womb or from her experience?

01:04:50.070 --> 01:04:56.070
You know, I mean, those all those questions can be asked, and there's a little bit

01:04:56.070 --> 01:04:59.590
of effort to ask them, but not enough, as far as I'm concerned.

01:04:59.750 --> 01:05:05.270
Um, you know, if you accept at all that there's toxic effects of inequality, um how

01:05:05.460 --> 01:05:07.060
does that work exactly?

01:05:07.220 --> 01:05:09.540
It is an underexplored question for sure.

01:05:09.620 --> 01:05:12.500
It's an underexplored question in the health field, too.

01:05:13.300 --> 01:05:15.140
People have their hypotheses.

01:05:15.300 --> 01:05:20.900
There's some people who are strongly convinced that the health effects of

01:05:20.900 --> 01:05:24.980
inequality, the negative health effects of inequality, are all mediated by stress hormones,

01:05:25.060 --> 01:05:26.660
and there's other people who don't.

01:05:27.380 --> 01:05:32.500
But yeah, I mean there's a crap load of great questions to be asked about.

01:05:32.790 --> 01:05:34.150
So how does that work?

01:05:34.630 --> 01:05:35.270
Yeah.

01:05:36.150 --> 01:05:36.870
Exactly.

01:05:38.710 --> 01:05:43.590
And sometimes people accuse evolutionary psychologists with a little bit of fairness of not

01:05:43.590 --> 01:05:44.790
being interested in that.

01:05:44.950 --> 01:05:50.790
Of just, you know, I can see a logic by which this variable should

01:05:50.790 --> 01:05:52.950
be predictive of that variable.

01:05:53.190 --> 01:05:55.350
And yeah, here it is.

01:05:55.590 --> 01:06:00.020
And yeah, but how how does that work and how is it mediated is

01:06:02.420 --> 01:06:08.260
well worth splitting and often highly relevant to ameliorating any

01:06:08.260 --> 01:06:09.460
negative consequences.

01:06:09.780 --> 01:06:10.100
Yeah.

01:06:10.260 --> 01:06:15.060
Although in in our defense, I think there's a there's a Marvin Minsky quote is you can't

01:06:15.060 --> 01:06:16.900
look for something till you have the idea of it.

01:06:16.980 --> 01:06:21.780
And so if somebody's criticism is uh well, yeah, but how does that work?

01:06:22.180 --> 01:06:23.060
That's great.

01:06:23.170 --> 01:06:23.970
That's the next step.

01:06:24.530 --> 01:06:24.850
Exactly.

01:06:25.090 --> 01:06:25.330
Yes.

01:06:28.610 --> 01:06:30.450
You psychologists step in.

01:06:31.650 --> 01:06:32.770
Ideally, yeah.

01:06:33.570 --> 01:06:37.570
Have you thought about the different dimensions of inequality?

01:06:37.650 --> 01:06:42.690
Because certainly inequality of wealth or resources is deeply intertwined with inequality

01:06:42.690 --> 01:06:43.330
in power.

01:06:43.490 --> 01:06:48.690
And certainly one leads to the other, such that if some people have disproportionate access

01:06:48.690 --> 01:06:54.580
to designing the rules of the game, they will design the rules uh so as to privilege them

01:06:54.580 --> 01:07:00.500
and and get themselves more stuff and prevent other people from from from taking that

01:07:00.500 --> 01:07:01.140
stuff, right?

01:07:01.700 --> 01:07:03.220
50-50 could go the other way.

01:07:03.380 --> 01:07:03.940
Could go the other way.

01:07:09.780 --> 01:07:10.180
Sure.

01:07:10.340 --> 01:07:16.110
Um so I'm wondering uh do you see this more as um inequality of resources per se,

01:07:16.190 --> 01:07:21.950
or whether inequality of power is more at the heart of it, such that if people see that the

01:07:21.950 --> 01:07:26.190
only way to get ahead is to be connected to the right people and otherwise you're screwed,

01:07:26.430 --> 01:07:31.230
then they might be more inclined to take more of a risky, violent strategy because that's

01:07:31.230 --> 01:07:35.390
really one of the only options they have of getting ahead if if they view themselves as

01:07:35.390 --> 01:07:37.150
being shut out of an unfair system.

01:07:38.350 --> 01:07:43.790
Do you view the the power aspect of it as more um relevant than the resource aspect?

01:07:44.520 --> 01:07:45.320
Possibly, yeah.

01:07:45.480 --> 01:07:49.560
No, that's that's that's that's a fair way to put it.

01:07:49.640 --> 01:07:53.240
And not just power, but you know, there's resources and resources.

01:07:53.320 --> 01:07:58.520
You know, often all the measures you've got are economic, but the economic may not be

01:07:58.520 --> 01:08:00.040
everything that matters.

01:08:00.280 --> 01:08:05.880
There's been a little bit of a fuss about that because uh a couple of

01:08:05.880 --> 01:08:11.790
criminologists a number of years ago made the claim that inequality matters in modern

01:08:11.790 --> 01:08:16.990
societies, but it doesn't matter in open quotes primitive close quote

01:08:17.150 --> 01:08:21.950
societies, um, in with huh in predicting violence.

01:08:22.190 --> 01:08:28.190
And uh I mean their basis for this argument was crap, but uh but they didn't

01:08:28.190 --> 01:08:33.950
sort of think of inequality as being instantiated in any interesting manner other than

01:08:33.950 --> 01:08:35.230
economic inequality.

01:08:35.310 --> 01:08:39.680
And it's like, you know, a highly unequal system.

01:08:39.760 --> 01:08:45.680
Like if one guy's got six wives and five guys are bachelors, that's more unequal than where

01:08:45.760 --> 01:08:51.040
everybody, and maybe it's more unequal in a more fundamentally important way, even than the

01:08:51.040 --> 01:08:52.640
dollars in the pocket.

01:08:52.880 --> 01:08:58.080
Um, and you know that there's interesting issues there.

01:08:58.240 --> 01:09:02.400
What exactly is the inequality that people are sensitive to?

01:09:02.770 --> 01:09:06.050
how you apprehend the concept of inequality of power.

01:09:06.210 --> 01:09:10.530
Like sometimes it just takes the form of, geez, a lot of people around here make it out

01:09:10.530 --> 01:09:12.690
like bandits, and it doesn't include me.

01:09:13.250 --> 01:09:18.850
Um you know, because because often if you lack power, you also lack a great deal of

01:09:18.850 --> 01:09:23.090
knowledge of how anything works around here, other than the you know.

01:09:24.240 --> 01:09:27.040
other people are seem to be set in the agenda.

01:09:27.760 --> 01:09:33.680
Um and yeah, I think that's absolutely central to why

01:09:33.680 --> 01:09:39.520
some people become highly risk prone and potentially dangerous if they um have the

01:09:39.520 --> 01:09:41.760
wherewithal to do so.

01:09:42.800 --> 01:09:43.200
Yeah.

01:09:43.360 --> 01:09:43.680
Yeah.

01:09:44.400 --> 01:09:50.090
It's interesting because you know, the more that um resources become captured by the

01:09:50.090 --> 01:09:55.610
political process, um, the more resources turn turn into a zero-sum game.

01:09:55.690 --> 01:09:58.890
Um, because you know, competition for political power is zero sum.

01:09:59.050 --> 01:10:04.730
Whereas in theory, uh you could uh have a win-win relationship where we both get richer by

01:10:04.730 --> 01:10:07.130
exchanging and creating wealth together.

01:10:07.290 --> 01:10:13.240
Um but if how much wealth you have depends on your connections, and there

01:10:13.240 --> 01:10:19.000
are limited opportunities for win-win gains and for social mobility, then it it may be that

01:10:19.000 --> 01:10:21.880
violence becomes a more rational strategy.

01:10:23.400 --> 01:10:28.520
So it may be that there's something about the zero-sumness of the social context as well.

01:10:29.640 --> 01:10:33.480
Yeah, and and and I think you're quite right.

01:10:33.640 --> 01:10:38.280
And it's interesting to uh to highlight the fact that both go on.

01:10:38.440 --> 01:10:44.270
That is to say, there are there are um positive sum games and zero sum games

01:10:44.270 --> 01:10:46.350
being played all around us all the time.

01:10:46.590 --> 01:10:51.630
Um there, you know, the idea of gains for trade isn't just propaganda from some free

01:10:51.630 --> 01:10:51.950
trader.

01:10:52.030 --> 01:10:54.510
It's yeah, it really exists.

01:10:54.910 --> 01:11:00.510
And at the same time, yeah, as you say, there's you know, only so

01:11:00.510 --> 01:11:05.790
many people can get to set the agenda for a group that you happen to belong to or or maybe

01:11:05.790 --> 01:11:06.750
only one person.

01:11:06.990 --> 01:11:08.900
Um yeah.

01:11:10.100 --> 01:11:11.300
Unequal.

01:11:11.540 --> 01:11:15.860
I mean, I'm how do you conceptualize power, do you think, ideally?

01:11:16.100 --> 01:11:19.620
Um Yeah, I mean it's it's it's a tricky question.

01:11:19.700 --> 01:11:20.740
I'm not sure.

01:11:20.900 --> 01:11:25.220
Um or operationalized, I guess I I should say power.

01:11:25.460 --> 01:11:30.900
I mean in a in a sort of open quotes natural close quotes

01:11:31.060 --> 01:11:36.830
ecology where um you're not talking about strong institutions and

01:11:37.390 --> 01:11:43.390
but you're just talking about differential power in social groups and social interaction

01:11:43.630 --> 01:11:49.630
and families even um yeah i mean i i i wish

01:11:49.630 --> 01:11:54.960
i had a good answer to that question yeah on that kind of thing like differential attention

01:11:55.280 --> 01:12:01.040
structures, you know who is always looked to whenever there's a behavioral decision to be

01:12:01.040 --> 01:12:01.440
made.

