Peace with Luke Glowacki
2026-01-13 13:00:00.000 +00:00

David, uh what podcast do you listen to? Evolutionary psychology, the podcast. That is a taglined podcast that goes by the tagline of uh actual evolutionary psychology by Are you gonna fill it in? I was gonna ask if there's I was starting to think about if there's other people. Usually you fill it in. I know I do, but I was wondering the question I said, like that are there podcasts that don't have taglines? And maybe the ones that I actually I don't know. something got garbled there. Okay. Well that's that's you that's pretty standard for us. Anyway, uh enjoy it. But it we're we're uh actual evolutionary psychologists uh by that wasn't grammatical. Well the tagline is actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists.

But what I was gonna say is we are actual evolutionary psychologists doing actual evolutionary psychology. That's correct. Okay. And let's enjoy that then. Um David, today we're talking to Luke Gloacchi, who is also the other half of the Omo Valley Research Project, which is super awesome, both doing really great basic research and also making the world slightly better and much more um better than many of us basic scientists. Um so it was great to talk to Luke. Yeah, this was a really fun conversation. Um way more fun than Leo Tol Tolstoy's War and Peace. He wrote War and Peace, right? I'm getting that right? Yeah. You you've been talking a lot about uh reading boring long books. Is that what's going on?

You've been reading War and Peace. Yeah, I've been reading War and Peace because I'm a really sophisticated uh yeah, yeah, yeah. I've uh yeah, I I've I've read it multiple times. Uh you know, pretty much every work of Tolstoy, every great work of literature I've I've read and mastered. Sure. Um uh because I'm a I'm a I'm just that kind of guy. Uh anyways, um if you didn't like uh the book War and Peace, you will certainly love this conversation about War and Peace, uh, because uh it is just uh full of fascinating insights. Uh we get into mon mongooses or mongeese, yeah. Uh uh and and in fact, uh whether it's mongoose is or mongeese. I think it should be mongeese. Um I I would agree. Yeah, and anyways, and Luke Lu Luke, I I just wanna like the context is Luke has a

wonderful uh paper called The Evolution of Peace. And it's a very it's an inversion of the usual, you know, like war needs to be explained but peace doesn't. And it's sort of I love this idea that you invert that and say, really the thing that needs to be explained is peace. And that's I I love that approach and that's part of what we talk about here today. Yes. And you will really want to listen to more than a piece of this episode about Zinger Zinger days. Okay. Um yeah. Just uh it comes from all helps me. There you go. That's great jokes. Fantastic. So without further ado, uh here is uh David and myself and Luke Lowaki talking about all things war and peace. Enjoy. Thank you. Today uh I'll start over.

Okay. So t today we're very happy to have uh Luke Gloacki. Uh Luke, you are in we can edit this out if I'm wrong, but I believe you are academic grandchild of Gene Goodall. Is that correct? Um yeah, maybe. I'm my PhD supervisor was Richard Rangam, but Jane Goodall was not technically Richard's PhD supervisor. He was the supervisor of the of the site. Oh okay. So okay, so it's a little bit fuzzy. Okay, because I actually always assume that Richard's maybe your academic great aunt. Yeah, maybe that's a good way to think about it. Low parenthood. You were exactly did she have direct students? I don't know the answer to that. Okay. All right. Well, we'll uh we'll chat GPT that. Uh or somebody can look it up while they're listening.

Yeah. Um Richard was a somebody who studied, was studying the he was there because he was studying chimps. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Um but a little known fact about Richard is he also spent like a year working in the um in the uh like Central African forests with horticulturalists and foragers there as well, sometime after his PhD. Okay. So when you were a student of his, which department was that in? So I started in the anthropology department at Harvard, biological anthropology, which transitioned into human evolutionary biology. So it's separate from the anthropology department. Yeah. And you are currently in anthro or psych department? Yeah, I'm currently in an anthropology department at Boston University.

Right. Fantastic. Yeah, because I mean your students, they're doing so much psychological stuff. And not to like, you know, be um not to not to be psychology centric, but it just I mean the division between anthro and psychological. Yeah. boundaries. You know you may be closer to what political scientists are doing in some cases than say for your own selves than psychologists or economists than psychologists, you know, the way the way the fields work. If we were designing them today from the ground up, we probably wouldn't start with the departments we have now. No, probably not. I I remember uh when we were chatting at at a conference, you mentioned that um you started out uh interested in philosophy and then gradually found your way into the evolutionary

behavioral sciences. I'm curious if you could elaborate on that journey and and what might have precipitated it. Yeah, I feel so, so fortunate for the sort of serendipity that led me to the evolutionary behavioral sciences. You know, I I didn't take any any classes in anthropology or psychology as an undergrad. I thought the closest you could get to understanding human cognition was Kant, you know, just deep reflection about the structures of the mind. And that if you really wanted to understand our species, you had to spend years just sort of like locked in a battle with yourself thinking through things. So it was only just through sort of like happenstance that I read a book about um cognitive

science and it was actually criticizing evolutionary psychology. And I don't remember the book now. It was an academic press, but I was like, oh wow, this is so cool. There is a world in which people are thinking about human behavior and like how we evolved and like studying it. Like I want to know more about that world. So I got uh I got very, very fortunate and I just started knocking on doors. Um, you know, like how can I get into actually studying human behavior instead of just like, you know, doing the awesome work that philosophers do, which is mostly just thinking and occasionally writing, but actually like getting into the weeds of designing studies and, you know, thinking about what the results of our research tells us about humans.

Yeah. I I I love that um you were turned on to evolutionary psychology by a critic of evolutionary psychology uh inadvertently. Uh I don't think we've ever had that origin story on the podcast before. I think I think Christina, it was Christina. I was just thinking we had Christina, because Christina also, it was a it was a very uh it was like it was mentioned and it was presented as like obviously wrong. And she's like, that sounds awesome. Yeah, like there's really there's really something to it. And and once you once you adopt an evolutionary framework, I mean so many things I feel like just pop into place. Like your understanding of our species really deepens and often think like it's it's sort

of impossible. Like, you know, so they say nothing in biology makes sense except for evolution. Well, I think a lot of things in human behavior don't really make sense unless you think about our evolutionary history. Yeah. Do you it for I think for David and I and a lot of people we've talked to, it's been sort of there's a dissatisfaction. At some point it's almost like authoritarian intellectualism, right? Where it's sort of like, this is what's true. Uh it's actually a very Kantian point, actually. Like Kant was sort of like we can't, you know, don't, don't do that. You know, it's sort of like and uh but but do you for for you do you have an idea of sort of was it this thing of like I don't I'm not I feel uncomfortable just like accepting a

premise, like and I want to know why the premise is there? Or what what do you do you have a thought about why you were attracted to evolutionary stuff? Um well, it was a framework that explained things. So there's you know just big patterns in the world. You see big patterns by age, you see big patterns by sex, you see big patterns by social status. And it was a framework that actually like lays out very clear predictions that you can test that seem to have a lot of explanatory power. So that's what, you know, that's what really drew it to me is like I'm a person that want to understand what understand why the world is the way it is. And this is a framework that really provides you a mechanism to understand, you know, where

we come from and why today it looks the way, you know, we have clothes, we drive, you know, we use the computer and all that, but essentially like we're still animals. We're just cultural animals. So a lot of the same sort of principles that apply that shape the behavior of other species also shape humans. Yeah. And for that, um, I wanna we're gonna flip come to really recent, maybe as a way to get into things, which is you had a very recent paper called The Evolution of Peace. Um, and uh to my mind, it was lovely and sort of um uh uh uh subversive in a way, uh in a good way. And it's exactly on the same point where it's sort of so much is is made about the evolution of war and needing to explain conflict.

And this the point of this paper is the title is the evolution of peace. Can you talk a little bit about um either that paper specifically or sort of how that paper is part of sort of your what you do um generally? Yeah. Yeah. So I sort of can see I'll just talk a little bit sort of about what I do. Um with my focus on intergroup relationships, conflict and cooperation. I think about like I think with humans, like we have really good theory, or mostly like on the evolution of cooperation. We have pretty decent theory on like the evolution of intergroup conflict. So these are theories that are designed to sort of apply across taxa. Some of them are more or less specific to humans, but we don't have a lot of sort of theory

like linking sort of our evolutionary biological explanations, say for a psychology for dominance or for status or imbalances of power with how the real world humans as cultural creatures operate. There's a gap sort of between, say, the like evolutionary explanations and in some ways the sort of more approximate psychological explanations. So like dehumanization may be like a maybe one proximate explanation for why people are more likely to contribute and violence, but we're we have a gap between the sort of biological evolutionary theory and the psychological processes. And in that gap, I think culture is really, really important. So I sort of focus on thinking about how to how do we understand that

separation between those two? How can we understand the role that culture has in both shaping institutions, say to promote war or promote cooperation, are inhibiting it. And how might culture then have acted on our own evolved minds. And a lot of the things I think we sort of take for granted, including things around war and peace, are actually, you know, evolved cultural technology, specifically peace. Peace is not just the absence of war. So the vast majority of social species, if they, you know, if two groups of some social primate meet in the force, they typically just avoid each other. Right. They don't interact. And most people would not call that peace. They call it avoidance. There's something really unusual with group with individuals from distinct social

groups coming together without having to negotiate those relationships individually. You know, I can meet I'm at Boston University, I can meet a student at Northeastern or MIT, and I don't have to be hesitant or worried and figure out how they're gonna treat me, or you know, a a person from China or Russia or any other place. We can have an expectation of how we should treat each other and how they're going to treat me. And it creates all sorts of opportunities for positive sum exchanges. Then in the conditions that get that, I think they depend crucially on cultural technologies. And like any sort of technology you can think about, you know, fire making, ritual technologies, it's the result of cultural evolutionary processes.

