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David, uh what podcast do you listen to?

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Evolutionary psychology, the podcast.

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That is a taglined podcast that goes by the tagline of

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uh actual evolutionary psychology by Are you gonna fill it in?

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I was gonna ask if there's I was starting to think about if there's other people.

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Usually you fill it in.

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I know I do, but I was wondering the question I said, like that are there podcasts that

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don't have taglines?

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And maybe the ones that I actually I don't know.

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something got garbled there.

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Okay.

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Well that's that's you that's pretty standard for us.

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Anyway, uh enjoy it.

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But it we're we're uh actual evolutionary psychologists uh by that wasn't grammatical.

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Well the tagline is actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists.

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But what I was gonna say is we are actual evolutionary psychologists doing actual

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evolutionary psychology.

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That's correct.

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Okay.

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And let's enjoy that then.

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Um David, today we're talking to Luke Gloacchi, who is also the other half of the

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Omo Valley Research Project, which is super awesome, both doing really great basic

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research and also making the world slightly better and much more um

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better than many of us basic scientists.

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Um so it was great to talk to Luke.

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Yeah, this was a really fun conversation.

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Um way more fun than Leo Tol Tolstoy's War and Peace.

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He wrote War and Peace, right?

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I'm getting that right?

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Yeah.

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You you've been talking a lot about uh reading boring long books.

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Is that what's going on?

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You've been reading War and Peace.

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Yeah, I've been reading War and Peace because I'm a really sophisticated uh yeah, yeah,

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yeah.

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I've uh yeah, I I've I've read it multiple times.

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Uh you know, pretty much every work of Tolstoy, every great work of literature I've I've

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read and mastered.

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Sure.

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Um uh because I'm a I'm a I'm just that kind of guy.

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Uh anyways, um if you didn't like uh the book War and Peace, you will certainly love this

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conversation about War and Peace, uh, because uh it is just uh full of

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fascinating insights.

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Uh we get into mon mongooses or mongeese, yeah.

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Uh uh and and in fact, uh whether it's mongoose is or mongeese.

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I think it should be mongeese.

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Um I I would agree.

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Yeah, and anyways, and Luke Lu Luke, I I just wanna like the context is Luke has a

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wonderful uh paper called The Evolution of Peace.

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And it's a very it's an inversion of the usual, you know, like war needs to be explained

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but peace doesn't.

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And it's sort of I love this idea that you invert that and say, really the thing that needs

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to be explained is peace.

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And that's I I love that approach and that's part of what we talk about here today.

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Yes.

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And you will really want to listen to more than a piece of this episode about Zinger Zinger

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days.

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Okay.

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Um yeah.

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Just uh it comes from all

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helps me.

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There you go.

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That's great jokes.

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Fantastic.

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So without further ado, uh here is uh David and myself and Luke Lowaki

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talking about all things war and peace.

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Enjoy.

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Thank you.

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Today uh I'll start over.

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Okay.

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So t today we're very happy to have uh Luke Gloacki.

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Uh Luke, you are in we can edit this out if I'm wrong, but I believe you are

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academic grandchild of Gene Goodall.

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Is that correct?

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Um yeah, maybe.

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I'm my PhD supervisor was Richard Rangam, but Jane Goodall was not technically

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Richard's PhD supervisor.

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He was the supervisor of the of the site.

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Oh okay.

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So okay, so it's a little bit fuzzy.

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Okay, because I actually always assume that Richard's maybe your academic great aunt.

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Yeah, maybe that's a good way to think about it.

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Low parenthood.

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You were exactly did she have direct students?

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I don't know the answer to that.

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Okay.

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All right.

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Well, we'll uh we'll chat GPT that.

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Uh or somebody can look it up while they're listening.

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Yeah.

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Um Richard was a somebody who studied, was studying the he was there because he was

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studying chimps.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, that's right.

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Okay.

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Um but a little known fact about Richard is he also spent like a year working in the um

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in the uh like Central African forests with horticulturalists and

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foragers there as well, sometime after his PhD.

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Okay.

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So when you were a student of his, which department was that in?

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So I started in the anthropology department at Harvard, biological anthropology, which

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transitioned into human evolutionary biology.

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So it's separate from the anthropology department.

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Yeah.

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And you are currently in anthro or psych department?

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Yeah, I'm currently in an anthropology department at Boston University.

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Right.

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Fantastic.

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Yeah, because I mean your students, they're doing so much psychological stuff.

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And not to like, you know, be um not to not to be psychology centric,

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but it just I mean the division between anthro and psychological.

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Yeah.

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boundaries.

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You know you may be closer to what political scientists are doing in some cases than say

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for your own selves than psychologists or economists than psychologists, you know, the way

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the way the fields work.

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If we were designing them today from the ground up, we probably wouldn't start with the

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departments we have now.

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No, probably not.

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I I remember uh when we were chatting at at a conference, you mentioned that um you started

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out uh interested in philosophy and then gradually found your way into the evolutionary

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behavioral sciences.

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I'm curious if you could elaborate on that journey and and what might have precipitated it.

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Yeah, I feel so, so fortunate for the sort of serendipity that led me to

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the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

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You know, I I didn't take any any classes in anthropology or psychology as an undergrad.

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I thought the closest you could get to understanding human cognition was Kant, you know,

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just deep reflection about the structures of the mind.

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And that if you really wanted to understand our species, you had to spend years just sort

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of like locked in a battle with yourself thinking through things.

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So it was only just through sort of like happenstance that I read a book about um cognitive

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science and it was actually criticizing evolutionary psychology.

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And I don't remember the book now.

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It was an academic press, but I was like, oh wow, this is so cool.

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There is a world in which people are thinking about human behavior and like how we evolved

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and like studying it.

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Like I want to know more about that world.

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So I got uh I got very, very fortunate and I just started knocking on doors.

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Um, you know, like how can I get into actually studying human behavior instead of just

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like, you know, doing the awesome work that philosophers do, which is mostly just thinking

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and occasionally writing, but actually like getting into the weeds of designing studies

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and, you know, thinking about what the results of our research tells us about humans.

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Yeah.

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I I I love that um you were turned on to evolutionary psychology by a critic of

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evolutionary psychology uh inadvertently.

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Uh I don't think we've ever had that origin story on the podcast before.

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I think I think Christina, it was Christina.

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I was just thinking we had Christina, because Christina also, it was a it was a very uh it

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was like it was mentioned and it was presented as like obviously wrong.

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And she's like, that sounds awesome.

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Yeah, like there's really there's really something to it.

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And and once you once you adopt an evolutionary framework, I mean so many things I feel

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like just pop into place.

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Like your understanding of our species really deepens and often think like it's it's sort

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of impossible.

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Like, you know, so they say nothing in biology makes sense except for evolution.

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Well, I think a lot of things in human behavior don't really make sense unless you think

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about our evolutionary history.

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Yeah.

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Do you it for I think for David and I and a lot of people we've talked to, it's been sort

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of there's a dissatisfaction.

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At some point it's almost like authoritarian intellectualism, right?

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Where it's sort of like, this is what's true.

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Uh it's actually a very Kantian point, actually.

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Like Kant was sort of like we can't, you know, don't, don't do that.

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You know, it's sort of like and uh but but do you for for you do you have an idea of sort

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of was it this thing of like I don't I'm not I feel uncomfortable just like accepting a

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premise, like and I want to know why the premise is there?

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Or what what do you do you have a thought about why you were attracted to evolutionary

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stuff?

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Um well, it was a framework that explained things.

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So there's you know just big patterns in the world.

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You see big patterns by age, you see big patterns by sex, you see big patterns by social

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status.

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And it was a framework that actually like lays out very clear predictions that you can test

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that seem to have a lot of explanatory power.

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So that's what, you know, that's what really drew it to me is like I'm a person that want

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to understand what understand why the world is the way it is.

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And this is a framework that really provides you a mechanism to understand, you know, where

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we come from and why today it looks the way, you know, we have clothes, we drive, you know,

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we use the computer and all that, but essentially like we're still animals.

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We're just cultural animals.

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So a lot of the same sort of principles that apply that shape the behavior of other species

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also shape humans.

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Yeah.

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And for that, um, I wanna we're gonna flip come to really recent, maybe as a way to

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get into things, which is you had a very recent paper called The Evolution of Peace.

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Um, and uh to my mind, it was lovely and sort of um uh

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uh uh subversive in a way, uh in a good way.

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And it's exactly on the same point where it's sort of so much is is made about the

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evolution of war and needing to explain conflict.

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And this the point of this paper is the title is the evolution of peace.

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Can you talk a little bit about um either that paper specifically or sort of how

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that paper is part of sort of your what you do um generally?

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So I sort of can see I'll just talk a little bit sort of about what I do.

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Um with my focus on intergroup relationships, conflict and

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cooperation.

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I think about like I think with humans, like we have really good theory, or mostly like on

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the evolution of cooperation.

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We have pretty decent theory on like the evolution of intergroup conflict.

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So these are theories that are designed to sort of apply across taxa.

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Some of them are more or less specific to humans, but we don't have a lot of sort of theory

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like linking sort of our evolutionary biological explanations, say for a psychology

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for dominance or for status or imbalances of power with how the real world humans

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as cultural creatures operate.

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There's a gap sort of between, say, the like evolutionary explanations and in

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some ways the sort of more approximate psychological explanations.

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So like dehumanization may be like a maybe one proximate explanation

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for why people are more likely to contribute and violence, but we're we have a gap between

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the sort of biological evolutionary theory and the psychological processes.

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And in that gap, I think culture is really, really important.

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So I sort of focus on thinking about how to how do we understand that

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separation between those two?

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How can we understand the role that culture has in both shaping institutions, say to

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promote war or promote cooperation, are inhibiting it.

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And how might culture then have acted on our own evolved minds.

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And a lot of the things I think we sort of take for granted, including things around war

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and peace, are actually, you know, evolved cultural technology, specifically peace.

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Peace is not just the absence of war.

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So the vast majority of social species, if they, you know, if two groups of some social

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primate meet in the force, they typically just avoid each other.

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Right.

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They don't interact.

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And most people would not call that peace.

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They call it avoidance.

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There's something really unusual with group with individuals from distinct social

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groups coming together without having to negotiate those relationships individually.

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You know, I can meet I'm at Boston University, I can meet a student at Northeastern or MIT,

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and I don't have to be hesitant or worried and figure out how they're gonna treat me, or

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you know, a a person from China or Russia or any other place.

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We can have an expectation of how we should treat each other and how they're going to

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treat me.

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And it creates all sorts of opportunities for positive sum exchanges.

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Then in the conditions that get that, I think they depend crucially on cultural

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technologies.

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And like any sort of technology you can think about, you know, fire making, ritual

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technologies, it's the result of cultural evolutionary processes.

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So you can study you can study peace as the result of these processes, and then you can

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hypothesize about when it when it would have come about in our lineage.

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Right.

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Yeah, that's a awesome, huge amount of stuff to talk about.

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I always uh just to follow up on the point about um people not being like chimps to kind of

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bring back to the Richard Rangham thing, is that um I teach intro to psych and it's like

246
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700 undergrads in a huge hall what hall and they're like freshmen.

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And they always laugh when I tell them, you know, if if if you all sat down and you were

248
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chimps, you wouldn't be like sitting quietly.

249
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Like it would be violent, right?

250
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And they laugh at that.

251
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But just taking that point for granted is something that I think like an evolutionary

252
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approach pokes on, right?

253
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And just says, oh, this is actually a weird thing about us that nobody knows anybody in

254
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that room.

255
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Yet everybody sat down, and that would be really weird for any other primate.

256
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Yeah, including what a lot of people assume it would be the case for bonobos, that they'd

257
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just be, you know, having a massive orgy.

258
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But the actual reality of bonobos is there would be just tons and tons of violence.

259
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It wouldn't be probably as lethaloserious as chimpanzees, but it would certainly

260
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be, you know, a very aggressive, tense, scary place.

261
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So humans are extremely unusual for our capacity for so the term

262
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that's often used is tolerance, just to tolerate strangers, not to have high affect or high

263
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arousal around strangers.

264
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And that's certainly something that like we evolved the neurobiological machinery that

265
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allows us to interact with strangers without like immediately, you know, being all the

266
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defensive.

267
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Yeah.

268
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Before we get to the cultural part, which is a big thing to bite off, um, when we just talk

269
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about the biological thing, we talked about two different things.

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One is sort of a comparative approach where we look at bonobos or chimps or think about a

271
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common ancestor that and we can kind of infer here's what an ancestral state was.

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And then we have to have some quote unquote biological explanation for how we got to where

273
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we are now, having the proximate phenotype we have.

274
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Another version is less about that comparative approach and is more like an adaptationist

275
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approach, which is just sort of given the way we are now, what's let's reverse engineer

276
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sort of the software.

277
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Um, we have in reality, there's sort of a complementary approach, and many people do

278
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both things.

279
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Uh, do you where do you put your own work in that continuum.

280
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Have you done both kinds?

281
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Or how do you typically sort of think about that?

282
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Or is that even a false distinction?

283
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Yeah.

284
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So I would say the way most people practice, most, you know, big thinking evolutionary

285
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behavioral sciences scholars sort of take aspects of both approaches.

286
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You know, if you want to know what things are just unique to humans, you have to look at

287
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other species.

288
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Yeah.

289
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Right.

290
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And then you can start with, okay, so humans have this peculiar trait, whatever it is, and

291
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you can start to figure out just logically what things you need to get it, but you can also

292
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look at other species to see, because often there's, you know, multiple pathways to some

293
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particular trait.

294
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And so, you know, maybe you have whatever trait it is because there was selection for eggs,

295
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but maybe some other species says you can get it for selection for Y.

296
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And this is this is why, at least in evolutionary anthropology, you you typically are

297
00:16:38,700 --> 00:16:42,620
really concerned with like, do mere cats have lethal intergroup violence?

298
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Do are there species that have it without imbalances of power?

299
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So, you know, in humans, the leading theory is that, you know, we have a psychology that

300
00:16:50,460 --> 00:16:56,220
goes very deep to be sensitive to imbalances of power and when you can turn those

301
00:16:56,220 --> 00:17:00,490
imbalances of power into a benefit for yourself.

302
00:17:00,650 --> 00:17:05,370
But if you find species that say have lethal intergroup aggression, similar to like, you

303
00:17:05,370 --> 00:17:09,930
know, proto-war without imbalances of power, suggests maybe there's different pathways and

304
00:17:09,930 --> 00:17:13,690
we should rethink whether it's the best explanation for humans.

305
00:17:13,770 --> 00:17:18,570
So I think in order to do good evolutionary behavioral sciences, you really do have to take

306
00:17:18,570 --> 00:17:20,090
aspects of both approaches.

307
00:17:20,620 --> 00:17:23,100
I want I want to pick up one of the loose loose ends there.

308
00:17:23,340 --> 00:17:27,900
Do in fact other species have uh lethal intergroup violence without any kind of imbalance

309
00:17:27,900 --> 00:17:28,540
of power?

310
00:17:29,260 --> 00:17:31,980
Um I think which species is it?

311
00:17:32,140 --> 00:17:33,180
Crescent macaques?

312
00:17:33,340 --> 00:17:36,220
There was a paper that came out recently.

313
00:17:36,460 --> 00:17:39,900
So so I'm gonna say there's a couple of species that it looks like it does.

314
00:17:40,140 --> 00:17:43,290
It depends on the particular type of intergroup violence.

315
00:17:43,370 --> 00:17:49,290
So, like bandit mongees, for instance, they have really high rates of lethal intergroup

316
00:17:49,290 --> 00:17:53,050
violence, where essentially they live in these large social groups.

317
00:17:53,130 --> 00:17:58,570
And the female from one social group will leave her group and go out, you know, in search

318
00:17:58,570 --> 00:18:04,220
of mates from another group, but all the males will follow along and they'll meet another

319
00:18:04,220 --> 00:18:07,020
group of bandit monkeys and they form a line.

320
00:18:07,100 --> 00:18:08,460
You can look at the pictures, it's wild.

321
00:18:08,540 --> 00:18:12,860
It's like a battle line, and they just have like a giant, giant scrum.

322
00:18:13,180 --> 00:18:19,100
And typically the deaths that result from this are like one of them gets separated from

323
00:18:19,100 --> 00:18:23,500
the rest of their group, and three or four of the opposing group pile on and kill them.

324
00:18:23,580 --> 00:18:28,990
But it's all in the midst of, you know, 20 mongees versus 20 monkeys.

325
00:18:29,070 --> 00:18:33,630
And at the same time, the female is off on the side mating with her preferred mate.

326
00:18:34,110 --> 00:18:36,270
Oh, yeah, yeah.

327
00:18:36,350 --> 00:18:38,990
Yeah, it's it looks like literally, it looks like a rugby scrum.

328
00:18:39,230 --> 00:18:40,830
Like it literally looks they're lining up.

329
00:18:40,910 --> 00:18:41,150
Yeah.

330
00:18:41,630 --> 00:18:42,670
That's interesting.

331
00:18:42,990 --> 00:18:47,870
Well, that well, it's I mean, it's interesting to note that uh when deaths do occur, it

332
00:18:47,870 --> 00:18:52,500
does follow somewhat this imbalance of power logic where it's usually you know, you know,

333
00:18:52,580 --> 00:18:56,420
three or four males ganging up on one, and there is kind of a mini imbalance of power in

334
00:18:56,420 --> 00:18:58,500
that little section of of the skirmish.

335
00:18:58,580 --> 00:18:59,940
So there there's at least something to the idea.

336
00:19:00,020 --> 00:19:04,660
I mean, I and I do think that the logic is really compelling in that you don't want to uh

337
00:19:04,660 --> 00:19:07,620
risk death unless you can be sure that your side is going to win.

338
00:19:07,700 --> 00:19:11,060
And in the most in the case where you're gonna be sure that your side is gonna win and

339
00:19:11,060 --> 00:19:15,300
you're gonna face few costs is if there's a huge imbalance of power favoring your side.

340
00:19:15,780 --> 00:19:20,150
Um but nevertheless it is still pretty interesting that they all line up that way and and

341
00:19:20,230 --> 00:19:23,590
you know it seems like they're for the most part pretty evenly matched.

342
00:19:23,830 --> 00:19:27,270
Um what do you think uh d do you have an idea of what what's going on?

343
00:19:27,350 --> 00:19:31,270
I don't know this is not necessarily your area of expertise, but uh is there uh a a

344
00:19:31,270 --> 00:19:34,070
reigning theory in the literature of what of what explains this?

345
00:19:34,710 --> 00:19:36,870
The the lining up like that?

346
00:19:37,190 --> 00:19:37,590
Mm-hmm.

347
00:19:37,750 --> 00:19:38,080
Yes, a good idea.

348
00:19:43,280 --> 00:19:48,240
Well, I I think they're fighting with each other over, you know, control of reproductively

349
00:19:48,400 --> 00:19:50,000
valuable females.

350
00:19:50,160 --> 00:19:53,920
So they they want to control access to that female.

351
00:19:54,000 --> 00:19:58,400
That's why they're following that female, they're trying to coerce her into the back of the

352
00:19:58,400 --> 00:19:58,720
group.

353
00:19:58,880 --> 00:20:03,840
You're then, you know, you encounter, and I I expect you may have a very similar dynamic in

354
00:20:03,840 --> 00:20:09,630
in many other species that have a sort of similar pattern where you line, you know, they're

355
00:20:09,630 --> 00:20:13,310
probably not thinking they just line up, but they're just positioning each other on the

356
00:20:13,310 --> 00:20:19,070
basis of like more simple heuristics of make sure I don't have an unfamiliar mongoose

357
00:20:19,070 --> 00:20:19,870
behind me.

358
00:20:20,030 --> 00:20:22,270
You know, make sure I can see as many as possible.

359
00:20:22,350 --> 00:20:25,390
And I imagine that's something that just creates a line.

360
00:20:25,470 --> 00:20:29,630
Um, and then I imagine most of the attacks aren't necessarily driven by the thought at that

361
00:20:29,630 --> 00:20:34,140
point we're going to, you know, try to kill another, but they're just, you know, fighting

362
00:20:34,140 --> 00:20:39,180
each other as a as an uh mergent behavior to try to make sure that you're not actually

363
00:20:39,180 --> 00:20:41,260
being victim of an attack.

364
00:20:41,580 --> 00:20:41,820
Right.

365
00:20:41,900 --> 00:20:42,140
Yeah.

366
00:20:42,220 --> 00:20:42,860
That's a good point.

367
00:20:43,020 --> 00:20:45,420
I John John Williams, yeah.

368
00:20:45,660 --> 00:20:46,220
John Williams.

369
00:20:46,620 --> 00:20:49,740
George Williams, different, different Williams, both great.

370
00:20:49,820 --> 00:20:54,140
Uh uh, George Williams, who wrote Adaptation Natural Selection, was like really uh he

371
00:20:54,140 --> 00:20:58,620
talked about schools of fish and how we shouldn't attribute schools of fish to anything

372
00:20:58,700 --> 00:21:00,940
other than the fish just not wanting to be eaten.

373
00:21:01,370 --> 00:21:04,170
and they just sort of form this ball as an emergent property.

374
00:21:04,250 --> 00:21:06,410
And that really reminds me of what you're saying, Louis.

375
00:21:06,650 --> 00:21:06,890
Yeah.

376
00:21:07,530 --> 00:21:07,770
Yeah.

377
00:21:07,930 --> 00:21:08,410
Interesting.

378
00:21:08,570 --> 00:21:12,890
Would you say that um the way to understanding it is you know there are two aspects to

379
00:21:12,890 --> 00:21:14,010
intergroup conflict.

380
00:21:14,170 --> 00:21:18,090
One is the expected costs to one side of the conflict to engaging in that conflict.