01:12:02.080 --> 01:12:03.040
All that kind of stuff.

01:12:03.440 --> 01:12:07.680
Yeah, that would be Brenda Brenda that would be Brenda Bowser and John Patton's uh answer.

01:12:07.920 --> 01:12:13.870
I mean there's also I think a thing of there's you know there's people who have power, but

01:12:13.870 --> 01:12:17.870
there's also then sort of where the rubber hits the road where is there a conflict or are

01:12:17.870 --> 01:12:18.990
you getting screwed over?

01:12:19.150 --> 01:12:19.390
Right.

01:12:19.470 --> 01:12:24.030
So there might be asymmetries in power, but I feel like if I have a need, I have a

01:12:24.030 --> 01:12:29.710
conflict, I've got a problem, my child is sick, or you know, I if it gets resolved,

01:12:29.870 --> 01:12:35.710
that's different than if the power is making it so that I can't feed my kids, or

01:12:35.790 --> 01:12:38.830
you know, my child is sick, but the other kids are fine.

01:12:38.990 --> 01:12:42.980
And it's because power is preventing that from happening.

01:12:43.140 --> 01:12:49.140
So I think like the the on the ground cues of I'm getting screwed over

01:12:50.020 --> 01:12:55.860
is sort of that's the kind of power that we should care about, especially

01:12:56.180 --> 01:13:02.100
in the sense of that's why this unequal, it's the unequal

01:13:02.100 --> 01:13:07.780
treatment of sort of feeling like you're there's really a bad fitness relevant situation

01:13:07.780 --> 01:13:08.100
here.

01:13:08.420 --> 01:13:14.290
Um that uh um that is socially caused and it's not just sort of an

01:13:14.290 --> 01:13:15.090
act of God.

01:13:15.810 --> 01:13:16.930
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13:17.090 --> 01:13:22.850
Which is sort of what I meant by saying, you know, the mindset of some

01:13:23.170 --> 01:13:28.770
people who become dangerous or people who carry a weapon and are ready to use it is

01:13:29.330 --> 01:13:32.850
somebody's make it out like a bandit around here and an ape me.

01:13:33.360 --> 01:13:36.000
Um you know that's exactly what I'm talking about.

01:13:36.240 --> 01:13:37.760
Yeah and then it's a social solution.

01:13:37.840 --> 01:13:43.600
Yeah it's somebody is their the solution to this really bad situation is

01:13:43.600 --> 01:13:45.040
changing the social structure.

01:13:45.200 --> 01:13:45.600
Yeah.

01:13:46.000 --> 01:13:49.520
Yeah redistribution of power preferably in my direction.

01:13:50.320 --> 01:13:50.800
Exactly.

01:13:50.880 --> 01:13:51.120
Yeah.

01:13:53.040 --> 01:13:53.440
It makes sense.

01:13:53.520 --> 01:13:53.920
It makes sense.

01:13:54.400 --> 01:13:56.560
Having a gun is the is the fastest ticket to power.

01:13:57.120 --> 01:13:59.360
Stick with the same social system and just put me on top.

01:13:59.520 --> 01:14:02.930
Yeah exactly Yeah.

01:14:03.010 --> 01:14:05.970
Usually if you're near the bottom, that is not a realistic hope.

01:14:06.610 --> 01:14:11.890
I I'm curious, with with these trends you're finding um the between inequality and

01:14:11.890 --> 01:14:15.490
violence, is are is it just of violence in general?

01:14:15.650 --> 01:14:18.210
Is it uh within class or between class?

01:14:18.370 --> 01:14:24.050
Is it you know aggression from uh the have nots against the haves, or is it more of a

01:14:24.050 --> 01:14:26.530
generalized uh strategy of violence?

01:14:27.540 --> 01:14:33.300
no, much much more of again among the have nots against the have not other have nots

01:14:33.460 --> 01:14:34.420
than against the haves.

01:14:34.500 --> 01:14:39.380
And interesting some people have have trotted that fact out as kind of a criticism for the

01:14:39.380 --> 01:14:42.580
idea that it's got anything to do with inequality.

01:14:42.660 --> 01:14:47.380
It's like well if the people at the bottom were really, you know, upset about being at the

01:14:47.380 --> 01:14:52.390
bottom, then they'd, you know, that they'd seek out and kill the top.

01:14:52.470 --> 01:14:55.030
And you say, well, that would actually be kind of a dumb strategy.

01:14:55.190 --> 01:15:01.190
Nothing leads to more certain negative consequences than going after someone much

01:15:01.190 --> 01:15:02.710
more powerful than yourself.

01:15:02.950 --> 01:15:08.870
I mean, if you if hierarchy matters, the people you most

01:15:08.870 --> 01:15:14.700
have to worry about are the people just below you and the people who you most

01:15:15.260 --> 01:15:18.380
want to inflict some costs on are the people just above you.

01:15:18.540 --> 01:15:24.220
Um I mean I think people seem to react that way to who their conflicts are.

01:15:24.300 --> 01:15:29.740
Not to and of course it's also largely just that they're in the same universe

01:15:30.140 --> 01:15:33.180
neighborhood in your face.

01:15:34.700 --> 01:15:40.610
But uh but yeah no it's again this there's really interesting

01:15:40.610 --> 01:15:42.290
questions that have never been addressed.

01:15:42.450 --> 01:15:48.450
One is um that's related to what you're talking about is stuff like if

01:15:50.770 --> 01:15:54.690
let me get let me gather my thoughts for a second.

01:15:55.330 --> 01:16:01.300
If inequality leads to

01:16:01.460 --> 01:16:03.220
greater violence.

01:16:04.180 --> 01:16:09.460
Does inequality at the top matter at all, or is it all inequality at the bottom?

01:16:09.620 --> 01:16:14.980
You can partition inequality across, say, an income distribution.

01:16:15.300 --> 01:16:19.620
And you can ask, you know, there are even measures for doing this.

01:16:19.700 --> 01:16:25.300
You can ask, is the homicide rate heavily dependent upon

01:16:25.300 --> 01:16:29.060
inequality at the bottom, but unaffected by inequality at the top?

01:16:29.270 --> 01:16:32.630
Um or is it somewhat affected by inequality at the top?

01:16:32.790 --> 01:16:33.670
Nobody's done it.

01:16:33.830 --> 01:16:34.470
Nobody's done it.

01:16:34.710 --> 01:16:39.830
That's just a great question because I think uh you know the fact does the fact that there

01:16:39.830 --> 01:16:45.750
are billionaires fuel resentment at the bottom or does nobody care that there are

01:16:45.750 --> 01:16:46.150
billionaires?

01:16:46.950 --> 01:16:50.630
Or does it fuel yeah does it does it fuel resentment among the millionaires?

01:16:51.190 --> 01:16:52.790
Yeah well that's an interesting question.

01:16:53.030 --> 01:16:53.270
Yeah.

01:16:53.510 --> 01:16:53.990
Yeah.

01:16:54.310 --> 01:16:59.080
But I mean d does it fuel resentment that actually turns into violence or just like nobody

01:16:59.080 --> 01:17:03.240
cares about their being billionaires if they redistributed their wealth so that there were

01:17:03.880 --> 01:17:08.280
you know a whole bunch of hundred millionaires instead of some billionaires and other

01:17:08.280 --> 01:17:08.920
millionaires.

01:17:09.320 --> 01:17:12.360
Um that wouldn't matter, or would it?

01:17:12.440 --> 01:17:18.360
Does it does knowing does knowing that somebody's that rich have anything to

01:17:18.360 --> 01:17:22.390
do with why um the poor are disgruntled.

01:17:23.030 --> 01:17:23.270
Right.

01:17:23.430 --> 01:17:23.750
Yeah.

01:17:23.990 --> 01:17:29.110
As opposed to just saying out loud, as opposed to that is also a a consequence of a

01:17:29.110 --> 01:17:33.190
structure where if your kid gets cancer, you might lose your home.

01:17:33.830 --> 01:17:36.070
So like you you got to tease these apart, right?

01:17:36.150 --> 01:17:42.070
Like if you the the the two by two cell of that's a reality versus not a reality versus

01:17:42.070 --> 01:17:45.990
there's a millionaire with that reality versus there's a billionaire with that reality,

01:17:46.150 --> 01:17:49.160
there's a billionaire with with that not happening.

01:17:49.480 --> 01:17:55.480
Do people care the same or or is it all driven by the billionaire or the cancer?

01:17:55.720 --> 01:18:01.480
Um I mean it's it's and and relatedly, there's the whole issue of does

01:18:01.480 --> 01:18:07.160
knowing all this weird stuff about people you don't actually know, how much does it affect

01:18:07.160 --> 01:18:07.960
your mental models?

01:18:08.120 --> 01:18:10.920
This is really important in a in an internet age.

01:18:11.160 --> 01:18:11.400
Yeah.

01:18:11.640 --> 01:18:16.610
You know, you think maybe the human mind is well adapted

01:18:17.570 --> 01:18:23.570
to responding reasonably appropriately to social information from a universe of

01:18:23.570 --> 01:18:27.810
known persons and encountered not very well known persons.

01:18:28.050 --> 01:18:33.940
But uh but in a world where everybody seems to be

01:18:33.940 --> 01:18:38.980
paying attention to people they don't know and knows a lot about a lot of them.

01:18:39.220 --> 01:18:44.820
Um what the hell does that do to their mental models of society and appropriate

01:18:44.820 --> 01:18:46.100
sociality and stuff?

01:18:46.340 --> 01:18:48.420
Um those are interesting questions.

01:18:48.500 --> 01:18:51.380
I guess really I am actually interested in psychology.

01:18:52.900 --> 01:18:54.020
Turns out, yeah.

