Plants, Infants, and the Evolution of Social Learning with Annie Wertz
2025-08-26 12:00:00.000 +00:00

So David, um, I wonder if people think that we have been screwing up on purpose or if we're doing it for real in the beginning. No, I can I can assure you all, for those listening, our screw-ups are genuine and sincere. We really are as incompetent as we sound. Well, I am uh not David Pinsoff, and you are not. I'm definitely not George Clooney, sadly. Okay, uh today Okay, keep going. I'm really bad at this. Uh I'm David Pinsov. I'm David Petrozowski. And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast actually features evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. That's right. So yeah. Enjoy Um David, good to see you. I'm really excited that uh I get to see you I got to see you at HBES, Human Behavior

Evolution Society. Uh love going to HBES and it's was lovely to just spend some time with you in person. Yeah, uh it was it was a a really fun time. Um and uh after HBES, we have a wonderful guest, uh, Annie Wirtz, who is a professor of psychology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Uh, we cover uh some really fascinating new stuff that Annie has been pioneering on the study of infant learning and uh how we think about plants. Yeah, totally new area, really unusual for somebody in our sort of generation of science to kind of develop a whole new area and a really lovely example of somebody taking evolutionary perspective on development and learning and generating completely new knowledge in an area where people really didn't think to look before, especially from a

psychological experimental perspective. So it's a really fun, interesting conversation. I think you'll really enjoy it. And yeah, enjoy the episode. Enjoy. Today we have Annie Wirtz, who is professor at UC Santa Barbara. and Annie, prior to UCSB, uh where where were you? Uh how far back should I go? Uh the snowy day. Uh Dan told us he was born in August. So uh you can go back all the way to the day of your childhood. So uh well, how about I I can go in reverse and then uh and then we can go. So uh prior to UCSB, so I started here in March of 2024, And then prior to that, I was at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin for almost 10 years, like nine and a half-ish years. That I was there, I had an independent research group called the Max Planck Research Group,

Naturalistic Social Cognition. And then before that, I was a postdoc at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale. And then before that, I was actually at UCSB. So I have looped again. I was at here for graduate school with Tams and German, and of course had Lita Cosmodies and John Tuby on my committee. And then before that, I was at Boston University. And before that, I was in uh Robozonia, Pennsylvania. Um until the day of my birth. And then before that, we don't know. We don't know, yeah. And we actually had Jamie Krems on, and she mentioned there's a whole bunch of people from eastern and apologies to western Pennsylvania, but eastern Pennsylvania, like um apparently Lita grew up in Philly, uh Jamie, um, and

Joe Henrik. And then David, do you remember who else she mentioned? Oh, Mike Gervin. Mike Gervin is from the Mike on. Yeah. So there's a parent, she she thinks there's something in the water. So congratulations on being from it's a good pedigree. Um hailing from eastern Pennsylvania. Um we'll get into all of that path. And one of the things we always ask people is um is how they got interested in evolutionary um psychology. But before we do that, can you tell people a little bit about what an independent research group leader is at the Mox Planck or what the Mox Planck is? Because I know lots of people, um, our audiences diverse may not know what that is. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. Yes, so it is um, it's the Max Planck Society is the overarching uh institution. And in Germany, the Max Planck Society has over, I mean, I'm not sure what the current count is, but it's somewhere over 70 different research institutes throughout Germany, the EU. There had been one in Florida. I don't know if there's still one in Florida, Italy. So they're dispersed all over the place. And they all focus on different topics. And the it runs the gamut from physics and chemistry to empirical aesthetics and history of science and all kinds of fascinating questions. And they build them around the the particular sets of people who they bring in to be directors, who are kind of the the um the people who are in charge of the

big centers. And there's usually several directors within an institute. And those are high-powered people with tons of money behind them and uh research scientists, postdocs, pre-docs, um, the whole thing. And then their system, they have what's equivalent to an assistant professor position within that, which are there's several different kinds, but um the kind that I had was an independent research group, um, so equivalent to an assistant professor position. And basically what that was is there's a call that goes out uh almost every year in the fall where you can apply for these positions and you pitch a research idea that you could do for around five-ish years. And I was successful in that application, and they gave me a bunch of money to do my work,

working on how infants, the the um how infants learn about plants, um, but the kind of underlying psychology for how babies learn about the natural world. Um, and so they gave me uh money to do that. Um, and I had uh I had my own PhD students, I had master's students, I had a team of student research assistants. I was lucky enough to have two paid lab manager, and then a person whose position was foreign language secretary who worked for me and were just wonderful professional science, uh science support staff. It was a fantastic position. Um, the biggest problem with it though is it's time limited. So even though there's an initial five year period for it, then uh after that you can apply for extensions of various kinds.

And I did that successfully along the way. Um, but uh outside of a few constrained things, typically they expect you that they've given you all these resources, they expect you to move on. Um, and so I did, and I was very lucky to then get the position here at UCSV. Right. And so it's sort of the the Mox Planck thing, it's sort of a high risk, as I understand it, it's sort of there's a high risk new question to be asked. And they give you sort of a temporary pot of money to say, look, here's this really new idea. And uh maybe not all of them work, but uh they're important big picture new ideas that challenge existing wisdom. And uh it's it's uh it's it's this really cool sort of like scientific um,

I don't know, what would you call that? Almost like a what is it when an entrepreneur throws money at things? I don't know anything about this. Startup or startup, yeah. It's sort of like a or a go, it's almost like a scientific startup or GoFundMe, or sort of like a thing up where, you know, it's just sort of an engine for like new innovative research ideas where, yeah, the ideas maybe some percentage or even high percentage fail, but then some are successful. And as far as we know, and I mean, this is when whenever we have guests on, I always think about like what to say about a person. There's very few people I know in our cohort who came up with a whole new area of research. Um and I think you're one of those people where the combination of babies and plants,

um, and I know it's more complicated, but I'm just we're being super adductive now. Like that's a when people hear that, they sort of do a double take. Um, and we can get into and sort of what that is, but I mean, was it but what you're saying is that you know you were one of these high risk people in this really cool program in Germany. And it by all accounts, based on the papers and based on the fact that you're UCSB, it it worked, right? Yes. Yeah. It did. Yeah. And I think you know that's it's it's another example in your work. And we've talked about, we've alluded to your work uh a bunch that um you know we've talked a little bit about innate versus learned, and we can get to that too. And your work is a good example of that.

But we've also talked about how taking an evolutionary approach um gives you new insights uh and questions to ask that you've never would have gotten without an evolutionary approach. And I think your work is a really good example of that to the point where when people hear about it, it sounds like a crazy idea, unless you sort of explain it. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, to just to put a button on the Max Planck thing, the the um the idea behind these independent research groups is it's really promising ideas that are potentially too new to be a a sure bet for traditional funding agencies. So they give you the money to really establish the idea if it's got something to it, um, and with the idea that later on down the line you can get money from traditional

funding agencies as well. And that's that's how it worked in my case. That's awesome. I I wish we had something like that here in the US. It sounds uh very cool. Um but I I I want to get into um the origin story behind um this topic uh of of plants, because I don't I don't think I've heard it or or or know how you got into this. So as far as I'm aware, like you're the first person to start studying this topic, you basically pioneered this new field of research. Um and that raises a lot of questions like how how did you discover that this was uh uh an underexplored topic? How did you uh uh move in this direction? Uh did did you slip on a plant and then uh like like what happened there? Yeah. Um, well, uh there uh several things kind of came together.

So when I was in graduate school at UCSB, um I guess this it sort of uh intersects with the origin story of how I ended up in evolutionary psychology too, because coming out, I I'm my kind of deep time history as a scientist is in cognitive development. Um and I that's what I was doing when I was in undergrad. Um uh in addition to working in a behavior genetics lab. Um And so I was reading a lot of the work. This was early 2000s. I was reading a lot of the infant cognition work that was coming out at the time. People, you know, like Karen Wynne, Elizabeth Stalke, Susan Carey, Alan Leslie, people like that, talking about the kinds of systems you would expect to see in infant minds. And that was a very uh it remains, it's a domain-specific view that there are

there are these um different people have different flavors of this, but to use uh Liz Felke's uh exam uh Liz Felke's framework, there are these different core knowledge systems, right, that are for different kinds of things. Um and so uh I had been working or thinking in in that um in that kind of way of, or I've been kind of steeped in that way of thinking. And when I applied to graduate school, I applied to work with Tams and German here to do theory of mind work. I was very interested in kind of thinking about thinking. But one of the other things that had always grabbed me in that work is there's a whole section on folk biology and intuitive biology and uh the kind of common sense understanding of the biological world, which basically boils down to plants and

animals, but also includes things like how kids think about disease or other kinds of biological processes. There's just a really, there's a really interesting literature there that was very active in the late 90s and early 2000s. And uh so I had been kind of I had been familiar with that work. Um I uh back when I started graduate school was the days where you were accepted and then you were brought out for a recruitment weekend. So um I had been accepted to UCSB. I came for the recruitment weekend, uh, and I was among many other uh interesting conversations that I had, and of course the really good fit with my advisor, um, I was lucky enough to meet with Lita Cosmodies. And I did not know that she was Lita Cosmodies, you know.

