WEBVTT

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David, uh what podcast do you listen to?

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Evolutionary psychology, the podcast.

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That is a taglined podcast that goes by the tagline of

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

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

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Usually you fill it in.

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

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don't have taglines?

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

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something got garbled there.

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Okay.

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

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Anyway, uh enjoy it.

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

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

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

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evolutionary psychology.

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That's correct.

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Okay.

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And let's enjoy that then.

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

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

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

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better than many of us basic scientists.

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Um so it was great to talk to Luke.

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Yeah, this was a really fun conversation.

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

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He wrote War and Peace, right?

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I'm getting that right?

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Yeah.

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

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Is that what's going on?

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You've been reading War and Peace.

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

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yeah.

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

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

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read and mastered.

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Sure.

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

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

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

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fascinating insights.

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Uh we get into mon mongooses or mongeese, yeah.

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

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I think it should be mongeese.

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Um I I would agree.

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

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wonderful uh paper called The Evolution of Peace.

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

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but peace doesn't.

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

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to be explained is peace.

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

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Yes.

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

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days.

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Okay.

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Um yeah.

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Just uh it comes from all

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helps me.

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There you go.

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That's great jokes.

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Fantastic.

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

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talking about all things war and peace.

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Enjoy.

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Thank you.

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Today uh I'll start over.

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Okay.

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

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

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academic grandchild of Gene Goodall.

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Is that correct?

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Um yeah, maybe.

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

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Richard's PhD supervisor.

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He was the supervisor of the of the site.

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Oh okay.

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

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

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

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Low parenthood.

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You were exactly did she have direct students?

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I don't know the answer to that.

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Okay.

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All right.

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

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

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Yeah.

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

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studying chimps.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, that's right.

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Okay.

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

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in the uh like Central African forests with horticulturalists and

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foragers there as well, sometime after his PhD.

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Okay.

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

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

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transitioned into human evolutionary biology.

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So it's separate from the anthropology department.

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Yeah.

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And you are currently in anthro or psych department?

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

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Right.

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Fantastic.

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

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

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

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Yeah.

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boundaries.

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

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

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the way the fields work.

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

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departments we have now.

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No, probably not.

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

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

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behavioral sciences.

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

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

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the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

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

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

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just deep reflection about the structures of the mind.

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

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

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

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science and it was actually criticizing evolutionary psychology.

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And I don't remember the book now.

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

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

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and like studying it.

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Like I want to know more about that world.

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

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

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

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

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

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Yeah.

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

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evolutionary psychology uh inadvertently.

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

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I think I think Christina, it was Christina.

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

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

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And she's like, that sounds awesome.

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

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

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like just pop into place.

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

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of impossible.

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

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

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about our evolutionary history.

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Yeah.

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

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of there's a dissatisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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stuff?

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Um well, it was a framework that explained things.

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

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

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status.

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

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that seem to have a lot of explanatory power.

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

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

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

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

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

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We're just cultural animals.

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

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also shape humans.

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Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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evolution of war and needing to explain conflict.

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

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

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

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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

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Um with my focus on intergroup relationships, conflict and

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cooperation.

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

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the evolution of cooperation.

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

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

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

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

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

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as cultural creatures operate.

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

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some ways the sort of more approximate psychological explanations.

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So like dehumanization may be like a maybe one proximate explanation

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

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the sort of biological evolutionary theory and the psychological processes.

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

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

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separation between those two?

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

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promote war or promote cooperation, are inhibiting it.

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

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

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

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Peace is not just the absence of war.

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

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

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Right.

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They don't interact.

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And most people would not call that peace.

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They call it avoidance.

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

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groups coming together without having to negotiate those relationships individually.

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

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

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

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

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treat me.

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

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

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technologies.

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

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

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

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

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Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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chimps, you wouldn't be like sitting quietly.

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Like it would be violent, right?

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And they laugh at that.

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

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approach pokes on, right?

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

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that room.

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

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

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just be, you know, having a massive orgy.

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

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

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

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

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

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arousal around strangers.

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

00:14:43.750 --> 00:14:48.550
allows us to interact with strangers without like immediately, you know, being all the

00:14:48.550 --> 00:14:49.270
defensive.

00:14:49.600 --> 00:14:49.920
Yeah.