01:18:54.260 --> 01:18:54.580
Yeah.

01:18:54.820 --> 01:18:58.830
I mean, is is the model you're working with, would it make different predictions about

01:18:58.830 --> 01:19:00.990
inequality at the bottom versus the top?

01:19:01.150 --> 01:19:04.430
Because I know there's work on what's called fractal inequality, where if you look at like

01:19:04.510 --> 01:19:09.230
the Giny coefficient among rich people, it turns out that the gap between millionaires and

01:19:09.230 --> 01:19:12.750
billionaires like is just as big as the gap between poor people and middle class people.

01:19:12.830 --> 01:19:18.190
But if you zoom in on any part of the wealth distribution, you'll get similar uh gaps

01:19:18.190 --> 01:19:21.950
between rich and poor, no matter which part of the distribution you zoom in on.

01:19:22.190 --> 01:19:26.430
So that there is vast e inequality even among billionaires, even among millionaires.

01:19:26.820 --> 01:19:32.020
Um and would you predict that the inequality you see, say, at the top, would also correlate

01:19:32.020 --> 01:19:38.020
with more risky aggressive strategy, like would you maybe more white collar uh crime um in

01:19:38.340 --> 01:19:40.980
among the the richer part of the distribution or something like that?

01:19:41.140 --> 01:19:45.700
Or would you or is this specific to the bottom end of the distribution where the stakes are

01:19:45.700 --> 01:19:47.860
much higher if you fall to the bottom?

01:19:48.500 --> 01:19:49.700
Well there's desperation.

01:19:49.780 --> 01:19:55.710
There is the issue of of um you know what have I got

01:19:55.710 --> 01:19:56.430
to lose?

01:19:56.670 --> 01:20:00.830
You know, um, you know, there's a little line from a Bob Dylan song, Well, you got nothing,

01:20:00.910 --> 01:20:02.270
you got nothing to lose.

01:20:02.430 --> 01:20:07.950
Um, and uh so you know, you wade into social

01:20:08.110 --> 01:20:09.150
circumstance.

01:20:10.510 --> 01:20:16.350
I remember Rob Boyd, you mentioned Rob Boyd, saying to me that uh he was a keen rock

01:20:16.350 --> 01:20:16.990
climber.

01:20:17.630 --> 01:20:23.560
And when they had their first kid, suddenly it stopped seeming thrilling and started

01:20:23.560 --> 01:20:24.360
seeming stupid.

01:20:24.520 --> 01:20:24.840
Yeah.

01:20:25.000 --> 01:20:30.840
Um to to free to freehand hold climb on places where

01:20:30.840 --> 01:20:32.600
you could really do yourself some damage.

01:20:32.760 --> 01:20:33.160
Yeah.

01:20:33.400 --> 01:20:39.320
And uh, you know, when you got something to lose, maybe your attitude to risk

01:20:39.320 --> 01:20:40.680
changes a lot.

01:20:42.250 --> 01:20:42.490
Yeah.

01:20:42.970 --> 01:20:48.890
In which case being rock bottom is really where the action is as

01:20:48.890 --> 01:20:52.170
regards becoming crazy dangerous.

01:20:52.650 --> 01:20:52.890
Yeah.

01:20:53.210 --> 01:20:56.890
And that I mean that and that comes out of even just, you know, risk-sensitive foraging

01:20:56.890 --> 01:21:00.730
theory to bring it back to the um evolutionary biology, right?

01:21:01.210 --> 01:21:02.570
It does indeed.

01:21:03.290 --> 01:21:04.250
Interesting.

01:21:05.200 --> 01:21:11.040
Um zooming out a bit, um, as you've you know witnessed the

01:21:11.040 --> 01:21:16.880
story of evolutionary psychology evolve, um have you

01:21:16.880 --> 01:21:21.360
been um pleased by how the field has changed over the years?

01:21:21.520 --> 01:21:22.480
Have you been displeased?

01:21:22.560 --> 01:21:26.560
Are there trends that you think have gone in a positive direction or in a negative

01:21:26.560 --> 01:21:27.040
direction?

01:21:27.280 --> 01:21:31.760
How do you how do you view the overall story and and change that you've lived through?

01:21:36.490 --> 01:21:38.250
I wasn't expecting this question.

01:21:38.330 --> 01:21:40.810
It takes me a second to sort of gather my thoughts on it.

01:21:40.970 --> 01:21:44.250
But you know, there are things are that are disappointments.

01:21:44.490 --> 01:21:50.170
Um I'm disappointed by the extent to which one group of

01:21:50.170 --> 01:21:54.730
evolutionists sometimes becomes alienated from another group of evolutionists for what seem

01:21:54.810 --> 01:21:56.090
like petty reasons.

01:21:56.250 --> 01:21:56.490
Yeah.

01:21:56.650 --> 01:22:02.600
Um and uh The usual sort of problems with anything

01:22:02.680 --> 01:22:07.960
that you know with sort of disappointing to the point of heartbreaking sometimes that

01:22:07.960 --> 01:22:10.840
there's infighting among people who ought to be allies.

01:22:11.000 --> 01:22:16.120
Um I'm heartened by

01:22:16.760 --> 01:22:22.280
the um breadth of acceptance of evolutionary

01:22:22.280 --> 01:22:28.110
approaches, but uh slightly horrified by the antipathy

01:22:28.110 --> 01:22:32.830
that still comes from a surprisingly large number of

01:22:34.110 --> 01:22:38.590
literalist religious people, um, not just here.

01:22:40.670 --> 01:22:42.670
They have Darwin Day in Iran.

01:22:42.750 --> 01:22:46.590
They celebrate Darwin Day in Iran, a small group in Tehran does.

01:22:46.750 --> 01:22:49.550
They have a meeting every year.

01:22:49.790 --> 01:22:54.180
Um I spoke at it last year.

01:22:54.500 --> 01:22:59.220
Um I wasn't in Tehran, I spoke at it remotely.

01:22:59.460 --> 01:23:02.180
Um and they were a great bunch.

01:23:02.260 --> 01:23:07.780
They're mostly psychologists and philosophers actually who who do Darwin Day and Tehran.

01:23:08.420 --> 01:23:14.030
And they you know they were they asked good

01:23:14.030 --> 01:23:14.510
questions.

01:23:14.670 --> 01:23:16.110
It was a great session.

01:23:16.190 --> 01:23:21.950
I actually forged a collaboration with a couple of young Iranians who have been doing some,

01:23:22.030 --> 01:23:22.270
you know.

01:23:22.430 --> 01:23:28.190
Gretchen and I um had a in the talk we gave a little

01:23:28.510 --> 01:23:34.510
tangent about cousin marriage and the interesting fact that cousin

01:23:34.590 --> 01:23:40.480
marriage could have all sorts of unexplored effects on what we were mainly talking

01:23:40.480 --> 01:23:44.480
about, which was the matrilateral bias and investment, investing more in your daughter's

01:23:44.480 --> 01:23:46.080
kids than your son's kids.

01:23:47.120 --> 01:23:52.720
And some Iranians in the audience were like, yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of

01:23:52.720 --> 01:23:54.240
cousin marriage in Iran still.

01:23:54.400 --> 01:24:00.390
There's there's all different kinds of cousin marriage, all Although some are more

01:24:00.390 --> 01:24:06.310
common than others, and we can investigate this with questionnaire studies, which I thought

01:24:06.310 --> 01:24:07.030
was just fine.

01:24:07.110 --> 01:24:10.470
And we notwithstanding my previous remarks.

01:24:13.350 --> 01:24:19.190
Anyway, Darwin Day in Iran had to be canceled this year because of the events in

01:24:19.190 --> 01:24:19.590
Iran.

01:24:19.670 --> 01:24:23.030
I mean, Darwin Day was last week, February 12th.

01:24:24.710 --> 01:24:29.140
And they were gonna celebrate this year, it's 2026.

01:24:29.300 --> 01:24:33.700
They were gonna make the central theme of this year's meeting be the 50th anniversary of

01:24:33.700 --> 01:24:36.820
Richard Dawkins's book, The Selfish Genes, publication.

01:24:36.980 --> 01:24:42.980
I guess it was pretty widely read and translated, perhaps more than most other

01:24:42.980 --> 01:24:48.710
things that we think of as seminal, and you know, had had an influence on people

01:24:48.710 --> 01:24:50.390
in Iran and elsewhere.

01:24:50.550 --> 01:24:53.990
Um, and that was going to be the central theme for this year's meeting, but this year's

01:24:53.990 --> 01:24:55.190
meeting had to be canceled.

01:24:55.350 --> 01:25:00.790
Now that's not a religious crackdown on Darwinists, and

01:25:01.990 --> 01:25:04.230
it's actually sort of a surprise.

01:25:04.390 --> 01:25:08.630
I hadn't realized this before, but within Islam, the uh

01:25:10.360 --> 01:25:16.120
the division that the Iranian clerics

01:25:16.120 --> 01:25:21.640
belong to is much more accepting of evolution than the other main

01:25:21.800 --> 01:25:24.440
division, which is Shiites, which is Sunnis anyway.

01:25:24.520 --> 01:25:25.800
They're the Shiites, right?

01:25:26.040 --> 01:25:26.680
Yeah.

01:25:27.720 --> 01:25:32.120
They're much more accepting of evolution than the Sunnis are apparently, but that you know

01:25:32.200 --> 01:25:37.890
there are religions and God help us they're in the USOA too,

01:25:38.850 --> 01:25:44.370
in which evolution is evil and wrong.

01:25:45.250 --> 01:25:50.690
And some of them may even have influence over the future of educational policy in the US

01:25:50.770 --> 01:25:53.730
and the near future of educational policy in the US.

01:25:53.970 --> 01:25:57.330
That's terrifying and disappointing and crazy.