So you can study you can study peace as the result of these processes, and then you can hypothesize about when it when it would have come about in our lineage. Right. Yeah, that's a awesome, huge amount of stuff to talk about. I always uh just to follow up on the point about um people not being like chimps to kind of bring back to the Richard Rangham thing, is that um I teach intro to psych and it's like 700 undergrads in a huge hall what hall and they're like freshmen. And they always laugh when I tell them, you know, if if if you all sat down and you were chimps, you wouldn't be like sitting quietly. Like it would be violent, right? And they laugh at that. But just taking that point for granted is something that I think like an evolutionary

approach pokes on, right? And just says, oh, this is actually a weird thing about us that nobody knows anybody in that room. Yet everybody sat down, and that would be really weird for any other primate. Yeah, including what a lot of people assume it would be the case for bonobos, that they'd just be, you know, having a massive orgy. But the actual reality of bonobos is there would be just tons and tons of violence. It wouldn't be probably as lethaloserious as chimpanzees, but it would certainly be, you know, a very aggressive, tense, scary place. So humans are extremely unusual for our capacity for so the term that's often used is tolerance, just to tolerate strangers, not to have high affect or high

arousal around strangers. And that's certainly something that like we evolved the neurobiological machinery that allows us to interact with strangers without like immediately, you know, being all the defensive. Yeah. Before we get to the cultural part, which is a big thing to bite off, um, when we just talk about the biological thing, we talked about two different things. One is sort of a comparative approach where we look at bonobos or chimps or think about a common ancestor that and we can kind of infer here's what an ancestral state was. And then we have to have some quote unquote biological explanation for how we got to where we are now, having the proximate phenotype we have. Another version is less about that comparative approach and is more like an adaptationist

approach, which is just sort of given the way we are now, what's let's reverse engineer sort of the software. Um, we have in reality, there's sort of a complementary approach, and many people do both things. Uh, do you where do you put your own work in that continuum. Have you done both kinds? Or how do you typically sort of think about that? Or is that even a false distinction? Yeah. So I would say the way most people practice, most, you know, big thinking evolutionary behavioral sciences scholars sort of take aspects of both approaches. You know, if you want to know what things are just unique to humans, you have to look at other species. Yeah. Right. And then you can start with, okay, so humans have this peculiar trait, whatever it is, and

you can start to figure out just logically what things you need to get it, but you can also look at other species to see, because often there's, you know, multiple pathways to some particular trait. And so, you know, maybe you have whatever trait it is because there was selection for eggs, but maybe some other species says you can get it for selection for Y. And this is this is why, at least in evolutionary anthropology, you you typically are really concerned with like, do mere cats have lethal intergroup violence? Do are there species that have it without imbalances of power? So, you know, in humans, the leading theory is that, you know, we have a psychology that goes very deep to be sensitive to imbalances of power and when you can turn those

imbalances of power into a benefit for yourself. But if you find species that say have lethal intergroup aggression, similar to like, you know, proto-war without imbalances of power, suggests maybe there's different pathways and we should rethink whether it's the best explanation for humans. So I think in order to do good evolutionary behavioral sciences, you really do have to take aspects of both approaches. I want I want to pick up one of the loose loose ends there. Do in fact other species have uh lethal intergroup violence without any kind of imbalance of power? Um I think which species is it? Crescent macaques? There was a paper that came out recently. So so I'm gonna say there's a couple of species that it looks like it does.

It depends on the particular type of intergroup violence. So, like bandit mongees, for instance, they have really high rates of lethal intergroup violence, where essentially they live in these large social groups. And the female from one social group will leave her group and go out, you know, in search of mates from another group, but all the males will follow along and they'll meet another group of bandit monkeys and they form a line. You can look at the pictures, it's wild. It's like a battle line, and they just have like a giant, giant scrum. And typically the deaths that result from this are like one of them gets separated from the rest of their group, and three or four of the opposing group pile on and kill them.

But it's all in the midst of, you know, 20 mongees versus 20 monkeys. And at the same time, the female is off on the side mating with her preferred mate. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's it looks like literally, it looks like a rugby scrum. Like it literally looks they're lining up. Yeah. That's interesting. Well, that well, it's I mean, it's interesting to note that uh when deaths do occur, it does follow somewhat this imbalance of power logic where it's usually you know, you know, three or four males ganging up on one, and there is kind of a mini imbalance of power in that little section of of the skirmish. So there there's at least something to the idea. I mean, I and I do think that the logic is really compelling in that you don't want to uh

risk death unless you can be sure that your side is going to win. And in the most in the case where you're gonna be sure that your side is gonna win and you're gonna face few costs is if there's a huge imbalance of power favoring your side. Um but nevertheless it is still pretty interesting that they all line up that way and and you know it seems like they're for the most part pretty evenly matched. Um what do you think uh d do you have an idea of what what's going on? I don't know this is not necessarily your area of expertise, but uh is there uh a a reigning theory in the literature of what of what explains this? The the lining up like that? Mm-hmm. Yes, a good idea. Well, I I think they're fighting with each other over, you know, control of reproductively

valuable females. So they they want to control access to that female. That's why they're following that female, they're trying to coerce her into the back of the group. You're then, you know, you encounter, and I I expect you may have a very similar dynamic in in many other species that have a sort of similar pattern where you line, you know, they're probably not thinking they just line up, but they're just positioning each other on the basis of like more simple heuristics of make sure I don't have an unfamiliar mongoose behind me. You know, make sure I can see as many as possible. And I imagine that's something that just creates a line. Um, and then I imagine most of the attacks aren't necessarily driven by the thought at that

point we're going to, you know, try to kill another, but they're just, you know, fighting each other as a as an uh mergent behavior to try to make sure that you're not actually being victim of an attack. Right. Yeah. That's a good point. I John John Williams, yeah. John Williams. George Williams, different, different Williams, both great. Uh uh, George Williams, who wrote Adaptation Natural Selection, was like really uh he talked about schools of fish and how we shouldn't attribute schools of fish to anything other than the fish just not wanting to be eaten. and they just sort of form this ball as an emergent property. And that really reminds me of what you're saying, Louis. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Would you say that um the way to understanding it is you know there are two aspects to intergroup conflict. One is the expected costs to one side of the conflict to engaging in that conflict. This would be like risk of injury or death. And the other would be the expected benefits of engaging in the conflict. Um and usually uh the thing that just determines um uh going uh into a conflict w in an imbalance of power situation is you know low expected costs. If you were were clearly more formidable, more numerous than the antagonist, then uh the costs are gonna be lower and that's gonna uh uh in many cases precipitate conflict. But in the case of of the mongees, is that mongeese, yeah, the bandit mongoose.

Bandit mongoose. That's the bandit mongoose. Is Isn't that plural? That's fantastic. I'm really sorry to interrupt, but I really did not know that. And I'm really I mean, maybe I'm maybe I'm making it up. No, no, you are the evolutionary biologist. We are bumbling uh we'll defer to you um No, no, no, this is fantastic. I feel like this is the best thing I've learned today. Uh in addition to the plural of Yeah. All right. So the I'm so glad. Yeah, no, no, no. It's like it's like pronouncing the Zatwasi, for example. Yeah. So normally, you know, a high expected cost would would precipitate conflict when there is a balance of power and the cost would be low. But with the monkeys, it seems like what might be going on is it's less about the expected

cost and more about the expected benefit. You know, there's a very clear Darwinian benefit in terms of you know conflict over females. And it may be that, you know, the the cost might be high, but on the other hand the benefit is also really high and that might be explaining why this conflict is taking place despite each side being, you know, pretty evenly matched. Do you buy that logic? I think that's a I think that's a fair way to think about the way we think about most in most species that this evol that this sort of lethal coalitionary intergroup violence evolves is that just the costs are really, really low because you have clear imbalance of power, you know, chimpanzees, it's an average of around eight chimpanzee attackers to one

victim. So the odds of any of you suffering any serious injury or costs are pretty low. But in Bandit Mongeese, it's a really different dynamic, and it could be because the benefits are just so high in this case, because you really are trying to control access to a to a reproductively valuable female. And so just to connect the dots, Richard Rangham's like the imbalance of power hypothesis. Can you just talk maybe just for a second about that? And was that what you started thinking about that eventually gets you to this paper about the evolution of Pete? Yeah, the imbalance of power hypothesis, I think is just one of the sort of like most beautiful, elegant theories out there to explain why you have, you know,

coalitionary violence between groups that's lethal. So the idea is that in species where territory is tied to some benefit in the currency of natural selection, that's reproductive benefits, even though it can be downstream. And you have species that have a particular grouping pattern, fission fusion. So these are not species that are solitary. So you know, tigers are solitary, they live in the forest primarily by themselves. You're never going to see coalitionary violence. Many, many primates are group living, they're but they live in troops. So these are stable units where it's always, you know, your whole life is with 40 other individuals. Anytime you meet another group, it's with 40 individuals.

So the costs are similar in bandit mongoose mongeese, however we're calling it now, costs are going to be going to be very high. But in the case of some species, you have a grouping pattern that's not a true there, it's fission fusion where so you can think of humans where you spend a lot of time in a large group, but people are often coming and going. And where they're going, they may be in a group of one individual, two or three, so they're in small subparties. But you're neighbored by other groups. So you may be out on if you're a chimpanzee, you may be foraging by yourself because it's a period of resource scarcity, and you come to your neighbor the periphery of your territory, and your neighbor, your neighboring community has a large fig fig tree.

So they're all together at that time. So you know, you can encounter you as a lone individual, potentially eight individuals from the neighboring community. So you have an imbalance of power then. So it's very easy for that larger party or that larger community to attack and kill that lone individual with very low cost. But in order to have the motivational system to do it, there has to be some benefits to it. So you're not going to see it in in species in which you know access to territory doesn't really pay off in terms of reproduction. So you're going to find it in in places where resources are really sort of heterogeneous and variable. So this is the leading theory of why some species have um

have a pattern that's eerily sort of similar to war, including chimpanzees. I see. So it's it's coming back to this idea of we can look at predictions of what the function or cause of something like war is, what its evolutionary unquote explanation is by looking at the distribution of where do we f in what species do we find it. Yeah. So that would be one of the ways to you. Exactly. Yeah. And and it sounds like that's been one of the approaches. And it sounds like there's quite a bit of that um data, that kind of data of pred of that it's kind of um cashing out the prediction. Yeah, we have we have so there are there are several species that have you know lethal coalitionary intergroup violence.