381
00:21:18,250 --> 00:21:19,850
This would be like risk of injury or death.

382
00:21:20,010 --> 00:21:23,770
And the other would be the expected benefits of engaging in the conflict.

383
00:21:23,850 --> 00:21:29,800
Um and usually uh the thing that just determines um uh going uh into a conflict w

384
00:21:29,880 --> 00:21:33,480
in an imbalance of power situation is you know low expected costs.

385
00:21:33,640 --> 00:21:38,120
If you were were clearly more formidable, more numerous than the antagonist, then uh the

386
00:21:38,120 --> 00:21:41,960
costs are gonna be lower and that's gonna uh uh in many cases precipitate conflict.

387
00:21:42,040 --> 00:21:47,080
But in the case of of the mongees, is that mongeese, yeah, the bandit mongoose.

388
00:21:47,320 --> 00:21:47,880
Bandit mongoose.

389
00:21:47,960 --> 00:21:48,920
That's the bandit mongoose.

390
00:21:50,520 --> 00:21:51,550
Is Isn't that plural?

391
00:21:51,950 --> 00:21:52,590
That's fantastic.

392
00:21:52,670 --> 00:21:55,310
I'm really sorry to interrupt, but I really did not know that.

393
00:21:55,390 --> 00:21:57,630
And I'm really I mean, maybe I'm maybe I'm making it up.

394
00:21:58,270 --> 00:21:59,790
No, no, you are the evolutionary biologist.

395
00:22:00,030 --> 00:22:04,350
We are bumbling uh we'll defer to you um No, no, no, this is fantastic.

396
00:22:04,510 --> 00:22:06,830
I feel like this is the best thing I've learned today.

397
00:22:06,910 --> 00:22:11,790
Uh in addition to the plural of

398
00:22:15,020 --> 00:22:15,180
Yeah.

399
00:22:15,500 --> 00:22:15,660
All right.

400
00:22:15,740 --> 00:22:17,580
So the I'm so glad.

401
00:22:17,660 --> 00:22:18,460
Yeah, no, no, no.

402
00:22:18,540 --> 00:22:21,580
It's like it's like pronouncing the Zatwasi, for example.

403
00:22:21,660 --> 00:22:21,980
Yeah.

404
00:22:22,540 --> 00:22:26,540
So normally, you know, a high expected cost would would precipitate conflict when there is

405
00:22:26,540 --> 00:22:28,140
a balance of power and the cost would be low.

406
00:22:28,220 --> 00:22:31,820
But with the monkeys, it seems like what might be going on is it's less about the expected

407
00:22:31,820 --> 00:22:33,260
cost and more about the expected benefit.

408
00:22:33,340 --> 00:22:36,700
You know, there's a very clear Darwinian benefit in terms of you know conflict over

409
00:22:36,700 --> 00:22:37,260
females.

410
00:22:37,420 --> 00:22:41,410
And it may be that, you know, the the cost might be high, but on the other hand the benefit

411
00:22:41,410 --> 00:22:45,330
is also really high and that might be explaining why this conflict is taking place despite

412
00:22:45,330 --> 00:22:47,330
each side being, you know, pretty evenly matched.

413
00:22:47,730 --> 00:22:48,370
Do you buy that logic?

414
00:22:48,930 --> 00:22:52,850
I think that's a I think that's a fair way to think about the way we think about most in

415
00:22:52,850 --> 00:22:58,530
most species that this evol that this sort of lethal coalitionary intergroup violence

416
00:22:58,530 --> 00:23:02,960
evolves is that just the costs are really, really low because you have clear imbalance of

417
00:23:02,960 --> 00:23:08,240
power, you know, chimpanzees, it's an average of around eight chimpanzee attackers to one

418
00:23:08,240 --> 00:23:08,560
victim.

419
00:23:08,720 --> 00:23:13,200
So the odds of any of you suffering any serious injury or costs are pretty low.

420
00:23:13,280 --> 00:23:17,200
But in Bandit Mongeese, it's a really different dynamic, and it could be because the

421
00:23:17,200 --> 00:23:22,800
benefits are just so high in this case, because you really are trying to control access to

422
00:23:22,800 --> 00:23:25,680
a to a reproductively valuable female.

423
00:23:26,290 --> 00:23:31,170
And so just to connect the dots, Richard Rangham's like the imbalance of power hypothesis.

424
00:23:31,250 --> 00:23:34,370
Can you just talk maybe just for a second about that?

425
00:23:34,610 --> 00:23:39,730
And was that what you started thinking about that eventually gets you to this paper about

426
00:23:39,730 --> 00:23:40,530
the evolution of Pete?

427
00:23:41,010 --> 00:23:44,130
Yeah, the imbalance of power hypothesis, I think is just one of the sort of like most

428
00:23:44,130 --> 00:23:49,250
beautiful, elegant theories out there to explain why you have, you know,

429
00:23:49,580 --> 00:23:53,740
coalitionary violence between groups that's lethal.

430
00:23:53,900 --> 00:23:59,820
So the idea is that in species where territory is tied to some benefit

431
00:24:00,220 --> 00:24:04,380
in the currency of natural selection, that's reproductive benefits, even though it can be

432
00:24:04,380 --> 00:24:05,820
downstream.

433
00:24:05,900 --> 00:24:09,580
And you have species that have a particular grouping pattern, fission fusion.

434
00:24:09,660 --> 00:24:11,810
So these are not species that are solitary.

435
00:24:11,970 --> 00:24:15,730
So you know, tigers are solitary, they live in the forest primarily by themselves.

436
00:24:15,810 --> 00:24:18,050
You're never going to see coalitionary violence.

437
00:24:18,290 --> 00:24:22,690
Many, many primates are group living, they're but they live in troops.

438
00:24:22,850 --> 00:24:27,170
So these are stable units where it's always, you know, your whole life is with 40 other

439
00:24:27,170 --> 00:24:27,650
individuals.

440
00:24:27,810 --> 00:24:31,090
Anytime you meet another group, it's with 40 individuals.

441
00:24:31,250 --> 00:24:37,250
So the costs are similar in bandit mongoose mongeese, however we're calling it now, costs

442
00:24:37,250 --> 00:24:39,090
are going to be going to be very high.

443
00:24:39,250 --> 00:24:44,520
But in the case of some species, you have a grouping pattern that's not a true there, it's

444
00:24:44,600 --> 00:24:50,280
fission fusion where so you can think of humans where you spend a lot of time in a large

445
00:24:50,280 --> 00:24:52,920
group, but people are often coming and going.

446
00:24:53,080 --> 00:24:57,240
And where they're going, they may be in a group of one individual, two or three, so they're

447
00:24:57,240 --> 00:24:58,840
in small subparties.

448
00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:00,920
But you're neighbored by other groups.

449
00:25:01,080 --> 00:25:05,830
So you may be out on if you're a chimpanzee, you may be foraging by yourself because it's a

450
00:25:05,830 --> 00:25:10,310
period of resource scarcity, and you come to your neighbor the periphery of your territory,

451
00:25:10,390 --> 00:25:14,230
and your neighbor, your neighboring community has a large fig fig tree.

452
00:25:14,310 --> 00:25:16,310
So they're all together at that time.

453
00:25:16,470 --> 00:25:21,510
So you know, you can encounter you as a lone individual, potentially eight individuals from

454
00:25:21,510 --> 00:25:22,550
the neighboring community.

455
00:25:22,630 --> 00:25:25,350
So you have an imbalance of power then.

456
00:25:25,510 --> 00:25:31,300
So it's very easy for that larger party or that larger community

457
00:25:31,300 --> 00:25:35,300
to attack and kill that lone individual with very low cost.

458
00:25:35,460 --> 00:25:41,380
But in order to have the motivational system to do it, there has to be some benefits

459
00:25:41,380 --> 00:25:41,700
to it.

460
00:25:41,860 --> 00:25:47,460
So you're not going to see it in in species in which you know access to territory doesn't

461
00:25:47,460 --> 00:25:50,660
really pay off in terms of reproduction.

462
00:25:51,010 --> 00:25:56,130
So you're going to find it in in places where resources are really sort of heterogeneous

463
00:25:56,130 --> 00:25:56,930
and variable.

464
00:25:57,090 --> 00:26:01,890
So this is the leading theory of why some species have um

465
00:26:03,170 --> 00:26:07,410
have a pattern that's eerily sort of similar to war, including chimpanzees.

466
00:26:07,730 --> 00:26:08,050
I see.

467
00:26:08,130 --> 00:26:13,570
So it's it's coming back to this idea of we can look at predictions of what the function or

468
00:26:13,570 --> 00:26:19,540
cause of something like war is, what its evolutionary unquote explanation is by looking

469
00:26:19,540 --> 00:26:23,060
at the distribution of where do we f in what species do we find it.

470
00:26:23,380 --> 00:26:23,540
Yeah.

471
00:26:23,620 --> 00:26:24,900
So that would be one of the ways to you.

472
00:26:26,180 --> 00:26:26,580
Exactly.

473
00:26:26,740 --> 00:26:26,980
Yeah.

474
00:26:27,060 --> 00:26:30,180
And and it sounds like that's been one of the approaches.

475
00:26:30,260 --> 00:26:35,940
And it sounds like there's quite a bit of that um data, that kind of data of pred of that

476
00:26:35,940 --> 00:26:38,390
it's kind of um cashing out the prediction.

477
00:26:38,710 --> 00:26:44,390
Yeah, we have we have so there are there are several species that have you know lethal

478
00:26:44,710 --> 00:26:46,870
coalitionary intergroup violence.

479
00:26:46,950 --> 00:26:48,150
It's a bit of a mouthful.

480
00:26:48,230 --> 00:26:53,430
So sort of proto-war, um, you know, including our close relatives, the

481
00:26:53,430 --> 00:26:54,310
chimpanzees.

482
00:26:54,470 --> 00:26:56,470
Bonobos don't have this pattern of behavior.

483
00:26:56,550 --> 00:26:58,950
So big mystery has been why bonobos don't.

484
00:26:59,030 --> 00:27:04,470
And and one of the leading hypotheses is that they just have lower rates of fission

485
00:27:04,470 --> 00:27:10,120
fusion than chimpanzees, due to the fact that their their territory is slightly different

486
00:27:10,120 --> 00:27:11,160
than chimpanzees.

487
00:27:11,240 --> 00:27:15,960
They're their evolutionary territory is slightly different than chimpanzees, that it's a

488
00:27:15,960 --> 00:27:17,560
more resource abundant area.

489
00:27:17,720 --> 00:27:21,240
And this is hypothesis, there's there's some debate about it.

490
00:27:21,640 --> 00:27:25,320
So when you find humans are doing something sort of eerily similar, and we also, I mean

491
00:27:25,400 --> 00:27:30,630
we're very famous as a fission fusion species, you know, you can think about central place

492
00:27:30,790 --> 00:27:31,190
foraging.

493
00:27:31,270 --> 00:27:34,150
We all come together in a night, you know, in the evening if you're a group of

494
00:27:34,150 --> 00:27:38,470
hunter-gatherers sharing food, but during the day you're often in smaller work parties as a

495
00:27:38,470 --> 00:27:43,910
solitary forager, a solitary hunter, or with a with a few other individuals creating the

496
00:27:43,910 --> 00:27:46,630
opportunity for fission fusion.

497
00:27:46,790 --> 00:27:51,510
But it hasn't been um you know, a lot of the work is sort of like speculative.

498
00:27:51,670 --> 00:27:53,430
Was this important in human evolution?

499
00:27:53,590 --> 00:27:56,230
How deep was it important in human evolution?

500
00:27:56,520 --> 00:28:01,720
If we, you know, have a model say similar to like savannah baboons, as many people think

501
00:28:01,720 --> 00:28:07,640
the Australopis would have been, then maybe there's not a good model for vision and

502
00:28:07,640 --> 00:28:08,040
fusion.

503
00:28:08,120 --> 00:28:13,080
So maybe we didn't actually have vision and fusion for an important part of our

504
00:28:13,080 --> 00:28:14,280
evolutionary history.

505
00:28:14,440 --> 00:28:19,400
So so a lot of it is sort of speculative and there hasn't been as many sort of clean tests

506
00:28:19,640 --> 00:28:20,680
as you would like.

507
00:28:21,170 --> 00:28:21,410
Yeah.

508
00:28:21,570 --> 00:28:25,570
But just just so so that we're I'm being clear, fission fusion.

509
00:28:25,730 --> 00:28:30,850
The idea is like cows just sort of intuitively don't need to fission fusion because the

510
00:28:30,850 --> 00:28:34,370
distribution of how they make their living, it's just all sort of there.

511
00:28:34,530 --> 00:28:36,210
So ungulates, for example, there's a lot of different things.

512
00:28:36,370 --> 00:28:42,370
Yeah, or or if they do fission fusion, that there's not a motivation or benefit,

513
00:28:42,530 --> 00:28:46,130
there's not a real benefit to attacking members of other groups.

514
00:28:46,290 --> 00:28:50,820
Because you can imagine like many herd species may have some sort of, you know, I don't

515
00:28:50,820 --> 00:28:55,940
know that you would call it fission fusion times where they're more due to breeding, you

516
00:28:55,940 --> 00:28:57,220
know, during breeding season.

517
00:28:57,460 --> 00:29:01,860
Yeah, you know, during breeding season or something, but there's not a real benefit from

518
00:29:01,860 --> 00:29:05,140
group and maybe that's because they're not group living in the same way that we think

519
00:29:05,940 --> 00:29:09,780
members of one group attacking and killing members of other groups.

520
00:29:10,020 --> 00:29:14,820
If they if they do and you know, I imagine imagine some of them do have lethal violence,

521
00:29:14,900 --> 00:29:18,490
you know, when they're headbutting each other, but then it's gonna be between dyads.

522
00:29:18,570 --> 00:29:24,250
It's not gonna be coalitionary, which is what's really unusual is you know, many mammalian

523
00:29:24,250 --> 00:29:28,490
species have, you know, violence where they kill members of their same species.

524
00:29:28,570 --> 00:29:33,610
But what's unusual is that it's a group killing members of the same species.

525
00:29:33,850 --> 00:29:34,010
Yeah.

526
00:29:34,090 --> 00:29:39,060
And so is is the the idea that we we don't see this in in say herbivores that that eat

527
00:29:39,060 --> 00:29:43,620
grass, it's it's because the distribution of resources is not very lopsided.

528
00:29:43,700 --> 00:29:48,740
You know, like there's no real benefit to like a herd of cattle attacking a rival herd

529
00:29:48,740 --> 00:29:52,820
because there's plenty of grass everywhere and there's not going to be a real payoff to

530
00:29:52,820 --> 00:29:53,460
that kind of behavior.

531
00:29:53,540 --> 00:29:54,020
Is that the idea?

532
00:29:54,340 --> 00:29:59,380
Yeah, it would also say they're not they're not a group living species in the way primates

533
00:29:59,380 --> 00:29:59,540
are.

534
00:29:59,780 --> 00:29:59,940
Okay.

535
00:30:00,580 --> 00:30:05,620
They they you know, they're living with others, but there's no clear in group out group

536
00:30:05,780 --> 00:30:06,420
boundaries.

537
00:30:06,830 --> 00:30:07,150
Right.

538
00:30:07,470 --> 00:30:11,230
It's it's so interesting because I mean, on the one hand, uh what I love about an

539
00:30:11,230 --> 00:30:14,990
evolutionary approach is that even something like are we fusion fission, and we were

540
00:30:14,990 --> 00:30:20,830
talking about that because we're talking about, you know, groups and like conflict, but we

541
00:30:20,830 --> 00:30:24,510
can talk about fission fusion as a consequence, right?

542
00:30:24,590 --> 00:30:27,470
It's coming back to this point of we take nothing for granted.

543
00:30:27,550 --> 00:30:30,910
It's a consequence of like just the ecology or what the environment is like.

544
00:30:31,070 --> 00:30:35,470
Does it do you need to fusion, fusion, fission, fusion um, or not?

545
00:30:35,640 --> 00:30:39,720
So I think that that's really cool, but it does add this complication of on one hand,

546
00:30:39,800 --> 00:30:44,120
you're talking about like the group psychology or like, because groups in some sense are

547
00:30:44,120 --> 00:30:49,480
like caused by the mental representation, which then causes the behavior.

548
00:30:49,640 --> 00:30:51,640
Um, so it becomes this complicated thing.

549
00:30:51,800 --> 00:30:55,800
Like, unsurprisingly, groups are complicated, which is we both have to deal with like the

550
00:30:55,800 --> 00:31:00,470
ecology to think about, like, well, why would there even be selection for conflict?

551
00:31:00,630 --> 00:31:05,350
But then at the same time, you're it's this thing of many species don't have the requisite

552
00:31:05,350 --> 00:31:08,870
psychology to do produce the behavior either.

553
00:31:09,030 --> 00:31:10,630
So how do we explain that too?

554
00:31:10,710 --> 00:31:10,950
Yeah.

555
00:31:11,350 --> 00:31:14,630
Yeah, it's really fun to think about because you can think about, you know, savannah

556
00:31:14,630 --> 00:31:19,270
baboons, they live in these sort of large groups, but they're eating, you know, seeds from

557
00:31:19,270 --> 00:31:19,910
the grasses.

558
00:31:20,070 --> 00:31:24,600
So they don't really have this sort of, as far as I understand, a like distinct in-group,

559
00:31:24,760 --> 00:31:29,880
out-group psychology where, you know, access to territory really matters for reproduction.

560
00:31:30,040 --> 00:31:35,080
But then you think about chimpanzees, where, you know, they're they like to eat, you know,

561
00:31:35,240 --> 00:31:37,000
figs from fig trees.

562
00:31:37,160 --> 00:31:42,120
So if if it's time where they're all, you know, where there's abundant figs, they're going

563
00:31:42,120 --> 00:31:43,560
to spend most of their days together.

564
00:31:43,720 --> 00:31:47,240
But then in a season where it's not quite as abundant, you know, there's not nearly as much

565
00:31:47,240 --> 00:31:47,560
food.

566
00:31:47,640 --> 00:31:49,890
They're in much smaller party.

567
00:31:49,970 --> 00:31:54,050
So they're both vulnerable, but they may have a reason if they're in a larger party than to

568
00:31:54,050 --> 00:31:57,010
predate on their neighbors.

569
00:31:57,650 --> 00:32:01,570
I'm working on a a paper sort of like laying out some ideas about the evolution of war.

570
00:32:01,650 --> 00:32:06,050
And one of the sessions is like, you know, why don't zeb off of Sapolskys, why don't zebras

571
00:32:06,130 --> 00:32:08,850
get ulcers is why don't like zebras wage war?

572
00:32:09,250 --> 00:32:09,810
Great question, yeah.

573
00:32:09,970 --> 00:32:12,290
You know, is that, you know, or rabbits or whatever.

574
00:32:12,610 --> 00:32:15,090
Why don't why don't squirrels wage war?

575
00:32:15,250 --> 00:32:19,340
You know, squirrels have violence, they're super aggressive, but you know, why don't they

576
00:32:19,340 --> 00:32:20,220
wage war?

577
00:32:20,300 --> 00:32:25,820
And some of the aspects to in order to wage war, you have to have a psychology to you to

578
00:32:25,820 --> 00:32:29,100
engage in coalitionary aggression, use it strategically.

579
00:32:29,340 --> 00:32:33,420
So that requires certain evolutionary preconditions to be met.

580
00:32:33,820 --> 00:32:34,060
Right.

581
00:32:34,460 --> 00:32:38,220
Do you do you think that carnivory might be one such precondition?

582
00:32:38,300 --> 00:32:43,030
And that if you have the cognitive machinery necessary to coordinate with other members of

583
00:32:43,030 --> 00:32:47,350
your group to aggressively attack a prey animal, that those types of abilities could be

584
00:32:47,350 --> 00:32:50,870
parlayed into a context of intergroup violence.

585
00:32:51,030 --> 00:32:55,670
Whereas if you don't have any kind of predation uh instincts or abilities, then it's going

586
00:32:55,670 --> 00:33:00,710
to be harder to evolve the kinds of coordination abilities and socio cognitive abilities

587
00:33:00,710 --> 00:33:05,190
necessary to get together in a group and count on the fact that you can all act in

588
00:33:05,190 --> 00:33:10,540
synchrono and synchrony and and uh cooperate with one another and and be confident that you

589
00:33:10,540 --> 00:33:13,820
know each member of the group is gonna have your back in in some sense.

590
00:33:14,060 --> 00:33:16,140
Um no, I don't think it's necessary.

591
00:33:16,300 --> 00:33:20,540
I think you know, I think there is something appealing sort of about you know hunting as a

592
00:33:20,540 --> 00:33:21,580
pathway to war.

593
00:33:21,740 --> 00:33:26,860
And I think this is one of the major sort of uh hypotheses that the imbalance of power sort

594
00:33:26,870 --> 00:33:32,150
of overturned, because you have many species that, you know, are carnivores to a more or

595
00:33:32,150 --> 00:33:33,910
lesser extent that don't have anything like it.

596
00:33:33,990 --> 00:33:39,430
And then you can think about some species that maybe aren't heavily

597
00:33:39,430 --> 00:33:45,430
carnivores, like some species of chimpanzees or potentially bonobos, if we end up finding

598
00:33:45,430 --> 00:33:50,550
that they do have rating, which some people, some people suspect that aren't carnivores, or

599
00:33:50,550 --> 00:33:51,830
gorillas, for instance.

600
00:33:51,910 --> 00:33:57,600
You know, there's been several cases of gorilla coalitionary violence against a lone

601
00:33:57,760 --> 00:33:59,120
outgroup individual.