01:26:01.890 --> 01:26:07.560
I guess I used to believe that we the progress was

01:26:07.880 --> 01:26:13.560
more nearly linear or at least monotonic

01:26:13.800 --> 01:26:14.760
than it is.

01:26:16.600 --> 01:26:22.120
And some of the setbacks to the agenda of just not

01:26:22.120 --> 01:26:26.610
evolutionary psychology, but science,

01:26:27.970 --> 01:26:33.490
medical research, everything can be pretty shocking.

01:26:33.810 --> 01:26:38.210
Those are things to be disappointed about in a larger scale.

01:26:38.610 --> 01:26:44.210
Evpsych itself, I think, is pretty robust.

01:26:44.530 --> 01:26:49.650
I used to say, and I still sort of believe, that you know, the day we know

01:26:50.580 --> 01:26:55.460
We've succeeded is the day you just drop the evolutionary from the from what you're from

01:26:55.460 --> 01:26:56.020
the label.

01:26:56.100 --> 01:26:57.620
You know, you're doing psychology.

01:26:57.860 --> 01:27:01.780
Well, of course, if you're doing psychology, you're doing it half decently.

01:27:01.940 --> 01:27:07.780
You better know a bit about Darwinism, um, and and have thought a bit about the

01:27:07.780 --> 01:27:11.140
relevance of past selection to whatever the hell you're interested in.

01:27:11.380 --> 01:27:12.420
Of course.

01:27:12.740 --> 01:27:16.820
And and you know, I think I think we we will get there.

01:27:18.770 --> 01:27:19.170
Yeah.

01:27:19.410 --> 01:27:25.090
Do you um in in terms of the evolutionary biology and anthropology

01:27:25.090 --> 01:27:28.930
parts, um, how are those parts doing?

01:27:32.610 --> 01:27:33.730
I wish I knew.

01:27:33.810 --> 01:27:39.730
Um, I mean my My

01:27:39.730 --> 01:27:44.130
best friends among evolutionary biologists, my closest acquaintances.

01:27:44.290 --> 01:27:49.220
Um Are deceased.

01:27:49.620 --> 01:27:52.820
Um George Williams was a close friend.

01:27:52.980 --> 01:27:54.580
Bill Hamilton was a friend.

01:27:54.740 --> 01:27:56.260
They're long gone.

01:27:58.900 --> 01:28:04.740
But uh the people I know like it, the university I'm an emeritus professor

01:28:04.740 --> 01:28:10.020
at who pursue their various biological interests, I mean,

01:28:10.340 --> 01:28:11.860
they're doing fine.

01:28:12.100 --> 01:28:17.970
Um, the evolution minded study of the behavior of non human animals

01:28:18.290 --> 01:28:20.130
is doing fine.

01:28:21.090 --> 01:28:27.090
I think John Alcock's book, The Triumph of Sociobiology, was not premature,

01:28:27.250 --> 01:28:27.810
actually.

01:28:28.290 --> 01:28:30.770
And it's God knows how long ago now.

01:28:31.570 --> 01:28:37.490
But that, you know, there was the sociobiology controversy cooked up

01:28:37.490 --> 01:28:42.680
by some biologists and the socio-biological approach, that is to say, the

01:28:42.680 --> 01:28:47.480
evolution-minded approach to the or the selectionist, if you like, approach to the study of

01:28:47.480 --> 01:28:50.520
behavior prevailed and it's over.

01:28:51.160 --> 01:28:56.120
You know, um, and the opposition is gone, and that's good.

01:28:56.760 --> 01:29:00.360
Um, I don't know what an anthropologist would say.

01:29:00.440 --> 01:29:06.200
I mean, certainly, again, we all know a lot of evolutionary anthropologists who

01:29:06.200 --> 01:29:11.930
seem to be busy in a thriving field, but the

01:29:11.930 --> 01:29:16.730
extent to which it's a subfielder still encounters hostility, I don't know.

01:29:16.970 --> 01:29:17.610
Yeah.

01:29:18.250 --> 01:29:24.090
One question is, and you talked about the the the friends that you had, somebody like

01:29:24.090 --> 01:29:29.850
um George Williams, my understanding was that his adaptation

01:29:30.010 --> 01:29:33.210
natural selection book was sort of righteous anger.

01:29:34.500 --> 01:29:35.700
about an issue, right?

01:29:35.780 --> 01:29:40.260
And I think even like the adapted mind was also in the spirit of righteous anger.

01:29:40.500 --> 01:29:46.420
Um and as a student of people, a descendant of these people in Don

01:29:46.420 --> 01:29:47.540
Simons, too, right?

01:29:47.620 --> 01:29:53.300
Like I think um these were people who who looked in the looked at the world and they

01:29:53.460 --> 01:29:59.300
they had righteous anger about um something they thought didn't make sense and they they

01:29:59.300 --> 01:30:01.380
had a mission and they wanted to do it.

01:30:01.620 --> 01:30:07.210
And I I sometimes w wonder as as the students

01:30:07.370 --> 01:30:13.130
generations go down, sometimes if the students lose that either that

01:30:13.130 --> 01:30:16.330
feeling or that mission or that broad perspective.

01:30:16.490 --> 01:30:21.530
And and I wanna w I'm asking, um I guess my question is, is that a fair

01:30:21.530 --> 01:30:27.210
characterization that that these were people who uh yeah, is that a fair

01:30:27.210 --> 01:30:28.090
characterization?

01:30:28.250 --> 01:30:29.130
Um yeah.

01:30:29.770 --> 01:30:30.890
Sure, I think so.

01:30:31.050 --> 01:30:37.040
I mean, you know, your friend Lita Cosmodes is certainly capable of some

01:30:37.040 --> 01:30:37.680
righteous anger.

01:30:38.080 --> 01:30:39.280
I've told Lita that myself.

01:30:39.360 --> 01:30:42.080
I said one of the r I told I I tell Lita this all the time.

01:30:42.160 --> 01:30:43.520
It's one of the reasons I love Lita.

01:30:43.600 --> 01:30:44.320
Yes, exactly.

01:30:47.840 --> 01:30:49.040
Yes, exactly.

01:30:49.360 --> 01:30:54.400
I mean John Tuby was was much more willing to just sort of accept

01:30:55.310 --> 01:31:00.030
The fact that different people thought different stuff, and in fact, he was open to every

01:31:00.030 --> 01:31:01.790
crackpot theory you could think of.

01:31:01.950 --> 01:31:07.870
But uh but Leto was much more damn it, there's right answers to

01:31:07.870 --> 01:31:10.110
these things, and these idiots have got them wrong.

01:31:10.270 --> 01:31:13.790
Um but uh yeah, no, you're right.

01:31:13.950 --> 01:31:19.550
I mean, it's funny, George Williams is a very soft-spoken and gentle guy who is never like

01:31:19.710 --> 01:31:20.990
mean to anybody.

01:31:21.230 --> 01:31:25.920
But if you you've read Adaptation and Natural Selection, right at the beginning he talks

01:31:25.920 --> 01:31:31.680
about having listened to this lecture by who was it, Emerson, one of the Alley

01:31:32.000 --> 01:31:32.640
group.

01:31:32.800 --> 01:31:38.400
Um that was an implicitly or maybe explicitly group selectionist lecture and and

01:31:38.560 --> 01:31:40.880
being just so peeved about it.

01:31:41.040 --> 01:31:45.600
And then he says he berated his wife, poor Doris, all the way home after the thing about

01:31:45.600 --> 01:31:49.200
what was wrong with the lecture, as if Doris would have stood up for it, which she

01:31:49.200 --> 01:31:49.680
wouldn't.

01:31:49.840 --> 01:31:53.190
Um But yeah, so righteous anger indeed.

01:31:53.350 --> 01:31:57.990
I mean, it's funny because I've never seen, I never saw George seeming angry.

01:31:58.790 --> 01:31:59.670
But yeah.

01:32:01.030 --> 01:32:03.350
Whereas I have seen Lady B seeming angry.

01:32:04.790 --> 01:32:07.030
But but anyway, yeah, is it gone?

01:32:07.190 --> 01:32:07.830
Is it gone?

01:32:07.990 --> 01:32:08.790
Is it gone?

01:32:09.670 --> 01:32:13.030
I'm old and I'm less angry than I used to be, I guess.

01:32:13.270 --> 01:32:15.990
I don't know if I'm less angry than I used to be, actually.

01:32:16.230 --> 01:32:21.300
Um is it I don't know about young people.

01:32:21.460 --> 01:32:26.500
I know people I know a lot of people are angry about the state of the academy for reasons

01:32:26.500 --> 01:32:27.860
that are a little bit different.

01:32:28.420 --> 01:32:34.260
They have to do more with the withdrawal of funding and the corporatization and

01:32:35.140 --> 01:32:40.980
you know the lesser openness of the people in

01:32:40.980 --> 01:32:46.710
charge of some major universities to um curiosity

01:32:46.790 --> 01:32:48.150
based research.

01:32:48.390 --> 01:32:50.310
Um yeah.

01:32:50.550 --> 01:32:50.790
Yeah.

01:32:50.950 --> 01:32:54.950
Do you need deliverables and uh uh profitability and yeah.

01:32:55.350 --> 01:32:56.070
Yeah, yeah.

01:32:56.310 --> 01:32:58.070
And uh that bothers me too.

01:32:58.150 --> 01:33:00.950
I mean it's it it's bad news and it's widespread.

01:33:01.030 --> 01:33:03.750
It ain't just an American phenomenon, that's for sure.

01:33:03.910 --> 01:33:08.310
I've seen it in Canada, I've seen it in New Zealand and I've heard about it in Europe.

01:33:09.350 --> 01:33:15.340
Um So there's that to be angry about, but what do you do with

01:33:15.340 --> 01:33:16.220
that anger?