It's a bit of a mouthful. So sort of proto-war, um, you know, including our close relatives, the chimpanzees. Bonobos don't have this pattern of behavior. So big mystery has been why bonobos don't. And and one of the leading hypotheses is that they just have lower rates of fission fusion than chimpanzees, due to the fact that their their territory is slightly different than chimpanzees. They're their evolutionary territory is slightly different than chimpanzees, that it's a more resource abundant area. And this is hypothesis, there's there's some debate about it. So when you find humans are doing something sort of eerily similar, and we also, I mean we're very famous as a fission fusion species, you know, you can think about central place

foraging. We all come together in a night, you know, in the evening if you're a group of hunter-gatherers sharing food, but during the day you're often in smaller work parties as a solitary forager, a solitary hunter, or with a with a few other individuals creating the opportunity for fission fusion. But it hasn't been um you know, a lot of the work is sort of like speculative. Was this important in human evolution? How deep was it important in human evolution? If we, you know, have a model say similar to like savannah baboons, as many people think the Australopis would have been, then maybe there's not a good model for vision and fusion. So maybe we didn't actually have vision and fusion for an important part of our

evolutionary history. So so a lot of it is sort of speculative and there hasn't been as many sort of clean tests as you would like. Yeah. But just just so so that we're I'm being clear, fission fusion. The idea is like cows just sort of intuitively don't need to fission fusion because the distribution of how they make their living, it's just all sort of there. So ungulates, for example, there's a lot of different things. Yeah, or or if they do fission fusion, that there's not a motivation or benefit, there's not a real benefit to attacking members of other groups. Because you can imagine like many herd species may have some sort of, you know, I don't know that you would call it fission fusion times where they're more due to breeding, you

know, during breeding season. Yeah, you know, during breeding season or something, but there's not a real benefit from group and maybe that's because they're not group living in the same way that we think members of one group attacking and killing members of other groups. If they if they do and you know, I imagine imagine some of them do have lethal violence, you know, when they're headbutting each other, but then it's gonna be between dyads. It's not gonna be coalitionary, which is what's really unusual is you know, many mammalian species have, you know, violence where they kill members of their same species. But what's unusual is that it's a group killing members of the same species. Yeah. And so is is the the idea that we we don't see this in in say herbivores that that eat

grass, it's it's because the distribution of resources is not very lopsided. You know, like there's no real benefit to like a herd of cattle attacking a rival herd because there's plenty of grass everywhere and there's not going to be a real payoff to that kind of behavior. Is that the idea? Yeah, it would also say they're not they're not a group living species in the way primates are. Okay. They they you know, they're living with others, but there's no clear in group out group boundaries. Right. It's it's so interesting because I mean, on the one hand, uh what I love about an evolutionary approach is that even something like are we fusion fission, and we were talking about that because we're talking about, you know, groups and like conflict, but we

can talk about fission fusion as a consequence, right? It's coming back to this point of we take nothing for granted. It's a consequence of like just the ecology or what the environment is like. Does it do you need to fusion, fusion, fission, fusion um, or not? So I think that that's really cool, but it does add this complication of on one hand, you're talking about like the group psychology or like, because groups in some sense are like caused by the mental representation, which then causes the behavior. Um, so it becomes this complicated thing. Like, unsurprisingly, groups are complicated, which is we both have to deal with like the ecology to think about, like, well, why would there even be selection for conflict?

But then at the same time, you're it's this thing of many species don't have the requisite psychology to do produce the behavior either. So how do we explain that too? Yeah. Yeah, it's really fun to think about because you can think about, you know, savannah baboons, they live in these sort of large groups, but they're eating, you know, seeds from the grasses. So they don't really have this sort of, as far as I understand, a like distinct in-group, out-group psychology where, you know, access to territory really matters for reproduction. But then you think about chimpanzees, where, you know, they're they like to eat, you know, figs from fig trees. So if if it's time where they're all, you know, where there's abundant figs, they're going

to spend most of their days together. But then in a season where it's not quite as abundant, you know, there's not nearly as much food. They're in much smaller party. So they're both vulnerable, but they may have a reason if they're in a larger party than to predate on their neighbors. I'm working on a a paper sort of like laying out some ideas about the evolution of war. And one of the sessions is like, you know, why don't zeb off of Sapolskys, why don't zebras get ulcers is why don't like zebras wage war? Great question, yeah. You know, is that, you know, or rabbits or whatever. Why don't why don't squirrels wage war? You know, squirrels have violence, they're super aggressive, but you know, why don't they

wage war? And some of the aspects to in order to wage war, you have to have a psychology to you to engage in coalitionary aggression, use it strategically. So that requires certain evolutionary preconditions to be met. Right. Do you do you think that carnivory might be one such precondition? And that if you have the cognitive machinery necessary to coordinate with other members of your group to aggressively attack a prey animal, that those types of abilities could be parlayed into a context of intergroup violence. Whereas if you don't have any kind of predation uh instincts or abilities, then it's going to be harder to evolve the kinds of coordination abilities and socio cognitive abilities necessary to get together in a group and count on the fact that you can all act in

synchrono and synchrony and and uh cooperate with one another and and be confident that you know each member of the group is gonna have your back in in some sense. Um no, I don't think it's necessary. I think you know, I think there is something appealing sort of about you know hunting as a pathway to war. And I think this is one of the major sort of uh hypotheses that the imbalance of power sort of overturned, because you have many species that, you know, are carnivores to a more or lesser extent that don't have anything like it. And then you can think about some species that maybe aren't heavily carnivores, like some species of chimpanzees or potentially bonobos, if we end up finding that they do have rating, which some people, some people suspect that aren't carnivores, or

gorillas, for instance. You know, there's been several cases of gorilla coalitionary violence against a lone outgroup individual. So it's it's less a case of like where the larger group goes and looks for like a patrol for individuals to take over the territory, and more like a larger group is being followed by a lone individual, and then they pile on and beat that individual to nearly to death or to death. Um, you know, and they're not, you know, not carnivores by any stretch of the imagination. Is it is it territory then? Is it the is it the exclusivity of like why don't squirrels go to war? Um well I don't think they're group living in the same in the same way. Right. And this is the problem, right?

It's like a chicken and egg thing because it's like, well why aren't they group living? And does it come back to then is it the um the distribution of resources? But you know, they control territories in the sense that they have a you know, you have a nice uh oak in your in your in your yard and you have uh you know one or two squirrel nests in it that they want to control. So they'll, you know, chase away squirrels from other you know, squirrels that are trying to encroach on their territory, but you don't have the opportunity for, you know, four nests from these three, you know, these three to gang up with each other and chase away and kill some other squirrel. Now we it may be, you know, if you when I started my PhD research in 2009, you know, many

of the species that have lethal intergroup aggression now we didn't actually know about it at the time or wasn't well documented. So it may be the case in 20 years we find out that you know some sort of like hyper-social population of squirrels somewhere, you know, does. So it may look different. But um, you know, but for the most part, I think the way we understand that why the vast majority of species, although they kill each other or why many mammalian species kill each other, don't do it as parts of coalitions. It's just the fact that you have to be social and typically territorial. Right. And the reason you're territorial is because territory is associated with access to resources that you can convert into reproduction.

Right. So this is the Harcourt-Dewall classic sort of coalitions in humans and non-humans. This was sort of in the 80s and 90s. There was just this like social brain hypothesis of really multi-agent conflict is really difficult. It's really zoologically rare. There's many situations where you look at something like classically, elephant seals, like it's very um male reproductive success is extremely skewed. There's a whole beach full of female elephant seals, and one male elephant seal is fights all the other males and gets access to all of them. And from a coalitional species perspective, it's insane because two or three, you know, uh beta and whatever, um, could could just gang up on that man, but they don't because they

just cannot do it. And it's so weird. Um so this idea that there's sort of like it's hard computationally to do this is I think was a really important idea. Has that been part of your thinking? And is that outdated now? Or how do you think that's it? Yeah, no, well, you know, I I think it's certainly true the, you know, the vast majority of lethal aggression you're going to see is, you know, all those, you know, exciting examples of two elephant seals, two horses going at it, you know, two lions, two deer. It's typically, uh, you know, it's typically dyadic. But I'm not sure that computation's really the limiting factor because presumably if the environment is such that it favors the prerequisites for it and there's sufficient payoff,

then you are gonna involve the computational machinery. Yeah. You know, so you may you may have to have other things necessarily like, you know, the conditions for which there to sort of be stable groups or stable coalitions. Right. You know, within it, how do you not get betrayed? You know, if a group of if beta is joined together to overthrow the alpha seal, how does one of them not get betrayed? So I think that if you know if the evolutionary payoffs are there over enough time that we we do see this paper or this behavior evolve and you know, distant taxa. So I think it's not like a, you know, an insurmountably high barrier. I see. So it's sort of like it's a it's obviously like a a a a maximum if in this possibility

space of like phenotypes, It's hard to get to, and not every species gets to it, but it's not a thing of there's any simple like one factor to why they don't. It's just you need sort of the right constellation of either the environment is such that like free riders get selected out automatically, or there's enough sort of cognitive complexity in the species for other reasons that might be even historical, that keeping track of sort of reciprocity or free riders is already sort of there enough. It's it's all sort of not, there's no sort of clear magic bullet per se. Yeah, I think that that's I think that that's fair. I also just want to say at this point, I feel like our our theorizing on the evolution of

coalitionary violence, lethal coalitionary violence, it's not as refined as it should be in the in the wake of just a lot of other data on species coming out. I feel like that this is a chance, you know, this is this is a time for us to really sort of do more theory building. You know, the imbalance of power is like dominant and beautiful, it's elegant, it explains so much, but I'm not sure it explains everything we're seeing right now. Or even if it even if it does answers questions at these other levels that you're asking, well, why don't some species develop it? So it's a um, so I don't think we have all the answers theoretically at Right, because it seems like the question the question that Dave was getting at is a is a separate question,

but very related. So we're originally talking about violence between groups where a coalition from one group will will gang up on uh a number of individuals from the other group. But there's also the question of coalitional violence within a group. So why don't the betas in a and a troop of elephant seals get together and overthrow the alpha? It would presumably be in their reproductive interests to do that. Why don't they? Why don't we see uh coalitions uh within a group uh uh you know fighting fighting with other members of the group. Uh and it seems to me that that is a related question and and and perhaps um they're correlated. You know, if you have coalitional violence within a group, you also are more likely to see

coalitional violence between a group. I know, you know, in chimpanzees for example, th they form alliances and they often can gang up on on the male within a group. Well if they have that ability, why not, you know, parlay that to between group violence as well? Is that uh is that a five factor? I love that example because this is actually one of the things I think about in trying to explain why don't bonobos have uh sort of the lethal rating that you see in chimpanzees. So the one is just that they have um, you know, they don't have as much imbalance of power, but another hypothesis is that they don't have as many male coalition or they don't have as strong of male coalitions as you see in chimpanzees.

And maybe that's due to, you know, some other feature, but also they have, you know, it's been reported to me, I'm not a bonobo researcher at all, but you know, bonobo females are very dominant and will often sort of like beat up and break up nascent coalitions. So it may just be that some of the proximate circumstances aren't there. Perhaps if you took away all the bonobo females, then you would have rating surge, but without, you know, with with the strong females that are breaking male coalitions. Maybe you just don't have the right sort of group coalis that then, you know, has enough sort of alignment of interests and stability to go out on a raid against another bonobo group. So I think this is a time that r really we should be doing some more theory refinement.

that you know, we I thought we had most of the these sort of like big picture issues settled 15 years ago. And it's turning out that, you know, new data leads to new theory. So it's a really exciting time to be working in this area. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, uh inner group conflict seems like it's such a straightforward selection pressure thing, you know, like foraging or mating. And it's obviously studying the lots of animals. It's pretty easy to observe. I mean, I say that not being in the forest being next to conflict, but but it's relatively easy to observe. Um, and so yeah, it's amazing that we still don't really have great theories. And you mean theories sort of at every level, right?