602
00:33:59,280 --> 00:34:05,200
So it's it's less a case of like where the larger group goes and looks

603
00:34:05,200 --> 00:34:10,240
for like a patrol for individuals to take over the territory, and more like a larger group

604
00:34:10,240 --> 00:34:16,240
is being followed by a lone individual, and then they pile on and beat that individual to

605
00:34:16,240 --> 00:34:18,160
nearly to death or to death.

606
00:34:18,320 --> 00:34:23,870
Um, you know, and they're not, you know, not carnivores by any stretch of the imagination.

607
00:34:24,270 --> 00:34:26,110
Is it is it territory then?

608
00:34:26,270 --> 00:34:31,150
Is it the is it the exclusivity of like why don't squirrels go to war?

609
00:34:31,470 --> 00:34:35,470
Um well I don't think they're group living in the same in the same way.

610
00:34:35,870 --> 00:34:36,270
Right.

611
00:34:36,510 --> 00:34:38,110
And this is the problem, right?

612
00:34:38,190 --> 00:34:41,150
It's like a chicken and egg thing because it's like, well why aren't they group living?

613
00:34:41,310 --> 00:34:45,960
And does it come back to then is it the um the distribution of resources?

614
00:34:46,600 --> 00:34:51,160
But you know, they control territories in the sense that they have a you know, you have a

615
00:34:51,160 --> 00:34:57,080
nice uh oak in your in your in your yard and you have uh you know one or

616
00:34:57,080 --> 00:34:59,480
two squirrel nests in it that they want to control.

617
00:34:59,720 --> 00:35:04,840
So they'll, you know, chase away squirrels from other you know, squirrels that are trying

618
00:35:04,840 --> 00:35:09,670
to encroach on their territory, but you don't have the opportunity for, you know, four

619
00:35:09,670 --> 00:35:15,510
nests from these three, you know, these three to gang up with each other and chase away and

620
00:35:15,510 --> 00:35:16,630
kill some other squirrel.

621
00:35:16,790 --> 00:35:22,470
Now we it may be, you know, if you when I started my PhD research in 2009, you know, many

622
00:35:22,470 --> 00:35:27,110
of the species that have lethal intergroup aggression now we didn't actually know about it

623
00:35:27,110 --> 00:35:28,630
at the time or wasn't well documented.

624
00:35:28,950 --> 00:35:33,510
So it may be the case in 20 years we find out that you know some sort of like

625
00:35:34,160 --> 00:35:38,240
hyper-social population of squirrels somewhere, you know, does.

626
00:35:38,400 --> 00:35:39,760
So it may look different.

627
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:44,720
But um, you know, but for the most part, I think the way we understand that why the vast

628
00:35:44,720 --> 00:35:49,920
majority of species, although they kill each other or why many mammalian species kill each

629
00:35:49,920 --> 00:35:52,480
other, don't do it as parts of coalitions.

630
00:35:52,560 --> 00:35:56,800
It's just the fact that you have to be social and typically territorial.

631
00:35:57,150 --> 00:35:57,310
Right.

632
00:35:57,390 --> 00:36:02,110
And the reason you're territorial is because territory is associated with access to

633
00:36:02,110 --> 00:36:04,430
resources that you can convert into reproduction.

634
00:36:04,830 --> 00:36:04,990
Right.

635
00:36:05,070 --> 00:36:10,510
So this is the Harcourt-Dewall classic sort of coalitions in humans and

636
00:36:10,510 --> 00:36:11,390
non-humans.

637
00:36:11,550 --> 00:36:13,390
This was sort of in the 80s and 90s.

638
00:36:13,470 --> 00:36:19,220
There was just this like social brain hypothesis of really multi-agent

639
00:36:19,220 --> 00:36:20,580
conflict is really difficult.

640
00:36:20,740 --> 00:36:22,420
It's really zoologically rare.

641
00:36:22,580 --> 00:36:27,460
There's many situations where you look at something like classically, elephant seals, like

642
00:36:27,540 --> 00:36:32,260
it's very um male reproductive success is extremely skewed.

643
00:36:32,340 --> 00:36:37,860
There's a whole beach full of female elephant seals, and one male elephant seal is fights

644
00:36:37,860 --> 00:36:40,100
all the other males and gets access to all of them.

645
00:36:40,260 --> 00:36:46,110
And from a coalitional species perspective, it's insane because two or three, you know, uh

646
00:36:46,110 --> 00:36:51,390
beta and whatever, um, could could just gang up on that man, but they don't because they

647
00:36:51,390 --> 00:36:52,510
just cannot do it.

648
00:36:52,670 --> 00:36:54,190
And it's so weird.

649
00:36:54,350 --> 00:37:00,190
Um so this idea that there's sort of like it's hard computationally to do this is

650
00:37:00,270 --> 00:37:02,510
I think was a really important idea.

651
00:37:03,070 --> 00:37:04,670
Has that been part of your thinking?

652
00:37:04,750 --> 00:37:05,790
And is that outdated now?

653
00:37:05,870 --> 00:37:06,350
Or how do you think that's it?

654
00:37:06,510 --> 00:37:11,700
Yeah, no, well, you know, I I think it's certainly true the, you know, the vast majority of

655
00:37:11,700 --> 00:37:15,860
lethal aggression you're going to see is, you know, all those, you know, exciting examples

656
00:37:15,860 --> 00:37:20,980
of two elephant seals, two horses going at it, you know, two lions, two deer.

657
00:37:21,460 --> 00:37:24,260
It's typically, uh, you know, it's typically dyadic.

658
00:37:24,500 --> 00:37:29,460
But I'm not sure that computation's really the limiting factor because presumably if the

659
00:37:29,460 --> 00:37:34,580
environment is such that it favors the prerequisites for it and there's sufficient payoff,

660
00:37:34,660 --> 00:37:38,810
then you are gonna involve the computational machinery.

661
00:37:39,050 --> 00:37:39,370
Yeah.

662
00:37:39,610 --> 00:37:43,770
You know, so you may you may have to have other things necessarily like, you know, the

663
00:37:43,770 --> 00:37:48,010
conditions for which there to sort of be stable groups or stable coalitions.

664
00:37:48,170 --> 00:37:48,330
Right.

665
00:37:48,490 --> 00:37:50,650
You know, within it, how do you not get betrayed?

666
00:37:50,730 --> 00:37:55,050
You know, if a group of if beta is joined together to overthrow the alpha seal, how does

667
00:37:55,050 --> 00:37:56,650
one of them not get betrayed?

668
00:37:56,810 --> 00:38:02,580
So I think that if you know if the evolutionary payoffs are there over enough time that we

669
00:38:02,660 --> 00:38:07,940
we do see this paper or this behavior evolve and you know, distant taxa.

670
00:38:08,020 --> 00:38:11,220
So I think it's not like a, you know, an insurmountably high barrier.

671
00:38:11,460 --> 00:38:11,780
I see.

672
00:38:11,860 --> 00:38:17,140
So it's sort of like it's a it's obviously like a a a a maximum if in this possibility

673
00:38:17,140 --> 00:38:22,990
space of like phenotypes, It's hard to get to, and not every species gets to it, but

674
00:38:22,990 --> 00:38:26,830
it's not a thing of there's any simple like one factor to why they don't.

675
00:38:27,070 --> 00:38:32,190
It's just you need sort of the right constellation of either the environment is such that

676
00:38:32,270 --> 00:38:37,710
like free riders get selected out automatically, or there's enough sort of

677
00:38:37,710 --> 00:38:43,550
cognitive complexity in the species for other reasons that might be even historical, that

678
00:38:43,550 --> 00:38:48,510
keeping track of sort of reciprocity or free riders is already sort of there enough.

679
00:38:48,720 --> 00:38:53,440
It's it's all sort of not, there's no sort of clear magic bullet per se.

680
00:38:54,240 --> 00:38:56,960
Yeah, I think that that's I think that that's fair.

681
00:38:57,120 --> 00:39:02,000
I also just want to say at this point, I feel like our our theorizing on the evolution of

682
00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:07,840
coalitionary violence, lethal coalitionary violence, it's not as refined as it should be in

683
00:39:07,840 --> 00:39:11,280
the in the wake of just a lot of other data on species coming out.

684
00:39:11,440 --> 00:39:15,440
I feel like that this is a chance, you know, this is this is a time for us to really sort

685
00:39:15,440 --> 00:39:17,650
of do more theory building.

686
00:39:18,050 --> 00:39:23,890
You know, the imbalance of power is like dominant and beautiful, it's elegant, it

687
00:39:23,890 --> 00:39:27,570
explains so much, but I'm not sure it explains everything we're seeing right now.

688
00:39:27,730 --> 00:39:32,770
Or even if it even if it does answers questions at these other levels that you're asking,

689
00:39:32,930 --> 00:39:35,730
well, why don't some species develop it?

690
00:39:35,810 --> 00:39:40,420
So it's a um, so I don't think we have all the answers theoretically at Right, because it

691
00:39:40,420 --> 00:39:43,540
seems like the question the question that Dave was getting at is a is a separate question,

692
00:39:43,620 --> 00:39:44,580
but very related.

693
00:39:44,740 --> 00:39:49,780
So we're originally talking about violence between groups where a coalition from one group

694
00:39:49,780 --> 00:39:53,140
will will gang up on uh a number of individuals from the other group.

695
00:39:53,300 --> 00:39:55,940
But there's also the question of coalitional violence within a group.

696
00:39:56,020 --> 00:40:00,900
So why don't the betas in a and a troop of elephant seals get together and overthrow the

697
00:40:00,900 --> 00:40:01,380
alpha?

698
00:40:01,540 --> 00:40:05,140
It would presumably be in their reproductive interests to do that.

699
00:40:05,300 --> 00:40:06,020
Why don't they?

700
00:40:06,180 --> 00:40:12,170
Why don't we see uh coalitions uh within a group uh uh you know fighting fighting

701
00:40:12,170 --> 00:40:13,290
with other members of the group.

702
00:40:13,370 --> 00:40:17,290
Uh and it seems to me that that is a related question and and and perhaps um they're

703
00:40:17,290 --> 00:40:17,850
correlated.

704
00:40:17,930 --> 00:40:21,450
You know, if you have coalitional violence within a group, you also are more likely to see

705
00:40:21,450 --> 00:40:23,290
coalitional violence between a group.

706
00:40:23,370 --> 00:40:27,450
I know, you know, in chimpanzees for example, th they form alliances and they often can

707
00:40:27,450 --> 00:40:29,290
gang up on on the male within a group.

708
00:40:29,450 --> 00:40:34,340
Well if they have that ability, why not, you know, parlay that to between group violence as

709
00:40:34,340 --> 00:40:34,500
well?

710
00:40:35,060 --> 00:40:37,300
Is that uh is that a five factor?

711
00:40:37,540 --> 00:40:40,340
I love that example because this is actually one of the things I think about in trying to

712
00:40:40,340 --> 00:40:45,700
explain why don't bonobos have uh sort of the lethal rating that you see in chimpanzees.

713
00:40:45,780 --> 00:40:50,100
So the one is just that they have um, you know, they don't have as much imbalance of power,

714
00:40:50,180 --> 00:40:54,900
but another hypothesis is that they don't have as many male coalition or they don't have as

715
00:40:54,900 --> 00:40:58,340
strong of male coalitions as you see in chimpanzees.

716
00:40:58,420 --> 00:41:03,430
And maybe that's due to, you know, some other feature, but also they have, you know, it's

717
00:41:03,430 --> 00:41:07,430
been reported to me, I'm not a bonobo researcher at all, but you know, bonobo females are

718
00:41:07,430 --> 00:41:12,310
very dominant and will often sort of like beat up and break up nascent coalitions.

719
00:41:12,390 --> 00:41:16,390
So it may just be that some of the proximate circumstances aren't there.

720
00:41:16,550 --> 00:41:21,830
Perhaps if you took away all the bonobo females, then you would have rating surge, but

721
00:41:21,830 --> 00:41:26,600
without, you know, with with the strong females that are breaking male coalitions.

722
00:41:26,760 --> 00:41:32,680
Maybe you just don't have the right sort of group coalis that then, you know, has

723
00:41:32,680 --> 00:41:37,880
enough sort of alignment of interests and stability to go out on a raid against another

724
00:41:37,880 --> 00:41:39,560
bonobo group.

725
00:41:39,880 --> 00:41:45,320
So I think this is a time that r really we should be doing some more theory refinement.

726
00:41:45,470 --> 00:41:49,710
that you know, we I thought we had most of the these sort of like big picture issues

727
00:41:49,710 --> 00:41:51,070
settled 15 years ago.

728
00:41:51,150 --> 00:41:54,590
And it's turning out that, you know, new data leads to new theory.

729
00:41:54,670 --> 00:41:57,390
So it's a really exciting time to be working in this area.

730
00:41:57,710 --> 00:41:58,270
Yeah, that's cool.

731
00:41:58,350 --> 00:41:58,510
Yeah.

732
00:41:58,590 --> 00:42:02,270
I mean, uh inner group conflict seems like it's such a straightforward selection pressure

733
00:42:02,270 --> 00:42:04,830
thing, you know, like foraging or mating.

734
00:42:04,910 --> 00:42:07,150
And it's obviously studying the lots of animals.

735
00:42:07,230 --> 00:42:08,430
It's pretty easy to observe.

736
00:42:08,590 --> 00:42:14,580
I mean, I say that not being in the forest being next to conflict, but but it's relatively

737
00:42:14,580 --> 00:42:15,620
easy to observe.

738
00:42:15,780 --> 00:42:19,700
Um, and so yeah, it's amazing that we still don't really have great theories.

739
00:42:19,940 --> 00:42:22,260
And you mean theories sort of at every level, right?

740
00:42:22,340 --> 00:42:26,180
Like in the sense of, I mean, obviously we don't have very good theories psychologically

741
00:42:26,180 --> 00:42:30,660
about the mental software in any species, but you even mean just sort of like the of all

742
00:42:30,740 --> 00:42:34,580
prerequisites like we're talking about, or even what the function or even ecological

743
00:42:34,580 --> 00:42:35,460
correlates, right?

744
00:42:35,700 --> 00:42:35,940
Yeah.

745
00:42:36,550 --> 00:42:41,670
Like when do you would you have predicted that bandit mongeese have this agreement?

746
00:42:41,830 --> 00:42:44,630
If you didn't know anything about their behavior, do you have a model that's going to

747
00:42:44,630 --> 00:42:45,590
predict why they have it?

748
00:42:45,670 --> 00:42:48,950
But let's say other species of mongoose don't have it.

749
00:42:49,190 --> 00:42:49,830
Right, right.

750
00:42:50,310 --> 00:42:52,310
You want a theory that does that.

751
00:42:52,870 --> 00:42:55,110
And I don't I don't know that we have that right now.

752
00:42:55,350 --> 00:42:57,270
Yeah, that's that's fantastic.

753
00:42:57,510 --> 00:43:02,710
Um, where where does the evolution of peace then come into uh

754
00:43:03,270 --> 00:43:04,230
come into this?

755
00:43:05,080 --> 00:43:11,080
So so I really started thinking about it um I mean just like in the first week or several

756
00:43:11,080 --> 00:43:12,360
weeks of my field work.

757
00:43:12,600 --> 00:43:15,240
And you know, I wanted to study decentralized war.

758
00:43:15,320 --> 00:43:19,080
So that if you want to study human war, you know, most people do it through like

759
00:43:19,080 --> 00:43:20,600
experiments or something like that.

760
00:43:20,680 --> 00:43:25,880
Or you'll work with chimpanzees and do sort of armchair theorizing about humans.

761
00:43:26,040 --> 00:43:31,910
But I wanted to work, I wanted to actually try to do field studies in a context that

762
00:43:31,910 --> 00:43:36,550
was as close as possible as we could get to like, you know, so-called ancestral conditions.

763
00:43:36,710 --> 00:43:41,110
So it means, you know, war outside of states, out of militaries, outside of, you know,

764
00:43:41,350 --> 00:43:45,350
formal institutions, hierarchy, generals, anything like that.

765
00:43:45,510 --> 00:43:51,240
Um, so I ended up working in in East Africa, right at the border of South Sudan and

766
00:43:51,240 --> 00:43:56,040
Kenya and Ethiopia in a region called the Alemi Triangle with a group called the Nangatom.

767
00:43:56,280 --> 00:44:00,120
And you know, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna like you know collect lots of data on like the cause

768
00:44:00,120 --> 00:44:00,440
of war.

769
00:44:00,600 --> 00:44:03,480
I'm gonna test what hypotheses are out there, it's gonna be amazing.

770
00:44:03,640 --> 00:44:09,290
And then like several weeks in, there was um, you know, you're do I was doing daily

771
00:44:09,290 --> 00:44:13,130
labor, just digging a water hole, and you start hearing, you know, all this cheering and

772
00:44:13,130 --> 00:44:16,810
clapping, the sort of stuff you may hear like in your campus office if you hear like a

773
00:44:16,810 --> 00:44:18,970
student parade outside or something.

774
00:44:19,130 --> 00:44:21,690
So I climb up out of the water hole, what's going on?

775
00:44:21,850 --> 00:44:26,490
And you can hear people firing AK 47, sort of then excitement.

776
00:44:26,570 --> 00:44:31,450
It's got a different pattern than an actual like, you know, in defense of a raid.

777
00:44:31,610 --> 00:44:34,250
And it was like, you know, oh, a group of raiders is coming back.

778
00:44:34,330 --> 00:44:37,400
They're coming back with a bunch of cattle that they stole from the Turcana.

779
00:44:37,720 --> 00:44:41,800
You know, so everybody that afternoon, people are just jubilant, they're so excited, gather

780
00:44:41,800 --> 00:44:43,560
under a big shade tree.

781
00:44:43,720 --> 00:44:44,600
You know, everyone's hanging out.

782
00:44:44,680 --> 00:44:45,800
It's really like a party.

783
00:44:46,040 --> 00:44:50,840
Um, and you know, they slaughter one of the cows, and everyone's like, oh, pastoralas must

784
00:44:50,920 --> 00:44:53,320
be meat all the time because that's what they live off.

785
00:44:53,400 --> 00:44:55,800
But actually, pastoras do not eat meat that often.

786
00:44:55,880 --> 00:44:59,910
You know, they tend to, you'll consume a lot of dairy products or grain that they're

787
00:44:59,910 --> 00:45:03,670
growing or trade for and typically save their livestock.

788
00:45:03,990 --> 00:45:09,110
So everyone's eating just tons of cow, you know, fresh beef roasted on the fire.

789
00:45:09,270 --> 00:45:10,230
Everybody's happy.

790
00:45:10,310 --> 00:45:11,830
It's a big party.

791
00:45:12,150 --> 00:45:17,350
And, you know, it was really because struck me then at the point was, you know, in the in

792
00:45:17,350 --> 00:45:22,620
the people who had successfully captured these cattle, everyone's singing to them, like all

793
00:45:22,620 --> 00:45:28,220
the all the women are singing and praising them, all the guys are sort of honoring them.

794
00:45:28,300 --> 00:45:31,420
The elders are giving speeches, like, ah, this is the future.

795
00:45:31,580 --> 00:45:35,580
You know, these are these are our warriors, like they're bringing glory to us.

796
00:45:35,740 --> 00:45:39,980
You know, and if you're successful in killing somebody, you get honorific scars, you get

797
00:45:39,980 --> 00:45:43,900
status, you go through all these rituals, you become a a new person essentially.

798
00:45:43,980 --> 00:45:45,340
You get a you get a new name.

799
00:45:45,500 --> 00:45:49,590
And it really struck me as the question is like in in these particular conditions, like

800
00:45:49,750 --> 00:45:53,910
actually the challenge is not to explain why there's conflict.

801
00:45:54,070 --> 00:45:55,270
I want people to go out and raid.

802
00:45:55,350 --> 00:45:57,270
I like fresh cow if I'm hungry.

803
00:45:57,350 --> 00:45:59,510
So I want those people to go raid.

804
00:45:59,590 --> 00:46:03,590
I want our cows to be fatter because they chase away the enemy and get access to grazing

805
00:46:03,590 --> 00:46:03,990
lands.

806
00:46:04,230 --> 00:46:08,630
The real challenge in these conditions is how do you get so once you're in this sort of

807
00:46:08,630 --> 00:46:12,070
like situation, how do you get groups to stop fighting?

808
00:46:12,230 --> 00:46:15,360
How do you change the costs and benefits.

809
00:46:15,440 --> 00:46:18,640
How do you change the incentives so people stop fighting?

810
00:46:18,800 --> 00:46:23,600
And that was, you know, uh uh when I give a talk on this, I like open with a passage from

811
00:46:23,600 --> 00:46:27,600
my journal where I'm like puzzling over this, realizing, oh my gosh, the really difficult

812
00:46:27,600 --> 00:46:30,000
question isn't why do humans have war?

813
00:46:30,160 --> 00:46:34,240
It's obvious there's many path ways to make war pay.

814
00:46:34,480 --> 00:46:38,640
You know, if you're you know, so like war isn't the really hard question in humans.

815
00:46:38,720 --> 00:46:41,040
The really hard question is how do you get rid of it?

816
00:46:41,990 --> 00:46:42,630
Interesting.

817
00:46:42,790 --> 00:46:43,030
Yeah.

818
00:46:43,190 --> 00:46:48,470
So again, so just to be really clear, from a cost-benefit perspective, and this is

819
00:46:48,470 --> 00:46:51,910
recapitulates what we were just talking about, is from an evolutionary perspective,

820
00:46:51,990 --> 00:46:57,750
everything ultimately translates into there's got to be some benefit or minimization of

821
00:46:57,750 --> 00:47:01,750
cost for some software or phenotype to get selected for.