01:33:17.420 --> 01:33:19.420
You you fight different battles.

01:33:19.500 --> 01:33:23.580
I mean if you're if you're if you know if if you're trying to act on that anger, then

01:33:23.580 --> 01:33:29.180
you're acting on it within the setting of the academy rather than within the setting of

01:33:29.180 --> 01:33:32.780
your you know your field of specialization.

01:33:33.350 --> 01:33:33.510
Yeah.

01:33:33.670 --> 01:33:36.470
And that's not that's not where we want the anger to be directed.

01:33:36.550 --> 01:33:40.950
I mean ideally it could be channeled into, you know, something that we can all appreciate,

01:33:41.110 --> 01:33:43.510
something productive, you know, uh a new set of things.

01:33:43.670 --> 01:33:49.270
Well I mean if if if if yeah if it can actually begin to

01:33:49.270 --> 01:33:53.590
effectively counter the corporatization of the university, for example, then that is very

01:33:53.590 --> 01:33:54.870
much where we want it directed.

01:33:55.110 --> 01:33:56.870
But but yeah I take your point.

01:33:56.950 --> 01:34:02.680
I mean within a discipline this this ain't um doing our

01:34:02.680 --> 01:34:06.280
particular discipline any great service, maybe.

01:34:07.480 --> 01:34:08.360
Yeah, I don't know.

01:34:08.440 --> 01:34:14.120
I mean I I'm sure there are angry young evolutionary

01:34:14.120 --> 01:34:15.560
psychologists, aren't there?

01:34:20.440 --> 01:34:24.520
Yeah, I mean a bit I I feel I feel like fear is more the emotion than anger.

01:34:26.440 --> 01:34:27.080
Yeah.

01:34:27.400 --> 01:34:29.240
Yeah I don't I yeah I don't know.

01:34:29.320 --> 01:34:34.510
I I think it's um I think every every generation you sort of feel you look around and

01:34:34.510 --> 01:34:37.070
you're like, what's going on and what do we do?

01:34:37.550 --> 01:34:42.910
Um and I think it's it's always different in the superficials, but I think in the deep

01:34:42.910 --> 01:34:45.150
structure that's always the same problem, right?

01:34:45.230 --> 01:34:48.910
And I think just to make percent, I mean I keep thinking about what you said about George

01:34:48.990 --> 01:34:52.590
Williams being writing adaptation and natural flex to the state of righteous anger.

01:34:52.750 --> 01:34:58.580
And it's like okay, here's a guy who's thoughtful and smart, and says

01:34:58.900 --> 01:35:04.260
a prevailing scarcely examined world

01:35:04.500 --> 01:35:07.540
view is screwing with biology.

01:35:07.700 --> 01:35:08.100
Yeah.

01:35:08.260 --> 01:35:13.700
Um, and it needs to be explicitly confronted and countered.

01:35:13.780 --> 01:35:14.020
Yeah.

01:35:14.260 --> 01:35:20.230
And maybe those kinds of opportunities are rare to see

01:35:20.310 --> 01:35:26.150
clearly that a prevailing view in your discipline is wrong and why it's wrong

01:35:26.230 --> 01:35:30.630
and how to go about explaining why it's wrong to everybody else.

01:35:30.870 --> 01:35:34.310
Maybe those kinds of opportunities are vanishingly rare.

01:35:34.550 --> 01:35:35.430
I don't know.

01:35:36.070 --> 01:35:41.910
Or the people an alternative appro idea is that they're everywhere,

01:35:42.070 --> 01:35:47.110
but the kind of people who are willing to do that and see it are rare.

01:35:48.360 --> 01:35:52.440
maybe yeah no that's a good that's a grim thought I don't know if they're everywhere.

01:35:52.520 --> 01:35:55.720
I mean for one thing maybe there are no prevailing ideas anymore.

01:35:56.360 --> 01:36:00.200
Yeah we're just drowning in data and uh I know exactly

01:36:02.680 --> 01:36:08.360
in not exactly conflicting but different

01:36:08.360 --> 01:36:09.000
models.

01:36:09.560 --> 01:36:14.920
Um there's a lot of that there's a lot of that yeah I've

01:36:15.110 --> 01:36:17.670
I've got angry in the past when I think about it.

01:36:17.910 --> 01:36:23.270
I mean I was angry at social psychology for being the social

01:36:23.350 --> 01:36:26.790
psychology of strangers for decades.

01:36:27.190 --> 01:36:33.030
Um when you know most of what the social psyche is about is

01:36:33.990 --> 01:36:39.960
acquaintances and relatives and friends and enemies, not a not strangers, you know, like

01:36:40.040 --> 01:36:45.480
what a dumb way to investigate fundamental social processes by always

01:36:45.480 --> 01:36:51.000
doing it where it's a stranger interaction that is the model.

01:36:51.320 --> 01:36:52.920
That used to drive me crazy about social.

01:36:53.480 --> 01:36:58.920
There must be other things that one could seize on like that, where you'd say, damn it,

01:36:59.240 --> 01:37:03.320
this is an outrage, and I'm outraged.

01:37:06.170 --> 01:37:10.650
I think it's lovely that I because I do think that um, you know, one of the reasons I

01:37:10.650 --> 01:37:16.650
wanted to work with John and Lita um was because it was very attractive to

01:37:16.650 --> 01:37:20.890
sort of find people who were willing to just be brave.

01:37:20.970 --> 01:37:26.860
You know, I think that it takes a certain amount of courage to um especially when it's

01:37:26.860 --> 01:37:32.460
important things like you know leading to conflict or violence or um uh

01:37:32.620 --> 01:37:38.380
or just social processes in general to to sort of say look uh come

01:37:38.380 --> 01:37:44.380
on let this this this thing that we're assuming or we're ignoring this thing

01:37:44.460 --> 01:37:49.490
um I mean that takes some courage Yeah, yeah, I guess.

01:37:49.730 --> 01:37:54.050
I mean, and that's part of what I'm bemoaning about the state of the academy, because the

01:37:54.050 --> 01:37:59.730
state of the academy um nurtures or squashes

01:37:59.730 --> 01:38:02.130
courage of the sort you're talking about, too.

01:38:02.370 --> 01:38:08.370
And uh and I think it's in a little bit more of a squashing than nurturing kind of state

01:38:08.450 --> 01:38:13.410
now, or at least relatively compared to how it was a couple or three decades ago.

01:38:13.490 --> 01:38:17.500
And that's Disheartening.

01:38:17.820 --> 01:38:23.580
Yeah, I often hear from people who are very senior who I very much admire, and

01:38:23.580 --> 01:38:28.540
they say this to be complimentary, and they'll they'll say, I could have never gotten a job

01:38:28.780 --> 01:38:29.100
now.

01:38:29.660 --> 01:38:35.100
And it is complimentary to us young kids, but it's also

01:38:35.420 --> 01:38:40.330
a real uh um uh uh uh

01:38:40.810 --> 01:38:46.730
criticism in the sense of we've we've created a uh selective regime that's going

01:38:46.970 --> 01:38:52.650
selecting out the rebellious, um uh um subversive minded

01:38:52.810 --> 01:38:58.410
uh um folks you know there's a there's a lot of sort of I think selection for conformity to

01:38:58.730 --> 01:39:02.730
existing approaches or assumptions and playing the game as it exists.

01:39:03.050 --> 01:39:07.450
Um yeah I'm I feel like that's probably been true for a very long time.

01:39:07.800 --> 01:39:08.120
I'm sure.

01:39:09.320 --> 01:39:14.040
When I think about like again, when I think about psychology and social psychology, I mean,

01:39:14.280 --> 01:39:19.080
man, if you didn't do the same experimental social psychology, if you didn't think that,

01:39:19.160 --> 01:39:25.160
you know, Solomon Ash's experiments were a centerpiece

01:39:25.160 --> 01:39:29.800
of your the introductory social psych course you were gonna teach, um, then you were not a

01:39:29.800 --> 01:39:30.440
candidate.

01:39:30.600 --> 01:39:36.270
You know, um you were not and and you know, we've had that kind of

01:39:36.590 --> 01:39:38.990
crap for a long time.

01:39:39.390 --> 01:39:45.230
Um whether Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what what

01:39:47.950 --> 01:39:52.590
best nurtures creativity and imagination.

01:39:53.070 --> 01:39:58.980
Um We used to have a much better granting system in Canada than we do now, and I

01:39:58.980 --> 01:40:01.300
think actually it was good for this purpose.

01:40:01.460 --> 01:40:07.300
Um, basically, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada used to

01:40:07.300 --> 01:40:12.580
award reasonably small grants to a very large proportion of its applicants.

01:40:12.900 --> 01:40:18.580
And so when I arrived at McMaster University,

01:40:18.980 --> 01:40:22.580
well, no, actually, when I arrived, there were a few Deadwood people, but then they

01:40:22.580 --> 01:40:23.460
retired.

01:40:24.310 --> 01:40:28.790
Six or eight years after I arrived, they're in a department of 25 people.

01:40:29.110 --> 01:40:34.790
24 of them had external research grants, and the 25th taught 3,000 students

01:40:34.790 --> 01:40:36.550
introductory psych every year.

01:40:37.830 --> 01:40:43.670
And you know, that ceased to be possible because the success rates went down and down and

01:40:43.670 --> 01:40:43.990
down.

01:40:44.470 --> 01:40:50.310
And I used to fight that battle a bit because keeping in my field anyway,

01:40:50.470 --> 01:40:56.360
which was then animal behavior, Keeping grants small, but giving out

01:40:56.360 --> 01:41:02.360
a lot of them actually gave you more good research for your dollar than concentrating

01:41:02.360 --> 01:41:03.880
them in a smaller number of hands.

01:41:04.040 --> 01:41:05.960
And that was a demonstrable fact.