Like in the sense of, I mean, obviously we don't have very good theories psychologically about the mental software in any species, but you even mean just sort of like the of all prerequisites like we're talking about, or even what the function or even ecological correlates, right? Yeah. Like when do you would you have predicted that bandit mongeese have this agreement? If you didn't know anything about their behavior, do you have a model that's going to predict why they have it? But let's say other species of mongoose don't have it. Right, right. You want a theory that does that. And I don't I don't know that we have that right now. Yeah, that's that's fantastic. Um, where where does the evolution of peace then come into uh

come into this? So so I really started thinking about it um I mean just like in the first week or several weeks of my field work. And you know, I wanted to study decentralized war. So that if you want to study human war, you know, most people do it through like experiments or something like that. Or you'll work with chimpanzees and do sort of armchair theorizing about humans. But I wanted to work, I wanted to actually try to do field studies in a context that was as close as possible as we could get to like, you know, so-called ancestral conditions. So it means, you know, war outside of states, out of militaries, outside of, you know, formal institutions, hierarchy, generals, anything like that.

Um, so I ended up working in in East Africa, right at the border of South Sudan and Kenya and Ethiopia in a region called the Alemi Triangle with a group called the Nangatom. And you know, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna like you know collect lots of data on like the cause of war. I'm gonna test what hypotheses are out there, it's gonna be amazing. And then like several weeks in, there was um, you know, you're do I was doing daily labor, just digging a water hole, and you start hearing, you know, all this cheering and clapping, the sort of stuff you may hear like in your campus office if you hear like a student parade outside or something. So I climb up out of the water hole, what's going on? And you can hear people firing AK 47, sort of then excitement.

It's got a different pattern than an actual like, you know, in defense of a raid. And it was like, you know, oh, a group of raiders is coming back. They're coming back with a bunch of cattle that they stole from the Turcana. You know, so everybody that afternoon, people are just jubilant, they're so excited, gather under a big shade tree. You know, everyone's hanging out. It's really like a party. Um, and you know, they slaughter one of the cows, and everyone's like, oh, pastoralas must be meat all the time because that's what they live off. But actually, pastoras do not eat meat that often. You know, they tend to, you'll consume a lot of dairy products or grain that they're growing or trade for and typically save their livestock.

So everyone's eating just tons of cow, you know, fresh beef roasted on the fire. Everybody's happy. It's a big party. And, you know, it was really because struck me then at the point was, you know, in the in the people who had successfully captured these cattle, everyone's singing to them, like all the all the women are singing and praising them, all the guys are sort of honoring them. The elders are giving speeches, like, ah, this is the future. You know, these are these are our warriors, like they're bringing glory to us. You know, and if you're successful in killing somebody, you get honorific scars, you get status, you go through all these rituals, you become a a new person essentially. You get a you get a new name.

And it really struck me as the question is like in in these particular conditions, like actually the challenge is not to explain why there's conflict. I want people to go out and raid. I like fresh cow if I'm hungry. So I want those people to go raid. I want our cows to be fatter because they chase away the enemy and get access to grazing lands. The real challenge in these conditions is how do you get so once you're in this sort of like situation, how do you get groups to stop fighting? How do you change the costs and benefits. How do you change the incentives so people stop fighting? And that was, you know, uh uh when I give a talk on this, I like open with a passage from my journal where I'm like puzzling over this, realizing, oh my gosh, the really difficult

question isn't why do humans have war? It's obvious there's many path ways to make war pay. You know, if you're you know, so like war isn't the really hard question in humans. The really hard question is how do you get rid of it? Interesting. Yeah. So again, so just to be really clear, from a cost-benefit perspective, and this is recapitulates what we were just talking about, is from an evolutionary perspective, everything ultimately translates into there's got to be some benefit or minimization of cost for some software or phenotype to get selected for. And in the context of conflict, we just spent a bunch of time talking about, well, you know, it might be this or that that gets ultimately this level of complexity of the

software for conflict, but it's all for maximizing benefits, minimizing costs in the context of conflict, right? And and then this question of sort of well, how when there's obvious benefits to conflict, do you get peace? That's the question. Yeah, that's the question that you know, if you think about why did our species evolve some particular trait, um, then then you look at costs and benefits over uh over evolutionary timescales. And you know, war in humans is pretty simple. You can think that it it just requires the capacity to form coalitions, to use aggression strategically, and then you get yourself in a situation where there's clear benefits from doing so. You know, so you have cultural institutions, but you may also capture, and it's common in

many societies, including hunter gatherers, things of value, weapons, physical trophies, captives, you know, that and and humans aren't morons like chimpanzees or most other species. We do so when the costs are typically pretty low through imbalances of power. You know, so the most common type of attack across the ethnographic literature and decentralized conflict is the raid, where you know, anywhere from four to fifteen individuals, typically young males, um, in almost all cases, go out and use ambush and stealth to kill one or two individuals from another group. And, you know, the at very, very low risk to themselves. And we don't have good like quantitative studies from many societies at all, but the few

that we do suggest the risk is typically negligible. Shagnon, and I think it was just sort of an armchair estimation, said it was probably like less than 5%. Steve Beckerman's data among the Warani, which is like one of the most, you know, had the highest rates of homicide. You know, it's more feuding than war at that point. He he he says that there's no record, nobody can recount, an offensive reader getting attacked or killed. And my data from the Nangatom, it's very, very rare. People are more likely to die of thirst, you know, so it's semi-arid than they are to be killed in the raid. In the couple of cases, it's um typically like friendly fire or something like that. So, you know, and it's because people are trying to minimize the danger to themselves.

So the costs are pretty low with this pattern of conflict that we think of as ancestral. You know, it's very similar to what you see in many other species, including chimpanzees. And the benefits in humans can be more proximate and tangible than, say, in chimpanzees, and maybe this really delayed mechanism of chimpanzees, where after 10 years they take over the territory and they get access to new fruiting trees, which allows them to re reduce their interbirth interval and have higher offspring survival. In humans, it may be much more like very direct. Like we steal your weapons, we have cultural mechanisms, you know. So you kill someone, you get a new name, you get honorary tokens of your of your status, or you capture a human, you know, a human child or a human wife.

Um, and then among pastoralists, you also get livestock, that, you know, really tasty meat we were talking about. Right. Yeah, And that and that cow is uh uh slaughterable and eatable and doesn't require it's not like the land, right? Like classically, pastoralists are like shepherds or whatever else uh you're you're grazing or your your the it's the it's the exclusivity and uh stealability. I'm using the wrong words, but basically how rival the goods are and how portable and packageable. I mean it's the same reason why like money and diamonds, Um, you know, people try to steal them, but you don't try to steal like a whole building. You can't. Like you can't, you know, you have to maintain it.

It's the same with like a cropland versus the the results of the crops. Yeah. Like the cow is the result of a lot of labor and resources, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the reasons I find what what you're alluding to there sort of competition competition for land, things that, you know, are really a collective good less satisfying for you know explanations of human war. It's not always clear, especially like in human conflict where you can have these long, long periods of just like back and forth, tit for tat. And we don't have a lot of really good records of say one, you know, mobile hunter-gatherer group taking over the territory of another mobile hunter-gatherer group. That's sort of the hypothesis.

But as someone who's in the literature, I I don't see as many of accounts of it as as I would like to. And instead what I typically see are just sort of like back and forth, you know, tit for tat rating for, you know, for long periods of time without, you know, concrete access to like we have taken over this land, and now over 10 years, you know, we're gonna have higher reproductive systems. Oh, I see. Okay. You know, so um so does that mean so like because typically like war, as like I think a lot of people, I mean, like in Luke, I just want to say like we went to a conference many years ago about the evolution of war and your pictures, you know, it was like, wow, this Luke is very brave. Like there's people with AK 47s or Krishnikovs like running around shooting them.

Like, but it it's uh it's in this context of there's sort of two versions. One is the monkeys thing, right? Where it's sort of lots of group lot of people together and it's in this asymmetric war of attrition or it's just sort of sussing out who's who which side will win. And even a lot of like mechanized war, you know, like the the Great Wars, even, a lot of it was that, right? It was just sort of for territory. But but it sounds like what you're saying is that that's not really the mu the model you're seeing. Um I would say I don't think that they're great models for thinking about the evolution of war in the human species. You know, even monkeys, it shows that there can be a different path to coalitionary

killing, but where you think about just like, you know, small parties operating. So if you just survey hunter-gatherer relationships, you know, sort of as close to pre-contact as you can get, you find the most potter common pattern of intergroup killing is what we're describing, the raid, which is somewhat the chimpanzee patrol, you know, small group of individuals goes out at less at low cost to themselves. So I take that as sort of the baseline thing that we're trying to understand. And then culture and humans can put it in all different types of ways. Among the Nangatom, there are things like battles, among the Turkana, things like battles, but I don't think that those are the real sort of like the window into our evolution.