I uh because I had you heard had you heard of her at that point? No, uh-uh. No, because I I didn't know anything about evolutionary psychology and uh what I had the uh well that's not entirely true. The only thing I had heard about it was that it was all basically like fake and wrong. Garbage, yeah. Yeah, just in passing, that was what I had heard about it. And I but I I didn't hear enough of it to form an opinion one way or the other. Um I just really didn't know. So I I I came I here I was uh for the for the recruitment weekend I was talking to Lita and she asked me about um well what are you thinking about? And one of the things that I had been thinking about at that point when I had been reading

is well how do you know what domains there should be? you know, because there's the at the time, it's there's objects, there's number, there's agency. Um, but why those and how would you carve them up? And so I said that to Lita, and she basically said, uh, I can teach you that. Um, and and so I came here and she did. Uh, and the other graduate students in the program here, and and my advisor. Um, and it was uh so that's I when I first got here, I knew nothing about evolutionary psychology. I remember um and if you ever do talk to Tams and German uh in in this, she can tell you, I remember going to her office early in graduate school and saying, It feels like they're all talking a different language and I have no idea what they're saying uh in the i

in talking to the other graduate students here. Um so I had a lot of kind of catching up to do in terms of how you do an evolutionary approach. But it just seemed when Lita explained so Lita basically gave me the short version of how you do evolutionary psychology and an adaptationist approach. And it just seemed like it must be true, right? That if you are, if you want to understand the structure of the mind of a particular kind of organism, why wouldn't you want to know about and use the process that built the organism as a way of deriving predictions for what should be or what might be in what might be systems in the mind, right? So this it just it just seemed, it seemed like it, it at that broad level it had to be

true. And then the question was learning how, how to do that. Um, and so that's what I did. I was reading a ton, I was working on theory of mind. I did my dissertation on theory of mind, which is still a topic I find absolutely fascinating. And just for people who do may not know, because we have a diverse audience, what is just theory of mind is the ability to sort of yeah. The the theory of mind is uh is the common sense understanding of that other people have mental states like beliefs, desires, um uh uh that basically motivate their behavior and that you can use to uh to interpret, predict, and explain their behavior. So you know it's almost it's it's such a weird. I remember when I first heard about theory of mine, I was like, that's weird.

And I had this experience with almost everything, like vision or mechanisms. I had sort of this initial reaction of like, well, why do you need a mechanism for that? Because and I realized in retrospect, it was in David, I have talked about instinct blindness, where it was just instinct blindness, where it seems so obvious that it just happens. Like you never even think to think, oh, I think about people as having mental states, but you know, as John and Lead, I think, wrote one time, like bubble a bowl of oatmeal can't do that, you know. So, like, right, so that but it always felt like sort of alien. And I think like that's part of being a scientist is sort of thinking about there are these mechanisms.

And that's interesting that you did you started out in theory of mind and thinking about mechanisms for these very obvious systems. Right. Well, yeah. Well what's what's interesting to me is that this was sort of this is sort of a different entryway into evolutionary psychology than we've heard from some of our other guests who sort of encountered it directly and saw the insights that it offered. This is an interesting case where you had a question that you were trying to answer, which is you know, how how do we figure out how to carve the mind up at the joints? What is the you know, we have these seems to have these intuitions about say minds, say agents, uh, number, but like why those categories?

Why not another set of categories? And that was the question that you were bringing to the table. Like where you were basically asking a deeper why question. Uh and what's interesting is that uh Leda is right in that really you need an evolutionary approach to even begin to answer that question. So your entry point seems to be that you were asking this question that evolutionary psychology really had was the only field that had the answer to, the only way of going about answering it. Uh and that was sort of how you how you uh entered into the field was that it it was it was a way of delivering an answer to a question that you had um uh that you didn't even know existed. That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And it was it was very uh at the time I don't think I quite understood How lucky I was to literally stumble into Lita's office, basically, to find this out. Because, you know, at the time coming out of undergrad and reading things and coming out of an undergrad mindset where you're reading all kinds of things, and there's somebody out there who knows the answer and they're testing you on the thing. And you you just, if you don't know it it's because you just haven't been assigned the right thing yet or like you haven't um you haven't hit upon the right way the right set of things to read right to basically find the answer um and uh I was lucky that I ran into Lita and she could tell me basically the way to do this where it's not as

you say it's not clear how else you could go about really really truly digging apart or really truly digging into what is uh why there would be certain systems in the mind, right? You can dig pretty far into the details of what's there and how it's done without an evolutionary approach, but it's really hard to think about in an a priori way what should be there without an evolutionary approach. Or what I mean, you know, should is is is strong, but I mean like if you're doing predictions, what might be there, and then uh to to be able to test whether or not your predictions about that are are correct. So yeah, it was it was luck. I mean, really, it was it was luck that I I ended up talking to Lita about it.

But once it was clear, it was this, it was uh having talked to other people about the way they get to evolutionary psychology, there's usually this kind of like aha moment of like, oh, right, this just makes sense. And it was very clear uh talking to Lita, this just made sense. And then as uh and then, you know, getting into the details of it, like I said, when I started talking to all these other grad students who had read all the things before I got there, because they had been doing this for a year or two in undergrad or they had made this discovery of evolutionary psychology before me, it made no sense for a while as I was learning. And what I found is that and I don't know, I mean, I don't know if this is just the

perspective I came from or if this is a common experience. But what I found is that in truly learning how to do an adaptationist approach, how to do evolutionary psychology the way that I do it, I would have these moments of, okay, this makes this completely makes sense. I get this. And then I would read more and then it would all kind of crumble apart, right? Or I'd think more and it would all kind of crumble apart. And then I would have to kind of push forward, and then it would kind of go back to making sense again as I was reading more things and thinking through things more deeply. And then it would kind of crumble again, right? And this is what I find about ideas that um, you know, these things are controversial for a

reason, these things are hard for a reason. It takes to truly grasp what's going on, you really do have to do the mental work um and the reading work and uh and and the thinking and talking to other people and and talking things through um because it's it's not the caricature of just thinking, oh hey, back in uh back when we were living in caves, it must be probably we could have done X, Y, and Z. And now I'm gonna make predictions based on that. It's actually a lot more complicated than that. There's a lot more that goes into that. does take actual training and it's hard. Um I don't want to detract from the getting to plants, but just really quick, the the like you think you got it and then you don't.

Have you thought about what that what was that? Like, do you have an idea of sort of what I don't know. I mean, it's something that it's something that I experienced in not just in evolutionary things. It's something that with kind of tr counterintuitive concepts. Right? Like concepts that it takes training to flip out of the way you normally think about things to overcome your instinct blindness. Since we've talked about instinct blindness. Um it's just anything that requires uh reframing how you would kind of, I don't know, for lack of a better word, naturally approach a question. Um, it just slips in and out. I mean, I find this a lot. I teach developmental psychology now, and I find this happens a lot, excuse me, a lot with

um uh uh heritability, right? Or like genes and environment. Like it just takes it, it it you can kind of get it at a surface level, and then you start thinking through another question and you realize, oh wait, this is actually very complicated, and you have to kind of like work at training yourself and how to keep kind of different conceptual levels uh clear and what the boundary conditions of what you're thinking about. So it just is, yeah, it just slips, it slipped in and out. Right. Yeah. Like nobody was starting from zero. Yeah. No, I should say like starting from zero with like, I didn't know about I didn't know about selection pressures. I didn't know about, you know, the whole literature, the like hunter-gatherer studies and

behavioral ecology. I didn't know that stuff. And so I was also adding these new pieces and adding these entire new pieces. It would help this process of really reframing how I was approaching the study of the human mind, but it would just like crumble briefly. And then you kind of put it back together. It was anyway, that's my experience of it. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you had um the humility to know when it was crumbling instead of sort of blundering through uh in an overconfident way, which I see is unfortunately uh a trend uh in some uh corners of the internet regarding evolutionary psychology. Um I'm I'm unaware David, do you have references? I'm unaware of this. No, I'm kidding. Oh yeah. We've spent several episodes going through this stuff, but yeah, um i it it's surprising to

me how easy people think it is. Yeah. Uh and how people think they can do it after learning about it for two minutes. Yeah. Um there's a lot of like really lazy amateur evolutionary psychology out there. I'm not sure w where that comes from or why people think it's so easy and it requires so little training and so little depth of thought. Uh I mean, do you have any uh is it is it just instinct blind? I mean it can't just be that. That's a good question. I mean it's something I have thought about. I think it's just I don't know. So I don't think anyone would think about becoming a cognitive neuroscientist as something you could do just by thinking about it for a few minutes, right? Yeah. And but that's something that's kind of that's a method, right?

Uh and I wonder if I wonder if the fact that at least from my perspective, what evolutionary psychology offers is a really rigorous, you know, logical theoretical framework. Right. And the complexity of the theoretical framework, I think, is something that um you can overlook right like you can't overlook that you're sticking someone in an MRI and you have to know how to like deal with the machine and the the data that come out of it and that this clearly takes huge amounts of training to figure out how to do these things the right way um and that it's something that's specialized and does require training, right? Um but I think when there's certain there seem to be certain kinds of theoretical

structures and even certain kinds of uh uh ways of doing science that people have uh are more likely to think are easier than they actually are. I actually find this, I mean this happens sometimes with baby stuff too. Like because I work with babies is sometimes people think it's just, you know, you just do a study with babies. Um, but it that's also something that takes quite a bit of training to learn how to use that method. Um, so I don't know, I'm not sure why evolutionary psychology falls into this category of it's easy to overlook how complicated it actually is and how difficult it actually is, but it certainly does. That's that's really interesting. I wonder, like this is, I think this is what Annie you were just saying, and you can tell

me if I'm wrong, but like it's sort of like the difference between you drive past somebody building a bridge versus you you like see somebody writing a book. And you're sort of like the bridge thing, it's like I don't have a crane. I don't have huge things of cement. Like that seems really hard. So you can kind of see the method and the in the discrepancy between what you have and what is required. But for writing a book, like I think there's this trope like everybody thinks they can write a book until they sit down and try to. And it's because all of the difficulty is abstract and hidden. And I think like one of the themes of this podcast has been like humility about how complicated things are that might seem superficially not even worthy of notice, let alone

consideration, let alone respect, like babies or like field work or like the difficulty of adaptationism. So it sounds like that's sort of what you're saying is that the the abstractness of this maybe combined with things like, you know, scientists who are, you know, kind of like, oh, babies, that's not scientific, you know, which is a different issue or a related issue. But but yeah, no, I I totally buy that. That it's a um the abstraction, it's it's this, it's this sort of silly thing of everyone who just thinks they can write a bestseller book until they sit down to to the well, it's not a typewriter anymore but you you get the the proverbial typewriter. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean I do think it it is the kind of thing like you can do a bad version of it

easily. Oh yeah. Right. I mean I think also do a bad version of cognitive neuroscience easily. Bang someone over the head with a hammer. Yes. Yeah that's true. Well I impaired your cognition. Wow I've new discovery. That's true. Um We once in grad school somebody did an MRI analysis. This is like back in the old days where you'd used an abacus, not for real, but like you had to hand code the analysis and like the uh the pixels were like away from the head. And so somebody like had discovered the soul. Like we we joked that like somebody had discovered the soul because you know there was like brain activation outside of the skull. Um neuroscience joke. Not sure how So uh you're you're learning about what

has been called core knowledge or the intuitions that uh babies bring to the table when they're learning about the world. So they don't just they're not blank slates, they don't come to the world with no preconceptions and no intuitions about anything. They often have uh very clear expectations about how the world works, and there's a whole literature of studies that basically surprise babies by violating their expectations or violating their intuitions by essentially doing magic tricks for them. And you can study this scientifically by looking at how long a baby will stare at something. So it's been shown that babies will look at something when they're surprised by it, and they'll they'll look at that for a longer time, kind of puzzling over how it works.