822
00:47:01,910 --> 00:47:06,060
And in the context of conflict, we just spent a bunch of time talking about, well, you

823
00:47:06,060 --> 00:47:11,740
know, it might be this or that that gets ultimately this level of complexity of the

824
00:47:11,740 --> 00:47:16,940
software for conflict, but it's all for maximizing benefits, minimizing costs in the

825
00:47:16,940 --> 00:47:18,620
context of conflict, right?

826
00:47:18,860 --> 00:47:23,900
And and then this question of sort of well, how when there's obvious benefits to conflict,

827
00:47:24,060 --> 00:47:25,500
do you get peace?

828
00:47:25,660 --> 00:47:26,860
That's the question.

829
00:47:27,150 --> 00:47:31,630
Yeah, that's the question that you know, if you think about why did our species evolve some

830
00:47:31,630 --> 00:47:37,390
particular trait, um, then then you look at costs and benefits over

831
00:47:38,030 --> 00:47:40,030
uh over evolutionary timescales.

832
00:47:40,270 --> 00:47:42,430
And you know, war in humans is pretty simple.

833
00:47:42,590 --> 00:47:48,270
You can think that it it just requires the capacity to form coalitions, to use aggression

834
00:47:48,270 --> 00:47:53,200
strategically, and then you get yourself in a situation where there's clear benefits from

835
00:47:53,200 --> 00:47:53,840
doing so.

836
00:47:54,000 --> 00:47:58,480
You know, so you have cultural institutions, but you may also capture, and it's common in

837
00:47:58,480 --> 00:48:03,440
many societies, including hunter gatherers, things of value, weapons, physical trophies,

838
00:48:03,760 --> 00:48:09,600
captives, you know, that and and humans aren't morons like chimpanzees or most

839
00:48:09,600 --> 00:48:10,160
other species.

840
00:48:10,320 --> 00:48:14,960
We do so when the costs are typically pretty low through imbalances of power.

841
00:48:15,120 --> 00:48:20,270
You know, so the most common type of attack across the ethnographic literature and

842
00:48:20,270 --> 00:48:25,950
decentralized conflict is the raid, where you know, anywhere from four to fifteen

843
00:48:25,950 --> 00:48:31,710
individuals, typically young males, um, in almost all cases, go out and use

844
00:48:31,710 --> 00:48:36,270
ambush and stealth to kill one or two individuals from another group.

845
00:48:36,510 --> 00:48:39,870
And, you know, the at very, very low risk to themselves.

846
00:48:39,950 --> 00:48:44,820
And we don't have good like quantitative studies from many societies at all, but the few

847
00:48:44,820 --> 00:48:48,020
that we do suggest the risk is typically negligible.

848
00:48:48,340 --> 00:48:53,220
Shagnon, and I think it was just sort of an armchair estimation, said it was probably like

849
00:48:53,220 --> 00:48:54,100
less than 5%.

850
00:48:54,820 --> 00:48:59,940
Steve Beckerman's data among the Warani, which is like one of the most, you know, had the

851
00:48:59,940 --> 00:49:02,260
highest rates of homicide.

852
00:49:02,420 --> 00:49:04,740
You know, it's more feuding than war at that point.

853
00:49:04,820 --> 00:49:10,260
He he he says that there's no record, nobody can recount, an offensive reader

854
00:49:10,390 --> 00:49:12,470
getting attacked or killed.

855
00:49:13,030 --> 00:49:15,670
And my data from the Nangatom, it's very, very rare.

856
00:49:15,750 --> 00:49:21,750
People are more likely to die of thirst, you know, so it's semi-arid than they are to be

857
00:49:21,750 --> 00:49:22,790
killed in the raid.

858
00:49:23,270 --> 00:49:28,870
In the couple of cases, it's um typically like friendly fire or something like that.

859
00:49:29,110 --> 00:49:33,640
So, you know, and it's because people are trying to minimize the danger to themselves.

860
00:49:33,720 --> 00:49:39,400
So the costs are pretty low with this pattern of conflict that we think of as ancestral.

861
00:49:39,800 --> 00:49:43,880
You know, it's very similar to what you see in many other species, including chimpanzees.

862
00:49:44,200 --> 00:49:49,160
And the benefits in humans can be more proximate and tangible than, say, in chimpanzees,

863
00:49:49,240 --> 00:49:54,040
and maybe this really delayed mechanism of chimpanzees, where after 10 years they take over

864
00:49:54,040 --> 00:49:58,920
the territory and they get access to new fruiting trees, which allows them to re reduce

865
00:49:58,920 --> 00:50:03,390
their interbirth interval and have higher offspring survival.

866
00:50:03,630 --> 00:50:07,470
In humans, it may be much more like very direct.

867
00:50:07,630 --> 00:50:11,150
Like we steal your weapons, we have cultural mechanisms, you know.

868
00:50:11,310 --> 00:50:17,150
So you kill someone, you get a new name, you get honorary tokens of your

869
00:50:17,310 --> 00:50:22,430
of your status, or you capture a human, you know, a human child or a human wife.

870
00:50:22,590 --> 00:50:28,510
Um, and then among pastoralists, you also get livestock, that, you know, really tasty

871
00:50:28,510 --> 00:50:30,190
meat we were talking about.

872
00:50:30,590 --> 00:50:31,070
Right.

873
00:50:31,310 --> 00:50:37,200
Yeah, And that and that cow is uh uh slaughterable and eatable and

874
00:50:37,200 --> 00:50:39,520
doesn't require it's not like the land, right?

875
00:50:39,600 --> 00:50:45,280
Like classically, pastoralists are like shepherds or whatever else uh you're

876
00:50:45,440 --> 00:50:50,720
you're grazing or your your the it's the it's the exclusivity and uh

877
00:50:50,880 --> 00:50:51,760
stealability.

878
00:50:51,840 --> 00:50:56,320
I'm using the wrong words, but basically how rival the goods are and how portable and

879
00:50:56,320 --> 00:50:56,880
packageable.

880
00:50:56,960 --> 00:51:01,290
I mean it's the same reason why like money and diamonds, Um, you know, people try to steal

881
00:51:01,290 --> 00:51:03,130
them, but you don't try to steal like a whole building.

882
00:51:03,210 --> 00:51:03,610
You can't.

883
00:51:03,690 --> 00:51:05,370
Like you can't, you know, you have to maintain it.

884
00:51:05,450 --> 00:51:09,610
It's the same with like a cropland versus the the results of the crops.

885
00:51:09,690 --> 00:51:09,850
Yeah.

886
00:51:09,930 --> 00:51:15,210
Like the cow is the result of a lot of labor and resources, right?

887
00:51:15,530 --> 00:51:15,770
Yeah.

888
00:51:15,930 --> 00:51:16,090
Yeah.

889
00:51:16,170 --> 00:51:20,730
It's one of the reasons I find what what you're alluding to there sort of competition

890
00:51:21,370 --> 00:51:26,800
competition for land, things that, you know, are really a collective good

891
00:51:27,040 --> 00:51:30,400
less satisfying for you know explanations of human war.

892
00:51:30,480 --> 00:51:35,520
It's not always clear, especially like in human conflict where you can have these long,

893
00:51:35,680 --> 00:51:38,640
long periods of just like back and forth, tit for tat.

894
00:51:38,720 --> 00:51:43,840
And we don't have a lot of really good records of say one, you know, mobile

895
00:51:43,840 --> 00:51:49,470
hunter-gatherer group taking over the territory of another mobile hunter-gatherer group.

896
00:51:49,550 --> 00:51:50,990
That's sort of the hypothesis.

897
00:51:51,150 --> 00:51:56,990
But as someone who's in the literature, I I don't see as many of accounts of it as as I

898
00:51:56,990 --> 00:51:57,630
would like to.

899
00:51:57,710 --> 00:52:03,070
And instead what I typically see are just sort of like back and forth, you know, tit for

900
00:52:03,230 --> 00:52:09,160
tat rating for, you know, for long periods of time without, you know, concrete

901
00:52:09,160 --> 00:52:15,000
access to like we have taken over this land, and now over 10 years, you know, we're gonna

902
00:52:15,000 --> 00:52:16,600
have higher reproductive systems.

903
00:52:16,760 --> 00:52:17,400
Oh, I see.

904
00:52:17,480 --> 00:52:17,720
Okay.

905
00:52:17,880 --> 00:52:23,240
You know, so um so does that mean so like because typically like war, as like I think a lot

906
00:52:23,240 --> 00:52:26,760
of people, I mean, like in Luke, I just want to say like we went to a conference many years

907
00:52:26,760 --> 00:52:31,570
ago about the evolution of war and your pictures, you know, it was like, wow, this Luke is

908
00:52:31,570 --> 00:52:32,130
very brave.

909
00:52:32,210 --> 00:52:37,250
Like there's people with AK 47s or Krishnikovs like running around shooting them.

910
00:52:37,410 --> 00:52:42,130
Like, but it it's uh it's in this context of there's sort of two versions.

911
00:52:42,210 --> 00:52:43,730
One is the monkeys thing, right?

912
00:52:43,810 --> 00:52:48,290
Where it's sort of lots of group lot of people together and it's in this asymmetric war of

913
00:52:48,290 --> 00:52:53,010
attrition or it's just sort of sussing out who's who which side will win.

914
00:52:53,090 --> 00:52:58,980
And even a lot of like mechanized war, you know, like the the Great Wars, even, a lot of

915
00:52:58,980 --> 00:52:59,940
it was that, right?

916
00:53:00,020 --> 00:53:02,100
It was just sort of for territory.

917
00:53:02,740 --> 00:53:07,540
But but it sounds like what you're saying is that that's not really the mu the model you're

918
00:53:07,540 --> 00:53:08,020
seeing.

919
00:53:08,260 --> 00:53:13,540
Um I would say I don't think that they're great models for thinking about the evolution of

920
00:53:13,540 --> 00:53:15,540
war in the human species.

921
00:53:15,700 --> 00:53:21,370
You know, even monkeys, it shows that there can be a different path to coalitionary

922
00:53:21,370 --> 00:53:25,450
killing, but where you think about just like, you know, small parties operating.

923
00:53:25,610 --> 00:53:30,170
So if you just survey hunter-gatherer relationships, you know, sort of as close to

924
00:53:30,170 --> 00:53:35,290
pre-contact as you can get, you find the most potter common pattern of intergroup killing

925
00:53:35,290 --> 00:53:39,460
is what we're describing, the raid, which is somewhat the chimpanzee patrol, you know,

926
00:53:39,620 --> 00:53:43,860
small group of individuals goes out at less at low cost to themselves.

927
00:53:44,100 --> 00:53:48,900
So I take that as sort of the baseline thing that we're trying to understand.

928
00:53:48,980 --> 00:53:51,620
And then culture and humans can put it in all different types of ways.

929
00:53:51,700 --> 00:53:55,540
Among the Nangatom, there are things like battles, among the Turkana, things like battles,

930
00:53:55,620 --> 00:54:00,430
but I don't think that those are the real sort of like the window into our evolution.

931
00:54:00,590 --> 00:54:05,470
I think those are the product of new social technologies which allow us to have larger

932
00:54:05,470 --> 00:54:11,150
population densities, uh more explicit or more uh established

933
00:54:11,150 --> 00:54:16,910
methods of incentivizing individuals, um, you know, either through rewards or

934
00:54:16,910 --> 00:54:17,710
coercion.

935
00:54:17,950 --> 00:54:21,630
But if we're trying to understand the evolution of our species, I think I think what we

936
00:54:21,630 --> 00:54:24,600
really have to do is understand the small, the pattern of small raids.

937
00:54:24,920 --> 00:54:25,160
Right.

938
00:54:25,240 --> 00:54:29,880
Like the the the Civil War soldier who does who just walks through the field getting shot

939
00:54:29,880 --> 00:54:35,160
at because the officer behind him will shoot him if he does is that that's not a good lit

940
00:54:35,400 --> 00:54:39,240
that's not a good like intuition pump for how people ordinarily behave in common.

941
00:54:39,640 --> 00:54:43,080
No, and no one of the biggest things when I when I talk on the evolution war, everybody

942
00:54:43,080 --> 00:54:48,280
thinks as rightfully so, you imagine what we think of as war, you know, hierarchies and

943
00:54:48,280 --> 00:54:53,550
formless and and coordination and some larger strategy, but there often no strategy.

944
00:54:53,630 --> 00:54:59,230
The strategy is there's tactics to that particular day, like surround the village, kill

945
00:54:59,230 --> 00:55:01,070
everybody, shoot them like dogs.

946
00:55:01,230 --> 00:55:04,270
There's no overarching strategy at all.

947
00:55:04,430 --> 00:55:07,950
Like, okay, you know, we're gradually going to beat them back in this area, and then

948
00:55:07,950 --> 00:55:11,150
they're gonna migrate here, and we're gonna have guys from that side come over.

949
00:55:11,230 --> 00:55:16,420
There's there's nothing really that I've ever personally seen like that, or really an

950
00:55:16,580 --> 00:55:20,340
ethnography of decentralized small-scale society.

951
00:55:20,420 --> 00:55:22,500
So like below the level of a chiefdom.

952
00:55:22,660 --> 00:55:22,900
Yeah.

953
00:55:23,220 --> 00:55:27,620
So once societies start getting sort of formal leaders, you know, they start transitioning

954
00:55:27,620 --> 00:55:32,980
to be a chiefdom, you do see, you know, things that like proto-militaries come up, and that

955
00:55:32,980 --> 00:55:36,260
resembles modern conflict or contemporary conflict much more.

956
00:55:36,970 --> 00:55:41,050
So a lot of Hollywoodification, maybe is like uh wait, I don't know.

957
00:55:41,130 --> 00:55:45,290
When you talk to people and you study war, do people have like weird thoughts about how it

958
00:55:45,290 --> 00:55:45,530
works?

959
00:55:45,610 --> 00:55:50,650
Or well often they're really surprised when they they I when I tell them they have AK 47s

960
00:55:50,890 --> 00:55:54,890
because I think that is things like, oh, they're gonna have spears and you know bows and

961
00:55:54,890 --> 00:56:00,740
arrows and you know in you know t in the twenty first century that's that's really

962
00:56:01,060 --> 00:56:06,180
very very rare but and then so there's a question I often faces how much did that sort of

963
00:56:06,180 --> 00:56:11,860
change the the patterns of like indigenous war and it um

964
00:56:12,500 --> 00:56:15,620
it's sort of unresolvable because we don't have enough data.

965
00:56:15,780 --> 00:56:21,670
The earliest accounts show you know similar small scale raids that you have now, sort

966
00:56:21,670 --> 00:56:23,990
of similar large scale battles.

967
00:56:24,070 --> 00:56:29,350
And by large scale, they're not large compared to us, but they're large for the level of

968
00:56:29,350 --> 00:56:31,270
social organization and population size.

969
00:56:31,350 --> 00:56:35,910
So they may involve two to three hundred people on the side coming together on a given day

970
00:56:35,990 --> 00:56:39,030
and just sort of attacking by overwhelming force.

971
00:56:39,190 --> 00:56:45,060
But if anything, I think in this part of the world, it's made more the small scale raids

972
00:56:45,060 --> 00:56:49,860
probably more common and more dangerous than they used to be, in the sense that like four

973
00:56:49,860 --> 00:56:55,780
guys can go out with you know four AK forty sevens and not be nearly as afraid as

974
00:56:55,780 --> 00:56:57,860
like four guys with four spears.

975
00:56:58,180 --> 00:56:58,740
Right, right.

976
00:56:59,060 --> 00:57:04,450
You know, if the goal is just to find a lone individual in the bush and shoot the kill.

977
00:57:04,850 --> 00:57:05,970
Yeah, you don't have to get as close.

978
00:57:06,050 --> 00:57:07,170
You don't have to, you don't risk.

979
00:57:07,250 --> 00:57:07,490
Yeah.

980
00:57:07,650 --> 00:57:12,690
I did did I hear you say too that also cell phones maybe even have more of a greater effect

981
00:57:12,690 --> 00:57:14,130
than than the weapons.

982
00:57:14,530 --> 00:57:15,010
Now, yeah.

983
00:57:15,090 --> 00:57:19,890
So cell phones are now becoming, you know, common all over the globe.

984
00:57:19,970 --> 00:57:22,210
And I mean they're both good for conflict resolution.

985
00:57:22,290 --> 00:57:23,410
Now they're they're used.

986
00:57:23,490 --> 00:57:28,290
So you'll, you know, NGOs and governments everywhere will put like conflict monitors who

987
00:57:28,290 --> 00:57:32,760
will call in, like we see the, you know, we see them there slaughtering bulls, which is

988
00:57:32,760 --> 00:57:36,040
often something that pastoralists would do before when they're trying to motivate young men

989
00:57:36,040 --> 00:57:36,680
to go to a raid.

990
00:57:36,760 --> 00:57:41,720
They may kill a couple of bulls and like, oh, we see them slaughtering bulls like red bulls

991
00:57:41,800 --> 00:57:42,200
or something.

992
00:57:42,360 --> 00:57:47,000
You know, a bull that's like uh ritualistically associated with going to raid.

993
00:57:47,080 --> 00:57:52,190
So they may put out and call other groups, you know, like have everybody be on heightened

994
00:57:52,190 --> 00:57:56,190
alert, have them sleep in the village, you know, don't have people out in small herding

995
00:57:56,190 --> 00:57:56,670
parties.

996
00:57:56,750 --> 00:58:00,190
Um, but then also reportedly, this isn't the case in the Nangatom at all.

997
00:58:00,270 --> 00:58:05,230
But so I've heard about, you know, in in Kenya, you know, using it for the same, using it

998
00:58:05,230 --> 00:58:09,630
to share information about, say, where herds are that then you could rage.

999
00:58:09,710 --> 00:58:13,310
So when people are mobile and you're from one group, let's say you're from the Nangatom and

1000
00:58:13,310 --> 00:58:17,100
you want to raid the Turkana, You don't really know necessarily where the villages are

1001
00:58:17,260 --> 00:58:20,620
because people move around or where the herds are because they're mobile.

1002
00:58:20,860 --> 00:58:22,140
So you'll send out scouts.

1003
00:58:22,300 --> 00:58:26,700
Big raiding parties are often preceded with scouts who will go out for several days, sort

1004
00:58:26,700 --> 00:58:30,620
of living off the land and come back and be like, okay, over by these mountains, you know,

1005
00:58:30,700 --> 00:58:32,380
I found fresh poop and some villages.

1006
00:58:32,620 --> 00:58:33,900
They're probably going to be over there.

1007
00:58:34,140 --> 00:58:38,380
But um, if you can do that then with cell phones, it's even more efficacious.

1008
00:58:38,770 --> 00:58:38,850
Right.

1009
00:58:39,010 --> 00:58:40,930
So cell phones are just coordination devices.

1010
00:58:41,090 --> 00:58:43,410
So either for peace or or conflict.

1011
00:58:44,530 --> 00:58:45,250
Yeah, exactly.

1012
00:58:45,410 --> 00:58:45,810
Yeah.

1013
00:58:46,290 --> 00:58:46,930
Interesting.

1014
00:58:47,650 --> 00:58:52,690
So it seems like there's a pretty big disconnect between, you know, the types of intergroup

1015
00:58:52,690 --> 00:58:57,410
violence that say the imbalance of power hypothesis would explain, and the types of

1016
00:58:57,410 --> 00:59:02,530
large-scale warfare that we see in the historical record where like, you know, France and

1017
00:59:02,530 --> 00:59:05,090
England will go to war and they'll have huge armies.

1018
00:59:05,170 --> 00:59:10,280
And that's very different from the types of small-scale raids that you might see in the

1019
00:59:10,280 --> 00:59:16,200
Turkana, where like a group of male young men will try to gang up on a on a smaller number

1020
00:59:16,200 --> 00:59:18,440
of people from another village.

1021
00:59:19,160 --> 00:59:24,520
So we have that disconnect between presumably what what the evolved psychology is is

1022
00:59:24,520 --> 00:59:30,450
designed for, which is, you know, uh low cost, low-risk, you know, uh uh raids

1023
00:59:30,610 --> 00:59:32,210
where the benefit is really high.

1024
00:59:32,370 --> 00:59:36,130
And then you have this totally different thing that happens once you get agriculture and

1025
00:59:36,130 --> 00:59:40,210
civilization and armies and kings and and what have you.

1026
00:59:40,450 --> 00:59:46,370
Um is there a similar part of that analogy with with regard to

1027
00:59:46,370 --> 00:59:46,690
peace?

1028
00:59:46,850 --> 00:59:52,280
So, in the same way that we have you know large-scale armies um and and civilizations and

1029
00:59:52,280 --> 00:59:52,680
kings.

1030
00:59:52,840 --> 00:59:57,080
Do we we we also have large scale you know peace treaties and uh international

1031
00:59:57,400 --> 01:00:00,680
organizations that try to regulate interstate conflict.

1032
01:00:00,840 --> 01:00:06,200
So we have that you know large scale element of of of peace and negotiation and diplomacy.

1033
01:00:06,360 --> 01:00:11,320
Do is there a small scale version of that uh as well that's that's analogous to the small

1034
01:00:11,400 --> 01:00:12,920
scale rating that we see?

1035
01:00:13,400 --> 01:00:15,160
Oh yeah that's a that's a great question.

1036
01:00:15,240 --> 01:00:16,120
I love that question.

1037
01:00:16,360 --> 01:00:21,950
Um yeah so just to sort of recapitulate, first I agree with you that the sort of like

1038
01:00:21,950 --> 01:00:27,950
centralized conflict is really sort of discontinuous with the sort of small-scale

1039
01:00:27,950 --> 01:00:29,470
evolutionary raids.

1040
01:00:29,550 --> 01:00:33,710
It uses some of the same psychological mechanisms, but it also uses things that are like

1041
01:00:33,710 --> 01:00:38,590
really pretty novel, the ability of second lieutenants to stand at the back of a line and

1042
01:00:38,750 --> 01:00:40,910
shoot would-be deserters.