I think those are the product of new social technologies which allow us to have larger population densities, uh more explicit or more uh established methods of incentivizing individuals, um, you know, either through rewards or coercion. But if we're trying to understand the evolution of our species, I think I think what we really have to do is understand the small, the pattern of small raids. Right. Like the the the Civil War soldier who does who just walks through the field getting shot at because the officer behind him will shoot him if he does is that that's not a good lit that's not a good like intuition pump for how people ordinarily behave in common. No, and no one of the biggest things when I when I talk on the evolution war, everybody

thinks as rightfully so, you imagine what we think of as war, you know, hierarchies and formless and and coordination and some larger strategy, but there often no strategy. The strategy is there's tactics to that particular day, like surround the village, kill everybody, shoot them like dogs. There's no overarching strategy at all. Like, okay, you know, we're gradually going to beat them back in this area, and then they're gonna migrate here, and we're gonna have guys from that side come over. There's there's nothing really that I've ever personally seen like that, or really an ethnography of decentralized small-scale society. So like below the level of a chiefdom. Yeah. So once societies start getting sort of formal leaders, you know, they start transitioning

to be a chiefdom, you do see, you know, things that like proto-militaries come up, and that resembles modern conflict or contemporary conflict much more. So a lot of Hollywoodification, maybe is like uh wait, I don't know. When you talk to people and you study war, do people have like weird thoughts about how it works? Or well often they're really surprised when they they I when I tell them they have AK 47s because I think that is things like, oh, they're gonna have spears and you know bows and arrows and you know in you know t in the twenty first century that's that's really very very rare but and then so there's a question I often faces how much did that sort of change the the patterns of like indigenous war and it um

it's sort of unresolvable because we don't have enough data. The earliest accounts show you know similar small scale raids that you have now, sort of similar large scale battles. And by large scale, they're not large compared to us, but they're large for the level of social organization and population size. So they may involve two to three hundred people on the side coming together on a given day and just sort of attacking by overwhelming force. But if anything, I think in this part of the world, it's made more the small scale raids probably more common and more dangerous than they used to be, in the sense that like four guys can go out with you know four AK forty sevens and not be nearly as afraid as

like four guys with four spears. Right, right. You know, if the goal is just to find a lone individual in the bush and shoot the kill. Yeah, you don't have to get as close. You don't have to, you don't risk. Yeah. I did did I hear you say too that also cell phones maybe even have more of a greater effect than than the weapons. Now, yeah. So cell phones are now becoming, you know, common all over the globe. And I mean they're both good for conflict resolution. Now they're they're used. So you'll, you know, NGOs and governments everywhere will put like conflict monitors who will call in, like we see the, you know, we see them there slaughtering bulls, which is often something that pastoralists would do before when they're trying to motivate young men

to go to a raid. They may kill a couple of bulls and like, oh, we see them slaughtering bulls like red bulls or something. You know, a bull that's like uh ritualistically associated with going to raid. So they may put out and call other groups, you know, like have everybody be on heightened alert, have them sleep in the village, you know, don't have people out in small herding parties. Um, but then also reportedly, this isn't the case in the Nangatom at all. But so I've heard about, you know, in in Kenya, you know, using it for the same, using it to share information about, say, where herds are that then you could rage. So when people are mobile and you're from one group, let's say you're from the Nangatom and

you want to raid the Turkana, You don't really know necessarily where the villages are because people move around or where the herds are because they're mobile. So you'll send out scouts. Big raiding parties are often preceded with scouts who will go out for several days, sort of living off the land and come back and be like, okay, over by these mountains, you know, I found fresh poop and some villages. They're probably going to be over there. But um, if you can do that then with cell phones, it's even more efficacious. Right. So cell phones are just coordination devices. So either for peace or or conflict. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Interesting. So it seems like there's a pretty big disconnect between, you know, the types of intergroup

violence that say the imbalance of power hypothesis would explain, and the types of large-scale warfare that we see in the historical record where like, you know, France and England will go to war and they'll have huge armies. And that's very different from the types of small-scale raids that you might see in the Turkana, where like a group of male young men will try to gang up on a on a smaller number of people from another village. So we have that disconnect between presumably what what the evolved psychology is is designed for, which is, you know, uh low cost, low-risk, you know, uh uh raids where the benefit is really high. And then you have this totally different thing that happens once you get agriculture and

civilization and armies and kings and and what have you. Um is there a similar part of that analogy with with regard to peace? So, in the same way that we have you know large-scale armies um and and civilizations and kings. Do we we we also have large scale you know peace treaties and uh international organizations that try to regulate interstate conflict. So we have that you know large scale element of of of peace and negotiation and diplomacy. Do is there a small scale version of that uh as well that's that's analogous to the small scale rating that we see? Oh yeah that's a that's a great question. I love that question. Um yeah so just to sort of recapitulate, first I agree with you that the sort of like

centralized conflict is really sort of discontinuous with the sort of small-scale evolutionary raids. It uses some of the same psychological mechanisms, but it also uses things that are like really pretty novel, the ability of second lieutenants to stand at the back of a line and shoot would-be deserters. Um, but then with then with peace, do you have that same sort of discontinuity? And I I think actually less so, because I think peace is I sort of conceptualize it, where relationships are not negotiated individually, but sort of at the at the group level. I don't have to like sort of tentatively hang around with you and figure out if you're gonna try to murder me in my sleep. I think they're really pretty novel in our ep species history.

I think they depended on us first culturally evolving technologies that allow us to like enforce norms at the group level and then coordinate our behavior and make those norms known both within and between and between groups. So some of those things are, and then once you do have peace, the ability to try to make it so nobody from your side breaks the peace. And I just recently read The Guns of August, like a really famous sort of popular book about World War I, and I was struck by one of the things the author said is that right before the German invasion of Belgium and then France, France pulled its armies like 10 miles back, all their soldiers 10 miles back from the border because they were so

concerned that one of their soldiers didn't sort of like strike the blow that set it off. That they wanted to be able to say it wasn't us, it was Germany. And that struck me is the reason it struck me is like, wow, that's a real sort of challenge that every society that wants to have peace has. It's like, you know, let's say we're, you know, three, you know, three males among the Nangatom or hunter-gatherers, and like, you know, I just want to live a good life, have my family. David P uh pins off wants to live a good, I realize you both have the same initial aspect. Yeah, we go, David, yeah. Also wants to live a good life and, you know, just raise his family. But then, you know, Santa Barbara Dave, you know, he's the sort of like, you know, Ferris

one who's just like unsatisfied with his lot in life, what's to stop him from going out, raiding the other group? He doesn't even have to tell anybody but his closest friends from doing it, and then reinitiating us in this sort of cycle of violence. You know, so the other group that's got raided isn't going to know, oh, it's just David P. He's, you know, sort of um, you know, a misanthrope. He what he's doing doesn't really reflect anybody on that. All they see is like, hey, we had a state of peace and we got rated. So the the central challenge for any society that's gonna any human society that's gonna have peace is how do we align our incentives enough so the sort of psychopaths or the people with impulse disorders or the people whose costs and benefits are

just a little, you know, the cost and benefit calculus is either inaccurate or just doesn't favor peace, how do you keep them from initiating offensive aggression, you know, at low cost to themselves when they may when there may be very clear, tangible benefits. So and this requires a level of centralization and cultural technologies that I think were pretty rare in for most of human history. So you need to be able to have norms at the group level saying, hey, this is not how we act to those to people of this particular group. And if we do, there's some sort of sanction for that. But it's difficult to get any type of sanctions like that among most mobile hunter-gatherer groups. It seems like it's it's interesting.

It's almost uh like we need some kind of decomposition or de uh homogenizing, I don't know if that's a word or not, but to dehomogenize the group such that um one member of the group is not a stand-in for everyone else within that group. Because if that were the case, if one psychopath from that group came and did some damage or attacked us, then we would automatically infer that that person is representative of everyone else in that group, and we would retaliate not against that psychopath, but against the group itself as a singular entity. But in order to avoid that, we need some way of decomposing the group away from this monolithic concept and toward a collection of parts. And we might represent the fact that this part is not a stand-in for the

whole. Do you think that that uh way of conceptualizing group is is part of this? The the decomposition isn't really something that often like happens in tribal societies, you know, where you're you're, you know, any action by any part of your group, the the blame falls on all of the group. So the way this is often resolved is turning over the killer. So uh Santa Barbara Dave, you know, turning you over for the other group to dispatch justice, or what's more common is us killing uh members of our in group killing the offender to show that that individual does not represent, you know, a norm, that they're not representing the will of the group or the new, the new norm. This is why peace is really, really difficult in tribal.

So it's sustained peace, not just like periods of intergroup conflict, but you know, sustained, iterated, you know, durable, harmonious relationships, because it really breaks down very easily. And then, and further, that many, many small-scale groups have the cosmology where not just like Santa Barbara Dave goes out and attacks somebody from the other group, but somebody from the other group falls ill after Dave having made eye contact with them, and that you know it's it's it's war by mystical means or by witchcraft, you know, or just you know, somebody's visiting from the other group Dave's village and falls sick and gets malaria and dies. How do you reassure the other group that it wasn't due to um you know it

wasn't due to malevolent behavior by day and this is something like in my own field work I saw I just saw a ton like a Nangatom guy was like up trading in Mercy and I guess he was old Mercy's one of the rival groups uh they long hostilities with and he died and there was just endless discussions over the days over like trying to figure out what the cause of death was and whether there would be retaliation or not. And and similarly um in the one sort of market town in Nangatam at that time, Kangaton, where there was a small health clinic, a a woman from Turkana who had family in Nangatom. You know, she some of her family married came in and she was dying of HIV, came to the clinic to get treatment, and she ended up dying when she was there.

I was like helping take her to the clinic and stuff. And there was just massive war. Like in the town, there was going to be retaliation by Kenya. So like I think the government, like the local government, sends somebody over to the you know to the Kenya side to be like, you know, she died at the clinic of, you know, you know, dehydration or whatever at the clinic, it wasn't the fairest. So these are real, real problems that limit the ability of of decentralized societies to make peace. Is that is that because so, David, what was the verb you used to decompose? De dehomogenize. Dehomogenize. I like that. Yeah. So to dehomogenize the groups. Luca, do you have an idea of why that is? So I mean, you know, if you took like modern day France or Germany, if you like lived in

France and your relative died in Germany currently, you know, you wouldn't think, well, the Germany killed my French relative and I have to retaliate against Germany currently, right? You wouldn't think that. you you might have 200 years ago. Yeah, but do we have a psychology? I mean, you would know both of you would know better because you're psychologists, but don't we have a psychology where we sort of want to blame every individual of a group, you know, attribute them some essence and blame them. I feel like this is sort of a fundamental thing feature of human psychology. It it is. I mean my my answer to that would be though that that sort of comes back then to what group though? And this is for me at least the thing that really breaks all of this open is our ability to

generate new group identities. Yeah. Right. Like if you're I mean, and this is kind of what I was wondering is like if you're stuck, like a good analogy would be like we're in like battleships and we're like really stuck in them. We can't switch back and forth between them. And we can't even really like individuate the people within. So if, like, you know, if a if a missile comes over to us, you know, it's sort of like there's no rational reason for me to individuate who did that because I can't do anything about it, you know. Um, and that's a very different situation than uh if I'm in a room full of people and we just have different color t shirts on, and I'm a red t-shirted person, somebody's got a blue shirt on, and another red-shirted person gets punched

by a blue-shirt person. We can choose like either it's reds versus blues, or we can sit down that red or that blue and not have a brawl, right? Because we're all sort of spatially together and we don't want to have to deal with like the escalation of conflict. But in the battleship condition, we really don't have a choice if we're going to respond at all. We're just sort of stuck because there's no chance of coordination. There's no value to uh there's no possibility of coordination with the other side, right? Or cooperation. Yeah, I think that that's a better model for sort of decentralized tribal societies. Is I mean, there is the possibility of coordination, it's just a lot harder. So you really know everybody's on foot.