And using that simple premise, you can study all these things about how babies think and and the intuitions that babies have about the world. So you're um uh at Santa Barbara, you're you're learning about core knowledge and these intuitions that we bring to the table and how babies are smarter than than we think they are. At what point does the light bulb go off and you think about uh plants as a potential uh area of inquiry? Yeah, well, so that was so I was going along doing my learning how to do evolutionary psychology, doing my work on theory of mind, and um my work on theory of mind um uh was very heavily informed by alan leslie's work. And uh that was a lot of, you know, task analysis work of how do you

build a successful model of theory of mind performance? How does that how how and how would different models explain the kind of data that you see when you test young kids at the time on theory of mind tasks. So I was learning not only kind of these broader questions or thinking about these broader questions of what are kind of core knowledge systems and what are the set of core knowledge systems, but I was very focused on this kind of like how do you do the nitty-gritty of unpacking what would successful performance look like on a particular task. Right. So that was extremely useful. And that was something, you know, this was uh what I was thinking about a lot in my day-to-day stuff. I really like theory of mind work.

I should preface what I'm about to say with I really like theory of mind work. Um I really, it was fascinating to think about. I learned a huge amount, and uh I have a huge amount of respect for the people working in the field, but at the time I was doing it, it was a hot topic and everybody was working on it. And I had the uh experience of submitting papers and getting the kind of like, well, this all looks great, the science is fine, but you're not adhering to my particular version of theory of mind, my particular theoretical structure. So we're going to reject the paper, which, you know, it's a standard thing that happens, but that was sort of grading on me. And at the same time, I'm sitting in on these on the Center for Evolutionary

Psychology meetings. And at the time when I was a graduate student, I really was just sitting there. I was very shy. I did not talk for most of my graduate career. Um, and uh so I was just absorbing everything that was coming through when I started going to HBus uh and uh connecting with um, you know, uh uh biological anthropologists and behavioral ecologists and primatologists and seeing the kind of work they were doing. And uh one of the things that came up was uh seeing a lot of Mike Gervin's work uh and looking at human life history trajectories. And a lot of the focus on that, um the data that he was presenting at the time was about uh caloric returns for hunting uh and kind of the age curves for when you

finally start to bring in more calories than you're using through hunting. And when when is that point? I always I find that fact fascinating and reassuring in in for me in my personal life. Yeah, I think it's 40s or 50s, right? I think it's a good thing. Remember the remember Mike Irvin's work. I know. I know. I'm really glad you said that, David, because I feel the same way too. And I'm like And I mean this was uh I the I am pulling that from, you know, twenty years ago probably at this point. But yeah, it was uh um yeah, so it's it's quite late, which is good. So he but you know, he's talking about the the great data that he has and the theoretical work. And at some point it or often it would be kind of mentioned like, okay, so there's this

variability in the calories that come in from hunting, but the kind of basis of the diet is plants, it's gathered plant resources. Dot move back to hunting. And I was like thinking, I'm like, hang on, how do you do that? Like what are the set of cognitive skills that are required to do that? Because that actually, even though it's reliable, that actually doesn't seem easy if you start thinking about it. And so that kind of grabbed my attention and I started thinking about it. And at the time, I mean, I don't know, I don't know if you like Dave and I are married. Uh we were both. News to me. I know. I don't know about it. Yeah, thanks. Um, and at the time we were, you know, doing a lot of trail running here in Santa

Barbara. And so we were up in the mountains. This was basically parents. So we had time to do it. Yes, this is preparenting. Now we don't go in the mountains. Um, but uh but we had time to do these long runs in the mountains on the weekends. Um, and we did some runs where we'd go back over into the backcountry and stuff. And there's a this is also pre like um pre uh earbuds and like listening to stuff while you're while you're going, it was just quiet and we would uh we would run with our with our friends. Um and there were a lot of times when I was out there and it was like, okay, if we got stuck this far out, I would die. Um but people did this. Like people did this here. They did this here successfully for thousands and thousands of years.

How do you do this? And so I was just kind of thinking about all of these things. And I just, I just started thinking through the problem. It just was interesting to me. I've kind of always kind of liked plants. I find them interesting and fruits and things like that. Um, I never have gotten into being a a super gardener yet, but I I I can see that coming someday. I see the TED talk in your future, Annie Words, plants and you are maybe I can see you writing some self-help book about the wisdom of flowers. Something like that. I think that could bring in some money for you. I'll I'll I'll keep that in mind for the title. Thanks to it. Um yeah, but it was so much. Oh, uh it's so ripe for puns. It's just you know, I do it it is, and I have to say I've used a bunch of puns in my titles

because I find it I I just I don't know. No, it's a contention. Life is hard enough. You might as well have puns now. No, I'm pro pun. I'm I'm firmly on the pro pun side. I think we me need more levity uh in in our science. Oh yes. Some people disagree with me, but I'm I'm firmly on the side of fun. Me too. But yeah, so I just I had the luxury though of like I started thinking about that. I don't remember exactly when, but a few years into grad school, maybe three years in. So I had like three years of just thinking about this for fun while I was frustrated about theory of mind stuff. So I was thinking about theory of mind stuff. I was doing the theory of mind stuff. I was doing my dissertation.

Um, I was working on the papers for that, um, and just getting intensely frustrated. Um, And uh but then I just had the time to think and I could. And I um then when we got our PhDs, Dave and I, uh he got the uh the job to go work with Karen Wynne at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale because this was the time when um she was looking at social relationship stuff and group kinds of things and his work fit really well. Um and I I did they had some money um for me to come along too, but there wasn't a specific project that it was tied to. And so I had a a meeting, Karen Wynne was here in Santa Barbara. Um think she was a sage fellow or something like that with one of our speaker series with have people um stay for at the time anyway, had people stay for a little bit in town.

So I met with her here uh and she basically asked, well, you know, what do you want to do for your postdoc project? And it was wide open, like it wasn't tied to a specific grant, it could be anything. And so I talked about some action perception and theory of mind kind of uh ideas that I had been thinking about and that I found very interesting. And they also said, but I also have been thinking about this thing that babies might there might be design in the human mind for learning about plants. And we could look at that in babies. And she, I mean, this is you know, condensing down the conversation, but she was basically like, Oh, yes, go do that. Uh, and so that's how we started working on that.

Um, she taught me how to do the actual baby studies. And this is also when Kylie Hamlin was a PhD student in the lab. And I learned a ton about how to test babies from Karen and from Kylie Hamlin, just watching her do her thing. Kylie is a baby testing master. And so I learned a ton from that and basically supplied like here's here's the theoretical stuff, here's what I think uh is our places we here are places I think we could start that may be fruitful, huh? For uh for looking at. Um, and uh and so we started with some of these basic questions about you know, a very basic level of is there evidence that babies are sensitive to the kind of harm that plants can inflict on humans. And is there evidence that they seem to that they may have social learning systems that are

set up for learning about plants? And so that was the focus of my postdoc, was kind of would basically resulted in a couple papers looking at those questions. And then it was on the basis of that work that I pitched to the Max Planck Society to say, hey, here's this new idea. There's a couple, you know, there's a couple papers on this, and they said, yes, please go do this. And that's what I did for like almost a decade. Um, and have really been lucky enough to have the opportunity to expand out uh into all kinds of different aspects of that question. And that's what I'm continuing to do here. Um, but yeah, and I there's a ton to do. It turns out plants are really complicated, it's very fun to think about.

Totally. I mean, so it seems like uh what what drove you into this area was a combination of two things. Um, one is a frustration with the sort of faddishness in in social science. So, like people were really into theory of mind, that was the hot topic, uh, as you said. And uh there are big problems with entering into a hot topic area and that you have a lot of competition. A lot of people have their own pet theories and their own pet ways of doing things. Uh, it's hard to break in. Um and so that uh i i is inherently limiting. So a continued frustration with that and trying to find something new um that you could carve out for yourself. And the other was um, I think a uh a glimpse of of the wave of a hand.

So uh you mentioned Mike Gervin Gervin's work, um, and he was talking about how, you know, uh uh uh gathering plant food as a as a source of calories. Uh and and and you just saw that and and said, wait, wait a second, what what's what's going on there with that wave of the hand about plant food? That's there's a lot in there that's being dismissed. Um and um what I really like about the evolutionary way of thinking is that it it teaches you how to spot those waves of the hand and say, wait, wait, wait, hold on. You can't just you can't just wave your hand like there. There's there's something underneath there, there's something more complicated. Uh it teaches you to be uh to have a better eye about, you know, uh

what what questions have not been asked, what uh what answers have not been given, um, and it helps you go uh in in a in a really good direction. Um so is is that a fair characterization of how you you ended up here? Uh you know, a a a frustration of of faddishness and a um and I guess a vigilance against having, you know, the wool pulled over your eyes or or a vigilance against just glib uh answers to questions that don't really get into the complexity. Yeah, I mean I it's close. I would say that the uh the for the first part um it makes me it makes it sound better than it actually was. I was frustrated and I was like it because for the part about um about the the the kind of working in a fad area was really like uh okay well I it w I was young, you

know, so I was kind of like, okay, you're going to tell me that I am not adhering to your theory. I'm gonna go do something that nobody's done before and I'm gonna build my own theory. Thank you very much. Like it was kind of like, I mean, I didn't say this out loud again because I was extremely shy, but that is what was that that more kind of um maybe uh juvenile motivation was was behind that. Thank goodness you had it. You know, I like we we we know n next to nothing about plant cognition. We know um I uh I we still don't know enough about theory of mind, but I think uh it's it's good to have a diversified approach to the discovery of knowledge. Uh we don't wanna all be studying the same thing.