1043
01:00:41,180 --> 01:00:46,460
Um, but then with then with peace, do you have that same sort of

1044
01:00:46,460 --> 01:00:47,580
discontinuity?

1045
01:00:47,900 --> 01:00:53,020
And I I think actually less so, because I think peace is I sort of conceptualize it, where

1046
01:00:53,020 --> 01:00:58,380
relationships are not negotiated individually, but sort of at the at the group level.

1047
01:00:58,540 --> 01:01:02,060
I don't have to like sort of tentatively hang around with you and figure out if you're

1048
01:01:02,060 --> 01:01:04,060
gonna try to murder me in my sleep.

1049
01:01:04,300 --> 01:01:08,060
I think they're really pretty novel in our ep species history.

1050
01:01:08,140 --> 01:01:13,690
I think they depended on us first culturally evolving technologies that

1051
01:01:13,690 --> 01:01:19,690
allow us to like enforce norms at the group level and then coordinate our behavior

1052
01:01:19,770 --> 01:01:24,650
and make those norms known both within and between and between groups.

1053
01:01:24,810 --> 01:01:30,010
So some of those things are, and then once you do have peace, the ability to try to make it

1054
01:01:30,090 --> 01:01:32,170
so nobody from your side breaks the peace.

1055
01:01:32,250 --> 01:01:37,290
And I just recently read The Guns of August, like a really famous sort of popular book

1056
01:01:37,290 --> 01:01:42,540
about World War I, and I was struck by one of the things the author said is that right

1057
01:01:42,540 --> 01:01:48,460
before the German invasion of Belgium and then France, France pulled its armies like

1058
01:01:48,460 --> 01:01:53,180
10 miles back, all their soldiers 10 miles back from the border because they were so

1059
01:01:53,180 --> 01:01:58,700
concerned that one of their soldiers didn't sort of like strike the blow that set it off.

1060
01:01:58,860 --> 01:02:02,620
That they wanted to be able to say it wasn't us, it was Germany.

1061
01:02:03,020 --> 01:02:07,020
And that struck me is the reason it struck me is like, wow, that's a real sort of challenge

1062
01:02:07,020 --> 01:02:10,290
that every society that wants to have peace has.

1063
01:02:10,450 --> 01:02:14,610
It's like, you know, let's say we're, you know, three, you know, three males among the

1064
01:02:14,610 --> 01:02:19,490
Nangatom or hunter-gatherers, and like, you know, I just want to live a good life, have my

1065
01:02:19,490 --> 01:02:19,890
family.

1066
01:02:20,210 --> 01:02:24,690
David P uh pins off wants to live a good, I realize you both have the same initial aspect.

1067
01:02:24,850 --> 01:02:26,130
Yeah, we go, David, yeah.

1068
01:02:26,370 --> 01:02:29,650
Also wants to live a good life and, you know, just raise his family.

1069
01:02:29,810 --> 01:02:34,370
But then, you know, Santa Barbara Dave, you know, he's the sort of like, you know, Ferris

1070
01:02:34,610 --> 01:02:40,020
one who's just like unsatisfied with his lot in life, what's to stop him from going out,

1071
01:02:40,420 --> 01:02:41,940
raiding the other group?

1072
01:02:42,180 --> 01:02:46,260
He doesn't even have to tell anybody but his closest friends from doing it, and then

1073
01:02:46,260 --> 01:02:50,500
reinitiating us in this sort of cycle of violence.

1074
01:02:50,580 --> 01:02:54,580
You know, so the other group that's got raided isn't going to know, oh, it's just David P.

1075
01:02:54,980 --> 01:02:57,700
He's, you know, sort of um, you know, a misanthrope.

1076
01:02:57,780 --> 01:03:00,770
He what he's doing doesn't really reflect anybody on that.

1077
01:03:00,930 --> 01:03:03,570
All they see is like, hey, we had a state of peace and we got rated.

1078
01:03:04,050 --> 01:03:09,890
So the the central challenge for any society that's gonna any human society that's

1079
01:03:09,890 --> 01:03:15,490
gonna have peace is how do we align our incentives enough so the sort of

1080
01:03:15,490 --> 01:03:20,210
psychopaths or the people with impulse disorders or the people whose costs and benefits are

1081
01:03:20,210 --> 01:03:24,720
just a little, you know, the cost and benefit calculus is either inaccurate or just doesn't

1082
01:03:24,720 --> 01:03:30,640
favor peace, how do you keep them from initiating offensive aggression, you know, at low

1083
01:03:30,640 --> 01:03:36,240
cost to themselves when they may when there may be very clear, tangible benefits.

1084
01:03:37,280 --> 01:03:42,640
So and this requires a level of centralization and cultural technologies that I think were

1085
01:03:42,720 --> 01:03:46,720
pretty rare in for most of human history.

1086
01:03:46,880 --> 01:03:52,670
So you need to be able to have norms at the group level saying, hey, this is not

1087
01:03:52,670 --> 01:03:55,790
how we act to those to people of this particular group.

1088
01:03:55,950 --> 01:03:58,670
And if we do, there's some sort of sanction for that.

1089
01:03:58,830 --> 01:04:04,190
But it's difficult to get any type of sanctions like that among most mobile hunter-gatherer

1090
01:04:04,190 --> 01:04:04,750
groups.

1091
01:04:05,470 --> 01:04:06,830
It seems like it's it's interesting.

1092
01:04:06,910 --> 01:04:12,100
It's almost uh like we need some kind of decomposition or de uh

1093
01:04:12,340 --> 01:04:18,340
homogenizing, I don't know if that's a word or not, but to dehomogenize the group such

1094
01:04:18,340 --> 01:04:24,100
that um one member of the group is not a stand-in for everyone else within that group.

1095
01:04:24,340 --> 01:04:28,180
Because if that were the case, if one psychopath from that group came and did some damage

1096
01:04:28,180 --> 01:04:32,180
or attacked us, then we would automatically infer that that person is representative of

1097
01:04:32,180 --> 01:04:35,700
everyone else in that group, and we would retaliate not against that psychopath, but

1098
01:04:35,700 --> 01:04:38,030
against the group itself as a singular entity.

1099
01:04:38,190 --> 01:04:43,310
But in order to avoid that, we need some way of decomposing the group away from this

1100
01:04:43,310 --> 01:04:47,070
monolithic concept and toward a collection of parts.

1101
01:04:47,230 --> 01:04:52,990
And we might represent the fact that this part is not a stand-in for the

1102
01:04:52,990 --> 01:04:53,310
whole.

1103
01:04:53,790 --> 01:04:57,310
Do you think that that uh way of conceptualizing group is is part of this?

1104
01:04:57,790 --> 01:05:03,780
The the decomposition isn't really something that often like happens in tribal societies,

1105
01:05:03,860 --> 01:05:08,340
you know, where you're you're, you know, any action by any part of your group, the the

1106
01:05:08,340 --> 01:05:10,740
blame falls on all of the group.

1107
01:05:10,900 --> 01:05:14,500
So the way this is often resolved is turning over the killer.

1108
01:05:14,740 --> 01:05:19,220
So uh Santa Barbara Dave, you know, turning you over for the other group to dispatch

1109
01:05:19,220 --> 01:05:24,100
justice, or what's more common is us killing uh members of our in group

1110
01:05:24,420 --> 01:05:30,410
killing the offender to show that that individual does not represent, you know, a norm,

1111
01:05:30,890 --> 01:05:35,210
that they're not representing the will of the group or the new, the new norm.

1112
01:05:35,370 --> 01:05:38,250
This is why peace is really, really difficult in tribal.

1113
01:05:38,330 --> 01:05:42,490
So it's sustained peace, not just like periods of intergroup conflict, but you know,

1114
01:05:42,650 --> 01:05:48,170
sustained, iterated, you know, durable, harmonious relationships, because it really breaks

1115
01:05:48,170 --> 01:05:48,970
down very easily.

1116
01:05:49,050 --> 01:05:54,820
And then, and further, that many, many small-scale groups have the cosmology where not just

1117
01:05:54,820 --> 01:05:59,300
like Santa Barbara Dave goes out and attacks somebody from the other group, but somebody

1118
01:05:59,300 --> 01:06:04,500
from the other group falls ill after Dave having made eye contact with them, and that you

1119
01:06:04,500 --> 01:06:10,180
know it's it's it's war by mystical means or by witchcraft, you know,

1120
01:06:10,420 --> 01:06:15,060
or just you know, somebody's visiting from the other group Dave's village and falls sick

1121
01:06:15,060 --> 01:06:16,580
and gets malaria and dies.

1122
01:06:16,900 --> 01:06:22,770
How do you reassure the other group that it wasn't due to um you know it

1123
01:06:22,770 --> 01:06:27,650
wasn't due to malevolent behavior by day and this is something like in my own field work I

1124
01:06:27,650 --> 01:06:33,170
saw I just saw a ton like a Nangatom guy was like up trading in Mercy and I guess he was

1125
01:06:33,170 --> 01:06:38,290
old Mercy's one of the rival groups uh they long hostilities with and he died and there was

1126
01:06:38,290 --> 01:06:42,770
just endless discussions over the days over like trying to figure out what the cause of

1127
01:06:42,770 --> 01:06:45,970
death was and whether there would be retaliation or not.

1128
01:06:46,130 --> 01:06:51,680
And and similarly um in the one sort of market town in Nangatam at that time, Kangaton,

1129
01:06:51,760 --> 01:06:57,360
where there was a small health clinic, a a woman from Turkana who had family in Nangatom.

1130
01:06:57,440 --> 01:07:01,520
You know, she some of her family married came in and she was dying of HIV, came to the

1131
01:07:01,520 --> 01:07:05,520
clinic to get treatment, and she ended up dying when she was there.

1132
01:07:05,680 --> 01:07:08,320
I was like helping take her to the clinic and stuff.

1133
01:07:08,480 --> 01:07:10,480
And there was just massive war.

1134
01:07:10,720 --> 01:07:14,810
Like in the town, there was going to be retaliation by Kenya.

1135
01:07:14,890 --> 01:07:19,050
So like I think the government, like the local government, sends somebody over to the you

1136
01:07:19,050 --> 01:07:23,530
know to the Kenya side to be like, you know, she died at the clinic of, you know, you know,

1137
01:07:23,770 --> 01:07:27,050
dehydration or whatever at the clinic, it wasn't the fairest.

1138
01:07:27,130 --> 01:07:33,050
So these are real, real problems that limit the ability of of decentralized

1139
01:07:33,050 --> 01:07:34,410
societies to make peace.

1140
01:07:34,900 --> 01:07:39,540
Is that is that because so, David, what was the verb you used to decompose?

1141
01:07:39,940 --> 01:07:40,820
De dehomogenize.

1142
01:07:41,060 --> 01:07:41,780
Dehomogenize.

1143
01:07:41,860 --> 01:07:42,180
I like that.

1144
01:07:42,260 --> 01:07:42,420
Yeah.

1145
01:07:42,580 --> 01:07:44,660
So to dehomogenize the groups.

1146
01:07:44,740 --> 01:07:46,740
Luca, do you have an idea of why that is?

1147
01:07:46,900 --> 01:07:51,140
So I mean, you know, if you took like modern day France or Germany, if you like lived in

1148
01:07:51,140 --> 01:07:56,660
France and your relative died in Germany currently, you know, you wouldn't think, well, the

1149
01:07:56,820 --> 01:08:01,860
Germany killed my French relative and I have to retaliate against Germany currently, right?

1150
01:08:01,940 --> 01:08:02,980
You wouldn't think that.

1151
01:08:03,810 --> 01:08:05,490
you you might have 200 years ago.

1152
01:08:06,050 --> 01:08:07,330
Yeah, but do we have a psychology?

1153
01:08:07,490 --> 01:08:10,370
I mean, you would know both of you would know better because you're psychologists, but

1154
01:08:10,370 --> 01:08:14,930
don't we have a psychology where we sort of want to blame every individual of a group, you

1155
01:08:14,930 --> 01:08:17,570
know, attribute them some essence and blame them.

1156
01:08:17,730 --> 01:08:22,530
I feel like this is sort of a fundamental thing feature of human psychology.

1157
01:08:23,250 --> 01:08:23,970
It it is.

1158
01:08:24,050 --> 01:08:28,800
I mean my my answer to that would be though that that sort of comes back then to what group

1159
01:08:28,880 --> 01:08:29,200
though?

1160
01:08:29,360 --> 01:08:35,360
And this is for me at least the thing that really breaks all of this open is our ability to

1161
01:08:35,360 --> 01:08:37,520
generate new group identities.

1162
01:08:37,760 --> 01:08:38,000
Yeah.

1163
01:08:38,240 --> 01:08:38,400
Right.

1164
01:08:38,480 --> 01:08:43,280
Like if you're I mean, and this is kind of what I was wondering is like if you're stuck,

1165
01:08:43,360 --> 01:08:48,400
like a good analogy would be like we're in like battleships and we're like really stuck in

1166
01:08:48,400 --> 01:08:48,640
them.

1167
01:08:48,800 --> 01:08:51,360
We can't switch back and forth between them.

1168
01:08:51,520 --> 01:08:56,090
And we can't even really like individuate the people within.

1169
01:08:56,330 --> 01:09:01,850
So if, like, you know, if a if a missile comes over to us, you know, it's sort of like

1170
01:09:02,010 --> 01:09:07,930
there's no rational reason for me to individuate who did that because I can't

1171
01:09:07,930 --> 01:09:09,850
do anything about it, you know.

1172
01:09:10,250 --> 01:09:16,170
Um, and that's a very different situation than uh if I'm in a room

1173
01:09:16,170 --> 01:09:21,560
full of people and we just have different color t shirts on, and I'm a red t-shirted

1174
01:09:21,640 --> 01:09:27,560
person, somebody's got a blue shirt on, and another red-shirted person gets punched

1175
01:09:27,560 --> 01:09:29,080
by a blue-shirt person.

1176
01:09:29,240 --> 01:09:35,080
We can choose like either it's reds versus blues, or we can sit down that red or that blue

1177
01:09:35,240 --> 01:09:37,080
and not have a brawl, right?

1178
01:09:37,400 --> 01:09:43,150
Because we're all sort of spatially together and we don't want to have to

1179
01:09:43,150 --> 01:09:46,190
deal with like the escalation of conflict.

1180
01:09:46,270 --> 01:09:50,910
But in the battleship condition, we really don't have a choice if we're going to respond at

1181
01:09:50,910 --> 01:09:51,070
all.

1182
01:09:51,230 --> 01:09:55,070
We're just sort of stuck because there's no chance of coordination.

1183
01:09:55,150 --> 01:10:00,990
There's no value to uh there's no possibility of coordination with the other side, right?

1184
01:10:01,070 --> 01:10:01,630
Or cooperation.

1185
01:10:01,870 --> 01:10:05,950
Yeah, I think that that's a better model for sort of decentralized tribal societies.

1186
01:10:06,030 --> 01:10:09,070
Is I mean, there is the possibility of coordination, it's just a lot harder.

1187
01:10:09,230 --> 01:10:12,240
So you really know everybody's on foot.

1188
01:10:12,400 --> 01:10:15,680
You know, you may span your side may span a five days walk.

1189
01:10:15,760 --> 01:10:20,080
So what does it actually take to even share information across your group?

1190
01:10:20,240 --> 01:10:23,200
Much less, you know, develop a norm for behavior.

1191
01:10:23,360 --> 01:10:29,280
I think it's there's there's real coordination problems in a way that we don't have in

1192
01:10:29,280 --> 01:10:31,280
in contemporary society.

1193
01:10:31,600 --> 01:10:37,510
Plus, you know it's you know, often there's really different moral norms towards

1194
01:10:37,510 --> 01:10:38,630
people outside the society.

1195
01:10:38,710 --> 01:10:44,150
You know, many, many traditional societies, sort of the moral boundaries stop at your

1196
01:10:44,150 --> 01:10:47,030
group, however your group is defined.

1197
01:10:47,110 --> 01:10:52,150
And the things that you do against members of other groups don't have the same moral

1198
01:10:52,150 --> 01:10:52,710
valence.

1199
01:10:52,790 --> 01:10:57,460
Like it's, you know, taking their property may not be called stealing in the way, you know,

1200
01:10:57,540 --> 01:11:01,780
with the word that you would use to describe it against an in-group member or killing

1201
01:11:01,780 --> 01:11:06,100
somebody, for instance, among the Nangatom during the time of field work, you know, you you

1202
01:11:06,180 --> 01:11:08,500
you know, if you killed another Nangatom, that's murder.

1203
01:11:08,660 --> 01:11:13,140
You kill a Turkana, that's you know, that's war, that's just life.

1204
01:11:13,220 --> 01:11:18,100
It's actually morally laudable in most conditions.

1205
01:11:18,580 --> 01:11:21,790
So I think I straight a little bit away from from uh your question.

1206
01:11:22,030 --> 01:11:22,510
No, no, no.

1207
01:11:22,590 --> 01:11:22,830
That's great.

1208
01:11:22,910 --> 01:11:26,430
And I mean, yeah, no, even your example of you're working in the water pit or you're

1209
01:11:26,430 --> 01:11:27,390
digging a hole, right?

1210
01:11:27,470 --> 01:11:28,510
And they're like excited.

1211
01:11:28,670 --> 01:11:32,590
I mean, that's even like I experienced that where, you know, they were talking about, oh,

1212
01:11:32,670 --> 01:11:34,590
we got this cow, that's wonderful.

1213
01:11:34,750 --> 01:11:37,070
And I was like, you guys, they're gonna retaliate again.

1214
01:11:37,150 --> 01:11:40,990
Like, you know, like and that's the different, that's the different setting on our evolved

1215
01:11:41,070 --> 01:11:41,790
psychology, right?

1216
01:11:41,870 --> 01:11:47,470
Of like, um, you and it's this thing of like this battleship metaphor where it's sort of

1217
01:11:47,470 --> 01:11:50,660
like, well, I'm never gonna interact with somebody in the out group.

1218
01:11:50,900 --> 01:11:54,020
There's no benefit to me to quelling them.

1219
01:11:54,180 --> 01:11:59,220
They're just like a resource, they're just like a fruit tree to be, you know, like there's

1220
01:11:59,220 --> 01:12:02,580
no, there's no future possibility of interaction.

1221
01:12:02,820 --> 01:12:07,860
Um Yeah, this is why I think about you know, peace is the solution to a collective action

1222
01:12:07,860 --> 01:12:12,390
problem, to a really hard collective action problem, because you you have people like young

1223
01:12:12,390 --> 01:12:15,670
men who say, Oh, there's no possibility, I have no interest in cooperating with the

1224
01:12:15,670 --> 01:12:16,310
Turkana.

1225
01:12:16,470 --> 01:12:17,990
I just want cows, I want fame.

1226
01:12:18,070 --> 01:12:23,270
I'm 16, I'm stuck watching these cows, and I want to be a famous warrior.

1227
01:12:23,430 --> 01:12:27,270
But then you have people who have really seen a lot and they realize exactly what you

1228
01:12:27,270 --> 01:12:31,030
thought is like, hey, if you did this to them, they're just gonna do it to us, and we're

1229
01:12:31,030 --> 01:12:35,980
gonna be locked into this just like cycle that's you know really difficult to break free.

1230
01:12:36,060 --> 01:12:40,780
So you have these internal tensions within society and even within the same individual.

1231
01:12:40,940 --> 01:12:42,860
Like does that person want peace or not?

1232
01:12:43,020 --> 01:12:48,140
Well it may depend on the particular time of them, you know, for them, like you know, the

1233
01:12:48,140 --> 01:12:54,060
day of the week or even potentially their mood um shaped on like shaped by

1234
01:12:54,060 --> 01:12:55,260
more recent events.

1235
01:12:55,500 --> 01:13:01,170
So society has to figure out a a way to solve these things and come to a consensus and then

1236
01:13:01,170 --> 01:13:05,650
to generate a norm and then the ability to enforce that norm, make sure everybody has

1237
01:13:05,650 --> 01:13:08,130
knowledge of the norm, including the other side.

1238
01:13:09,010 --> 01:13:10,050
So it's common knowledge.

1239
01:13:11,330 --> 01:13:11,650
Yeah.

1240
01:13:12,210 --> 01:13:14,290
And also time horizon, I would expect.

1241
01:13:14,370 --> 01:13:19,090
You know, more future-oriented members of the society might be more in favor of peace, more

1242
01:13:19,090 --> 01:13:23,000
present-oriented members of the society, like young men who are trying to impress a girl,

1243
01:13:23,160 --> 01:13:26,600
like they're they're very present-oriented and and they what want what's best for them

1244
01:13:26,600 --> 01:13:26,920
right now.

1245
01:13:27,080 --> 01:13:29,800
They're not thinking about, you know, twenty years into the future.

1246
01:13:29,960 --> 01:13:35,640
Um and so the the degree to which the the the society is is inclined to

1247
01:13:35,640 --> 01:13:40,360
conceptualize those future costs that might not happen now, but you know, in a decade or

1248
01:13:40,360 --> 01:13:44,760
two decades or three decades, that ability pr is probably also a variable, I would imagine.

1249
01:13:44,920 --> 01:13:46,050
Um yeah.

1250
01:13:46,130 --> 01:13:50,450
So you'll have like, you know, when peace is starting to to come about through being built,

1251
01:13:50,610 --> 01:13:54,690
you'll often have like prominent leaders berating the young men.

1252
01:13:54,850 --> 01:13:55,890
Don't go on a raid.

1253
01:13:56,050 --> 01:13:56,770
Absolutely not.

1254
01:13:56,930 --> 01:13:57,890
You're gonna break the peace.

1255
01:13:57,970 --> 01:13:59,010
It's gonna be horrible.