You know, you may span your side may span a five days walk. So what does it actually take to even share information across your group? Much less, you know, develop a norm for behavior. I think it's there's there's real coordination problems in a way that we don't have in in contemporary society. Plus, you know it's you know, often there's really different moral norms towards people outside the society. You know, many, many traditional societies, sort of the moral boundaries stop at your group, however your group is defined. And the things that you do against members of other groups don't have the same moral valence. Like it's, you know, taking their property may not be called stealing in the way, you know,

with the word that you would use to describe it against an in-group member or killing somebody, for instance, among the Nangatom during the time of field work, you know, you you you know, if you killed another Nangatom, that's murder. You kill a Turkana, that's you know, that's war, that's just life. It's actually morally laudable in most conditions. So I think I straight a little bit away from from uh your question. No, no, no. That's great. And I mean, yeah, no, even your example of you're working in the water pit or you're digging a hole, right? And they're like excited. I mean, that's even like I experienced that where, you know, they were talking about, oh, we got this cow, that's wonderful.

And I was like, you guys, they're gonna retaliate again. Like, you know, like and that's the different, that's the different setting on our evolved psychology, right? Of like, um, you and it's this thing of like this battleship metaphor where it's sort of like, well, I'm never gonna interact with somebody in the out group. There's no benefit to me to quelling them. They're just like a resource, they're just like a fruit tree to be, you know, like there's no, there's no future possibility of interaction. Um Yeah, this is why I think about you know, peace is the solution to a collective action problem, to a really hard collective action problem, because you you have people like young men who say, Oh, there's no possibility, I have no interest in cooperating with the

Turkana. I just want cows, I want fame. I'm 16, I'm stuck watching these cows, and I want to be a famous warrior. But then you have people who have really seen a lot and they realize exactly what you thought is like, hey, if you did this to them, they're just gonna do it to us, and we're gonna be locked into this just like cycle that's you know really difficult to break free. So you have these internal tensions within society and even within the same individual. Like does that person want peace or not? Well it may depend on the particular time of them, you know, for them, like you know, the day of the week or even potentially their mood um shaped on like shaped by more recent events. So society has to figure out a a way to solve these things and come to a consensus and then

to generate a norm and then the ability to enforce that norm, make sure everybody has knowledge of the norm, including the other side. So it's common knowledge. Yeah. And also time horizon, I would expect. You know, more future-oriented members of the society might be more in favor of peace, more present-oriented members of the society, like young men who are trying to impress a girl, like they're they're very present-oriented and and they what want what's best for them right now. They're not thinking about, you know, twenty years into the future. Um and so the the degree to which the the the society is is inclined to conceptualize those future costs that might not happen now, but you know, in a decade or

two decades or three decades, that ability pr is probably also a variable, I would imagine. Um yeah. So you'll have like, you know, when peace is starting to to come about through being built, you'll often have like prominent leaders berating the young men. Don't go on a raid. Absolutely not. You're gonna break the peace. It's gonna be horrible. You'll have, you know, sort of shaman or religious or ritual specialists not bless the men. You know, typically you may get a blessing before you go on a raid, you know. So they they'll they'll agree at a peace meeting. Let's say we're not gonna bless the young men who want to raid. In some cases in the ethnography, you find, um, and I haven't seen this, I've just read it,

where they'll if they detect young men going on a raid. So Santa Barbara Dave decides, oh, he doesn't care, he doesn't need blessings, he's still gonna go to raid. Sorry to pick on you, Dave. No, it's great. Um you know, he's gonna he's just gonna go a raid, he's gonna get his best friends, they're not gonna tell anyone, they're gonna sneak off. So we arrange, okay, you know, meet me down at the at the at the ocean, you know, in in three hours. And they they find Dave and his friends, and they actually physically beat him to get him withdraw his plans of going on a raid. So there can be really you know complicated social dynamics that have to be solved to you know get everybody's incentives to align.

Yeah, interesting. I wanna I wanna pick your brain about a topic that is very interesting to me, I think also interesting to Dave, which is the role of uh moralization, pretext, ideology, uh narrative, whatever you there are lots of words we might use for this. Um you you mentioned that you know it's not seen as immoral to kill or steal from an outgroup member, but it is to kill or steal from an in-group member. You mentioned how sometimes intergroup conflicts are precipitated by accusations of witchcraft. If someone falls ill, they might blame it on, you know, sorcery from members of a rival group, and that might in some cases precipitate or justify the conflict. Have you thought much about the role of justification or moralization or even demonization

of the of the rival group as a way to coordinate intergroup violence. What what is what are the role of these these ideas, these beliefs, these these narratives, these pretexts? Um do you think that they are they play an instrumental role, or do you think they're they're more of a of a modern phenomenon? So I don't think they're I don't think they're a mod modern phenomena, but I think the question is whether they're causal. So there's certainly, you know, dehumanization language. They're, you know, they're savages, they're like animals, you know, they're horrible. Remember all the time, you know, we just did the victim complex. Remember all the times they did this, this, and this and this, um, you know, without

remembering the times you did that, that, that, and then to them. You know, there's all sorts of you know, slurs that are used, just like, you know, in in our society. Um, so those certainly appear, you know, they certainly are very present. I think there's probably something present across, you know, almost all human societies, or at least small scale societies that are engaging in intergroup conflict. Um, and they certainly seem to be associated with people getting aroused, with people, you know, having a a feeling of, you know, that there was a grievance against them. I just don't know whether they're necessary, like how much causal work they do. You can certainly have high rates of lethal violence in say chimpanzees

without anything like that. Um you know, so maybe they're sort of an epiphenomena. Yeah, I don't know. That would be something for the lab to like more sort of engagement experimentally. Yeah. I mean, I would expect my current thinking is that it it it may well play a strong causal role in the sense that, you know, chimpanzees may not need it because they don't have the same kind of social marketplace and reputation management that humans do. And among among humans, we have very strong um social norms and moral norms to be peaceful and friendly and generous with members of the group. And insofar as one is bloodthirsty and vengeful toward outgroups, that could license a variety of interest uh inferences about that person's character.

And if we're all um acting in a way that is um you know uh activating those inferences in one another's, there could be reputational costs to trying to mobilize outgroup aggression in the absence of any kind of moral justification or in the absence of any kind of pretext. And it may make it easier to coordinate uh out uh and um and punish free riders and defectors from the collective action if we have a common narrative that justifies the collective action versus if we don't. Yeah, I mean it it sounds plausible. I just don't know how much you actually need that in universes where your moral boundaries really do stop at at your people. I mean I just think the ethnographies are just you know replete with examples of strangers

being killed on site, women and children being killed. You know, it it in during my field work, there was a kid in my village who was killed and mostly beheaded. And like I had no doubt that the other group was absolutely celebrating, just as people in my group would have been doing in the same circumstances were reversed. Or, you know, there was a case where, you know, a raiding party encountered a young kid of the other group and they wanted to kill. And there's discussion now that it's moralized, and they decided to bring him back as a captive. And one of them was like, you know, just so upset because it was his chance to get scars, you know, honorific scars, or um it I had another example I was gonna tell, but I can't remember.

Um, you know, like your your moral universe really does is often limited to just people of your own group. You know, and it's not always even that you acknowledge them as less than human. You may think they're fully human. You invite them. So think of the treacherous feast that, you know, Shagnan writes so much about. Like you recognize them as fully human, motivated by the same things you're motivated by, you know, that you you want to come hang out and have a party and you know, get drunk and you know, uh meet prospective mates and you know this about you know this enough about your enemy that you you know you know you construct this elaborate ruse to invite them over um so it sounds plausible i just don't know how much it applies in in this universe and it was

one of the things that sort of as an anthropologist was like the most difficult to wrap my head around is that you know it I never worried about any Nangatom doing anything to me, but I worried say if I wanted a guy from the Hammer, a different ethnic group who's often enemies in the Nangatom to come visit me in my village. Yeah. You know, how to what extent would he be safe? You know, and I knew okay, he'd often be totally safe when he's with me, but what about if he goes out to use the bathroom, you know, and and encounters somebody who doesn't know him or somebody who's just really upset at, you know, you know, and wants the insignia that comes from killing somebody. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I'm I'm wondering if if the boundedness of the moral universe

is um actually an example of the type of thing I'm talking about. That y that actually requires work and coordination to create that boundedness. And we need to uh perpetuate the idea that there is the a a distinction there that, you know, uh you know, morality uh applies to our group but not to the other group. Uh, and if you aggress against the outgroup, then we're not going to negatively judge you. And I think there may well need to be a kind of cultural coordination about that fact itself that enables um the violence to occur. If if there wasn't any coordination to that effect, where there would be um doubts about whether I might be doing something morally wrong by attacking a member of their group, then

I think that could very well destroy the ability of the group uh to engage in collective action. So it may be that that boundedness is itself part of the thing I'm talking about that enables um the the violence to take place. It may not be a given or an automatic or something that just you know automatically applies. It may itself require work to maintain yeah I guess what I'm trying trying to understand a lost to is why do you need this extra thing to do violence? Like why you know we like is the idea that we're just like innately inhibited from killing others. Is that uh not that we're innately inhibited, um that we're uh innately inclined to draw inferences about each other's character based on their behaviors and their

words and deeds. Um and uh wanton violence it uh may feed into those inference systems such that we're inclined to judge someone who is wantonly violent as a cruel person. And therefore, we're going to be less willing to partner up with that person, cooperate with them. We might be more afraid of that person, et cetera, et cetera. So what I'm talking about is the type of inferences that we're inclined to draw about one another based on their behavior. And oftentimes, when we engage in a violent outgroup attack, we can't turn off that machinery. We're going to be making inferences about everyone who's involved in that collective action. We're going to be making inferences about the people who propose it, the leaders who lead

it, uh the people who are most bloodthirsty uh uh within it. Um and the only way to uh deactivate those inferences is to replace them with a different set of inferences, that instead of the person being bloodthirsty and cruel, they're brave um and and valiant. Uh instead of the person being exploitative toward the outgroup, they're they're helping the in-group. Instead of someone, you know, uh attacking an outgroup member for no reason, they're retaliating against all the evil things that group did to us in the past. And if we change those inferences, then it actually changes the incentives to engage in the in the collective violence because not only are you getting the material benefits of say

cattle or or resources or territory or whatever, you're also gaining social benefits and reputational benefits. And those social benefits might be instrumental to to the collective action itself. And without those social benefits, there might not be enough of an impetus to engage in it. And at least that that's that's how I'm I'm currently thinking of it. I might be wrong, but I think there there might be something to it. Yeah. Can I mediate this? Cause I think I agree with both of you. Um, and I think so. Let me try to okay. So I think for Luke, Luke, and both of you tell me if I'm wrong. So I think Luke, Luke is coming in this from the perspective of like, if you look across the animal kingdom, basically, like conflict, you know, to be just kind of glib about it,

is everywhere. And as long as you're not hurting me, David, if you hurt some other guy that I'm not really interested in and doesn't, isn't my best friend, and especially if I don't even know him, like more power to you, whatever, right? Like, so as soon as there's sort of like any uh anonymity, and we're not a super cooperative species, then like whatever, yeah, go for it. He's a resource. And if you're in you're a cooperator with me. So like I don't care if you're belligerent, more or less, right? And I think from Luke's perspective, then thinking about uh this scaled up is that if we have sort of these pockets of coordination or cooperation where we're sort of all in these ships or these small scale social worlds, it's really not

surprising that, like, where the boundaries of this coordination exist, then any member outside this group is just sort of not seen as in the moral sphere, right? Like just as Luke's talking about. Now, and so what you need to explain then is how do you get out of that? Now, David, what I think you're explaining, I completely also agree with, is that once you already take the perspective of uh human psychology that's already engaged in the fact that you're already using that cultural technology, and there are people who are saying, Look, uh, if we do take the cows, they're gonna retaliate. So let's have a conversation about uh what what group identity we should all agree with or whether we should be belligerent.