No, it's true. Yeah, and I I mean I taught a grad class this uh this past spring quarter here, and I described, and I it did feel at the time it was kind of like in doing theory of mind stuff. It was sort of like I took my ball and went home. You know what I mean? Um, but uh, and then for the second part, I think, I mean, what I so I I completely agree that it's it's looking for, well, hang on, you just passed over something there that is actually really complicated. And I you're exactly right, there's a vigilance for that is a problem that people have been solving, and it's actually pretty a lot more complex. I would say in Mike Irvin, I would not say he was he wasn't being gliding. Oh, yeah.

Don't mean to just Mike Irvin by any stretch of the imagination. No, no, no. And you know, we all focus on what we focus on, right? So, but it was, it was just, it was the vigilance for like, oh, hang on, that is hard, right? And right now, that is, you know, either it's being overlooked or it's in the bin for like, I'll deal with this later, you know, but I'm focusing on this other thing. Um, but it was very much that vigilance for like, okay, yes, this this requires an explanation. And how is that how is that happening? And then critically, having been trained in how to do an adaptationist approach, it gave me the theoretical toolkit to basically be like, well, nobody's done this before in the way that I, in this like kind of holistic way that I'm thinking about it, or thinking,

not I mean holistic is the wrong word, but in a focused way, right? Because people have gotten to pieces of this. You know, like there are people like um Liz Cashton had some work looking in in the uh mid 90s, looking at why kids are neophobic about um about vegetables, right? Like why do little kids not want to eat their vegetables? And um uh uh um Margie Prophet in the adapted mind has the whole thing about plant toxins and uh pregnancy. Susan Gelman um had uh had work actually looking at how young kids think about plants. Again, that was in the kind of mid-90s. This was, as I said, there's that whole intuitive biology literature, right? So people had studied what do young kids think about plants, but it was, with the exception

of Susan Gelman's work, as far as I'm aware, almost all of it was how are plants and animals the same, right? So, like, uh, how do living things work, right? And so, and you can you can learn quite a lot from that by looking at that question for plants. So, like little preschool age kids, um you know, three to three to five-year-old kids, four to six, can know things like um plants like animals grow, Plants like animals can uh need food and water to grow. They can get heal themselves after they get damaged and they can die. Like they know these kinds of things about both both sets of entities. But there again, that's another place where the evolutionary approach, you look at that and you're like, okay, sure, there's commonalities between plants and animals, but if you're

thinking adaptive problem first, of what how are you as uh either a young human or even an adult, how are you engaging with these things? The way that you engage with plants is very different than the way that you engage with animals because a lot of my work kind of uh now you've got me on puns, it stems from this, um, which is that uh it is uh plants are plants are rooted to the ground, right? And because plants are rooted to the ground, that's a very different thing than animals that can move around. So, like the example of dangerous plants and dangerous animals, um a dangerous spider, a poisonous spider, a poisonous snake, um, a uh a lion, whatever, big dangerous animals, small dangerous animals, all of those things can come to you.

You have to be vigilant about them in different ways. A dangerous plant, you can have a poison oak plant that you're gonna get a horrible rash, or you can have a deadly toxic plant that if you take a bite of it, you will die. But none of that happens unless you go to the plant. Right. So even though the danger, you the danger of injury or the danger of death is there in both cases, it's very different how it plays out. So if you're thinking about how systems should be designed to deal with those dangers, they likely have different characteristics and different design features. And so that's that's where I really that's that's how I started thinking about that too. Um so there's there's pieces in the literature, but not from the standpoint of

what is what are the broader adaptive problems really of humans dealing with plants and how would you see what what would the cognitive systems for those kinds of problems look like in babies and in uh young kids right so it's that that uh instead of all the infinite ways you could carve up plants as a thing sort of in a school book, you know, it's thinking of this privilege class of what would there be selection pressures for for people. And I mean, one of the things that I whenever I see your talks is that the first few slides are sort of, you know, the way that we think of plants now is this sort of backdrop and wallpaper. But that's very unusual. And our brains are really evolved for this world where we didn't have grocery stores and

where everything really is, you know, you you have to go out and actually like get food. And that is super not trivial. Um, as you said, like I'm sure all of us would die. Um, probably Annie, you would probably survive the longest of the three of us. David, I don't know. Who do you think if we were in the wilderness, who would go first? Oh, I would go first, definitely. I didn't want to say it, but I don't know. We'll we'll see. We we've been through this many times. Every time we bring on an anthropologist, I'm like shivering with fear to describe what they've been through. But uh but yeah, but no, but but the point of like, you know, you really, you know, this thing of affordances, right? Like what does this thing afford?

And we had Ed Hagan on already too, and he talked about how like this this, you know, these secondary compounds, these pesticides, like there's just a ton of these chemicals. And I I just love that. You know, this your your talks are incredibly logical in the sense of plants, even though they look like wallpaper, are fundamentally important. They literally are like life and death for eating and also other stuff like you know, construction. But then they're super, super dangerous. And I think even as much as I thought I appreciated just hearing all the details from you about even like tomatoes, like the leaves of the tomato plant, it's like a deadly nightshade family. So even though it's been artificially selected, even though you know it's still yeah, yeah,

it's still like super dangerous, right? Like plants are just super dangerous. Yeah. Don't eat tomato leaves, don't eat potato leaves. Don't eat raw potatoes, also. Don't eat raw potatoes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is what's it's uh plants are really complicated and and it's it's really, it's always very interesting to talk to people about this because when I give the few-word description of I study babies and plants, Dave's right, everybody goes, huh? And I mean, now it's it happens less because I've been doing it long enough that people sort of expect that. And sometimes now they go, oh, you're the one. Um, but uh, but um there's usually kind of like, well, I get asked a lot of things. One thing I get asked a lot is what were you really looking for when you found this?

It's something I get asked a lot. And I said, Well, I was looking for this. Like I started out, I mean, I was thinking about this for literal years before I started looking for this. Um, and uh and then the the second thing is kind of a oh, well, okay, maybe I guess, but you know, people have this idea very much built on their own experience that plants are just like not that important. Um, and then when you start to when you start to get people thinking about, first of all, as Dave mentioned, in worlds where people are living in wild environments, and you can't go to the grocery store, you can't go to a restaurant, how are you gonna get your plant foods, right? Um, you have to go out and you have to actually identify these things, but plants are

really tricky because they all have, as you heard from Ed, they all have these toxic secondary compounds in them. Um, they all have toxic secondary compounds. And then some of those exist in forms and in concentrations that can be really bad for humans. Um, and Ed probably talked about how we have enzymatic pathways. There's all kinds of defenses that we have against plants. Like our physiology is really adapted to these things, and not just us, but existing off of uh of um wild forage plant resources, this is something that applies to all kinds of other animals, arguably most other animals, right? Right. If you were to do like a pie chart of likely selection pressures, yes. Plants, contrary to the intuition, like this probably the most certain

stable feature that that like animals have been, you know, dealing with for really really long time well well prior to um you know whatever what what what mammals I mean right like even yeah I mean yeah insects do this right most of plants is like plants and insects um and it's uh it's it is a really long-standing problem and so I think I mean of the the the one of the benefits of also doing this and starting this in my 20s is I I just knew this had to be true. Right. Like it now I think I'd be more risk averse. And even if I knew it had to be true, I don't know that I would either counsel my students or allow myself to just like, no, no, just go do a whole new area based on this logic that you have, right?

Um, but uh but it had to be true. There had it, they they why would an entity that lives off of these things out in the world, like yeah, even just if you take the fundamental that just like consumes these things, eats these things, why would there not be psychology for engaging with plants? How could there not be psychology for the kind of thing, one of the main kinds of things that this kind of organism exists on? right? Um, and so I, from that perspective, it yeah, it it it had to be true. So I started doing it with the certainty that, you know, I might be, I might be wrong about the details, right? So I might be wrong about the way that the uh psychology is set up to deal with plants. that's entirely possible.

I don't think I'm wrong that the psychology is set up to deal with plants. Right. Right. In some way. Like some aspects of human psychology must be set up to deal with plants. Yeah. Maybe not the way I think, maybe not the way I've interpreted my data, but there's there's there there should, and it's a good place you should. Like there should be something there for that. If an insect is set up that way, if a gorilla is set up that way, why not humans? Right. Um yeah. So it seemed like a safe bet. And I mean it's worked out, but it was in in retrospect, like later on in my postdoc career, I had a kind of passing conversation with Paul Bloom, who was uh who was uh kind of a co-advisor at the at the time.

Um and he said something like, Yeah, this was actually brave to do this. I thought and it was the first time I thought about it. And I was like, oh no, this this could have been a huge mistake. But uh but yeah, it it ended up working out. Um all right. So you took this uh this leap of faith. Well I it's actually it's a more of a leap of logic, I think. I think there's really rigorous and solid logic. So I don't think it was a leap at all. Um and uh so after you you take this leap and you do this brave thing of, you know walking out onto a new field, another plant metaphor, um, uh, you know, ten years later or so, uh you have harvested uh uh you know, another plant metaphor, uh a lot of empirical evidence.