00:14:50.080 --> 00:14:54.640
Before we get to the cultural part, which is a big thing to bite off, um, when we just talk

00:14:54.640 --> 00:14:57.360
about the biological thing, we talked about two different things.

00:14:57.600 --> 00:15:03.360
One is sort of a comparative approach where we look at bonobos or chimps or think about a

00:15:03.360 --> 00:15:09.120
common ancestor that and we can kind of infer here's what an ancestral state was.

00:15:09.200 --> 00:15:13.920
And then we have to have some quote unquote biological explanation for how we got to where

00:15:13.920 --> 00:15:17.670
we are now, having the proximate phenotype we have.

00:15:17.990 --> 00:15:23.990
Another version is less about that comparative approach and is more like an adaptationist

00:15:23.990 --> 00:15:28.870
approach, which is just sort of given the way we are now, what's let's reverse engineer

00:15:28.950 --> 00:15:30.470
sort of the software.

00:15:30.710 --> 00:15:36.470
Um, we have in reality, there's sort of a complementary approach, and many people do

00:15:36.470 --> 00:15:37.590
both things.

00:15:37.990 --> 00:15:42.580
Uh, do you where do you put your own work in that continuum.

00:15:43.460 --> 00:15:44.900
Have you done both kinds?

00:15:44.980 --> 00:15:47.700
Or how do you typically sort of think about that?

00:15:47.860 --> 00:15:49.860
Or is that even a false distinction?

00:15:50.260 --> 00:15:50.500
Yeah.

00:15:50.580 --> 00:15:56.580
So I would say the way most people practice, most, you know, big thinking evolutionary

00:15:56.660 --> 00:16:01.380
behavioral sciences scholars sort of take aspects of both approaches.

00:16:01.540 --> 00:16:06.340
You know, if you want to know what things are just unique to humans, you have to look at

00:16:06.340 --> 00:16:07.220
other species.

00:16:07.380 --> 00:16:07.620
Yeah.

00:16:07.790 --> 00:16:08.110
Right.

00:16:08.270 --> 00:16:13.870
And then you can start with, okay, so humans have this peculiar trait, whatever it is, and

00:16:13.870 --> 00:16:18.670
you can start to figure out just logically what things you need to get it, but you can also

00:16:18.670 --> 00:16:23.230
look at other species to see, because often there's, you know, multiple pathways to some

00:16:23.390 --> 00:16:24.350
particular trait.

00:16:24.430 --> 00:16:29.470
And so, you know, maybe you have whatever trait it is because there was selection for eggs,

00:16:29.550 --> 00:16:33.070
but maybe some other species says you can get it for selection for Y.

00:16:33.310 --> 00:16:38.700
And this is this is why, at least in evolutionary anthropology, you you typically are

00:16:38.700 --> 00:16:42.620
really concerned with like, do mere cats have lethal intergroup violence?

00:16:42.780 --> 00:16:46.140
Do are there species that have it without imbalances of power?

00:16:46.300 --> 00:16:50.460
So, you know, in humans, the leading theory is that, you know, we have a psychology that

00:16:50.460 --> 00:16:56.220
goes very deep to be sensitive to imbalances of power and when you can turn those

00:16:56.220 --> 00:17:00.490
imbalances of power into a benefit for yourself.

00:17:00.650 --> 00:17:05.370
But if you find species that say have lethal intergroup aggression, similar to like, you

00:17:05.370 --> 00:17:09.930
know, proto-war without imbalances of power, suggests maybe there's different pathways and

00:17:09.930 --> 00:17:13.690
we should rethink whether it's the best explanation for humans.

00:17:13.770 --> 00:17:18.570
So I think in order to do good evolutionary behavioral sciences, you really do have to take

00:17:18.570 --> 00:17:20.090
aspects of both approaches.

00:17:20.620 --> 00:17:23.100
I want I want to pick up one of the loose loose ends there.

00:17:23.340 --> 00:17:27.900
Do in fact other species have uh lethal intergroup violence without any kind of imbalance

00:17:27.900 --> 00:17:28.540
of power?

00:17:29.260 --> 00:17:31.980
Um I think which species is it?

00:17:32.140 --> 00:17:33.180
Crescent macaques?

00:17:33.340 --> 00:17:36.220
There was a paper that came out recently.