01:41:06.120 --> 01:41:12.040
I mean, you could analyze data and show that that was the case, both trends within

01:41:12.040 --> 01:41:14.360
countries and between countries.

01:41:14.600 --> 01:41:19.160
You know, Sweden and Canada punched way above their weight because they didn't give big

01:41:19.160 --> 01:41:22.120
grants, but they gave grants to a large proportion of the applicants.

01:41:23.310 --> 01:41:27.870
And you know that that's been

01:41:30.030 --> 01:41:35.950
the move towards: well, we've got a limited budget, we better put most of it in the

01:41:35.950 --> 01:41:41.070
hands of a small number of people who we think are potential or are stars already,

01:41:41.630 --> 01:41:44.270
perhaps past it stars already.

01:41:50.400 --> 01:41:55.520
think that has done some damage and is something that one would like to see reversed.

01:41:55.600 --> 01:42:01.280
And it's done some damage to spontaneity and creativity on the part of the younger

01:42:01.280 --> 01:42:02.240
scientists.

01:42:02.960 --> 01:42:07.040
Because the idea that, you know, if you had an idea and you managed to publish a couple of

01:42:07.040 --> 01:42:10.960
papers a year, then hell yeah, you could have your $25,000 a year and run your lab.

01:42:12.800 --> 01:42:14.080
Was great.

01:42:14.480 --> 01:42:20.210
And I think it fostered more creativity than

01:42:20.850 --> 01:42:25.650
well let's put all the money in the hands of the senior poo bah who surely knows this field

01:42:25.650 --> 01:42:31.570
best um that's a change that I'm I

01:42:31.570 --> 01:42:34.370
guess old guys always think things are getting worse.

01:42:36.050 --> 01:42:37.730
Speaking of inequality, right?

01:42:37.810 --> 01:42:39.650
The why did that happen do you know?

01:42:39.810 --> 01:42:42.450
Why did the I don't know.

01:42:42.610 --> 01:42:48.200
Why did why did the Canadian granting agencies get NSF envy and

01:42:49.000 --> 01:42:51.000
why did NSF do that in the first place?

01:42:51.400 --> 01:42:53.000
Why did NSF do that in the first place?

01:42:53.160 --> 01:42:56.360
But why did other people looking at them think, hey, what a great model?

01:42:56.920 --> 01:43:01.640
When you could show, hey, we're actually getting more science per dollar, more publishable

01:43:01.640 --> 01:43:07.320
science, more quality stuff out the door by any by various metrics

01:43:07.650 --> 01:43:11.330
per dollar than they are by this concentration.

01:43:11.490 --> 01:43:12.610
Um I don't know.

01:43:13.010 --> 01:43:18.450
Yeah, John John John uh John Tuby would always joke that it was evidence that aliens were

01:43:18.450 --> 01:43:23.730
trying to prevent science from happening because his argument was it was a funding system

01:43:23.730 --> 01:43:29.480
designed to minimize the amount of science produced and maximize the amount of wasted time

01:43:29.720 --> 01:43:35.000
in this sort of difficult lottery based system where you have everybody's doing the work

01:43:35.000 --> 01:43:37.240
and only a few people get the resources out of it.

01:43:37.640 --> 01:43:43.400
The grant application process became so much more onerous over the last

01:43:43.400 --> 01:43:47.160
thirty years, more or less continuously, I think, over the last thirty years.

01:43:47.400 --> 01:43:49.730
Um Yeah.

01:43:50.130 --> 01:43:50.610
I love that.

01:43:51.890 --> 01:43:56.850
It's a really comforting way of thinking about uh institutional incompetence and sclerosis

01:43:56.930 --> 01:44:02.850
to view it as uh designed by exactly leave it to John Design by designed

01:44:02.850 --> 01:44:06.770
by hostile or at least with a really bad sense of humor.

01:44:07.250 --> 01:44:07.970
Yes, exactly.

01:44:08.130 --> 01:44:08.450
Exactly.

01:44:08.530 --> 01:44:10.050
I love John's John's humor.

01:44:10.210 --> 01:44:14.850
I actually wanna I wanna I wanted to ask one question, Martin, which is so there is lore um

01:44:15.010 --> 01:44:19.800
from John, I think Lita told me this that something about like your kangaroo rat desert

01:44:19.880 --> 01:44:25.800
like palm spring something some conversation about what to call this field um

01:44:26.120 --> 01:44:32.120
do you have a memory of um the that we had this conversation while they were visiting

01:44:32.120 --> 01:44:36.520
us at our field site yes or something like this where where it was literally like the you

01:44:36.520 --> 01:44:40.360
know it was the analog of the smoking room you know the people sitting around the table

01:44:40.360 --> 01:44:43.470
being like what are we going to call this field and it was, are we going to call it

01:44:43.470 --> 01:44:46.750
Darwinian psychology, evolutionary psychology, psychology at all?

01:44:46.830 --> 01:44:49.870
Do you have a memory of this or what is the Yeah, yeah.

01:44:50.590 --> 01:44:51.310
This happened.

01:44:51.390 --> 01:44:54.270
I'm trying, I don't remember where it's happening.

01:44:54.750 --> 01:44:58.510
I always, you know, I I'm a pedant.

01:44:58.590 --> 01:45:04.430
And so I the very phrase evolutionary psychology, I didn't like it so well because I was

01:45:04.430 --> 01:45:09.560
thinking, it sounds too much like you're going to reconstruct

01:45:09.560 --> 01:45:13.400
phylogeny, you know, if it's evolutionary.

01:45:13.560 --> 01:45:18.200
And people say evolutionary researchers, and it's like, what the hell does that mean?

01:45:20.600 --> 01:45:25.080
I'm just sort of a pedant and using the part of speech in the wrong place or something.

01:45:25.240 --> 01:45:29.720
So I Don Simons called it Darwinian psychology, and I liked that better.

01:45:29.880 --> 01:45:35.090
But then I think maybe John and Lita sort of argued

01:45:35.330 --> 01:45:40.450
persuasively that the trouble with the phrase Darwinian psychology was that

01:45:41.330 --> 01:45:46.770
too often people thought, well, they'd say, Well, Darwin didn't know that or didn't believe

01:45:46.770 --> 01:45:48.610
that or wrote something contrary to that.

01:45:48.690 --> 01:45:53.010
And you say, Well, no, no, I don't mean whatever the hell Darwin meant, or thought when I

01:45:53.010 --> 01:45:55.330
say Darwinian psychology, why are you calling it that?

01:45:55.570 --> 01:45:59.170
And then you're gonna do neo-Darwinian psychology, gag.

01:45:59.570 --> 01:46:05.460
Um, so evolutionary psychology sort of won out, but yeah

01:46:05.460 --> 01:46:07.380
I do I do remember those arguments.

01:46:07.460 --> 01:46:07.620
Yeah.

01:46:07.860 --> 01:46:13.540
We had a lot of stupid arguments in that uh and they as I say the whole notion that we were

01:46:13.540 --> 01:46:19.300
somehow going to write a seminal book together or something foundered

01:46:19.300 --> 01:46:21.300
largely on this kind of pedantic crap.

01:46:21.460 --> 01:46:21.780
Right.

01:46:21.940 --> 01:46:22.580
Um Yeah.

01:46:22.970 --> 01:46:24.330
That feels very human, right?

01:46:24.570 --> 01:46:26.170
Like, what are we gonna call ourselves?

01:46:26.330 --> 01:46:27.450
What are the bylaws?

01:46:27.530 --> 01:46:28.730
Yeah, no, exactly.

01:46:29.130 --> 01:46:29.530
Yes.

01:46:29.610 --> 01:46:29.770
Yeah.

01:46:30.250 --> 01:46:31.370
How about the monkeys?

01:46:33.530 --> 01:46:37.930
I I asked John once, uh, where did Don Simons come from?

01:46:38.410 --> 01:46:40.330
Um, and I want to ask you that.

01:46:40.410 --> 01:46:46.410
Uh, and there's lots of ways to take that, but for me, he just sort of sprang

01:46:46.410 --> 01:46:52.400
forth in the sense of being design-minded in a in an intellectual tradition

01:46:52.560 --> 01:46:55.840
that was maybe unfairly not.

01:46:56.400 --> 01:46:57.520
Maybe this is false.

01:46:57.680 --> 01:46:59.040
But I I'm just always curious.

01:46:59.120 --> 01:47:02.240
I just read Don Simons and I think he's so design-minded.

01:47:02.400 --> 01:47:03.760
Where did he come from?

01:47:04.480 --> 01:47:05.120
Yeah, yeah.

01:47:05.200 --> 01:47:07.360
No, that's a that's that's a great question.

01:47:07.440 --> 01:47:08.560
I'm not sure the answer.

01:47:08.640 --> 01:47:12.160
I mean, his early research was on Rhesus Monkeys.

01:47:12.400 --> 01:47:13.760
Play him Reesus Monkeys.

01:47:13.840 --> 01:47:19.210
He wrote a monograph on that, which I think was based on his PhD thesis work, I think.

01:47:19.530 --> 01:47:24.810
So he was in an animal behavior-y mindset

01:47:24.970 --> 01:47:25.690
somewhere.

01:47:25.930 --> 01:47:29.290
I mean, when you read, you know, what's it called?

01:47:29.450 --> 01:47:33.770
The Evolution of Human Sexuality, his or whatever, his 78 book.

01:47:34.170 --> 01:47:35.050
Yeah, it's a great book.

01:47:35.130 --> 01:47:35.290
Yeah.

01:47:35.610 --> 01:47:37.050
Um, it's a great book.

01:47:37.210 --> 01:47:43.000
And uh and it's clear that he is extremely

01:47:43.000 --> 01:47:48.680
broadly read in cultural anthropology and other and humanities.