Um could you give us uh a sketch of some of the discoveries you found, some of the design features of this the system? What have you learned uh in the past decade or so? Yeah, sure. So the the overarching thing is the that um fundamentally because humans are i uh huh well here let me just step back. So the the the logic, the the core of the logic about the design of plant systems is that a large portion of what is going on in humans is likely to involve social learning, right? And the reason for this is because uh so as we've talked about, plants are many things. They are edible, um, but they are also dangerous and they can be that in very specific ways. So most cases plants are um only edible uh or like it's certain

parts of plants are edible at certain times of the year, basically, because that's you know how that's not entirely the case, but that's that's how it works. For humans, we also do this thing where we uh process our food and we cook our food. And so that unlocks a lot of plant resources that are otherwise toxic. So there's a lot of things, the kinds of foods that humans specialize in, like fruits, roots, and nuts, a lot of the roots and nuts that humans rely on and that are the kind of staples of human diets. If you look in uh in small scale and small scale indigenous societies you see that they they are uh they're plant resources that are not edible unless you do some kind of processing to them so they're toxic until they're processed and then they are food and

they're the they are these um staple kind of core basis of and of the of the caloric intake um so what that means though is that as a human being when you are dropped, when you're born, you're basically dropped into a particular environment. You can't know in advance what the plant life around you is going to be. Um, so because we are omnivores and we don't specialize in like one or two particular plants, like some species do, you can't build in something that's more like a template for like find this particular plant. And if you find this particular plant or this particular features of plants, then you know you're fine, go ahead and eat it. We're not set up that way. We have this large diet breadth, and because we specialize in these higher caloric

density parts that require processing beforehand, it means that any individual human can't construct a human diet on their own, right? So if you as a baby are born to a particular place, if you were by trial and error to kind of just even figure out which plants are around you are edible, and you just start eating particular plants and seeing what happens based on what happens to you when you eat it, at best, you're going to spend a lot of time sick and uh and and out of commission. At worst, you're going to die. And so instead, what you see, and now I've done this with some collaborators, is when you run selection dynamic models, when you run the math on this, these circumstances select for the evolution of social learning mechanisms

where instead of trial and error learning the information for yourself, you instead the mechanisms are set up to learn the information from the people in your local environment who already know it, right? So I know and this is one of these places where there's a little there's a little bit of a gloss over, like it does gloss over how do you get that knowledge in the first place, right? Again, this is this is it clearly there is a process there by which the first individual figured out that you could eat this, and then the the individuals along the way across generations figured out, for example, the processing techniques and things like that that you could do, and you have this kind of cumulative cultural evolution of these kinds

of uh of these aspects of things. For right now, for me, that stuff is black boxed, right? I know it's there, I know it's something to be explained, but I'm assuming that that is there. And then given that babies are dropped into a world where that exists, then the argument is that their their psychology, particularly our psychology, human psychology, especially when we're we're uh when we're in the earliest parts of our lives, is really geared towards getting that information from watching what other people do, Right. So what we have found is at a broad level is that infants show evidence of a psychology that is designed for balancing the costs and benefits of plants, such that when infants are first

confronted with unfamiliar plants, they show a reluctance to reach out and touch plants compared to other things. So we do this by uh we test babies with a series of different objects. We have real plants, we have artificial plants that look very realistic, but we include them for two reasons. And first we include them because uh they don't grow or change or die over the course of testing, and the real plants do. And then secondly, we include them because they don't have a scent and the real plants do. And scent is important, but when we were testing this, we wanted to make sure that we weren't just getting babies responding to stuff that smelled one way versus things that don't smell at all.

So we have real plants, artificial plants, and then we make a bunch of control objects to examine whether babies are responding to plants per se, or are they responding to particular features? Like is it a broader class of anything that's green or anything that has some a particular kind, particular kinds of shapes? So we build these artifacts. I don't have any in my office, or I would pull one over, but we we uh we we build these artifacts that share features of the plants, but they when you see them especially up close, they are definitely not plants. Um we also include familiar objects, objects that are both things that babies would uh would use all the time themselves, like little board books, and then

objects that would also be things that parents would caution babies about using. So we have like cooking pots, we have uh uh a knife, it's an infant-safe 3D printed knife, but it is a knife, and uh and and other kinds of objects like that. And then we have another category of stimuli that are other inanimate natural kinds that are not plants. So shells, stones, like a dried-out sea sponge, these kinds of things, so that um we can examine whether it's a broader category potentially of natural versus human-made, right? So we we have this whole set of different objects and uh we put them down in front of infants uh one at a time in a randomized order and then what we see is that infants take longer to reach out and touch the plants versus all of the other object types we tested.

So we see this plant specific response. They treat the real and the artificial plants similarly And show this reluctance to touch. And we've replicated that now, I think, seven times in different contexts, including some work with collaborators looking at indigenous small scale societies, where we see aspects of this also in those societies as well. And what we see in addition to that initial reluctance to touch is at least in the US and the German populations that we've looked at in the time before babies touch, they actually look up to the adult to see the way we interpret that is to it's it's a if you are geared to get social information, you have to look at the person to see what they're doing, right?

So in these studies, the adult experimenters across the table from the baby, they put these uh stimulus objects down. And what we see is that if you on my computer screen, if you're the experimenter and you hand me the baby an object, uh if it's a plant, what I do is I look to you first and then I will go ahead and try and touch it. If it's one of these other non-plant objects, I'll touch it first, and then I'll look to you to see what to do. So we see this kind of like social information gathering thing, and then we also have evidence that in addition to looking for social information prior to making contact with plants, we we see that babies appear to be geared to learn that particular plants are edible.

So we see kind of selective learning of plant edibility. We see that that information that babies learn about plants is when it's generalized to new things, they're really careful about how they generalize information about plants, especially edibility information. They seem to generalize that more tightly than they do, say, toxicity information. And when they're generalizing just information like name information about plants, they use or when they're generalizing name information when it's about a plant, they focus on these little fine grain features more than when it's a human made artifact. So we see that there seems to be, because one of the thinking adaptive problem first, one of the problems is after you learn about a particular plant in your environment, you have

to be able to apply that information in new settings. And the because many plants look very similar and they have that high cost of making a mistake as even very similar looking plants, one can be edible, one can be toxic, it suggests that there should be selection on the mechanisms to use all available features to make these kind of fine-grained distinctions. And we're seeing some evidence about that in babies and some in adults too. So that's that's kind of like that's a gloss, but that's one of the that's kind of the large, the big picture at this point. Initial reluctance, look uh evidence of looking for social information, and then gathering social information in specific ways, and then generalizing that information in

specific ways as well. Fascinating. I mean it it it makes uh good logical sense um what you're talking about, because with with a physical artifact, like say a chair, chairs vary uh quite substantially in terms of how big they are, their shape. You know, any man-made artifact or human-made artifact can uh you know have have different have you know vary in in size, um, but what what is constant is is the function. Like what is the purpose? You know, chairs are for sitting and um hammers are for hammering nails. Um and so you wouldn't necessarily expect such a a focused attention on the details of a physical artifact if you want to learn how to use that artifact or what its its function is. But with plants, on the other hand, uh the the the tiny subtle details actually matter a

great deal in terms of differentiating um one plant from another plant. Um with with a plant, you know, the size, shape, texture really uh is is hugely important and could could mean the difference between uh you know uh getting sick or dying and uh eating something that is edible. So I think that's a really fascinating uh example of how uh fine-grained the learning psychology is. Um I also think it's fascinating how laser specific uh these mechanisms are. So it's not it's not just green things, it's not just pointy things, it's not just you know sharp things. Uh it's it's a it's a like really the the specific features of a plant are are what's uh triggering this psychology and this reluctance to touch this curiosity about what other

adults think of this thing and whether they think it's safe? It's truly fascinating. Given that you've uh uh gathered all this evidence about this, you know, seemingly laser-focused psychology uh on plants, how would you refer to this uh uh This system, this collection of mechanisms. I know you and Dave have written a lot about modularity and how you don't like that term. To me, this sounds like maybe module is a is a good way of thinking about it. If it's not a module, what is it? How do you talk about this system? Yeah, I mean, though so the way that I think about it is that what I'm looking at is a collection of sort of related but uh overlapping systems, right? So I think about this as uh there are systems, I what I what I've called them to have kind

of a a single label for everything that I'm doing, is that I'm looking at a collection of systems for plant learning and avoiding natural toxins or plant systems. Um, but I don't think about this as there is a single module for plants, right? First because I think that, as I mean, probably you've discussed with Dave, I think that use the the use of module and modularity gets tied up in implications of Fodorian modularity, and I certainly do not mean that. Um I understand. Yeah, to Jerry Fodor, who was funny, uh scathing um and pretty controversial philosopher of mine at Rutgers, who was actually a colleague of Alan Leslie's, right? If I'm is that right, Andy? But but he basically the idea is like a module.

I don't know how much we talked about what Fodor meant about module, but basically the idea is like sort of that um it's things that are you as like an intuitive agent can't control. You know, like seeing an illusion is a classic example. Like you know that two lines and an illusion, You've measured them with a ruler, they're both the same length, but you can't help but see them as different length because of the other parts of the scene. And so the idea is something like visual perception is modular in the sense of like you, the little person in your head who has sort of beliefs, desires, goals to throw back to theory mind. Like that theory of mind parts of you can't control something. And so for Fodor, that was in for, I mean, there's a whole other, you can, you know,

there's a whole paper on it you can read. But basically, the idea is like Fodor had a reason for differentiating like the stuff you quote unquote the little person can control versus those other things. Evolutionary psychology really never meant that evolved stuff are those things that you can't control, but it kind of got tied together. And David and I did talk about sort of like the way people misunderstand it and how they often want to compartmentalize it to some things. And it is often the things you can't control. And even in the podcast and popular spaces that's often the way it's sort of framed is like there's this there's you and then there's like this additional stuff where it's not coming

from you but it's coming from evolution and so I think it's a very pre-potent thing. But that I just wanted to fill in like that's the Fedorian version but that's but what Annie's saying correct me if I'm wrong but you're saying like that's not what you're talking about here. That's right. And I mean there's even if you read the he his the uh if you read photos work there's even like a list of of criteria that a system has if you're claiming that it's modular and it's things like fast, automatic, encapsulated. And uh when when it when as Dave said, when evolutionary psychologists talk about modularity, they're talking about a functionally specif specialized system, right? And maybe it's fast, maybe it's slow, maybe it's automatic, maybe it's not, maybe it's

encapsulated, maybe it's not. It's the the it's the George Williams adaptationism, the form follows the function, right? And it depends on the it depends on the function and on the problem the thing is designed to solve, the function that it has. Those are the design criteria it has. It's Clark Barrett's thing of it depends, right? And uh and uh so um that's why I would not say it's a module. Well, that's why I would say it's not a module, right? I would say that I'm looking at systems that are functionally uh functionally specialized around the problems that people face with respect to plants. And I'm you may also hear I'm also saying there's multiple, right? So I don't think that there is just one problem with respect to plants.