And especially like me as a human being who is grown up in a cultural milieu where I'm like lucky enough and privileged enough to be like the whole world is the cooperative unit, right? Like, so I totally get the intuition that like seeing somebody be belligerent is bad and like it's really short-sighted. And I and I even felt that when Luke was saying that example about like the cow, right? And people celebrating and praising the belligerent. But I think that, and I agree with that 100%. And I think that is a true readout of the evolved psychology. But I I would think that Luke would say that's a readout of the evolved psychology that's gone through this experience of the inputs of we're gonna talk about the moral boundary being more malleable

and being larger, such that we're gonna sort of like have a higher prior that any kind of belligerence is sort of frowned upon. Do you guys how do you guys feel about that? Yeah, I think that's that's a good way of putting it. I mean, let me backtrack a little bit and maybe try to put forward a more a weaker version of the thesis, which is that it may be that this that you only see this um sort of thing in in modern social environments where uh the necessity of pretexts and ideologies and moralistic narratives is much higher in large anonymous um uh highly uh you know sedentary societies. Uh and I'm I'm thinking of the work of Joshua Jackson showing that um we're more inclined to draw uh a sweeping variety of inferences about someone's character based on a single

action that they perform. Um I forget what what the term he uses for this, but we're more we're uh we basically view morality as like a singular dimension. And if you do one bad thing, then you're bad across the board. You know, if you happen to lie, then you're also probably a bad spouse, you're also probably a bad parent, you're a bad friend, uh and and and we we just view you as a bad person in general. Whereas you don't see this kind of sweeping uh inference being made in small-scale societies where, yeah, maybe you lied this one time or maybe you were mean to this one person, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person across the board. Uh and his argument is that because we have such huge social networks and the option the

social options available to us are much larger, we're sort of forced to make these uh these sweeping inferences as a kind of heuristic. Um, in the same way that if we're you know, you know, uh bewildered in a in a in a shopping market full of different products, we don't have time to you know individually inspect every individual product and look at all the features. We just make inference, oh, I like this brand, I don't like this brand, it's generally a good brand. I generally don't like this. We do the same thing socially. We this is just a generally bad person. I don't really pay a lot of costs for just excluding that person because I have so many other social options in my universe. And so it might be because we're we're so inclined to make these promiscuous social

inferences across people in the modern world with these large social networks that um proposing or engaging in outgroup violence uh is more likely to result in reputational damage uh in in the modern world than it might have in in a in a small-scale society. So it so I I'm willing to entertain the hypothesis that maybe this this sort of phenomenon is is unique to modern social environments. But um but yeah that that that's sort of how I'm thinking of it. I'm curious what what you think, Luke. Yeah that that sounds that sounds like something that makes a a lot of sense to me. I mean for one, as an anthropologist, the lesson that was given to me you can never make an enemy no matter what. And now I realize like in small scale societies you can never like burn a bridge or fully

extract yourself from a relationship because the webs of interdependence are just so deep. Like you, even if somebody, I mean, somebody may be recognized as a psychopath. Somebody goes like crazy far in war and kills a whole bunch of people or kills cows, for instance, or something they recognize like that dude is a psychopath, but it doesn't mean it's it's moralized in the same way. But you may recognize, like, oh, we don't want to listen to that guy when our group is trying to decide what we should do in war, whether we should retaliate with a battle or whether we should migrate somewhere else. You know, but also, yeah, then I was gonna say that the time where I think it really might become a little bit more moralized is when there is peace with another group.

And you can fully expect that if you go kill somebody else, you know, so there's been a peace meeting and an agreement. You know, the two parties have come together, they've broken spears, they've eaten together. It's common knowledge, you know, which essentially this resets the prisoner's dilemma. So it's common knowledge. Then and you go and kill somebody, you're that's probably going to be moralized, not necessarily because it's bad or to kill that person, but it's bad because it broke the peace. Right. Can I um so let me let me see if I can define peace as you've defined it to just make it explicit. So what I've heard you say basically it's peace is preempting like a acute predatory um conflict or just predation.

Um and that's out of an interest in either minimizing costs or expanding benefits. Is that I don't think it has to be the I I define it as like a state of like relatively harmonious, durable um interactions where there's not the expectation of violence or if violence or aggression occurs, it's aberrant. Okay, good. So let me let me clarify then that I think what I wasn't doing is defining peace, but maybe the engine or what's the cost benefit logic, bringing this back full circle. What's the cost-benefit logic of the individual agents to engage in peace or for there to even be the opportunity for sort of cultural norms or for the evolution of these norms and institutions. And is it this idea that with this time horizon, as David talked about, and with this idea

of we can think about the possible costs and benefits and say, look, there's more of a benefit to not being belligerent right now, on average for most of us. So let's all agree. Let's produce common knowledge such that even when any one of us sort of pops up as the variant the the alternate where it's sort of like, no, no, I really want to kill that group, you've sort of all agreed ahead of time. And there's common knowledge we've all agreed. That on average for all of us it's we're going to be better off. yeah but then you need a you need some sort of mechanism to enforce that outlier whose cost benefit calculus is is different and this is this is why it's really I mean it's hard to get you have to have some sort of level of centralization to pull all this

knowledge to come up with a norm to have the enforcement mechanism I see so it's not just it's not just seeing the prospect for it and getting everybody to agree, which are already two really hard things. Yeah. But it's also, as you just said, the enforcement mechanism. Yeah. Yeah. So people one of the things I realized early on is many people could see the benefits for peace. You know, they could see like if only we could stop fighting, like we'd all be better off. Because often what happens is you end up with say big no man's lands where everybody's scared to go in, you know, and and so underuse of resources, you lose access to potential reproductive partners, trading partners. Um, you know, it typically results in like you know net uh net

costs for both sides, like at average, while you may have a few outliers benefits. So you have people realize this, but it's just a matter of like coordinating to make to sort of solve that prisoner's dilemma or solve that collective action problem. So it's you know, it's multiple layers, which is why I think it's rare. So among hunter-gatherers, you have often instances of like intergroup cooperation, but I think they typically don't rise to the level often among, you know, so this is you know as close to contact as we can get, or the records of peace, because they're frequently broken by conflict or there are relationships that sort of exist dyadically. I know you, so I interact peacefully with you.

But if I meet someone else from your group, I have to negotiate that relationship individually. Right. But just the idea that we can come together as members of the group and fully expect to be treated, you know, with norms that involve nonviolence or non-aggression is it's a really high bar. Okay. But it's, I think this is one of the things that's most sort of overlooked in thinking about the evolution of our species, particular cultural evolution, because intergroup exchange is one of the engines that drives cultural evolution. So once we solve this problem, you know, we have the capacity to unlock positive sum relationships or positive sum um positive sum benefits from every potential intergroup relationship.

I see. So it can fuel tons and tons of cumulative cultural evolution. That, you know, in in sense you don't, you know, the difference between us and chimpanzees partly one of them is just that we solve the problem of intergroup relationships, which allow us then to, you know, turn on the engine of cumulative cultural evolution. Right. Yeah. It reminds me of um something something you wrote in in in your uh evolution of peace paper that jumped out at me, which is that the same factors that uh lead to intergroup peace are often the same factors that lead to in the increased scale and destructiveness of conflict when it does occur. I'm w wondering if you could elaborate on on that idea. Yeah, there's this really ironic sort of tragic logic to peace that you know, we just

assume peace is the absence of conflict, not realizing it's the product of cultural technologies that allow us to coordinate norms, enforce those norms. Um, but once you have that capacity, you can turn it into, instead of coordinating a norm for nonviolence and sanctioning people that, you know, preemptively use violence, you can turn it into a norm for, say, aggression against the outgroup and sanction those who don't participate. So, you know, as you have increasing socio-political complexity, you get the greater opportunity for peace, but you also get the greater opportunity for violence, you know, coordinated violence for war. Interesting. Yeah, so I think it's a new, it's a really new way of thinking about peace and human

evolution as you know, both you know, a cultural technology that you know we we had to make. We made it so I I think the better way instead of the evolution is like the invention of piece. We invented it, we invented these technologies allow us to allow us to solve these coordination problems. And then when they're in place, like it really fully unlocks the full potential of our species. You know, you can have you can imagine, like, you know, we're a species where we live in thousand-member groups, but they're really sort of isolated and bounded, you know, with not a lot of trade or relationship. You know, occasionally marriage partners are exchanged, you know, you know, uh young women, but they're not bringing the full repertoire of group knowledge.

You imagine cumulative cultural evolution is just much, much smaller in that scenario. So I think it's it's one of the critical aspects, us being able to solve this problem is one of the critical aspects of our species history. Right. And just to be explicit about it, because we haven't talked a ton about like the interaction between biological and cultural evolution. The idea is that if you take these evolve this evolved psychology, that's sort of like, well, I want to minimize my costs, maximize my benefits. And you might be in this culture where you look around and you're like, we'd all be better off if there was more peace, but I don't know. What am I going to do about it? Right. Like I can't do anything about it.

But the idea is that all the that same feeling is felt by people everywhere. And for different reasons that are partially historic, partially accidental, partially ecological, whatever, there might be there, there's just trial and error or people trying to create institutions. And somewhere, sometime, one works a little bit better that allows people to sort of like have an agreement or create a technology to see those benefits, somehow create a social institution that creates a penalty system that everybody agrees with. And then once that happens, those people are doing better. And the people that are near those people see that and are like, oh, that looks good. I'll take that. Or they have more stuff or both.