01:47:48.840 --> 01:47:54.680
Um and so you sort of forget that, well, he did come out of an animal

01:47:54.680 --> 01:47:57.080
behavior background somehow as well.

01:47:57.640 --> 01:48:00.520
Um but that's a that's a good question.

01:48:00.680 --> 01:48:01.880
I don't know his prehistory.

01:48:01.960 --> 01:48:07.030
I don't Yeah, I don't know how when

01:48:07.750 --> 01:48:13.430
with you know with what colleagues or supervisor or whatever he did his racist work.

01:48:13.590 --> 01:48:13.910
I don't know.

01:48:14.070 --> 01:48:14.230
Yeah.

01:48:14.310 --> 01:48:19.270
I mean, I guess another way of asking it is like what um, and I only I spent a little bit

01:48:19.270 --> 01:48:22.310
of time with him when I was a graduate student at UCSB, very little though.

01:48:22.470 --> 01:48:24.390
I mean, he was sort of gone and retiring.

01:48:24.470 --> 01:48:26.390
I actually inherited part of his library.

01:48:26.470 --> 01:48:27.910
Um, I told David this.

01:48:28.070 --> 01:48:33.920
I have a copy of the Richard Alexander um The biology of moral systems with markups of Don

01:48:33.920 --> 01:48:35.520
Simon's writing.

01:48:35.680 --> 01:48:40.480
Um and he sort of loves, he loves Richard Alexander Alexander, he loves him, but he'll

01:48:40.560 --> 01:48:45.680
he'll still sort of say this is baby counting in the margins some places, you know.

01:48:45.840 --> 01:48:49.040
So it's a lovely artifact of like the real time thing.

01:48:49.200 --> 01:48:55.200
But what in in sort of real time or any of these people, um for any of these people for

01:48:55.200 --> 01:49:00.090
us who who weren't there, you know, was Don Simons, I mean, the cartoonish view would be

01:49:00.090 --> 01:49:02.810
sort of, it's like, you know, he wakes up in the morning, he's like, you're not being

01:49:02.810 --> 01:49:04.970
design minded enough to like his colleagues.

01:49:05.210 --> 01:49:06.810
Is that is that a caricature?

01:49:06.970 --> 01:49:12.650
Is that too, you know, was he just concerned about getting evolution generally into human

01:49:12.650 --> 01:49:13.210
behavior?

01:49:13.370 --> 01:49:16.490
You know, what I don't know.

01:49:17.050 --> 01:49:17.770
It's a great question.

01:49:17.850 --> 01:49:19.850
I mean, I didn't have enough interaction with Don.

01:49:19.930 --> 01:49:20.650
I had some.

01:49:20.970 --> 01:49:26.960
Um, he was the main person who sort of got on our case about try to be more

01:49:26.960 --> 01:49:28.640
explicitly psychological.

01:49:29.360 --> 01:49:35.280
You know what is it, what is it that you're imagining are the

01:49:35.280 --> 01:49:40.880
psychological phenomena, processes, entities that underlie

01:49:41.200 --> 01:49:45.040
the things that you're thinking are good intuitive hypotheses.

01:49:45.920 --> 01:49:51.760
He pushed that hard at me anyway, um and uh

01:49:52.480 --> 01:49:54.750
I presume at others as well.

01:49:54.990 --> 01:49:58.350
Um he was a bit of a recluse though.

01:49:58.590 --> 01:50:01.390
Um he didn't come to AH Best meetings much.

01:50:01.550 --> 01:50:07.390
He came to the one we had here in Canada, in Southern Ontario, in 1991, which was the

01:50:07.390 --> 01:50:08.350
third meeting.

01:50:08.510 --> 01:50:11.630
And I don't know if he ever attended another after that.

01:50:11.790 --> 01:50:13.630
Um, if he did, it was like one.

01:50:14.030 --> 01:50:19.820
Um I remember him saying when I was trying to urge him to go maybe to

01:50:19.820 --> 01:50:22.060
an overseas meeting or something.

01:50:22.220 --> 01:50:24.540
Um he said, I live in Santa Barbara.

01:50:24.620 --> 01:50:27.420
Why would anybody ever leave Santa Barbara to go anywhere?

01:50:28.060 --> 01:50:30.380
It is a problem, yes, no, no for sure.

01:50:30.540 --> 01:50:31.340
Yes, exactly.

01:50:31.500 --> 01:50:33.820
Especially in the winter, yes, exactly.

01:50:34.460 --> 01:50:35.890
Um yeah.

01:50:36.370 --> 01:50:37.970
And and he loved that.

01:50:38.050 --> 01:50:39.890
I mean, he loved his orchids.

01:50:40.210 --> 01:50:43.250
He Yeah, he was a funny guy.

01:50:43.490 --> 01:50:49.010
Um I hadn't seen him for a long, long time until I saw him at at the Tubi Memorial.

01:50:49.170 --> 01:50:49.490
Yeah.

01:50:49.730 --> 01:50:55.570
And unfortunately he was um cancer that he knew at that

01:50:55.570 --> 01:51:01.180
time was terminal and he didn't last a great deal longer, but he was seeming to be in sort

01:51:01.180 --> 01:51:03.900
of good spirits and at ease with it all at that time.

01:51:04.140 --> 01:51:04.300
Yeah.

01:51:04.540 --> 01:51:09.820
He was always a very mellow presence in my company.

01:51:09.980 --> 01:51:13.340
He never I never saw him angry.

01:51:13.660 --> 01:51:14.140
Yeah.

01:51:14.460 --> 01:51:16.780
But I didn't see him all that many times.

01:51:18.330 --> 01:51:23.770
Uh but yeah, but is there as we're wrapping up here, you know, do you is there anything

01:51:23.770 --> 01:51:28.650
that you would love to have people either know about any of the people who are gone or is

01:51:28.650 --> 01:51:30.330
there a funny anecdote?

01:51:30.570 --> 01:51:36.090
Um uh and maybe this is sort of too trite to ask that kind of question, or just um

01:51:36.330 --> 01:51:41.940
yeah, what would you want to tell a hungry, eager grad student who's just

01:51:41.940 --> 01:51:47.620
sort of eagerly looking forward to a career in evolutionary behavioral

01:51:47.620 --> 01:51:48.580
sciences.

01:51:51.460 --> 01:51:52.100
Huh.

01:51:52.660 --> 01:51:58.420
We were, I think I said this already, we were uh extremely

01:51:58.420 --> 01:52:02.350
lucky, whether we knew it or not at the time, to have the

01:52:02.990 --> 01:52:07.550
enthusiastic support of Bill Hamilton.

01:52:07.950 --> 01:52:12.110
Although Bill did say that he thought the Human Behavior and Evolution Society that we

01:52:12.110 --> 01:52:13.950
should keep it a secret society.

01:52:15.230 --> 01:52:16.750
That's not a bad idea, actually.

01:52:16.830 --> 01:52:18.990
We can still circle back to that, actually.

01:52:19.630 --> 01:52:21.150
He was the first president.

01:52:22.190 --> 01:52:22.590
That's fine.

01:52:23.150 --> 01:52:27.840
But you know, to have the enthusiastic support of Hamilton and George Williams, Bob

01:52:27.840 --> 01:52:29.600
Trivers, you mentioned, yeah.

01:52:29.760 --> 01:52:33.600
Um, Sewell Wright came to an early pre-meeting.

01:52:33.760 --> 01:52:37.920
And that was really funny because uh he was in his 90s already.

01:52:38.160 --> 01:52:43.280
And I don't know if he'd ever met Bill Hamilton before, but he and Hamilton were, you know,

01:52:43.440 --> 01:52:47.520
just sort of nadering away together a lot whenever they could.

01:52:47.680 --> 01:52:51.680
But he sat in the front row for all these student presentations, asked them all good

01:52:51.680 --> 01:52:54.000
questions, had suggestions for their field work.

01:52:54.650 --> 01:52:56.010
He was wonderful.

01:52:57.130 --> 01:53:02.730
And you know, the sense that significant

01:53:02.730 --> 01:53:08.730
figures in evolutionary biology and the people who are formulating the big general

01:53:08.730 --> 01:53:13.690
theories that weren't human specific thought that what you were doing was worthwhile and

01:53:13.690 --> 01:53:15.370
interesting was huge.

01:53:15.610 --> 01:53:16.890
It was absolutely huge.

01:53:17.050 --> 01:53:22.300
I don't know if there's anything quite like that available

01:53:23.180 --> 01:53:23.500
now.

01:53:28.460 --> 01:53:29.820
There must be.

01:53:30.460 --> 01:53:31.100
Yeah.

01:53:32.540 --> 01:53:38.460
Yeah, I wish I wish there were more of that, of just applying theories that you know apply

01:53:38.460 --> 01:53:40.940
to to all animals and just applying them to humans.

01:53:41.020 --> 01:53:45.210
I mean, that's the beauty of uh of the evolutionary approach and part of what attracted me

01:53:45.210 --> 01:53:50.250
to the field is you know ideas like reciprocal altruism, parent offspring conflict, uh

01:53:50.410 --> 01:53:56.170
biological markets, signaling theory, like all these ideas apply to, you know, uh animals

01:53:56.170 --> 01:54:01.850
across the animal kingdom, and they give you the additional insight of uh

01:54:02.090 --> 01:54:03.450
how human beings work.

01:54:04.490 --> 01:54:10.410
Yeah, and and and I I I guess I would still say to uh to a young person interested

01:54:10.410 --> 01:54:15.560
in this field is get the to the lab

01:54:16.200 --> 01:54:21.400
of somebody studying some non-human animal and do a project with them.