And I also find just in thinking through doing the task analysis and what and making predictions about the design that, and again, this is maybe where my approach to this might be wrong and potentially leading me astray, but I find it easier to think about, you know, this that there's at best there's sort of subcomponents to the problem of plants, but more likely I think there are these the that the problems, the adaptive problems, uh are to some degree distinct within plants. And I think there's also areas where the problem that I'm thinking of from the perspective of being interested in plants is actually larger than just plants, right? So, like there's there's a lot of things for foraging, for example, for plant foraging,

that there's probably actually a larger category of stationary resource foraging, which would include things like honey, and it would include things like probably marine life, aspects of marine life. And so then a psychology designed for that is not really plant specific, but plants, there would be a lot of overlap. You could get to thinking about that psychology from starting with plants and then seeing commonalities with other things. So when I think about the systems that I'm studying, I really do think that it's a fuzzy set of cognitive mechanisms that have overlap with these other systems and other problems that are functionally specialized for those problems. And so in a way, it's an unsatisfying answer because it's complicated, right?

Like it basically comes down to it's complicated, but the way that I approach it in my science and the way that I prefer, the way that I just like to think about it because I'm interested in thinking about plants is I think kind of the plant problems first, right? And then seeing that there is often overlap with other things. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually a beautiful example of how you wouldn't uh necessarily expect a well-designed system for solving the problem of finding edible plants and avoiding toxic plants. You wouldn't expect that system to be fast automatic and encapsulated from the rest of cognition. In fact, if it was, it would serve its function extremely poorly. You want to be open to other kinds of social information.

You want to be looking at the social cues you get, the the mental states that you can infer other adults around you are having with regard to the plant. If they're making a grossed-out face or a fearful face, that's going to be important information that should feed into the system. So there's a rich variety of information that should that this learning system should be connected to. And it doesn't necessarily need to be fast or automatic. And what the the modularity, the Fodorian modularity approach, I think, misleads us into doing is to thinking that adaptations have one shape, or that they that uh instead of looking at what is the actual problem that needs to be solved and what is the best way to solve it.

And then just abandoning all your preconceptions about what a good solution would be and just and just looking at uh how how would you actually solve this in practice in a way that that would be fitness promoting. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's like I mean we used to, Dave and I, I don't we've kind of moved away from this, but we used to call that binning. You know, like that it would like create it was like it's calling something module it like puts it in the module calling something modular it puts it in the module bin and then by virtue of being in the module bin then it has it entails all of these different criteria and then people try to say well this thing you're claiming it's an adaptation and you're

saying there's a module and then so you have to show all of these things in photos list right and as you said that's if from an adaptationist perspective that's just kind of the wrong way to go about it because the form follows the functions. So it's really thinking about what is the problem, what what are the design features that could solve the problem, and then test for the presence of those design features. And if if there if there's evidence for them, great. If there's not, then you've made an error somewhere along the way. You can falsify your predictions and you can go back and really think about the structure independent of kind of having to worry about whether you've ticked all the boxes for that

particular bin, right? Yeah. And it it another downside of this is that it it uh distracts us into having this really silly and pointless debate about whether something counts as a module. Yes. Like that is the absolutely the wrong question that we should be asking and the wrong debate to be having. Yeah. It's what we should be asking is how the mind works, how it solves the particular problems that we know that our ancestors would have needed to solve to survive and reproduce, and just going about and figuring out how those systems work. Whether something you know fits some definition of a module is just the wrong question to be asking. And it's a distraction. Exactly. That's exactly right. And and in in addition to that, with my work, the fact that what I'm predicting is an

evolved learning system is something that I hope is a contribution of this work. Because you have uh in in many areas of psychology, you have a misconception that evolved things are somehow opposite. Evolution is the opposite of learning, right? That either it's evolved or it's learned. And I think it does come in part from this Fodorian from a from thinking that things follow Fodorian modularity, right? So that there can't be learning if you have a Fodorian module. But for an evolved system, there's no reason that part of the design can't be learning. And in fact, there should be learning here. And then of course there's the whole you talk to Christina Moya. I mean, there's the whole, you know, there's there's big research traditions within the

evolutionary social sciences about this, but it's not clear that um that information makes it out into the wider world, the it or at least to the the the the other scientific communities that I care very much about and uh have a lot of contact with that you know evolution and learning are not in conflict. Evolution can design a learning system. Right. And and even needs to, right? I mean like even the point of just, you know, even just as David said, the specifics of the plants, right? And like your the whole point of your research is is is as you're saying is that uh and I like what you're saying because there's like kind of two things. One is like in its affordance base. Like you know, as you talked about, like it's something can hurt you, you can eat it.

And so you're privileging all the ways to categorize a research program into what are likely the evolutionarily relevant affordances. And people just weren't looking at these things psychologically or developmentally. But then it's also respecting the entity itself. And plants have just have specific properties, right? And so that combination of like respecting the entity and its properties and the affordances that are evolutionary. It's that combination that I think it's it's very striking that that's sort of like the north star of the work you're doing. And it's really interesting. You alluded to some of the affordances or like the different systems. Like what do humans, for people who might not have thought about this, like what do humans

use plants for other than food and occasionally failing to misidentify a toxic plant and sources of death. Like so, other than like having a full stomach or dying, what else do plants provide people? I mean, I I know I'm sure people have some intuition, but maybe not, especially if they're not talking to like human behavioral ecologists who are out in the out in the world. Um yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're thinking about humans in a hunter-gatherer world and you're thinking about um making a living in a world where you need to gather all of your food, you need to get all of your food, and also you need to make all the stuff that enables your life. Plants are a huge part of that as well. So plants are a huge part of human material culture.

Plants don't fossilize, which is, or they don't fossilize, they don't fossilize the same way. They are preserved in the archaeological record in the same way a lot of other things are so things like um things like ropes and baskets and clothing and uh and um like shelters and the uh you know you see all this you you see all of the spear points but you're missing like the wooden spear right that's uh that that the the the point made it, but the spirit didn't. And when you read, when you read the literature, the people who are looking and the archaeological record for plants, this is something that comes up a lot. That you have these issues of like it just can be, it's not preserved in the same way.

But if you look at modern populations and people living in societies today that still use subsistence practices that include hunting and gathering and small scale, small-scale horticulture. You see, plants are used to build all kinds of different things. They're also used for their underlying chemical properties. So there's a lot of kind of medicinal plant use, and there's a lot of using plants for ritual things and making dyes and making face paints and making uh like making making the things you make pretty. Uh so there's kind of like these function uh uh it's maybe it's not right to call it exactly functional uses versus versus more kind of decorative uses, but there is that as well. Um so yeah, plants get used for pretty much everything.

Um yeah, interesting folk uh chemistry, or maybe not even folk chemistry, just sort of different cultural. I mean, that's a really interesting thing. Yeah. I mean, going back to Mike Gervin, like they one of the things that uh the Chimane use is they um use uh uh they do barbosco fishing. So it's you there's a plant that you use that you poison the river with the plant and then that kills the fish and you uh you get the fish out of the river. So uh you're there are um and you can eat them meat, right? Like that's important too, right? It kills the fish in a particular way such that you don't I I think that they they suffocate Yes, they suffocate it. But it doesn't like it stops the oxygen oxygen uptake in the gills, I think, or something.

But I mean it's just such an a a lovely example, right? Of like, you know, it's so improbable. And it is across this diffuse like trial and error um thing, or just like, you know, social learning as you're putting it. But I just love that example of like even the way it kills the fish, you know. Somebody I guess had to take that first little bite, you know, to be like, I guess it's okay. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so and and people use uh uh plant toxins to poison arrows for hunting. Um, so I mean it we are an ingenious bunch, us humans, and people exploit plants. Uh even you have a plant that part of it is toxic, part of it is edible, the edible part is eaten, the toxic part is used for something else.

Interesting. But there's also interesting things about for when you look at the kinds of plants that are eaten. There uh this um this literature, maybe Ed Hagen might know, probably knows more about this than than I do, but the number of edible plants that or the number of plants that are in fact edible in an environment is usually a lot higher than the set of plants that people in that particular environment eat. And what I'm uh and so you could think about that that's kind of that could be evidence for these social learning systems like shunting people in particular ways. There's probably also the uh the the kind of cultural learning, cultural evolution part of specializing in the plants that end up having the highest nutritional

yield over time. And so there's, I think there's something very interesting there to be dug into. That yeah, it's one of the one of the things in my bin of at some point I'm really interested in looking into what's going on with that. Yeah. And that's also a reason, I mean, just talking about like the the stuff that you can eat, the other materials could be used for like material construction. That would be another reason for it to not be modular in this quote unquote encapsulated way, which is that as you're interfacing with this object, what are all the other affordances sort of as a byproduct, you know, as like you're just like tearing apart this thing to to get the food, well, what are the other things that could this thing

could afford, right? Like I mean, evolved organisms are really non-entropic. And so plants, you know, like I'm I guess I mean like I'm sitting on a wooden building, you know, essentially, right? Like, you know, like we're many of us, like David, would fall through the floor right now if it wasn't for the fact that trees um, you know, have selection pressures to like grow tall, right? And that's what makes wood strong. So like there's there's all these I don't think this is wood. I realized yeah I'm I I I'm actually realizing this is like a veneered uh I mean we we have similar offices. I don't know. Maybe the door is wooden. But I mean but yeah but the point is right and this is where I think one of

the so because I was starting with infants, and because I wanted to start with the very, very basic questions of looking at uh avoiding danger, learning that it could be eaten. There's this whole category of thing of uh how do plants intersect with artifact psychology and actually the building and making of artifacts, because artifact psychology is very interesting. that it it was something that again that had that was a big research focus in the late 90s early 2000s is a really fascinating um topic it's kind of fallen out of the out it's fallen by the wayside a bit um in the scientific literature but it's really interesting to think about how plants factor into artifact psychology and how using materials from plants, and also this is an area where

this is wider than plants, right? If you've killed an animal and you are butchering the animal for meat, you also see all of these parts inside of that thing that you can use and people do use for all kinds of different things. And so this is where the overlap between I think about it from plants, but if you're thinking about how to build artifacts and the psychology for building material culture in a hunter-gatherer world, there's probably a huge overlap in that between plants and animals and in how that psychology is set up. Um it'd be very interesting to look at. Yeah. It's a very cool way to think about like our evolved architecture where it's sort of like we have this, I mean I at least have this idea sort of even now, like of sort of, you know,