1256
01:13:59,170 --> 01:14:04,450
You'll have, you know, sort of shaman or religious or ritual specialists not bless the men.

1257
01:14:04,530 --> 01:14:08,480
You know, typically you may get a blessing before you go on a raid, you know.

1258
01:14:08,640 --> 01:14:11,040
So they they'll they'll agree at a peace meeting.

1259
01:14:11,120 --> 01:14:14,160
Let's say we're not gonna bless the young men who want to raid.

1260
01:14:14,400 --> 01:14:19,280
In some cases in the ethnography, you find, um, and I haven't seen this, I've just read it,

1261
01:14:19,440 --> 01:14:22,720
where they'll if they detect young men going on a raid.

1262
01:14:22,800 --> 01:14:26,480
So Santa Barbara Dave decides, oh, he doesn't care, he doesn't need blessings, he's still

1263
01:14:26,480 --> 01:14:27,120
gonna go to raid.

1264
01:14:27,200 --> 01:14:27,840
Sorry to pick on you, Dave.

1265
01:14:28,160 --> 01:14:28,640
No, it's great.

1266
01:14:28,720 --> 01:14:31,920
Um you know, he's gonna he's just gonna go a raid, he's gonna get his best friends, they're

1267
01:14:31,920 --> 01:14:33,490
not gonna tell anyone, they're gonna sneak off.

1268
01:14:33,570 --> 01:14:37,730
So we arrange, okay, you know, meet me down at the at the at the ocean, you know, in in

1269
01:14:37,730 --> 01:14:38,290
three hours.

1270
01:14:38,370 --> 01:14:42,610
And they they find Dave and his friends, and they actually physically beat him to get him

1271
01:14:42,610 --> 01:14:46,610
withdraw his plans of going on a raid.

1272
01:14:46,690 --> 01:14:51,570
So there can be really you know complicated social dynamics that have to be solved to you

1273
01:14:51,570 --> 01:14:55,410
know get everybody's incentives to align.

1274
01:14:55,810 --> 01:14:56,850
Yeah, interesting.

1275
01:14:57,460 --> 01:15:02,420
I wanna I wanna pick your brain about a topic that is very interesting to me, I think also

1276
01:15:02,420 --> 01:15:08,180
interesting to Dave, which is the role of uh moralization, pretext,

1277
01:15:08,500 --> 01:15:13,220
ideology, uh narrative, whatever you there are lots of words we might use for this.

1278
01:15:13,380 --> 01:15:17,620
Um you you mentioned that you know it's not seen as immoral to kill or steal from an

1279
01:15:17,620 --> 01:15:21,690
outgroup member, but it is to kill or steal from an in-group member.

1280
01:15:21,930 --> 01:15:25,930
You mentioned how sometimes intergroup conflicts are precipitated by accusations of

1281
01:15:25,930 --> 01:15:26,490
witchcraft.

1282
01:15:26,570 --> 01:15:31,370
If someone falls ill, they might blame it on, you know, sorcery from members of a rival

1283
01:15:31,370 --> 01:15:35,690
group, and that might in some cases precipitate or justify the conflict.

1284
01:15:36,170 --> 01:15:41,690
Have you thought much about the role of justification or moralization or even demonization

1285
01:15:41,690 --> 01:15:46,020
of the of the rival group as a way to coordinate intergroup violence.

1286
01:15:46,180 --> 01:15:49,860
What what is what are the role of these these ideas, these beliefs, these these narratives,

1287
01:15:49,940 --> 01:15:50,980
these pretexts?

1288
01:15:51,140 --> 01:15:55,060
Um do you think that they are they play an instrumental role, or do you think they're

1289
01:15:55,140 --> 01:15:57,060
they're more of a of a modern phenomenon?

1290
01:15:58,500 --> 01:16:01,780
So I don't think they're I don't think they're a mod modern phenomena, but I think the

1291
01:16:01,780 --> 01:16:03,460
question is whether they're causal.

1292
01:16:03,780 --> 01:16:07,140
So there's certainly, you know, dehumanization language.

1293
01:16:07,300 --> 01:16:11,860
They're, you know, they're savages, they're like animals, you know, they're horrible.

1294
01:16:12,020 --> 01:16:14,500
Remember all the time, you know, we just did the victim complex.

1295
01:16:14,610 --> 01:16:18,930
Remember all the times they did this, this, and this and this, um, you know, without

1296
01:16:18,930 --> 01:16:22,690
remembering the times you did that, that, that, and then to them.

1297
01:16:22,770 --> 01:16:27,810
You know, there's all sorts of you know, slurs that are used, just like, you know, in in

1298
01:16:27,810 --> 01:16:28,690
our society.

1299
01:16:28,850 --> 01:16:33,730
Um, so those certainly appear, you know, they certainly are very present.

1300
01:16:33,890 --> 01:16:38,050
I think there's probably something present across, you know, almost all human societies, or

1301
01:16:38,050 --> 01:16:41,810
at least small scale societies that are engaging in intergroup conflict.

1302
01:16:41,970 --> 01:16:47,080
Um, and they certainly seem to be associated with people getting aroused, with people, you

1303
01:16:47,080 --> 01:16:51,800
know, having a a feeling of, you know, that there was a grievance against them.

1304
01:16:51,960 --> 01:16:56,440
I just don't know whether they're necessary, like how much causal work they do.

1305
01:16:56,600 --> 01:17:02,040
You can certainly have high rates of lethal violence in say chimpanzees

1306
01:17:02,200 --> 01:17:03,960
without anything like that.

1307
01:17:04,280 --> 01:17:07,400
Um you know, so maybe they're sort of an epiphenomena.

1308
01:17:08,070 --> 01:17:08,790
Yeah, I don't know.

1309
01:17:09,350 --> 01:17:14,630
That would be something for the lab to like more sort of engagement experimentally.

1310
01:17:15,190 --> 01:17:15,350
Yeah.

1311
01:17:15,510 --> 01:17:21,110
I mean, I would expect my current thinking is that it it it may well play a strong causal

1312
01:17:21,110 --> 01:17:24,230
role in the sense that, you know, chimpanzees may not need it because they don't have the

1313
01:17:24,230 --> 01:17:27,830
same kind of social marketplace and reputation management that humans do.

1314
01:17:27,990 --> 01:17:33,940
And among among humans, we have very strong um social norms and moral norms to be

1315
01:17:34,260 --> 01:17:38,260
peaceful and friendly and generous with members of the group.

1316
01:17:38,420 --> 01:17:44,100
And insofar as one is bloodthirsty and vengeful toward outgroups,

1317
01:17:44,260 --> 01:17:48,420
that could license a variety of interest uh inferences about that person's character.

1318
01:17:48,820 --> 01:17:54,670
And if we're all um acting in a way that is um you know uh activating

1319
01:17:54,670 --> 01:18:00,670
those inferences in one another's, there could be reputational costs to trying

1320
01:18:00,670 --> 01:18:05,710
to mobilize outgroup aggression in the absence of any kind of moral justification or in the

1321
01:18:05,710 --> 01:18:06,990
absence of any kind of pretext.

1322
01:18:07,070 --> 01:18:13,070
And it may make it easier to coordinate uh out uh and um and

1323
01:18:13,070 --> 01:18:17,230
punish free riders and defectors from the collective action if we have a common narrative

1324
01:18:17,230 --> 01:18:20,190
that justifies the collective action versus if we don't.

1325
01:18:21,020 --> 01:18:23,100
Yeah, I mean it it sounds plausible.

1326
01:18:23,180 --> 01:18:29,180
I just don't know how much you actually need that in universes where your moral

1327
01:18:29,180 --> 01:18:32,780
boundaries really do stop at at your people.

1328
01:18:32,860 --> 01:18:38,380
I mean I just think the ethnographies are just you know replete with examples of strangers

1329
01:18:38,380 --> 01:18:42,140
being killed on site, women and children being killed.

1330
01:18:42,220 --> 01:18:47,190
You know, it it in during my field work, there was a kid in my village who was killed and

1331
01:18:47,190 --> 01:18:48,070
mostly beheaded.

1332
01:18:48,150 --> 01:18:53,750
And like I had no doubt that the other group was absolutely celebrating, just as

1333
01:18:54,390 --> 01:19:00,150
people in my group would have been doing in the same circumstances were reversed.

1334
01:19:00,390 --> 01:19:05,350
Or, you know, there was a case where, you know, a raiding party encountered a young kid of

1335
01:19:05,350 --> 01:19:07,160
the other group and they wanted to kill.

1336
01:19:07,240 --> 01:19:10,760
And there's discussion now that it's moralized, and they decided to bring him back as a

1337
01:19:10,760 --> 01:19:11,160
captive.

1338
01:19:11,240 --> 01:19:15,320
And one of them was like, you know, just so upset because it was his chance to get scars,

1339
01:19:15,400 --> 01:19:20,680
you know, honorific scars, or um it

1340
01:19:21,960 --> 01:19:25,240
I had another example I was gonna tell, but I can't remember.

1341
01:19:25,480 --> 01:19:30,830
Um, you know, like your your moral universe really does is often

1342
01:19:30,830 --> 01:19:34,030
limited to just people of your own group.

1343
01:19:34,190 --> 01:19:36,990
You know, and it's not always even that you acknowledge them as less than human.

1344
01:19:37,150 --> 01:19:38,190
You may think they're fully human.

1345
01:19:38,270 --> 01:19:38,750
You invite them.

1346
01:19:38,830 --> 01:19:42,590
So think of the treacherous feast that, you know, Shagnan writes so much about.

1347
01:19:42,670 --> 01:19:47,550
Like you recognize them as fully human, motivated by the same things you're motivated by,

1348
01:19:47,710 --> 01:19:53,070
you know, that you you want to come hang out and have a party and you know, get drunk and

1349
01:19:53,150 --> 01:19:59,060
you know, uh meet prospective mates and you know this about you know this enough about your

1350
01:19:59,300 --> 01:20:04,980
enemy that you you know you know you construct this elaborate ruse to invite them over um

1351
01:20:06,100 --> 01:20:10,100
so it sounds plausible i just don't know how much it applies in in this universe and it was

1352
01:20:10,100 --> 01:20:14,420
one of the things that sort of as an anthropologist was like the most difficult to wrap my

1353
01:20:14,420 --> 01:20:20,310
head around is that you know it I never worried about any Nangatom doing anything to me,

1354
01:20:20,390 --> 01:20:25,750
but I worried say if I wanted a guy from the Hammer, a different ethnic group who's often

1355
01:20:25,750 --> 01:20:28,470
enemies in the Nangatom to come visit me in my village.

1356
01:20:28,630 --> 01:20:28,870
Yeah.

1357
01:20:29,030 --> 01:20:31,110
You know, how to what extent would he be safe?

1358
01:20:31,270 --> 01:20:35,430
You know, and I knew okay, he'd often be totally safe when he's with me, but what about if

1359
01:20:35,430 --> 01:20:39,430
he goes out to use the bathroom, you know, and and encounters somebody who doesn't know him

1360
01:20:39,590 --> 01:20:44,900
or somebody who's just really upset at, you know, you know, and wants the

1361
01:20:44,900 --> 01:20:47,220
insignia that comes from killing somebody.

1362
01:20:47,620 --> 01:20:47,860
Yeah.

1363
01:20:48,500 --> 01:20:48,660
Yeah.

1364
01:20:48,740 --> 01:20:54,740
I mean I'm I'm wondering if if the boundedness of the moral universe

1365
01:20:54,740 --> 01:20:58,580
is um actually an example of the type of thing I'm talking about.

1366
01:20:58,660 --> 01:21:03,220
That y that actually requires work and coordination to create that boundedness.

1367
01:21:03,380 --> 01:21:08,500
And we need to uh perpetuate the idea that there is the a a distinction there that, you

1368
01:21:08,500 --> 01:21:12,510
know, uh you know, morality uh applies to our group but not to the other group.

1369
01:21:12,590 --> 01:21:16,510
Uh, and if you aggress against the outgroup, then we're not going to negatively judge you.

1370
01:21:16,590 --> 01:21:20,750
And I think there may well need to be a kind of cultural coordination about that fact

1371
01:21:20,750 --> 01:21:23,870
itself that enables um the violence to occur.

1372
01:21:23,950 --> 01:21:28,750
If if there wasn't any coordination to that effect, where there would be um doubts about

1373
01:21:28,750 --> 01:21:32,990
whether I might be doing something morally wrong by attacking a member of their group, then

1374
01:21:32,990 --> 01:21:37,620
I think that could very well destroy the ability of the group uh to engage in collective

1375
01:21:37,620 --> 01:21:37,940
action.

1376
01:21:38,100 --> 01:21:41,620
So it may be that that boundedness is itself part of the thing I'm talking about that

1377
01:21:41,620 --> 01:21:43,940
enables um the the violence to take place.

1378
01:21:44,420 --> 01:21:47,780
It may not be a given or an automatic or something that just you know automatically

1379
01:21:47,780 --> 01:21:48,100
applies.

1380
01:21:48,180 --> 01:21:52,580
It may itself require work to maintain yeah I guess what I'm trying trying to understand a

1381
01:21:52,740 --> 01:21:57,220
lost to is why do you need this extra thing to do violence?

1382
01:21:57,380 --> 01:22:03,380
Like why you know we like is the idea that we're just like innately inhibited

1383
01:22:03,380 --> 01:22:05,290
from killing others.

1384
01:22:05,450 --> 01:22:11,290
Is that uh not that we're innately inhibited, um that we're uh innately

1385
01:22:11,290 --> 01:22:15,610
inclined to draw inferences about each other's character based on their behaviors and their

1386
01:22:15,610 --> 01:22:17,050
words and deeds.

1387
01:22:17,290 --> 01:22:22,810
Um and uh wanton violence it uh may feed into those inference systems such that we're

1388
01:22:22,810 --> 01:22:26,820
inclined to judge someone who is wantonly violent as a cruel person.

1389
01:22:27,220 --> 01:22:31,940
And therefore, we're going to be less willing to partner up with that person, cooperate

1390
01:22:31,940 --> 01:22:32,420
with them.

1391
01:22:32,820 --> 01:22:35,300
We might be more afraid of that person, et cetera, et cetera.

1392
01:22:35,460 --> 01:22:39,060
So what I'm talking about is the type of inferences that we're inclined to draw about one

1393
01:22:39,060 --> 01:22:40,580
another based on their behavior.

1394
01:22:40,980 --> 01:22:46,580
And oftentimes, when we engage in a violent outgroup attack, we can't turn off that

1395
01:22:46,580 --> 01:22:47,140
machinery.

1396
01:22:47,220 --> 01:22:50,340
We're going to be making inferences about everyone who's involved in that collective

1397
01:22:50,340 --> 01:22:50,580
action.

1398
01:22:50,660 --> 01:22:53,940
We're going to be making inferences about the people who propose it, the leaders who lead

1399
01:22:53,990 --> 01:22:57,910
it, uh the people who are most bloodthirsty uh uh within it.

1400
01:22:58,070 --> 01:23:03,830
Um and the only way to uh deactivate those inferences is to replace them with a different

1401
01:23:03,830 --> 01:23:08,070
set of inferences, that instead of the person being bloodthirsty and cruel, they're brave

1402
01:23:08,230 --> 01:23:09,750
um and and valiant.

1403
01:23:09,830 --> 01:23:13,510
Uh instead of the person being exploitative toward the outgroup, they're they're helping

1404
01:23:13,510 --> 01:23:14,150
the in-group.

1405
01:23:14,390 --> 01:23:18,230
Instead of someone, you know, uh attacking an outgroup member for no reason, they're

1406
01:23:18,230 --> 01:23:21,800
retaliating against all the evil things that group did to us in the past.

1407
01:23:21,960 --> 01:23:26,680
And if we change those inferences, then it actually changes the incentives to engage in the

1408
01:23:26,680 --> 01:23:30,360
in the collective violence because not only are you getting the material benefits of say

1409
01:23:30,520 --> 01:23:34,760
cattle or or resources or territory or whatever, you're also gaining social benefits and

1410
01:23:34,760 --> 01:23:35,960
reputational benefits.

1411
01:23:36,280 --> 01:23:41,000
And those social benefits might be instrumental to to the collective action itself.

1412
01:23:41,160 --> 01:23:44,920
And without those social benefits, there might not be enough of an impetus to engage in it.

1413
01:23:45,000 --> 01:23:47,000
And at least that that's that's how I'm I'm currently thinking of it.

1414
01:23:47,240 --> 01:23:49,800
I might be wrong, but I think there there might be something to it.

1415
01:23:50,190 --> 01:23:50,430
Yeah.

1416
01:23:50,750 --> 01:23:52,030
Can I mediate this?

1417
01:23:52,110 --> 01:23:53,870
Cause I think I agree with both of you.

1418
01:23:54,430 --> 01:23:55,630
Um, and I think so.

1419
01:23:55,710 --> 01:23:56,670
Let me try to okay.

1420
01:23:56,830 --> 01:24:01,390
So I think for Luke, Luke, and both of you tell me if I'm wrong.

1421
01:24:01,470 --> 01:24:06,350
So I think Luke, Luke is coming in this from the perspective of like, if you look across

1422
01:24:06,350 --> 01:24:12,340
the animal kingdom, basically, like conflict, you know, to be just kind of glib about it,

1423
01:24:12,420 --> 01:24:13,540
is everywhere.

1424
01:24:13,780 --> 01:24:18,820
And as long as you're not hurting me, David, if you hurt some other guy that I'm not really

1425
01:24:18,820 --> 01:24:24,660
interested in and doesn't, isn't my best friend, and especially if I don't even

1426
01:24:24,660 --> 01:24:27,940
know him, like more power to you, whatever, right?

1427
01:24:28,420 --> 01:24:34,310
Like, so as soon as there's sort of like any uh anonymity, and we're not a super

1428
01:24:34,310 --> 01:24:37,190
cooperative species, then like whatever, yeah, go for it.

1429
01:24:37,350 --> 01:24:38,070
He's a resource.

1430
01:24:38,150 --> 01:24:40,150
And if you're in you're a cooperator with me.

1431
01:24:40,230 --> 01:24:43,910
So like I don't care if you're belligerent, more or less, right?

1432
01:24:44,230 --> 01:24:49,590
And I think from Luke's perspective, then thinking about uh this

1433
01:24:49,590 --> 01:24:55,430
scaled up is that if we have sort of these pockets of coordination or cooperation where

1434
01:24:55,430 --> 01:25:00,320
we're sort of all in these ships or these small scale social worlds, it's really not

1435
01:25:00,320 --> 01:25:06,320
surprising that, like, where the boundaries of this coordination exist, then

1436
01:25:06,800 --> 01:25:12,480
any member outside this group is just sort of not seen as in the moral sphere, right?

1437
01:25:12,560 --> 01:25:14,400
Like just as Luke's talking about.

1438
01:25:14,640 --> 01:25:19,200
Now, and so what you need to explain then is how do you get out of that?

1439
01:25:19,360 --> 01:25:24,640
Now, David, what I think you're explaining, I completely also agree with, is that

1440
01:25:24,960 --> 01:25:30,430
once you already take the perspective of uh human

1441
01:25:30,430 --> 01:25:36,270
psychology that's already engaged in the fact that you're already using that

1442
01:25:36,270 --> 01:25:42,270
cultural technology, and there are people who are saying, Look, uh, if we do

1443
01:25:42,270 --> 01:25:45,630
take the cows, they're gonna retaliate.

1444
01:25:45,870 --> 01:25:51,760
So let's have a conversation about uh what what group identity we should all

1445
01:25:51,760 --> 01:25:54,400
agree with or whether we should be belligerent.

1446
01:25:54,560 --> 01:26:00,560
And especially like me as a human being who is grown up in a cultural milieu where I'm like

1447
01:26:00,560 --> 01:26:04,560
lucky enough and privileged enough to be like the whole world is the cooperative unit,

1448
01:26:04,720 --> 01:26:04,960
right?

1449
01:26:05,200 --> 01:26:10,960
Like, so I totally get the intuition that like seeing somebody be belligerent is bad

1450
01:26:11,040 --> 01:26:13,440
and like it's really short-sighted.

1451
01:26:13,890 --> 01:26:18,290
And I and I even felt that when Luke was saying that example about like the cow, right?

1452
01:26:18,370 --> 01:26:21,090
And people celebrating and praising the belligerent.

1453
01:26:21,330 --> 01:26:24,130
But I think that, and I agree with that 100%.

1454
01:26:24,690 --> 01:26:27,490
And I think that is a true readout of the evolved psychology.

1455
01:26:27,570 --> 01:26:33,010
But I I would think that Luke would say that's a readout of the evolved psychology that's

1456
01:26:33,010 --> 01:26:38,690
gone through this experience of the inputs

1457
01:26:38,850 --> 01:26:44,820
of we're gonna talk about the moral boundary being more malleable

1458
01:26:45,140 --> 01:26:50,980
and being larger, such that we're gonna sort of like have a higher prior that any kind of

1459
01:26:50,980 --> 01:26:53,780
belligerence is sort of frowned upon.

1460
01:26:54,260 --> 01:26:56,500
Do you guys how do you guys feel about that?

1461
01:26:58,660 --> 01:27:00,820
Yeah, I think that's that's a good way of putting it.

1462
01:27:00,900 --> 01:27:05,610
I mean, let me backtrack a little bit and maybe try to put forward a more a weaker version

1463
01:27:05,610 --> 01:27:10,490
of the thesis, which is that it may be that this that you only see this um sort of thing in

1464
01:27:10,490 --> 01:27:16,250
in modern social environments where uh the necessity of pretexts and

1465
01:27:16,250 --> 01:27:22,250
ideologies and moralistic narratives is much higher in large anonymous

1466
01:27:23,060 --> 01:27:27,060
um uh highly uh you know sedentary societies.