01:54:21.560 --> 01:54:27.080
Um, I think I think having a research background in the study of non-human animals, and to

01:54:27.080 --> 01:54:31.240
some extent actually having an anthropological background, provides the same thing, which

01:54:31.240 --> 01:54:36.520
is a bit more of a comparative perspective, a bit less hazard of

01:54:36.840 --> 01:54:42.670
thinking, you know, in weirdly ethnocentric or anthropocentric ways.

01:54:43.950 --> 01:54:49.950
And you know, some of the best, some of the best evolutionary psychologists

01:54:49.950 --> 01:54:55.950
early on, whether they called themselves psychologists or not, um did come from studying

01:54:55.950 --> 01:54:56.910
other animals.

01:54:57.390 --> 01:54:59.870
Surprising amount of entomology in there, actually.

01:55:02.350 --> 01:55:07.380
And uh and I always felt that that was useful.

01:55:07.540 --> 01:55:12.900
It just sort of made a deep

01:55:13.060 --> 01:55:18.420
comparative mindset part of what they brought to the table.

01:55:18.580 --> 01:55:24.500
And that sometimes some of the most embarrassingly bad evolutionary psychology has

01:55:24.500 --> 01:55:29.620
come from people who have never given a thought to any other creature than Homo sapiens.

01:55:30.180 --> 01:55:35.870
So uh so that would be one little bit of advice is to uh become involved,

01:55:35.950 --> 01:55:41.870
even just you know, as a sort of secondary project on route to your master's or PhD

01:55:42.110 --> 01:55:47.470
in some sort of non human animal research, it will it will do you good, I think.

01:55:48.430 --> 01:55:48.830
Yeah.

01:55:49.470 --> 01:55:50.110
That's great advice.

01:55:50.430 --> 01:55:51.230
Yeah, that's fantastic.

01:55:51.390 --> 01:55:56.750
I'm also hearing the advice is maybe for middle or even later career folks to also

01:55:56.750 --> 01:56:02.460
encourage young students and give your support to them because that can mean a lot more

01:56:02.460 --> 01:56:04.700
to them than you might think.

01:56:05.660 --> 01:56:07.020
Yes, obviously.

01:56:07.180 --> 01:56:11.100
I mean, anybody who's a half-decent teacher Sardo knows that, but yes.

01:56:11.500 --> 01:56:13.100
It's easy to forget though, I think.

01:56:13.180 --> 01:56:19.020
And you know, I think I've I've heard people um talk, and

01:56:19.020 --> 01:56:24.380
even just as you said, I mean, very famous people, at least in our orbit, you know, Sewell

01:56:24.460 --> 01:56:29.870
Wright, um, going to students' talks in in a way that you it's it's

01:56:29.870 --> 01:56:34.910
remarkable, not in the um exaggerative way, but just that it's notable, right?

01:56:35.070 --> 01:56:40.830
Going to posters, talking to students, early career students, that that is a virtue, yeah,

01:56:41.150 --> 01:56:42.190
I'm hearing you say.

01:56:42.350 --> 01:56:42.750
Yeah.

01:56:43.230 --> 01:56:45.150
Yes, yes, yes, indeed.

01:56:45.390 --> 01:56:51.070
Um students are an enthusiastic bunch sometimes, if you you know, if you

01:56:51.920 --> 01:56:53.840
play play them properly.

01:56:54.400 --> 01:57:00.160
They they they seem like a bunch of blasse somethings that are you know that their faces

01:57:00.320 --> 01:57:02.640
off their phones, but yes, exactly.

01:57:03.120 --> 01:57:06.720
There can be a surprising amount of enthusiasm from young students.

01:57:08.080 --> 01:57:09.440
That's fantastic.

01:57:09.680 --> 01:57:11.920
Uh David, it looked like you were gonna ask something.

01:57:12.350 --> 01:57:15.150
No, I I think uh we're just about approaching the end.

01:57:15.230 --> 01:57:17.790
It was really wonderful uh talking to you, Martin.

01:57:17.950 --> 01:57:20.670
This was a fascinating and and lovely conversation.

01:57:20.990 --> 01:57:23.950
Yeah, no, lovely talking to you guys, and it's nice to meet you, David.

01:57:25.870 --> 01:57:26.030
Yeah.

01:57:27.230 --> 01:57:28.830
I think it used to be because I've met him before.

01:57:29.310 --> 01:57:29.950
Yeah, no, exactly.

01:57:30.030 --> 01:57:31.710
I think yes, I think yeah.

01:57:31.870 --> 01:57:35.630
Um should we have asked you anything really quickly before we leave?

01:57:35.870 --> 01:57:37.310
It's our compulsory question.

01:57:37.470 --> 01:57:40.030
We only have one ever, and that's that's the one.

01:57:40.990 --> 01:57:42.740
It's a hard, hard probably.

01:57:43.060 --> 01:57:43.460
Yeah.

01:57:43.700 --> 01:57:45.220
That's a great answer.

01:57:45.540 --> 01:57:48.740
That's that's the best answer I think we have so far.

01:57:49.540 --> 01:57:51.940
Undoubtedly, probably, yes, exactly.

01:57:52.100 --> 01:57:53.300
Well, Martin, it was a pleasure.

01:57:53.380 --> 01:57:53.940
Thank you so much.

01:57:54.100 --> 01:57:54.660
Really appreciate it.

01:57:54.980 --> 01:57:55.460
Thank you guys.

01:57:55.540 --> 01:57:55.700
Yeah.

01:57:55.940 --> 01:57:56.580
Thank you guys.

01:57:56.660 --> 01:57:57.460
Have a pleasant day.

01:57:57.780 --> 01:57:59.380
Yeah, you too, and stay warm in Ontario.

01:58:00.340 --> 01:58:00.980
Evening for me.

01:58:01.220 --> 01:58:02.660
Yes, exactly.

01:58:05.140 --> 01:58:07.130
Oh, that was wonderful conversation.

01:58:07.290 --> 01:58:08.010
Really enjoyed it.

01:58:08.090 --> 01:58:12.330
David, I want to remind everyone that you do the wonderful music for the podcast too.

01:58:12.410 --> 01:58:13.850
I think people don't always know that.

01:58:14.330 --> 01:58:14.890
That is true.

01:58:14.970 --> 01:58:16.810
I'm an amateur composer.

01:58:16.970 --> 01:58:19.290
I composed that uh little bit of music.

01:58:19.450 --> 01:58:23.210
Um it was uh do you use a keyboard with a MIDI uh connection?

01:58:23.530 --> 01:58:24.010
No actually.

01:58:24.170 --> 01:58:27.530
Um I just drag the notes with my mouse.

01:58:27.930 --> 01:58:28.250
Really?

01:58:28.650 --> 01:58:29.130
Yeah, yeah.

01:58:29.530 --> 01:58:31.290
Just cop copy and paste notes and yeah.

01:58:32.440 --> 01:58:34.040
I think I think Mozart did that too.

01:58:34.280 --> 01:58:35.160
Or was it Beethoven?

01:58:35.400 --> 01:58:41.160
It was one of those Yeah, I'm following in uh Beethoven's

01:58:41.160 --> 01:58:41.560
footsteps.

01:58:41.880 --> 01:58:46.360
Which wait, um I I even I went to one of their houses when I was living in Europe.

01:58:46.440 --> 01:58:48.920
Which one was the one that was doing stuff when they were like five?

01:58:49.080 --> 01:58:50.920
Was that uh Beethoven?

01:58:51.400 --> 01:58:53.400
One maybe both, maybe I don't remember.

01:58:53.640 --> 01:58:56.440
I feel like they're uh they all have wait which one was Amadeus?

01:58:56.520 --> 01:58:57.240
That was Mozart.

01:58:57.480 --> 01:58:58.200
That's Mozart, yeah.

01:58:58.440 --> 01:58:59.720
Yeah, Mozart is the one I'm thinking.

01:58:59.800 --> 01:59:01.320
He's the one in Austria, yeah.

01:59:01.730 --> 01:59:02.610
Yeah, that's right.

01:59:02.690 --> 01:59:06.450
Oh, by the way, Amadeus is a great movie, wonderful movie about uh envy envy.

01:59:06.610 --> 01:59:07.250
Oh, yes.

01:59:07.410 --> 01:59:09.090
Very psychology of envy, yeah.

01:59:09.410 --> 01:59:10.530
Yes, yes, yeah.

01:59:11.330 --> 01:59:15.570
That's our that's our this this episode is sponsored by the Omnismooth.

01:59:15.810 --> 01:59:17.570
That's our go go watch Amadeus.

01:59:17.890 --> 01:59:22.690
Yeah, it's a great yeah, it's a great slice of human nature, uh, and beautifully acted.

01:59:22.770 --> 01:59:28.530
And um um there's nothing it's a lovely virtuosity and proje

01:59:29.010 --> 01:59:31.010
prejudicity, is that a word?

01:59:31.720 --> 01:59:33.000
Prodigiousness, maybe.

01:59:33.080 --> 01:59:33.320
Yeah.

01:59:33.560 --> 01:59:34.440
Prodigicity.

01:59:35.000 --> 01:59:35.720
Prodigiocity.

01:59:35.880 --> 01:59:36.120
I don't know.

01:59:36.200 --> 01:59:36.440
I don't know.

01:59:36.920 --> 01:59:37.800
I guess as good as mine.

01:59:38.120 --> 01:59:40.840
Well we're we were clearly prodigious at using the word prodigious.

01:59:41.480 --> 01:59:45.000
Yeah, I don't know how we got there, but uh we took a journey.

01:59:45.320 --> 01:59:47.800
Yeah, but anyway, uh everyone, thank you for listening.

01:59:47.880 --> 01:59:50.360
Uh please support the podcast in the usual ways.

01:59:50.440 --> 01:59:53.240
And David, I'll I guess I'll see you next week.

01:59:53.560 --> 01:59:54.760
Yeah, sounds great.

01:59:55.000 --> 01:59:55.950
Okay, you guys.