like there's people who specialize in like carpentry or there's like chemists or physicists, you know, and like there's just these different things, but like, you know, we have software for doing chemistry and physical construction and like thinking about artifacts. And you know, if you I think if you watch kids or like even think about like I love playing with like I even like randomly, I don't know if you guys did this, but like when I would talk to my friends and I would just be out in the woods, I would just like grab a stick and just peel the bark off randomly. Like it's almost like there's this placeholder for like processing plants as just one of the repertoire behavioral motor repertoires of what we do, even to the point where I'll

just do it even when it's for no purpose. It's just, it's such an interesting thing to think about where there is this just discrepancy between sort of this job has been taken care of for us by the division of labor in a modern environment, but yet the software still exists in us. And maybe to the extent we don't understand it, we're actually possibly not doing as well as we could be. Um, you know, like that's that's another thing. I know you're starting to think about also like food and nutrition. Yes. And just also like there there are consequences of this mismatch that are both health and physical and also maybe mental. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the what you describe of being a kid and walking through the woods

and actually engaging with plants and with the with with the natural world around you. That's kind of the being immersed in the natural world and growing up, having this rich first-person experience, not only with the natural world, but with watching other people who have this rich knowledge, manufacturing the kinds of things you need to survive, getting the food you need to survive, processing the food you need to survive. All of those things are things we're just really missing. And it it with respect to food, the way that I have looked at um uh plant edibility so far with babies is largely with showing them an adult. Sometimes it's been Dave acting in my stimuli, but then after Dave it was my my students

in Berlin. Um, but uh but picking a piece of fruit off of a plant and sticking it in the mouth, right? And that is a cue of edibility. Um, and it seems to be something that uh plants are selectively seen as edible, even if you if you show babies somebody eating a piece of fruit off of a plant and then eating a similar thing off of a human-made object, they'll make the inference that the plant is edible, um, even though the action is the same. So the social information is uh is is uh is processed differently when depending on what is being acted upon. Um but the thing about plants it's true that there are plants that where you can pick stuff off of it and eat it but like I was talking about earlier there's a lot of plants where you

can't eat it until you do a lot of other things to it first. And so not only do you as a human need to learn that this plant is edible, you also need to learn all of the things you need to do to make it edible in order to feed yourself and your family and the other people in your community. And so oftentimes babies are just like along for the ride for foraging, right? They're when they're really little, they're carried along for foraging. When uh children get a little bit older, they are tend to be kind of together in these um uh multi-age groups of kids running around, but there's still those little groups of kids go out and do their own foraging. Um uh Karen Kramer gave a great talk at uh CWES recently at the at a

conference we we had here recently detailing all the ways that kids do this kind of foraging. Um, that I would encourage people to go look up what Karen Kramer has written about this. And also people like uh Sheena Lou Levy is working on this. There's really, there's really great work. And Barry Hewlett, of course, has all of this work on hunter-gatherer, children and childhoods. And that was something that had not been a big focus of the research for a while. But it there now is starting to be some very, very interesting great work looking at what kids actually do. And this also includes that they're doing it themselves with their multi-age peers, but they're also around while their parents are processing these various food items.

And so what my work suggests is the littlest babies, their initial response to unknown plants is to kind of avoid them, right? As a way of avoiding exposure to these potentially dangerous toxins until they have some information about how to proceed. But if you have this psychology that's basically like, just don't engage with this thing until you have the social information that it's safe, until you have the social information that it's edible. If you're in a world where you're not getting the social information in the correct form that this thing is safe and this thing is edible, it leads you to places like we see a lot where you have a lot of very young kids who will not touch vegetables. Right.

Um, and you that it's a it's a big struggle, and it makes sense that you would have kids as they are developing their own motor skills and their own independence. Um, this is what Liz Cashton talked about that it would make sense that you would ramp up this neophobia, this food neophobia for these potentially dangerous things in the environment. but in hunter-gatherer kinds of situations, in these small-scale societies in which our brains evolved, you would see the information that would show you, no, no, this is the thing. Like this, this is the thing we're processing. This is the thing that everybody's eating. This is the thing that's being gathered. And the way we feed kids today, you know, we basically like plunk them down at a table and

we give them food that's already prepared that just looks like like messes of colors and shapes and oftentimes it's different than what the adult is eating uh because it's the kid food as opposed to the adult food. Um and you know they haven't seen how it gets there. And you're like, no no trust me, it's food, just eat it. And you end up fighting this battle of getting a small child to accept something where potentially from their mechanisms perspectives, they're like, why are you feeding me poison? Right. So uh so there's this is one of the the areas now I'm almost have my lab built here in uh Santa Barbara. And one of the things that I'm very interested in doing going forward is to really start

unpacking what are the what is the entirety of the set of cues of food learning, of how something becomes food. And this is some work that I've already started doing with my former postdoc and now collaborator Camille Rioux, who uh is uh who is in a research center in Dijon in France. Um She and I have started looking, doing some initial work looking at food processing and how infants respond to signals that somebody has uh it previously interacted with the food. And we have a paper we're working on getting out the door now with my uh former PhD student, Karula Schlegelmilch, and former postdoc as well, um, looking at what babies do when they actually see somebody cutting up a novel plant food with a knife versus eating it

versus a control action of just touching it, but not in a way that processes it. Interesting. I another question I would be interested in is if once they see an adult preparing a particular food, um, do they generalize to other adults or do they want that same adult to prepare the food? Because I have this problem with my daughter Whenever I I bring her food, she says, No, I want Mama to do it. I want Mama to put me the milk. Is it though, David? Are you is it is she saying you're bad cook? Or are you just cutting out carrots? Maybe you're bad cutting a sun. Presumably at some point she saw, you know, my wife preparing the food and she and she knew that like she didn't die when she ate that food.

So she's not gonna take a risk on me, I guess. I don't know. I don't know. She she might have things to say about the your cooking house. No, but it is it is really interesting. I mean, and this is um my colleague here, Zoe Liberman, has been looking at social inferences based on food, right? Like so based on what people eat, but it is in and it's very clear that because for humans food is social, there are a lot of social inferences that you can make based off of what people are eating and food sharing and things like this. And Ashley Thomas has some work touching on this as well of people who are like uh uh well, people who are getting like their saliva and food and things like that. But um but uh but it would be fascinating to actually look at

what happens when you have different kinds of people giving different kinds of information about food. And you might you could expect, for example, that something about information about whether something is toxic or not, it might not matter who's telling you that, right? So like if somebody who's, you know, somebody who is in some kind of outgroup role for for lack of a better term tells you you will die if you eat this thing, you might just accept that information no matter what. But if it's something more something more nuanced about how a food is prepared or um or something about how you build a particular artifact, something something like that, that might matter a lot, who it is that's telling you what's going on there.

So yeah, it would be that's something that would be fascinating to look at. We'll eat your cooking, David. Okay, good. That'll make me feel better. Because uh yeah, my daughter has insulted me uh one too many times. So I could use an ego boost. Um another thing that occurred to me um, have you thought about how emotions might interface with this system? Because as I've been reflecting on this, it seems like this would be, you know, a really good domain for disgust to be involved in because this is you know a contaminant, it could involve toxins and poisons and make you sick. Uh, but just reflecting on it in terms of the phenomenology of it, it's disgust isn't really the emotion I feel when I think about a toxic plant.

It is not really analogous at all to when I think about like rotting garbage or feces or or or something or rotting meat. Which is really interesting to me. And it and it ties into what you were saying before about all the different things that we use plants for, you know, for making tools, for preparing food, even for hunting in some cases. So given that we depend on plants for so many different purposes, it kind of makes a functional sense that we wouldn't feel disgust necessarily toward a plant. I mean, you do want to feel caution and a certain amount of fear about, you know, not uh engaging with the plant in a way that might make you sick. But it seems like disgust might be too coarse grained of an emotion to apply to plants

because you don't want to necessarily avoid the plant at all times and keep keep your distance from it in every way possible. You might just want to avoid eating it, say, or or engaging with a particular part of it, say, but you might want to use it for these other purposes. So it it may be that um there there's a reason why disgust is not coming online when it comes to plants and it's more of just a kind of caution or fear. Uh have have you thought about that in any way? Yeah, I have. And I think you're right. I think I think it's I mean, so to preface this by we have not tested this yet. So to try to distinguish between these things empirically. Um, but what what my the way that I think about it is that

what makes sense for plants is basically just an avoidance, right? It's not it's i I mean, watching the kids, it looks like boredom. It looks like they kind of want to do anything else other than be there. They're like curious, but they're looking at the person, you know, but it's not like I don't see any evidence of them exhibiting a disgust reaction to plants. I also don't think that fear per se is necessarily involved because fear seems like the kind of thing that you would want to have for like a snake or a spider, something that you need to like get up and move away from. It's not clear that being afraid of a plant per se is necessary. It really, I think, is this is why I talk about it as an avoidance mechanism.

It really is just as far as I am aware, um it's an avoidance, right? It's like an and a caution, right? And it particularly as you say, there's different parts of a plant. So there's lots of plants that you have like raspberries or blackberries or any of those kind of brambly plants. You have to be very careful with how you go in and pick those fruits, but the fruits themselves you don't have to be cautious of. But the broader plant you have to exhibit caution around. Yeah, I mean it's almost a a a a distinct emotion. Like it's not disgust, it's not fear. It really is this this caution state. And and it would be interesting to look at that as a distinct emotional profile and how it could be differentiated from fear and disgust.

Yeah. I totally agree. I totally agree. And I mean I think in taking kind of a step back and thinking about the broader thing with plant learning, the way I think about that is that it's gonna likely be a largely observational system. right? So especially with what we what the literature says about the way that social or the way that um kind of teaching unfolds in small-scale societies is you know, this is some of the work of people like Michelle Klein, but um you you don't see necessarily explicit teaching. You don't see a lot of the kind of pedagogical stance uh that you see in is certainly in the way we do things in the US and uh and in uh in other kind of westernized cultures for lack of a better term.

But uh instead, what you see is that there's often kind of subtle changes that people make when they know they have a naive learner who's there observing them. Um, and so it could be that in some cases, maybe for some of the things around food preparation or around artifact building, you would have kids just observing what the adults or the older kids are doing when they're making these things. They're not really being taught in any sort of specific way, but maybe the person is kind of adjusting a little bit, the model is kind of adjusting a little bit what they're doing. If it's a foraging thing and a baby's along, maybe the people who are going foraging aren't bothering to do anything differently, but the baby's still there.