00:17:36.460 --> 00:17:39.900
So so I'm gonna say there's a couple of species that it looks like it does.

00:17:40.140 --> 00:17:43.290
It depends on the particular type of intergroup violence.

00:17:43.370 --> 00:17:49.290
So, like bandit mongees, for instance, they have really high rates of lethal intergroup

00:17:49.290 --> 00:17:53.050
violence, where essentially they live in these large social groups.

00:17:53.130 --> 00:17:58.570
And the female from one social group will leave her group and go out, you know, in search

00:17:58.570 --> 00:18:04.220
of mates from another group, but all the males will follow along and they'll meet another

00:18:04.220 --> 00:18:07.020
group of bandit monkeys and they form a line.

00:18:07.100 --> 00:18:08.460
You can look at the pictures, it's wild.

00:18:08.540 --> 00:18:12.860
It's like a battle line, and they just have like a giant, giant scrum.

00:18:13.180 --> 00:18:19.100
And typically the deaths that result from this are like one of them gets separated from

00:18:19.100 --> 00:18:23.500
the rest of their group, and three or four of the opposing group pile on and kill them.

00:18:23.580 --> 00:18:28.990
But it's all in the midst of, you know, 20 mongees versus 20 monkeys.

00:18:29.070 --> 00:18:33.630
And at the same time, the female is off on the side mating with her preferred mate.

00:18:34.110 --> 00:18:36.270
Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:18:36.350 --> 00:18:38.990
Yeah, it's it looks like literally, it looks like a rugby scrum.

00:18:39.230 --> 00:18:40.830
Like it literally looks they're lining up.

00:18:40.910 --> 00:18:41.150
Yeah.

00:18:41.630 --> 00:18:42.670
That's interesting.

00:18:42.990 --> 00:18:47.870
Well, that well, it's I mean, it's interesting to note that uh when deaths do occur, it

00:18:47.870 --> 00:18:52.500
does follow somewhat this imbalance of power logic where it's usually you know, you know,

00:18:52.580 --> 00:18:56.420
three or four males ganging up on one, and there is kind of a mini imbalance of power in

00:18:56.420 --> 00:18:58.500
that little section of of the skirmish.

00:18:58.580 --> 00:18:59.940
So there there's at least something to the idea.

00:19:00.020 --> 00:19:04.660
I mean, I and I do think that the logic is really compelling in that you don't want to uh

00:19:04.660 --> 00:19:07.620
risk death unless you can be sure that your side is going to win.

00:19:07.700 --> 00:19:11.060
And in the most in the case where you're gonna be sure that your side is gonna win and

00:19:11.060 --> 00:19:15.300
you're gonna face few costs is if there's a huge imbalance of power favoring your side.

00:19:15.780 --> 00:19:20.150
Um but nevertheless it is still pretty interesting that they all line up that way and and

00:19:20.230 --> 00:19:23.590
you know it seems like they're for the most part pretty evenly matched.

00:19:23.830 --> 00:19:27.270
Um what do you think uh d do you have an idea of what what's going on?

00:19:27.350 --> 00:19:31.270
I don't know this is not necessarily your area of expertise, but uh is there uh a a

00:19:31.270 --> 00:19:34.070
reigning theory in the literature of what of what explains this?

00:19:34.710 --> 00:19:36.870
The the lining up like that?

00:19:37.190 --> 00:19:37.590
Mm-hmm.

00:19:37.750 --> 00:19:38.080
Yes, a good idea.

00:19:43.280 --> 00:19:48.240
Well, I I think they're fighting with each other over, you know, control of reproductively

00:19:48.400 --> 00:19:50.000
valuable females.

00:19:50.160 --> 00:19:53.920
So they they want to control access to that female.

00:19:54.000 --> 00:19:58.400
That's why they're following that female, they're trying to coerce her into the back of the

00:19:58.400 --> 00:19:58.720
group.

00:19:58.880 --> 00:20:03.840
You're then, you know, you encounter, and I I expect you may have a very similar dynamic in

00:20:03.840 --> 00:20:09.630
in many other species that have a sort of similar pattern where you line, you know, they're

00:20:09.630 --> 00:20:13.310
probably not thinking they just line up, but they're just positioning each other on the

00:20:13.310 --> 00:20:19.070
basis of like more simple heuristics of make sure I don't have an unfamiliar mongoose

00:20:19.070 --> 00:20:19.870
behind me.