1467
01:27:27,220 --> 01:27:32,740
Uh and I'm I'm thinking of the work of Joshua Jackson showing that um we're more inclined

1468
01:27:32,740 --> 01:27:37,300
to draw uh a sweeping variety of inferences about someone's character based on a single

1469
01:27:37,300 --> 01:27:38,420
action that they perform.

1470
01:27:38,580 --> 01:27:42,740
Um I forget what what the term he uses for this, but we're more we're uh we basically

1471
01:27:44,550 --> 01:27:46,390
view morality as like a singular dimension.

1472
01:27:46,470 --> 01:27:49,190
And if you do one bad thing, then you're bad across the board.

1473
01:27:49,350 --> 01:27:53,350
You know, if you happen to lie, then you're also probably a bad spouse, you're also

1474
01:27:53,350 --> 01:27:58,150
probably a bad parent, you're a bad friend, uh and and and we we just view you as a bad

1475
01:27:58,150 --> 01:27:58,870
person in general.

1476
01:27:59,030 --> 01:28:03,270
Whereas you don't see this kind of sweeping uh inference being made in small-scale

1477
01:28:03,270 --> 01:28:06,150
societies where, yeah, maybe you lied this one time or maybe you were mean to this one

1478
01:28:06,150 --> 01:28:08,470
person, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person across the board.

1479
01:28:08,640 --> 01:28:13,520
Uh and his argument is that because we have such huge social networks and the option the

1480
01:28:13,520 --> 01:28:17,600
social options available to us are much larger, we're sort of forced to make these uh these

1481
01:28:17,600 --> 01:28:20,080
sweeping inferences as a kind of heuristic.

1482
01:28:20,160 --> 01:28:23,680
Um, in the same way that if we're you know, you know, uh bewildered in a in a in a shopping

1483
01:28:23,680 --> 01:28:27,520
market full of different products, we don't have time to you know individually inspect

1484
01:28:27,520 --> 01:28:29,600
every individual product and look at all the features.

1485
01:28:29,680 --> 01:28:32,480
We just make inference, oh, I like this brand, I don't like this brand, it's generally a

1486
01:28:32,480 --> 01:28:32,910
good brand.

1487
01:28:32,990 --> 01:28:34,190
I generally don't like this.

1488
01:28:34,350 --> 01:28:35,710
We do the same thing socially.

1489
01:28:35,870 --> 01:28:37,310
We this is just a generally bad person.

1490
01:28:37,550 --> 01:28:40,990
I don't really pay a lot of costs for just excluding that person because I have so many

1491
01:28:40,990 --> 01:28:42,750
other social options in my universe.

1492
01:28:42,990 --> 01:28:46,670
And so it might be because we're we're so inclined to make these promiscuous social

1493
01:28:46,670 --> 01:28:51,310
inferences across people in the modern world with these large social networks that um

1494
01:28:51,790 --> 01:28:56,670
proposing or engaging in outgroup violence uh is more likely to result in reputational

1495
01:28:56,670 --> 01:29:01,000
damage uh in in the modern world than it might have in in a in a small-scale society.

1496
01:29:01,080 --> 01:29:06,120
So it so I I'm willing to entertain the hypothesis that maybe this this sort of phenomenon

1497
01:29:06,120 --> 01:29:08,920
is is unique to modern social environments.

1498
01:29:09,160 --> 01:29:12,360
But um but yeah that that that's sort of how I'm thinking of it.

1499
01:29:12,440 --> 01:29:14,360
I'm curious what what you think, Luke.

1500
01:29:14,760 --> 01:29:18,760
Yeah that that sounds that sounds like something that makes a a lot of sense to me.

1501
01:29:19,000 --> 01:29:23,400
I mean for one, as an anthropologist, the lesson that was given to me you can never make an

1502
01:29:23,400 --> 01:29:24,600
enemy no matter what.

1503
01:29:24,760 --> 01:29:29,730
And now I realize like in small scale societies you can never like burn a bridge or fully

1504
01:29:29,730 --> 01:29:33,970
extract yourself from a relationship because the webs of interdependence are just so deep.

1505
01:29:34,130 --> 01:29:37,650
Like you, even if somebody, I mean, somebody may be recognized as a psychopath.

1506
01:29:37,890 --> 01:29:42,930
Somebody goes like crazy far in war and kills a whole bunch of people or kills cows, for

1507
01:29:42,930 --> 01:29:47,730
instance, or something they recognize like that dude is a psychopath, but it doesn't mean

1508
01:29:47,730 --> 01:29:50,770
it's it's moralized in the same way.

1509
01:29:50,850 --> 01:29:55,160
But you may recognize, like, oh, we don't want to listen to that guy when our group is

1510
01:29:55,160 --> 01:29:59,720
trying to decide what we should do in war, whether we should retaliate with a battle or

1511
01:29:59,720 --> 01:30:01,880
whether we should migrate somewhere else.

1512
01:30:03,720 --> 01:30:08,120
You know, but also, yeah, then I was gonna say that the time where I think it really might

1513
01:30:08,120 --> 01:30:12,440
become a little bit more moralized is when there is peace with another group.

1514
01:30:12,680 --> 01:30:17,430
And you can fully expect that if you go kill somebody else, you know, so there's been a

1515
01:30:17,430 --> 01:30:18,710
peace meeting and an agreement.

1516
01:30:18,790 --> 01:30:22,390
You know, the two parties have come together, they've broken spears, they've eaten

1517
01:30:22,390 --> 01:30:22,710
together.

1518
01:30:22,790 --> 01:30:26,790
It's common knowledge, you know, which essentially this resets the prisoner's dilemma.

1519
01:30:26,950 --> 01:30:28,470
So it's common knowledge.

1520
01:30:28,710 --> 01:30:33,670
Then and you go and kill somebody, you're that's probably going to be moralized, not

1521
01:30:33,670 --> 01:30:38,870
necessarily because it's bad or to kill that person, but it's bad because it broke the

1522
01:30:38,870 --> 01:30:39,270
peace.

1523
01:30:39,510 --> 01:30:39,910
Right.

1524
01:30:40,440 --> 01:30:45,960
Can I um so let me let me see if I can define peace as you've defined it to just make it

1525
01:30:45,960 --> 01:30:46,440
explicit.

1526
01:30:46,520 --> 01:30:51,560
So what I've heard you say basically it's peace is preempting like a acute

1527
01:30:51,880 --> 01:30:57,160
predatory um conflict or just predation.

1528
01:30:57,320 --> 01:31:03,240
Um and that's out of an interest in either minimizing costs or expanding

1529
01:31:03,240 --> 01:31:03,960
benefits.

1530
01:31:04,200 --> 01:31:09,750
Is that I don't think it has to be the I I define it as like a state of like relatively

1531
01:31:09,750 --> 01:31:15,110
harmonious, durable um interactions where there's not the

1532
01:31:15,110 --> 01:31:20,710
expectation of violence or if violence or aggression occurs, it's aberrant.

1533
01:31:21,110 --> 01:31:21,590
Okay, good.

1534
01:31:21,670 --> 01:31:25,910
So let me let me clarify then that I think what I wasn't doing is defining peace, but maybe

1535
01:31:25,910 --> 01:31:30,950
the engine or what's the cost benefit logic, bringing this back full circle.

1536
01:31:31,190 --> 01:31:36,960
What's the cost-benefit logic of the individual agents to engage in peace

1537
01:31:37,040 --> 01:31:42,560
or for there to even be the opportunity for sort of cultural norms or for the

1538
01:31:42,560 --> 01:31:45,440
evolution of these norms and institutions.

1539
01:31:46,000 --> 01:31:52,000
And is it this idea that with this time horizon, as David talked about, and with this idea

1540
01:31:52,000 --> 01:31:57,760
of we can think about the possible costs and benefits and say, look,

1541
01:31:58,000 --> 01:32:03,610
there's more of a benefit to not being belligerent right now, on

1542
01:32:03,610 --> 01:32:05,370
average for most of us.

1543
01:32:05,610 --> 01:32:07,050
So let's all agree.

1544
01:32:07,210 --> 01:32:13,130
Let's produce common knowledge such that even when any one of us sort of pops up

1545
01:32:13,130 --> 01:32:18,170
as the variant the the alternate where it's sort of like, no, no, I really want to kill

1546
01:32:18,170 --> 01:32:21,850
that group, you've sort of all agreed ahead of time.

1547
01:32:22,010 --> 01:32:24,330
And there's common knowledge we've all agreed.

1548
01:32:24,570 --> 01:32:27,850
That on average for all of us it's we're going to be better off.

1549
01:32:28,320 --> 01:32:34,160
yeah but then you need a you need some sort of mechanism to enforce that outlier

1550
01:32:34,160 --> 01:32:39,520
whose cost benefit calculus is is different and this is this is why it's really I mean it's

1551
01:32:39,520 --> 01:32:44,960
hard to get you have to have some sort of level of centralization to pull all this

1552
01:32:44,960 --> 01:32:50,400
knowledge to come up with a norm to have the enforcement mechanism I see so it's not just

1553
01:32:50,480 --> 01:32:55,650
it's not just seeing the prospect for it and getting everybody to agree, which are already

1554
01:32:55,650 --> 01:32:56,610
two really hard things.

1555
01:32:56,850 --> 01:32:57,010
Yeah.

1556
01:32:57,410 --> 01:32:59,970
But it's also, as you just said, the enforcement mechanism.

1557
01:33:00,210 --> 01:33:00,370
Yeah.

1558
01:33:00,530 --> 01:33:00,690
Yeah.

1559
01:33:00,770 --> 01:33:05,330
So people one of the things I realized early on is many people could see the benefits for

1560
01:33:05,330 --> 01:33:05,650
peace.

1561
01:33:05,730 --> 01:33:09,570
You know, they could see like if only we could stop fighting, like we'd all be better off.

1562
01:33:09,730 --> 01:33:13,410
Because often what happens is you end up with say big no man's lands where everybody's

1563
01:33:13,410 --> 01:33:18,770
scared to go in, you know, and and so underuse of resources, you lose access to potential

1564
01:33:18,770 --> 01:33:20,930
reproductive partners, trading partners.

1565
01:33:21,090 --> 01:33:27,040
Um, you know, it typically results in like you know net uh net

1566
01:33:27,280 --> 01:33:32,400
costs for both sides, like at average, while you may have a few outliers

1567
01:33:32,880 --> 01:33:33,440
benefits.

1568
01:33:33,520 --> 01:33:39,040
So you have people realize this, but it's just a matter of like coordinating to make to

1569
01:33:39,360 --> 01:33:43,840
sort of solve that prisoner's dilemma or solve that collective action problem.

1570
01:33:44,400 --> 01:33:47,520
So it's you know, it's multiple layers, which is why I think it's rare.

1571
01:33:47,680 --> 01:33:52,950
So among hunter-gatherers, you have often instances of like intergroup cooperation, but I

1572
01:33:52,950 --> 01:33:58,390
think they typically don't rise to the level often among, you know, so this is you know as

1573
01:33:58,390 --> 01:34:03,910
close to contact as we can get, or the records of peace, because they're frequently broken

1574
01:34:03,910 --> 01:34:07,590
by conflict or there are relationships that sort of exist dyadically.

1575
01:34:07,750 --> 01:34:10,710
I know you, so I interact peacefully with you.

1576
01:34:10,790 --> 01:34:14,310
But if I meet someone else from your group, I have to negotiate that relationship

1577
01:34:14,310 --> 01:34:15,270
individually.

1578
01:34:15,910 --> 01:34:16,550
Right.

1579
01:34:17,540 --> 01:34:22,020
But just the idea that we can come together as members of the group and fully expect to be

1580
01:34:22,020 --> 01:34:28,020
treated, you know, with norms that involve nonviolence or non-aggression is it's

1581
01:34:28,020 --> 01:34:29,220
a really high bar.

1582
01:34:29,460 --> 01:34:29,620
Okay.

1583
01:34:29,860 --> 01:34:33,940
But it's, I think this is one of the things that's most sort of overlooked in thinking

1584
01:34:33,940 --> 01:34:38,100
about the evolution of our species, particular cultural evolution, because intergroup

1585
01:34:38,100 --> 01:34:41,940
exchange is one of the engines that drives cultural evolution.

1586
01:34:42,100 --> 01:34:46,930
So once we solve this problem, you know, we have the capacity to unlock positive sum

1587
01:34:46,930 --> 01:34:52,610
relationships or positive sum um positive sum benefits from every potential

1588
01:34:52,610 --> 01:34:54,450
intergroup relationship.

1589
01:34:54,690 --> 01:34:54,930
I see.

1590
01:34:55,330 --> 01:34:58,530
So it can fuel tons and tons of cumulative cultural evolution.

1591
01:34:58,610 --> 01:35:02,690
That, you know, in in sense you don't, you know, the difference between us and chimpanzees

1592
01:35:02,930 --> 01:35:08,370
partly one of them is just that we solve the problem of intergroup relationships, which

1593
01:35:08,370 --> 01:35:13,410
allow us then to, you know, turn on the engine of cumulative cultural evolution.

1594
01:35:13,890 --> 01:35:14,130
Right.

1595
01:35:14,290 --> 01:35:14,610
Yeah.

1596
01:35:15,170 --> 01:35:20,120
It reminds me of um something something you wrote in in in your uh evolution of peace paper

1597
01:35:20,120 --> 01:35:25,240
that jumped out at me, which is that the same factors that uh lead to intergroup peace are

1598
01:35:25,240 --> 01:35:29,880
often the same factors that lead to in the increased scale and destructiveness of conflict

1599
01:35:29,880 --> 01:35:30,920
when it does occur.

1600
01:35:31,080 --> 01:35:34,040
I'm w wondering if you could elaborate on on that idea.

1601
01:35:34,520 --> 01:35:39,010
Yeah, there's this really ironic sort of tragic logic to peace that you know, we just

1602
01:35:39,010 --> 01:35:43,650
assume peace is the absence of conflict, not realizing it's the product of cultural

1603
01:35:43,650 --> 01:35:48,210
technologies that allow us to coordinate norms, enforce those norms.

1604
01:35:48,290 --> 01:35:53,490
Um, but once you have that capacity, you can turn it into, instead of coordinating a norm

1605
01:35:53,490 --> 01:35:59,090
for nonviolence and sanctioning people that, you know, preemptively use violence, you can

1606
01:35:59,090 --> 01:36:04,680
turn it into a norm for, say, aggression against the outgroup and sanction those who don't

1607
01:36:04,680 --> 01:36:05,240
participate.

1608
01:36:05,400 --> 01:36:10,120
So, you know, as you have increasing socio-political complexity, you get the greater

1609
01:36:10,120 --> 01:36:15,160
opportunity for peace, but you also get the greater opportunity for violence, you know,

1610
01:36:15,320 --> 01:36:17,160
coordinated violence for war.

1611
01:36:17,800 --> 01:36:18,760
Interesting.

1612
01:36:19,160 --> 01:36:23,640
Yeah, so I think it's a new, it's a really new way of thinking about peace and human

1613
01:36:23,640 --> 01:36:29,390
evolution as you know, both you know, a cultural technology that you know

1614
01:36:29,550 --> 01:36:30,750
we we had to make.

1615
01:36:30,910 --> 01:36:34,510
We made it so I I think the better way instead of the evolution is like the invention of

1616
01:36:34,510 --> 01:36:34,750
piece.

1617
01:36:34,910 --> 01:36:40,030
We invented it, we invented these technologies allow us to allow us to solve these

1618
01:36:40,030 --> 01:36:41,230
coordination problems.

1619
01:36:41,390 --> 01:36:45,470
And then when they're in place, like it really fully unlocks the full potential of our

1620
01:36:45,470 --> 01:36:46,030
species.

1621
01:36:46,270 --> 01:36:49,790
You know, you can have you can imagine, like, you know, we're a species where we live in

1622
01:36:49,870 --> 01:36:54,760
thousand-member groups, but they're really sort of isolated and bounded, you know, with not

1623
01:36:54,760 --> 01:36:56,520
a lot of trade or relationship.

1624
01:36:56,600 --> 01:37:01,800
You know, occasionally marriage partners are exchanged, you know, you know, uh young women,

1625
01:37:01,880 --> 01:37:05,400
but they're not bringing the full repertoire of group knowledge.

1626
01:37:05,560 --> 01:37:11,240
You imagine cumulative cultural evolution is just much, much smaller in that scenario.

1627
01:37:11,640 --> 01:37:15,480
So I think it's it's one of the critical aspects, us being able to solve this problem is

1628
01:37:15,480 --> 01:37:18,440
one of the critical aspects of our species history.

1629
01:37:18,770 --> 01:37:18,930
Right.

1630
01:37:19,090 --> 01:37:22,290
And just to be explicit about it, because we haven't talked a ton about like the

1631
01:37:22,290 --> 01:37:25,170
interaction between biological and cultural evolution.

1632
01:37:25,410 --> 01:37:31,010
The idea is that if you take these evolve this evolved psychology, that's sort of like,

1633
01:37:31,170 --> 01:37:34,930
well, I want to minimize my costs, maximize my benefits.

1634
01:37:35,170 --> 01:37:39,170
And you might be in this culture where you look around and you're like, we'd all be better

1635
01:37:39,170 --> 01:37:40,850
off if there was more peace, but I don't know.

1636
01:37:40,930 --> 01:37:41,890
What am I going to do about it?

1637
01:37:41,970 --> 01:37:42,050
Right.

1638
01:37:42,210 --> 01:37:43,570
Like I can't do anything about it.

1639
01:37:43,730 --> 01:37:49,440
But the idea is that all the that same feeling is felt by people everywhere.

1640
01:37:49,760 --> 01:37:55,200
And for different reasons that are partially historic, partially accidental, partially

1641
01:37:55,200 --> 01:38:01,200
ecological, whatever, there might be there, there's just trial and error or people

1642
01:38:01,200 --> 01:38:03,040
trying to create institutions.

1643
01:38:03,360 --> 01:38:09,360
And somewhere, sometime, one works a little bit better that allows people to sort

1644
01:38:09,360 --> 01:38:14,990
of like have an agreement or create a technology to see those benefits,

1645
01:38:15,150 --> 01:38:21,070
somehow create a social institution that creates a penalty system that everybody

1646
01:38:21,070 --> 01:38:22,030
agrees with.

1647
01:38:22,270 --> 01:38:25,950
And then once that happens, those people are doing better.

1648
01:38:26,110 --> 01:38:29,310
And the people that are near those people see that and are like, oh, that looks good.

1649
01:38:29,390 --> 01:38:30,430
I'll take that.

1650
01:38:30,670 --> 01:38:32,590
Or they have more stuff or both.

1651
01:38:32,830 --> 01:38:38,640
And then the evolved psychology hasn't changed, but because everybody's evolved psychology

1652
01:38:38,640 --> 01:38:43,440
is looking at their neighbor and being like, oh, they're doing better, or maybe they take

1653
01:38:43,440 --> 01:38:48,000
you over because they're doing better, either way, like you eventually adopt what they're

1654
01:38:48,000 --> 01:38:48,320
doing.

1655
01:38:48,640 --> 01:38:48,880
Yeah.

1656
01:38:49,040 --> 01:38:50,640
So so I would say two things.

1657
01:38:50,800 --> 01:38:52,160
One, like that's the scenario.

1658
01:38:52,240 --> 01:38:53,920
And I didn't touch on this much in the paper.

1659
01:38:54,000 --> 01:38:56,240
I just like ran out of space.

1660
01:38:56,320 --> 01:39:00,240
But it's something I really want to visit is you you do have this ratchet effect is like

1661
01:39:00,320 --> 01:39:04,000
once you've solved this problem, you're going to be more successful, meaning you're going

1662
01:39:04,000 --> 01:39:08,130
to both outcompete those groups that don't have it, but your ideas are going to be

1663
01:39:08,130 --> 01:39:08,610
borrowed.

1664
01:39:08,690 --> 01:39:14,450
But at the same time, a critical mechanism of peace in this in the small-scale societies is

1665
01:39:14,450 --> 01:39:19,890
the execution of not people who are proactively aggressive, like uh Richard

1666
01:39:20,210 --> 01:39:24,530
has in Demonic Metals with the Self-Domestic, but people that break the peace.

1667
01:39:24,770 --> 01:39:29,170
So this is really, really common once you get the capacity to enforce peace.

1668
01:39:29,250 --> 01:39:34,640
So and in the same thing, it can continue to ratch up, ratchet up our above psychology, say

1669
01:39:34,800 --> 01:39:37,840
for you know impulse control, for tolerance.

1670
01:39:38,000 --> 01:39:42,560
So it's the same sort of mechanism he posits, but instead of against reactive aggression,

1671
01:39:42,640 --> 01:39:46,320
it's against people who may use aggression strategically or physical violence

1672
01:39:46,320 --> 01:39:47,120
strategically.

1673
01:39:48,560 --> 01:39:53,920
So in that sense, yeah, yeah, like literally the execution.

1674
01:39:54,000 --> 01:39:58,610
This is this is all over the all over the case because you need to signal to the other

1675
01:39:58,610 --> 01:40:04,450
group that you don't endorse that the behavior, you know, is not reflective of your

1676
01:40:04,450 --> 01:40:04,770
group.

1677
01:40:04,850 --> 01:40:08,530
You need to reset the prisoner's dilemma.

1678
01:40:08,770 --> 01:40:08,930
Right.

1679
01:40:09,170 --> 01:40:11,250
So this is this is very, very common.

1680
01:40:11,330 --> 01:40:16,210
So I think in that sense, you may have a rationing up of our actual Bov psychology as well.

1681
01:40:16,530 --> 01:40:20,050
Once we create it, the first sort of like proto piece.