And so you can have the learning systems kind of like um like kind of zero in on the relevant information, right? And that was a lot of the basis behind uh why I was testing, are they particularly vigilant for pick something off of a plant and eat it? Like, because I think these are probably largely observational systems, and it's not people, it's not adults or older kids sitting around being like, look, this is what you do with this. First you do this, first you do that. Instead, there's people living their lives and doing these things, And it's a young learner's problem basically to key in on what's happening and figure it out themselves and practice it and in in safe ways. Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah. There's a whole I mean, oh, and that's what I was sorry. I just I I realized I I don't think you necessarily need a lot of emotion with that. right so I don't think you necessarily need like big like ah or like uh or or big like uh disgust sleep maybe it happens and certainly I bet plants are bitter right the toxins in them are bitter so I'm sure there would be I'm sure you would uh we haven't done it yet we should we we haven't done it yet where somebody tastes something that's like um but the you would expect there might be vigilance for that but I don't know that you need disgust as the input. I mean, certainly our our our work suggests that you don't. It just seems to be, as far as we can tell, it seems to be sort of the default response

before there's social information. Right. Yeah. Fear is sort of like you're far. Oh, sorry, David, you're like kind of far into it. So, like if you totally, you know, if you're like you you've beaten a bunch and all of a sudden you realize you use the poisonous plant, you might get afraid, right? But that's different, you know, like that's a different function, or like you're far into a forest and you realize there's no way out, and you become afraid. Like that, that's engaging that, but that's sort of incidental that it's plants. But it's it's for like, as you said, Annie, it's like for this additional motivating, like get out of this situation. And typically, plants, it's sort of you don't have to, you don't get all that far in if

everything is going right, and you don't need those emotions exactly. And I David, I love the idea of sort of this cautionary, um, distinct category. Um, yeah. I think yeah it could very well be its own distinct emotion with its distinct design features and that it prompts attention to parts rather than holes and procedures and and where you know uh uh prompts a greater attention toward you know how other people are reacting to it and and social learning. So yeah, it's an interesting underexplored topic. But yeah, yeah. And again, because you know, since long before we were humans, this was a problem, right? So having something, having a motivational system that kind of shifts everything, all the

necessary uh different other systems into the right setting when you're engaging with it makes a lot of sense, right? So yeah, but I I can barely convince a lot of people that there should be any psychology for plants. I think convincing them that there might be a separate emotional component for plants would be that's that's a lift, but that's something I mean that would be cool. Right. And and so it sounds like, I mean, just to sort, I mean, we we've David and I've talked a lot about too, about not sort of like overselling results from studies or telling people what to do. You know, like I think we have to be humble about we don't know a lot. But it sounds like what you're saying that as much as possible, like expose kids to food

preparation and the fact that they're not getting that. Um, and there's like this whole category of like, you know, like plant uh interactions of like cooking, like on YouTube. If you just like there's all these things of like people building houses out of like plants and people watch this or like cooking shows or right, like or just you know, the people love watching like people make stuff. And I wonder if to some extent that's sort of like a a a readout of the psychology that's not getting the relevant cues for other for those of us who are not in in a place where people are sort of physically interacting with the environment as much. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so. As you say, you don't want to overread stuff, but I I think that's right.

And I and I mean, you know, one of the reasons that I'm interested in following up more on this food learning thing is because I in an ideal world, I'd be able to identify kind of what are these relevant cues. And then how could we find ways of, you know, we're not going back to having sitting, you know, we're not going back to a small-scale world in all likelihood. Um, and but how could we provide aspects of those cues to toddlers, to infants, to young kids in ways that could help to get them over some of this very um reasonable reluctance towards the what what turn out to be the healthiest foods yeah right um and so that's that's something I would I I I that's that's next on the on the list is to really start digging into what that is.

Um and yeah we'll see. I mean I've done a little bit of uh doing some gardening program stuff which is uh was a a a big task um but but fun to do um and I think there is a world where you could imagine like ways of designing things that you could potentially target the design of these systems to get you kind of the biggest bang for your buck in these kinds of systems. Let let the kids plan the dirt and plant some things. Exactly. And and let them see where their food is coming from. And I mean, this is uh Camille Ryu, my former postdoc now collaborator, she has some work from her PhD actually showing that some of this food neophobia stuff seems maybe uh the result of um having less or more immature categorization abilities.

So if you have a harder time knowing that the thing that you are encountering is in fact the same kind of thing you've encountered before, you are more likely to show neophobia. So if you're into categorization abilities, yeah, right. If you're if your categorization abilities, if you score more high, uh highly on categorization abilities, you're less likely to exhibit neophobia in some of her studies. So this is why, yeah, be maybe you're just cutting the vegetables the wrong way for your daughter. Honestly, I think that might be it. Yeah, I'm cutting them in the wrong shape or something. Because she does have a hard time like when we're eating uh uh tortilla chips, I remember I have this memory of uh she had a meltdown uh because she was upset that I ate

the the specific tortilla chip that she wanted. Right. Where she wasn't just saying they were all the same kind of thing, you know, it was they were all they were distinct tortilla chips and she had her eye on that particular tortilla chips, which suggests that she's having a hard time like treating it as a general category of the same type of thing, and that and that could be driving this. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, food is one of those things. Like, we look at it, this is a big instinct blindness thing, right? Like we look at it and it's very clearly food. And why can't you see that it's food? But if you step back from it, it's just piles of shapes and colors and like textures. And why should that be food and not something else?

Right. Yeah, she wanted the one that was a particular shape of of a triangle and not the one that was a different shape, you know, like she was paying attention to details that I completely ignored that, you know, make sense if you're if you're trying to figure out how the world works, like it's not obvious what details are worth paying attention to. Exactly. Yeah, build a robot that can identify food. That's the uh but uh one of the questions we always ask people is is there any question we should have asked you? Oh, uh, I don't know. I feel like you got them all. Um, yeah. Well, I mean, David sort of alluded to did I slip on a plant? And there was, there is one like big plant experience that I did have uh

as a child that um probably so the the big plant experience as a child is I accidentally climbed up a poison oak vine, not knowing that it was poison oak uh and got huge poison oak rash on my face it was like summer so it was along my my legs my whole body and got a really really really terrible rash so I learned firsthand that plants can be really dangerous and really unpleasant uh and that you might not want to touch them. That's a great origin story. Poison Oak would be a great supervillain name for you where you use your technology. That's great. Poison Oak strikes again. It's also a good like folk fusion band name, Poison Oak, sort of. Oh yeah. Totally. Maybe a little bit of rocking it too.

Yeah. Um I want to see the movie where you seek revenge on Reviewer 2 by us. As Poison Oak. Yeah, Poison Oak. The really good superpower, yeah. Like harnessing the power of plants. I mean that's yeah. Um who was saying, David, do you remember? I think it was either um Chris von Ruden or Ed Hagen was saying plants aren't your friends. It might have been it was somebody who like was in the schmar, like with in the forest, or like really just you know, no, they are not your friends. They're building weapons factories. I mean, really, they are. That's how they defend themselves. This is what they've come up with. And they've come up with some very clever ways to do it. Um yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta respect the plants.

Yeah. Respect plants. Yeah, yeah. So respect the adaptations and respect plants. And yeah. So um yeah, but uh David, anything else? No, I I think, you know, we we covered a lot of ground. And uh yeah, we we harvested our our insights and we planted our seeds and we uh I'll just keep rattling off. Keep going, keep going. And now we're out of time. Oh T H Y M E. Those are yeah, it's hard, it's harder to get those to can convey across this acoustic modality. Yeah, but you know. But yeah, no, thank you so much. And you know, genuinely, like, you know, personal bias aside, like the work that you're doing, it's extremely important, not only because you're uncovering a new area of adaptations people hadn't looked before, but because it's also an example of exactly what

you said, like learning is not opposed to evolutionary and the connection to development. I mean, we had Deb Lieberman Deb Lieberman on. She was really excited about the special issue with development, um, on development. And I think it comes back to the initial thing that David mentioned about what you were doing, which is that as a developmental psychologist, you were already asking like a good question, and evolutionary psychology answered it. And I do think that the connection between developmental and evolutionary approaches are very much kindred because in many cases developmentalists are asking, and you can you're nodding your head, so I I suggest you know you agree, but but yeah, because you have to

sort of respect that there are systems that because they're kids, you know, you have to really think about what's the Q structure. I think there's a lot of connections to integrating development evolutionary. And so thank you for for doing that because I think it'll it's it's really gonna help keep both development and evolutionary psychology sort of invigorated and um thriving and flourishing uh to tiptoe towards a plant pun. Well thank you. Thank you for saying that. That that that means a lot. And I mean, you know, I'm standing on shoulders of giants with all of this stuff. And I I uh I appreciate that. And I hope that people who are interested in development and evolution, you know, I'm gonna

be looking for grad students for the next many years to come in this lab and research assistance. And so if you're if you're interested in that kind of thing, you know, keep an eye out for me and my work. Um, and hopefully we can bring development and uh evolution, evolutionary approaches closer together. Yeah, the lab name, it's a relatively new lab name. What is the lab? Uh the lab for infant learning and cognition or lilac. Yeah, nice. Plant puns. All right, yeah. Top, top that, yeah. Uh but yeah, thank you so much both of you for having me on. This is a real pleasure. It's great to great to talk to you, even though I get to talk to one of you every day, but this is a different format. Exactly.

But we don't often get to talk to you. So thank you. Yeah. Oh yeah. All right. All right. David, we have ended another episode, this one full of the weird combination of babies and plants. Yes. It was a uh wild ride. Um a lot of seeds were planted, um, a lot of flowers of insight bloomed. And it was in but now it's time to end the episode. O T H Y M E okay. There's a lot of the homonyms really don't come across on podcasts. I really don't know. Yeah, exactly. Not the ideal format. But um if you want to support us, please uh leave us a kind review, give us some feedback, uh tell us what you want to hear, you know, who you want to listen to, what topics you want us to cover. Uh if you're so inclined, you can uh support us on Patreon.

Uh anything else people can do, Dave? Um, you know, just you know, look up uh interesting, important work in evolutionary social sciences. And if you come across stuff that we should cover, let us know. Yeah, please do. All right. We'll see you guys next week. See ya. Bye.