00:20:20.030 --> 00:20:22.270
You know, make sure I can see as many as possible.

00:20:22.350 --> 00:20:25.390
And I imagine that's something that just creates a line.

00:20:25.470 --> 00:20:29.630
Um, and then I imagine most of the attacks aren't necessarily driven by the thought at that

00:20:29.630 --> 00:20:34.140
point we're going to, you know, try to kill another, but they're just, you know, fighting

00:20:34.140 --> 00:20:39.180
each other as a as an uh mergent behavior to try to make sure that you're not actually

00:20:39.180 --> 00:20:41.260
being victim of an attack.

00:20:41.580 --> 00:20:41.820
Right.

00:20:41.900 --> 00:20:42.140
Yeah.

00:20:42.220 --> 00:20:42.860
That's a good point.

00:20:43.020 --> 00:20:45.420
I John John Williams, yeah.

00:20:45.660 --> 00:20:46.220
John Williams.

00:20:46.620 --> 00:20:49.740
George Williams, different, different Williams, both great.

00:20:49.820 --> 00:20:54.140
Uh uh, George Williams, who wrote Adaptation Natural Selection, was like really uh he

00:20:54.140 --> 00:20:58.620
talked about schools of fish and how we shouldn't attribute schools of fish to anything

00:20:58.700 --> 00:21:00.940
other than the fish just not wanting to be eaten.

00:21:01.370 --> 00:21:04.170
and they just sort of form this ball as an emergent property.

00:21:04.250 --> 00:21:06.410
And that really reminds me of what you're saying, Louis.

00:21:06.650 --> 00:21:06.890
Yeah.

00:21:07.530 --> 00:21:07.770
Yeah.

00:21:07.930 --> 00:21:08.410
Interesting.

00:21:08.570 --> 00:21:12.890
Would you say that um the way to understanding it is you know there are two aspects to

00:21:12.890 --> 00:21:14.010
intergroup conflict.

00:21:14.170 --> 00:21:18.090
One is the expected costs to one side of the conflict to engaging in that conflict.

00:21:18.250 --> 00:21:19.850
This would be like risk of injury or death.

00:21:20.010 --> 00:21:23.770
And the other would be the expected benefits of engaging in the conflict.

00:21:23.850 --> 00:21:29.800
Um and usually uh the thing that just determines um uh going uh into a conflict w

00:21:29.880 --> 00:21:33.480
in an imbalance of power situation is you know low expected costs.

00:21:33.640 --> 00:21:38.120
If you were were clearly more formidable, more numerous than the antagonist, then uh the

00:21:38.120 --> 00:21:41.960
costs are gonna be lower and that's gonna uh uh in many cases precipitate conflict.

00:21:42.040 --> 00:21:47.080
But in the case of of the mongees, is that mongeese, yeah, the bandit mongoose.

00:21:47.320 --> 00:21:47.880
Bandit mongoose.

00:21:47.960 --> 00:21:48.920
That's the bandit mongoose.

00:21:50.520 --> 00:21:51.550
Is Isn't that plural?

00:21:51.950 --> 00:21:52.590
That's fantastic.

00:21:52.670 --> 00:21:55.310
I'm really sorry to interrupt, but I really did not know that.

00:21:55.390 --> 00:21:57.630
And I'm really I mean, maybe I'm maybe I'm making it up.

00:21:58.270 --> 00:21:59.790
No, no, you are the evolutionary biologist.

00:22:00.030 --> 00:22:04.350
We are bumbling uh we'll defer to you um No, no, no, this is fantastic.

00:22:04.510 --> 00:22:06.830
I feel like this is the best thing I've learned today.

00:22:06.910 --> 00:22:11.790
Uh in addition to the plural of

00:22:15.020 --> 00:22:15.180
Yeah.

00:22:15.500 --> 00:22:15.660
All right.

00:22:15.740 --> 00:22:17.580
So the I'm so glad.

00:22:17.660 --> 00:22:18.460
Yeah, no, no, no.

00:22:18.540 --> 00:22:21.580
It's like it's like pronouncing the Zatwasi, for example.

00:22:21.660 --> 00:22:21.980
Yeah.