1682
01:40:21,260 --> 01:40:27,260
Could it be that also, you know, uh the imbalance of power uh hypothesis rears

1683
01:40:27,260 --> 01:40:30,620
its ugly head once you start creating these social technologies.

1684
01:40:30,780 --> 01:40:35,340
So in is insofar as you create peace and networks of mutual cooperation and you grow the

1685
01:40:35,340 --> 01:40:40,700
size and scale of your society and and the uh uh and the layers of of mutually beneficial

1686
01:40:40,700 --> 01:40:44,700
cooperation and technology, well uh all of a sudden once you get that peace happening uh

1687
01:40:44,850 --> 01:40:48,850
and you get a larger and more complex society, and you look and you see your neighbor is

1688
01:40:48,850 --> 01:40:53,650
not nearly as complex or as coordinated or as large as you, well, all of a sudden you've

1689
01:40:53,650 --> 01:40:58,610
created a really large uh spectacle of an imbalance of power.

1690
01:40:58,850 --> 01:41:03,010
And uh you can use all of that machinery that you've that was formerly used to creating

1691
01:41:03,010 --> 01:41:08,690
peace and unification and harness it to dominating and conquering uh the next guy in the

1692
01:41:08,690 --> 01:41:09,570
neighboring territory.

1693
01:41:09,730 --> 01:41:12,770
Do you buy that that is also a mechanism that that might be part of this?

1694
01:41:13,540 --> 01:41:14,580
Yeah, I'm just trying to think.

1695
01:41:14,660 --> 01:41:19,540
One of the things that really puzzle myself over is sometimes why why you don't see more

1696
01:41:19,540 --> 01:41:21,460
conquest among small-scale societies.

1697
01:41:21,540 --> 01:41:25,300
And particularly I think a puzzle that hasn't been explained is the emergence of like

1698
01:41:25,300 --> 01:41:29,220
patron-client relationships between between groups.

1699
01:41:36,650 --> 01:41:42,170
small groups of horticulturalists or you know forger horticulturalists surrounded by really

1700
01:41:42,170 --> 01:41:48,090
powerful groups that do wage war and not be like immediately wiped out right or

1701
01:41:48,170 --> 01:41:50,170
um assimilated.

1702
01:41:50,810 --> 01:41:52,250
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1703
01:41:52,650 --> 01:41:58,490
Um so the uh did he was just saying uh patron uh yeah, well yeah patron, like

1704
01:41:58,570 --> 01:42:00,090
patron client relationships.

1705
01:42:00,250 --> 01:42:05,260
You have you know, ethnography's got lots of examples of sort of like small Pacific groups,

1706
01:42:05,340 --> 01:42:09,900
you know, like forager horticulturalists that don't have much means of organizing for war,

1707
01:42:09,980 --> 01:42:14,460
nor do they have much of a history, you know, surviving and persisting around larger, more

1708
01:42:14,460 --> 01:42:15,660
bellicose groups.

1709
01:42:15,820 --> 01:42:20,300
And sometimes they form patron-client relationships where they'll offer a specific type of

1710
01:42:20,300 --> 01:42:24,300
service, such as, you know, products from the forest or big building dugout canoes.

1711
01:42:24,380 --> 01:42:25,500
But in many cases they don't.

1712
01:42:25,580 --> 01:42:31,510
They just seem to sort of like subsist nearby, you know, and engaging in occasional trade,

1713
01:42:31,750 --> 01:42:37,670
or more typically the you know, provision of female marriage or partners from the

1714
01:42:37,670 --> 01:42:42,470
sort of smaller, weaker group to the more powerful Paci group.

1715
01:42:42,870 --> 01:42:43,750
Yeah, that's interesting.

1716
01:42:43,830 --> 01:42:47,990
I mean, I I bet it would depend on the nature of the resources and the resource

1717
01:42:47,990 --> 01:42:53,350
distribution and the type of resources that you know the large scale society might need to

1718
01:42:53,400 --> 01:42:58,760
expand, you know, if it's just a matter of land or lumber or ore or whatever, and there's

1719
01:42:58,760 --> 01:43:02,120
plenty of that in the neighboring territory, why not just kill everyone and take and take

1720
01:43:02,120 --> 01:43:02,360
it?

1721
01:43:02,520 --> 01:43:06,600
But if it you know, if if the other if people in the neighboring territory uh have

1722
01:43:06,600 --> 01:43:10,440
knowledge that is really useful, they they know how to make something, uh, then it might be

1723
01:43:10,440 --> 01:43:13,320
cheaper just to trade with them than to you know take them over, because if you kill them,

1724
01:43:13,400 --> 01:43:15,000
you're gonna destroy all that knowledge.

1725
01:43:15,080 --> 01:43:19,320
Um and so I I I would imagine that ecology also plays an important role in this as well.

1726
01:43:19,950 --> 01:43:24,030
Yeah, it's one of the things that, you know, I love being an evolutionary anthropologist,

1727
01:43:24,110 --> 01:43:27,950
but we really need so many more tight quantitative studies.

1728
01:43:28,110 --> 01:43:31,310
And, you know, our window to do those for these questions has really passed.

1729
01:43:31,390 --> 01:43:36,270
You know, we can work with ethnographic documents at sort of large scale and EHREF and

1730
01:43:36,270 --> 01:43:40,190
other other repositories, but you know, they're only so fine-grained.

1731
01:43:40,510 --> 01:43:46,460
And there's really just like so few societies now that have sort of like, you know,

1732
01:43:46,780 --> 01:43:51,580
non-state patterns of interaction that are, you know, truly subsistence, that I I is

1733
01:43:51,820 --> 01:43:56,860
sometimes get a little frustrated that we really are sort of confined to most speculation,

1734
01:43:56,940 --> 01:44:00,380
except for the stuff that we can, you know, we can build models and tests, you know,

1735
01:44:00,620 --> 01:44:03,100
against or we can we can test in the lab.

1736
01:44:03,180 --> 01:44:07,180
But you know, a lot of what we're talking about now is just, you know, speculation.

1737
01:44:07,470 --> 01:44:07,950
Yeah.

1738
01:44:08,110 --> 01:44:11,230
Um we had Zach Garfield on just recently.

1739
01:44:11,630 --> 01:44:16,430
Uh he talked about you and he working on the Omaha Valley research project.

1740
01:44:16,990 --> 01:44:21,710
Um he talked a lot about it and how so how you're uh actually doing all this cool stuff

1741
01:44:21,870 --> 01:44:25,310
sponsoring students uh in education.

1742
01:44:25,470 --> 01:44:27,390
Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

1743
01:44:27,550 --> 01:44:33,420
Um Yeah, so um yeah, it's something I'm I'm very excited about, very proud of, because you

1744
01:44:33,420 --> 01:44:39,340
know, as an anthropologist, my career is enabled by the generosity and kindness of the

1745
01:44:39,340 --> 01:44:40,220
host communities.

1746
01:44:40,300 --> 01:44:44,620
And and my research specialization was for my dissertation was war.

1747
01:44:44,780 --> 01:44:47,820
I work much more broadly on just human sociality now.

1748
01:44:47,980 --> 01:44:52,540
But so people often focus on that while ignoring the fact that these are like people just

1749
01:44:52,540 --> 01:44:56,300
like you and me, you know, their their culture is vibrant, they have relationships, they

1750
01:44:56,300 --> 01:44:59,740
fall in love, they grieve, they mourn, they have friendships.

1751
01:44:59,900 --> 01:45:05,130
And I have friends with I'm, you know, good friends with many people from the communities I

1752
01:45:05,130 --> 01:45:05,930
worked with.

1753
01:45:06,250 --> 01:45:11,370
And really glad to finally reach a point in my career with Zach where we're able to start

1754
01:45:11,370 --> 01:45:13,450
thinking about ways to give back.

1755
01:45:13,610 --> 01:45:19,530
And we try to do so in an anthropologically minded way of trying to give them

1756
01:45:19,530 --> 01:45:24,090
what they request and need instead of saying, oh, you know, here's a village, they need a

1757
01:45:24,090 --> 01:45:26,170
pump, you know, and now we can be done with it.

1758
01:45:26,490 --> 01:45:32,160
And what people commonly ask for is that, you know, the students from their

1759
01:45:32,160 --> 01:45:36,880
communities that have made it through high school, but you know, so so in Ethiopia, unlike

1760
01:45:36,880 --> 01:45:39,600
Kenya, there's no fees for going to elementary school or high school.

1761
01:45:39,760 --> 01:45:44,080
And there's very, very few students from these pastoralist communities who have made it

1762
01:45:44,080 --> 01:45:48,080
through high school, but then college is just incredibly prohibitively expensive.

1763
01:45:48,160 --> 01:45:52,870
You know, they have to pay fees or they have to move to a city somewhere, pay for lodging,

1764
01:45:53,030 --> 01:45:54,710
pay for transportation, pay for food.

1765
01:45:54,870 --> 01:45:57,430
So we provide scholarships for these students.

1766
01:45:57,590 --> 01:46:03,270
Typically, we also provide a computer for them, and we're funding something like

1767
01:46:03,270 --> 01:46:08,470
23 students right now in scholarships, including the first doctor from the Nangatom and

1768
01:46:08,470 --> 01:46:11,110
from the Omo Valley, who is doing his internship year.

1769
01:46:11,190 --> 01:46:15,190
So he finished his MDE, and then after that, you do a year of like internships working on

1770
01:46:15,190 --> 01:46:16,550
different specializations.

1771
01:46:17,110 --> 01:46:18,550
And we have a website.

1772
01:46:18,630 --> 01:46:24,600
And if anybody out there is interested in this project, like it's an opportunity for your

1773
01:46:24,760 --> 01:46:29,000
money to go directly to supporting the student of a scholarship, a scholarship for a

1774
01:46:29,000 --> 01:46:30,680
student who would not be in school otherwise.

1775
01:46:30,840 --> 01:46:32,680
Even $10, $15 would help.

1776
01:46:32,760 --> 01:46:35,720
Um, it's called the Omo Valley Research Project.

1777
01:46:35,960 --> 01:46:37,160
You can check it out online.

1778
01:46:37,320 --> 01:46:38,840
You can also send me an email.

1779
01:46:38,920 --> 01:46:41,110
Um we'll put in the show notes.

1780
01:46:41,430 --> 01:46:41,750
Yeah, yeah.

1781
01:46:42,230 --> 01:46:45,510
We did a workshop this summer, Zach might have told you about, like a digital skills

1782
01:46:45,510 --> 01:46:49,670
workshop, bringing together all of our students for a couple of days, just training them on

1783
01:46:49,670 --> 01:46:53,830
the stuff a lot of I think my undergrads need, like how to leverage Google Suite, for

1784
01:46:53,830 --> 01:46:58,390
instance, working on writing a resume, making a cover letter, providing feedback to each

1785
01:46:58,390 --> 01:46:58,550
other.

1786
01:46:58,710 --> 01:47:03,700
And um, you know, it's really amazing to be the point in my career where we can actually

1787
01:47:03,700 --> 01:47:09,460
like provide tangible benefits to these, to these communities who have given us, and and I

1788
01:47:09,460 --> 01:47:11,780
would say all of the anthropological community.

1789
01:47:11,940 --> 01:47:16,900
Like if you're reading my papers and Zach's paper, you're the beneficiary of what these

1790
01:47:16,900 --> 01:47:19,060
communities have given us.

1791
01:47:19,380 --> 01:47:22,420
Yeah, it's it's it's so cool and so wonderful.

1792
01:47:22,580 --> 01:47:28,270
And and I really like what you said about that it's anthropological in the sense of

1793
01:47:28,270 --> 01:47:33,790
you have to first understand or listen to them and say here ask them what they want and not

1794
01:47:33,790 --> 01:47:39,230
just sort of patronizingly or just sort of helicopter in and drop something off

1795
01:47:39,390 --> 01:47:41,390
that's not at all what they need.

1796
01:47:41,470 --> 01:47:42,110
Yeah.

1797
01:47:42,510 --> 01:47:42,830
Yeah.

1798
01:47:43,310 --> 01:47:43,710
Yeah.

1799
01:47:43,950 --> 01:47:44,990
Super cool stuff.

1800
01:47:45,310 --> 01:47:45,550
Yeah.

1801
01:47:45,680 --> 01:47:46,880
So thanks for having me on.

1802
01:47:46,960 --> 01:47:49,200
Um really enjoyed talking to you.

1803
01:47:49,440 --> 01:47:49,920
Yeah, thanks.

1804
01:47:50,080 --> 01:47:51,360
Is there anything we should have asked you?

1805
01:47:51,440 --> 01:47:52,640
We have to ask that question.

1806
01:47:53,280 --> 01:47:54,160
We covered a lot of ground.

1807
01:47:54,240 --> 01:47:54,640
It went quick.

1808
01:47:54,800 --> 01:47:54,960
Yeah.

1809
01:47:55,120 --> 01:47:59,600
So so I feel like podcasts are often like when they end up with when they in and not that

1810
01:47:59,600 --> 01:48:02,720
you asked me, but it was something that I think about emailing us a four-looking question.

1811
01:48:02,800 --> 01:48:04,480
So like yeah, what are you working on now?

1812
01:48:04,640 --> 01:48:07,920
What are the biggest questions in our field that need to be answered?

1813
01:48:08,080 --> 01:48:11,920
What are some like methodological advances that you're really excited about?

1814
01:48:12,160 --> 01:48:14,390
Um, you know, yeah, those are great questions.

1815
01:48:14,470 --> 01:48:17,510
You should have uh we you got a spot anytime you want one.

1816
01:48:18,070 --> 01:48:21,270
No, uh actually that was something that Gervin said too.

1817
01:48:21,350 --> 01:48:26,550
And you know, we actually are thinking about having some folks on uh returners on, and so

1818
01:48:26,630 --> 01:48:29,510
maybe yeah, but do you want to tackle one of those real quick?

1819
01:48:30,390 --> 01:48:33,430
Oh well, so what I'm working on now is really two things.

1820
01:48:33,590 --> 01:48:38,390
I'm I'm working on a book manuscript trying to sort of describe some of my own personal

1821
01:48:38,440 --> 01:48:42,920
field work experiences and puzzling through these questions from going in as a sort of like

1822
01:48:43,240 --> 01:48:49,080
more serious bio not biological determinist, but a behavioral ecological approach to war

1823
01:48:49,080 --> 01:48:54,360
and balance of power to really sort of thinking about the cultural mechanisms that you know

1824
01:48:54,440 --> 01:48:59,720
if that explain the vast variation you have between societies and war and peace.

1825
01:48:59,880 --> 01:49:02,840
So that's the thing I'm really excited about right now.

1826
01:49:03,080 --> 01:49:03,640
That's fantastic.

1827
01:49:04,040 --> 01:49:05,080
Larger writing project.

1828
01:49:05,470 --> 01:49:05,950
Fantastic.

1829
01:49:06,110 --> 01:49:07,710
We'll have to have you back when when it's ready.

1830
01:49:07,790 --> 01:49:11,070
And yeah, well, hopefully that's within the next five years.

1831
01:49:11,790 --> 01:49:12,750
I have a title for you.

1832
01:49:12,910 --> 01:49:13,710
I have a title for you.

1833
01:49:13,870 --> 01:49:15,150
You should call it War and Peace.

1834
01:49:15,230 --> 01:49:18,830
I don't think there's any book that's Yeah, that's that's a great idea.

1835
01:49:19,230 --> 01:49:24,910
So the the tentative title actually is uh Enemy Eaters, because in among

1836
01:49:24,910 --> 01:49:29,310
tribal societies, many times, eating is a verb that does a lot of work.

1837
01:49:29,470 --> 01:49:30,750
It's it's so common.

1838
01:49:30,830 --> 01:49:36,100
So and if you become a famous warrior in Nangatom, you become known as an enemy eater.

1839
01:49:36,180 --> 01:49:37,300
Like you ate your enemies.

1840
01:49:37,380 --> 01:49:39,300
And if you want to go to war, you're like so hungry.

1841
01:49:39,380 --> 01:49:41,300
Like, I want to eat them, I want to devour them.

1842
01:49:41,540 --> 01:49:43,060
So that's sort of the working title.

1843
01:49:43,140 --> 01:49:43,940
Like you think about it.

1844
01:49:44,180 --> 01:49:46,660
And you know, who knows what it will actually end up with.

1845
01:49:46,820 --> 01:49:52,820
But it captures so much more about sort of like the cultural instantiation of war as a set

1846
01:49:52,820 --> 01:49:53,540
of values.

1847
01:49:53,860 --> 01:49:54,980
Yeah, it's fantastic.

1848
01:49:55,140 --> 01:50:01,130
Well, well, Luke, I mean, uh, you know, you could not take a more important topic, war and

1849
01:50:01,130 --> 01:50:01,770
peace.

1850
01:50:02,090 --> 01:50:08,090
Um, and you know, you've done you are you are a brave person for

1851
01:50:08,090 --> 01:50:11,850
exposing yourself to danger, going out into the field.

1852
01:50:12,010 --> 01:50:17,210
Uh we all benefit from you going out and doing it as well, and as well as all the people

1853
01:50:17,210 --> 01:50:18,410
that you work with.

1854
01:50:18,570 --> 01:50:20,890
And so thank you for being that conduit.

1855
01:50:20,970 --> 01:50:24,340
Um, we wouldn't know about all of them if it wasn't for you.

1856
01:50:24,500 --> 01:50:27,620
So thank you for doing that work and and thanks for coming on today.

1857
01:50:27,940 --> 01:50:29,060
Yeah, thanks so much, guys.

1858
01:50:29,220 --> 01:50:30,900
Good talking to you and enjoy your show.

1859
01:50:31,220 --> 01:50:31,860
Oh, thanks.

1860
01:50:32,020 --> 01:50:32,500
Thanks, Luke.

1861
01:50:32,580 --> 01:50:34,260
Yeah, we'll we'll have you on another time.

1862
01:50:34,500 --> 01:50:34,820
All right.

1863
01:50:34,980 --> 01:50:35,540
Bye-bye.

1864
01:50:35,700 --> 01:50:36,020
All right.

1865
01:50:39,140 --> 01:50:44,980
David, uh, what can people do to uh make the world better slash support this

1866
01:50:44,980 --> 01:50:45,780
podcast?

1867
01:50:46,330 --> 01:50:49,450
Well, they can say kind things about us on social media.

1868
01:50:49,530 --> 01:50:51,290
They can leave us a kind review.

1869
01:50:51,450 --> 01:50:53,530
They can visit us on Patreon.

1870
01:50:53,770 --> 01:50:59,770
And they can contact us with any ideas for topics or questions or guests.

1871
01:51:00,250 --> 01:51:00,650
Yeah.

1872
01:51:00,890 --> 01:51:05,130
Somebody commented that I think I say um too often, which is a fair point, and I'm working

1873
01:51:05,130 --> 01:51:05,370
on it.

1874
01:51:05,450 --> 01:51:07,850
And if we had more time to edit them out, that would be great.

1875
01:51:08,090 --> 01:51:12,060
If anybody wants to edit edit them Yeah, if anyone wants to go through and individually

1876
01:51:12,060 --> 01:51:16,300
edit out every um, uh we would pay you zero dollars to do that.

1877
01:51:16,780 --> 01:51:17,500
Exactly.

1878
01:51:18,300 --> 01:51:24,300
Uh so I I've occasionally edited out some ums of the guest or or myself or you, David,

1879
01:51:24,540 --> 01:51:25,660
but it's very infrequently.

1880
01:51:25,740 --> 01:51:25,980
Yeah.

1881
01:51:26,060 --> 01:51:26,140
Yeah.

1882
01:51:26,540 --> 01:51:29,900
Well, I mean, that's actually a good incentive for people to support us on Patreon.

1883
01:51:31,500 --> 01:51:33,900
Oh, we should be saying more ums and uhs than interstellar.

1884
01:51:34,140 --> 01:51:38,810
Yeah, so if you are uh disappointed with the frequency of ums and uhs, Here's what you can

1885
01:51:38,810 --> 01:51:39,370
do to change that.

1886
01:51:39,690 --> 01:51:41,210
You can give us some money on Patreon.

1887
01:51:41,450 --> 01:51:46,810
And if we raise enough money, we could hire someone to edit us and and make us sound uh

1888
01:51:46,810 --> 01:51:47,770
smarter than we are.

1889
01:51:48,170 --> 01:51:53,050
Yeah, I mean these are very like you you might be surprised or completely unsurprised,

1890
01:51:53,130 --> 01:51:56,090
these episodes are often not edited at all.

1891
01:51:56,490 --> 01:51:56,970
That's true.

1892
01:51:57,370 --> 01:52:02,250
Um some are, but the but m the vast majority are almost not.

1893
01:52:02,900 --> 01:52:03,300
Yes.

1894
01:52:03,460 --> 01:52:07,140
You are getting the unfiltered truth from Dave and David.

1895
01:52:07,700 --> 01:52:09,220
Unedited, raw.

1896
01:52:09,540 --> 01:52:09,860
Yeah.

1897
01:52:10,100 --> 01:52:13,700
I think everyone's like, well, this outro was definitely not edited.

1898
01:52:13,860 --> 01:52:15,220
So um yeah.

1899
01:52:15,380 --> 01:52:17,620
But but anyway, yes, thank you for listening.

1900
01:52:17,700 --> 01:52:18,900
Uh please support us.

1901
01:52:18,980 --> 01:52:23,780
And yes, if you're particularly perturbed about my um, I'm working on it, but yes, also

1902
01:52:23,860 --> 01:52:28,980
please support us on Patreon or or reach out to guest edit.

1903
01:52:29,540 --> 01:52:30,020
Yeah.

1904
01:52:30,670 --> 01:52:31,230
All those things.

1905
01:52:31,390 --> 01:52:31,550
All right.

1906
01:52:31,790 --> 01:52:32,270
See you next week.