And then the evolved psychology hasn't changed, but because everybody's evolved psychology is looking at their neighbor and being like, oh, they're doing better, or maybe they take you over because they're doing better, either way, like you eventually adopt what they're doing. Yeah. So so I would say two things. One, like that's the scenario. And I didn't touch on this much in the paper. I just like ran out of space. But it's something I really want to visit is you you do have this ratchet effect is like once you've solved this problem, you're going to be more successful, meaning you're going to both outcompete those groups that don't have it, but your ideas are going to be borrowed. But at the same time, a critical mechanism of peace in this in the small-scale societies is

the execution of not people who are proactively aggressive, like uh Richard has in Demonic Metals with the Self-Domestic, but people that break the peace. So this is really, really common once you get the capacity to enforce peace. So and in the same thing, it can continue to ratch up, ratchet up our above psychology, say for you know impulse control, for tolerance. So it's the same sort of mechanism he posits, but instead of against reactive aggression, it's against people who may use aggression strategically or physical violence strategically. So in that sense, yeah, yeah, like literally the execution. This is this is all over the all over the case because you need to signal to the other group that you don't endorse that the behavior, you know, is not reflective of your

group. You need to reset the prisoner's dilemma. Right. So this is this is very, very common. So I think in that sense, you may have a rationing up of our actual Bov psychology as well. Once we create it, the first sort of like proto piece. Could it be that also, you know, uh the imbalance of power uh hypothesis rears its ugly head once you start creating these social technologies. So in is insofar as you create peace and networks of mutual cooperation and you grow the size and scale of your society and and the uh uh and the layers of of mutually beneficial cooperation and technology, well uh all of a sudden once you get that peace happening uh and you get a larger and more complex society, and you look and you see your neighbor is

not nearly as complex or as coordinated or as large as you, well, all of a sudden you've created a really large uh spectacle of an imbalance of power. And uh you can use all of that machinery that you've that was formerly used to creating peace and unification and harness it to dominating and conquering uh the next guy in the neighboring territory. Do you buy that that is also a mechanism that that might be part of this? Yeah, I'm just trying to think. One of the things that really puzzle myself over is sometimes why why you don't see more conquest among small-scale societies. And particularly I think a puzzle that hasn't been explained is the emergence of like patron-client relationships between between groups.

small groups of horticulturalists or you know forger horticulturalists surrounded by really powerful groups that do wage war and not be like immediately wiped out right or um assimilated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um so the uh did he was just saying uh patron uh yeah, well yeah patron, like patron client relationships. You have you know, ethnography's got lots of examples of sort of like small Pacific groups, you know, like forager horticulturalists that don't have much means of organizing for war, nor do they have much of a history, you know, surviving and persisting around larger, more bellicose groups. And sometimes they form patron-client relationships where they'll offer a specific type of service, such as, you know, products from the forest or big building dugout canoes.

But in many cases they don't. They just seem to sort of like subsist nearby, you know, and engaging in occasional trade, or more typically the you know, provision of female marriage or partners from the sort of smaller, weaker group to the more powerful Paci group. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I I bet it would depend on the nature of the resources and the resource distribution and the type of resources that you know the large scale society might need to expand, you know, if it's just a matter of land or lumber or ore or whatever, and there's plenty of that in the neighboring territory, why not just kill everyone and take and take it? But if it you know, if if the other if people in the neighboring territory uh have

knowledge that is really useful, they they know how to make something, uh, then it might be cheaper just to trade with them than to you know take them over, because if you kill them, you're gonna destroy all that knowledge. Um and so I I I would imagine that ecology also plays an important role in this as well. Yeah, it's one of the things that, you know, I love being an evolutionary anthropologist, but we really need so many more tight quantitative studies. And, you know, our window to do those for these questions has really passed. You know, we can work with ethnographic documents at sort of large scale and EHREF and other other repositories, but you know, they're only so fine-grained. And there's really just like so few societies now that have sort of like, you know,

non-state patterns of interaction that are, you know, truly subsistence, that I I is sometimes get a little frustrated that we really are sort of confined to most speculation, except for the stuff that we can, you know, we can build models and tests, you know, against or we can we can test in the lab. But you know, a lot of what we're talking about now is just, you know, speculation. Yeah. Um we had Zach Garfield on just recently. Uh he talked about you and he working on the Omaha Valley research project. Um he talked a lot about it and how so how you're uh actually doing all this cool stuff sponsoring students uh in education. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Um Yeah, so um yeah, it's something I'm I'm very excited about, very proud of, because you

know, as an anthropologist, my career is enabled by the generosity and kindness of the host communities. And and my research specialization was for my dissertation was war. I work much more broadly on just human sociality now. But so people often focus on that while ignoring the fact that these are like people just like you and me, you know, their their culture is vibrant, they have relationships, they fall in love, they grieve, they mourn, they have friendships. And I have friends with I'm, you know, good friends with many people from the communities I worked with. And really glad to finally reach a point in my career with Zach where we're able to start thinking about ways to give back. And we try to do so in an anthropologically minded way of trying to give them

what they request and need instead of saying, oh, you know, here's a village, they need a pump, you know, and now we can be done with it. And what people commonly ask for is that, you know, the students from their communities that have made it through high school, but you know, so so in Ethiopia, unlike Kenya, there's no fees for going to elementary school or high school. And there's very, very few students from these pastoralist communities who have made it through high school, but then college is just incredibly prohibitively expensive. You know, they have to pay fees or they have to move to a city somewhere, pay for lodging, pay for transportation, pay for food. So we provide scholarships for these students.

Typically, we also provide a computer for them, and we're funding something like 23 students right now in scholarships, including the first doctor from the Nangatom and from the Omo Valley, who is doing his internship year. So he finished his MDE, and then after that, you do a year of like internships working on different specializations. And we have a website. And if anybody out there is interested in this project, like it's an opportunity for your money to go directly to supporting the student of a scholarship, a scholarship for a student who would not be in school otherwise. Even $10, $15 would help. Um, it's called the Omo Valley Research Project. You can check it out online. You can also send me an email.

Um we'll put in the show notes. Yeah, yeah. We did a workshop this summer, Zach might have told you about, like a digital skills workshop, bringing together all of our students for a couple of days, just training them on the stuff a lot of I think my undergrads need, like how to leverage Google Suite, for instance, working on writing a resume, making a cover letter, providing feedback to each other. And um, you know, it's really amazing to be the point in my career where we can actually like provide tangible benefits to these, to these communities who have given us, and and I would say all of the anthropological community. Like if you're reading my papers and Zach's paper, you're the beneficiary of what these

communities have given us. Yeah, it's it's it's so cool and so wonderful. And and I really like what you said about that it's anthropological in the sense of you have to first understand or listen to them and say here ask them what they want and not just sort of patronizingly or just sort of helicopter in and drop something off that's not at all what they need. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super cool stuff. Yeah. So thanks for having me on. Um really enjoyed talking to you. Yeah, thanks. Is there anything we should have asked you? We have to ask that question. We covered a lot of ground. It went quick. Yeah. So so I feel like podcasts are often like when they end up with when they in and not that you asked me, but it was something that I think about emailing us a four-looking question.

So like yeah, what are you working on now? What are the biggest questions in our field that need to be answered? What are some like methodological advances that you're really excited about? Um, you know, yeah, those are great questions. You should have uh we you got a spot anytime you want one. No, uh actually that was something that Gervin said too. And you know, we actually are thinking about having some folks on uh returners on, and so maybe yeah, but do you want to tackle one of those real quick? Oh well, so what I'm working on now is really two things. I'm I'm working on a book manuscript trying to sort of describe some of my own personal field work experiences and puzzling through these questions from going in as a sort of like

more serious bio not biological determinist, but a behavioral ecological approach to war and balance of power to really sort of thinking about the cultural mechanisms that you know if that explain the vast variation you have between societies and war and peace. So that's the thing I'm really excited about right now. That's fantastic. Larger writing project. Fantastic. We'll have to have you back when when it's ready. And yeah, well, hopefully that's within the next five years. I have a title for you. I have a title for you. You should call it War and Peace. I don't think there's any book that's Yeah, that's that's a great idea. So the the tentative title actually is uh Enemy Eaters, because in among

tribal societies, many times, eating is a verb that does a lot of work. It's it's so common. So and if you become a famous warrior in Nangatom, you become known as an enemy eater. Like you ate your enemies. And if you want to go to war, you're like so hungry. Like, I want to eat them, I want to devour them. So that's sort of the working title. Like you think about it. And you know, who knows what it will actually end up with. But it captures so much more about sort of like the cultural instantiation of war as a set of values. Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, well, Luke, I mean, uh, you know, you could not take a more important topic, war and peace. Um, and you know, you've done you are you are a brave person for

exposing yourself to danger, going out into the field. Uh we all benefit from you going out and doing it as well, and as well as all the people that you work with. And so thank you for being that conduit. Um, we wouldn't know about all of them if it wasn't for you. So thank you for doing that work and and thanks for coming on today. Yeah, thanks so much, guys. Good talking to you and enjoy your show. Oh, thanks. Thanks, Luke. Yeah, we'll we'll have you on another time. All right. Bye-bye. All right. David, uh, what can people do to uh make the world better slash support this podcast? Well, they can say kind things about us on social media. They can leave us a kind review. They can visit us on Patreon.

And they can contact us with any ideas for topics or questions or guests. Yeah. Somebody commented that I think I say um too often, which is a fair point, and I'm working on it. And if we had more time to edit them out, that would be great. If anybody wants to edit edit them Yeah, if anyone wants to go through and individually edit out every um, uh we would pay you zero dollars to do that. Exactly. Uh so I I've occasionally edited out some ums of the guest or or myself or you, David, but it's very infrequently. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's actually a good incentive for people to support us on Patreon. Oh, we should be saying more ums and uhs than interstellar. Yeah, so if you are uh disappointed with the frequency of ums and uhs, Here's what you can

do to change that. You can give us some money on Patreon. And if we raise enough money, we could hire someone to edit us and and make us sound uh smarter than we are. Yeah, I mean these are very like you you might be surprised or completely unsurprised, these episodes are often not edited at all. That's true. Um some are, but the but m the vast majority are almost not. Yes. You are getting the unfiltered truth from Dave and David. Unedited, raw. Yeah. I think everyone's like, well, this outro was definitely not edited. So um yeah. But but anyway, yes, thank you for listening. Uh please support us. And yes, if you're particularly perturbed about my um, I'm working on it, but yes, also please support us on Patreon or or reach out to guest edit.

Yeah. All those things. All right. See you next week.