00:22:22.540 --> 00:22:26.540
So normally, you know, a high expected cost would would precipitate conflict when there is

00:22:26.540 --> 00:22:28.140
a balance of power and the cost would be low.

00:22:28.220 --> 00:22:31.820
But with the monkeys, it seems like what might be going on is it's less about the expected

00:22:31.820 --> 00:22:33.260
cost and more about the expected benefit.

00:22:33.340 --> 00:22:36.700
You know, there's a very clear Darwinian benefit in terms of you know conflict over

00:22:36.700 --> 00:22:37.260
females.

00:22:37.420 --> 00:22:41.410
And it may be that, you know, the the cost might be high, but on the other hand the benefit

00:22:41.410 --> 00:22:45.330
is also really high and that might be explaining why this conflict is taking place despite

00:22:45.330 --> 00:22:47.330
each side being, you know, pretty evenly matched.

00:22:47.730 --> 00:22:48.370
Do you buy that logic?

00:22:48.930 --> 00:22:52.850
I think that's a I think that's a fair way to think about the way we think about most in

00:22:52.850 --> 00:22:58.530
most species that this evol that this sort of lethal coalitionary intergroup violence

00:22:58.530 --> 00:23:02.960
evolves is that just the costs are really, really low because you have clear imbalance of

00:23:02.960 --> 00:23:08.240
power, you know, chimpanzees, it's an average of around eight chimpanzee attackers to one

00:23:08.240 --> 00:23:08.560
victim.

00:23:08.720 --> 00:23:13.200
So the odds of any of you suffering any serious injury or costs are pretty low.

00:23:13.280 --> 00:23:17.200
But in Bandit Mongeese, it's a really different dynamic, and it could be because the

00:23:17.200 --> 00:23:22.800
benefits are just so high in this case, because you really are trying to control access to

00:23:22.800 --> 00:23:25.680
a to a reproductively valuable female.

00:23:26.290 --> 00:23:31.170
And so just to connect the dots, Richard Rangham's like the imbalance of power hypothesis.

00:23:31.250 --> 00:23:34.370
Can you just talk maybe just for a second about that?

00:23:34.610 --> 00:23:39.730
And was that what you started thinking about that eventually gets you to this paper about

00:23:39.730 --> 00:23:40.530
the evolution of Pete?

00:23:41.010 --> 00:23:44.130
Yeah, the imbalance of power hypothesis, I think is just one of the sort of like most

00:23:44.130 --> 00:23:49.250
beautiful, elegant theories out there to explain why you have, you know,

00:23:49.580 --> 00:23:53.740
coalitionary violence between groups that's lethal.

00:23:53.900 --> 00:23:59.820
So the idea is that in species where territory is tied to some benefit

00:24:00.220 --> 00:24:04.380
in the currency of natural selection, that's reproductive benefits, even though it can be

00:24:04.380 --> 00:24:05.820
downstream.

00:24:05.900 --> 00:24:09.580
And you have species that have a particular grouping pattern, fission fusion.

00:24:09.660 --> 00:24:11.810
So these are not species that are solitary.

00:24:11.970 --> 00:24:15.730
So you know, tigers are solitary, they live in the forest primarily by themselves.

00:24:15.810 --> 00:24:18.050
You're never going to see coalitionary violence.

00:24:18.290 --> 00:24:22.690
Many, many primates are group living, they're but they live in troops.

00:24:22.850 --> 00:24:27.170
So these are stable units where it's always, you know, your whole life is with 40 other

00:24:27.170 --> 00:24:27.650
individuals.

00:24:27.810 --> 00:24:31.090
Anytime you meet another group, it's with 40 individuals.

00:24:31.250 --> 00:24:37.250
So the costs are similar in bandit mongoose mongeese, however we're calling it now, costs

00:24:37.250 --> 00:24:39.090
are going to be going to be very high.

00:24:39.250 --> 00:24:44.520
But in the case of some species, you have a grouping pattern that's not a true there, it's

00:24:44.600 --> 00:24:50.280
fission fusion where so you can think of humans where you spend a lot of time in a large

00:24:50.280 --> 00:24:52.920
group, but people are often coming and going.

00:24:53.080 --> 00:24:57.240
And where they're going, they may be in a group of one individual, two or three, so they're

00:24:57.240 --> 00:24:58.840
in small subparties.

00:24:59.000 --> 00:25:00.920
But you're neighbored by other groups.

00:25:01.080 --> 00:25:05.830
So you may be out on if you're a chimpanzee, you may be foraging by yourself because it's a

00:25:05.830 --> 00:25:10.310
period of resource scarcity, and you come to your neighbor the periphery of your territory,

00:25:10.390 --> 00:25:14.230
and your neighbor, your neighboring community has a large fig fig tree.

00:25:14.310 --> 00:25:16.310
So they're all together at that time.

00:25:16.470 --> 00:25:21.510
So you know, you can encounter you as a lone individual, potentially eight individuals from

00:25:21.510 --> 00:25:22.550
the neighboring community.

00:25:22.630 --> 00:25:25.350
So you have an imbalance of power then.

00:25:25.510 --> 00:25:31.300
So it's very easy for that larger party or that larger community

00:25:31.300 --> 00:25:35.300
to attack and kill that lone individual with very low cost.

00:25:35.460 --> 00:25:41.380
But in order to have the motivational system to do it, there has to be some benefits

00:25:41.380 --> 00:25:41.700
to it.

00:25:41.860 --> 00:25:47.460
So you're not going to see it in in species in which you know access to territory doesn't

00:25:47.460 --> 00:25:50.660
really pay off in terms of reproduction.

00:25:51.010 --> 00:25:56.130
So you're going to find it in in places where resources are really sort of heterogeneous

00:25:56.130 --> 00:25:56.930
and variable.

00:25:57.090 --> 00:26:01.890
So this is the leading theory of why some species have um

00:26:03.170 --> 00:26:07.410
have a pattern that's eerily sort of similar to war, including chimpanzees.

00:26:07.730 --> 00:26:08.050
I see.

00:26:08.130 --> 00:26:13.570
So it's it's coming back to this idea of we can look at predictions of what the function or

00:26:13.570 --> 00:26:19.540
cause of something like war is, what its evolutionary unquote explanation is by looking

00:26:19.540 --> 00:26:23.060
at the distribution of where do we f in what species do we find it.

00:26:23.380 --> 00:26:23.540
Yeah.

00:26:23.620 --> 00:26:24.900
So that would be one of the ways to you.

00:26:26.180 --> 00:26:26.580
Exactly.

00:26:26.740 --> 00:26:26.980
Yeah.

00:26:27.060 --> 00:26:30.180
And and it sounds like that's been one of the approaches.

00:26:30.260 --> 00:26:35.940
And it sounds like there's quite a bit of that um data, that kind of data of pred of that

00:26:35.940 --> 00:26:38.390
it's kind of um cashing out the prediction.

00:26:38.710 --> 00:26:44.390
Yeah, we have we have so there are there are several species that have you know lethal

00:26:44.710 --> 00:26:46.870
coalitionary intergroup violence.

00:26:46.950 --> 00:26:48.150
It's a bit of a mouthful.

00:26:48.230 --> 00:26:53.430
So sort of proto-war, um, you know, including our close relatives, the

00:26:53.430 --> 00:26:54.310
chimpanzees.

00:26:54.470 --> 00:26:56.470
Bonobos don't have this pattern of behavior.

00:26:56.550 --> 00:26:58.950
So big mystery has been why bonobos don't.

00:26:59.030 --> 00:27:04.470
And and one of the leading hypotheses is that they just have lower rates of fission

00:27:04.470 --> 00:27:10.120
fusion than chimpanzees, due to the fact that their their territory is slightly different

00:27:10.120 --> 00:27:11.160
than chimpanzees.

00:27:11.240 --> 00:27:15.960
They're their evolutionary territory is slightly different than chimpanzees, that it's a

00:27:15.960 --> 00:27:17.560
more resource abundant area.

00:27:17.720 --> 00:27:21.240
And this is hypothesis, there's there's some debate about it.

00:27:21.640 --> 00:27:25.320
So when you find humans are doing something sort of eerily similar, and we also, I mean

00:27:25.400 --> 00:27:30.630
we're very famous as a fission fusion species, you know, you can think about central place

00:27:30.790 --> 00:27:31.190
foraging.

00:27:31.270 --> 00:27:34.150
We all come together in a night, you know, in the evening if you're a group of

00:27:34.150 --> 00:27:38.470
hunter-gatherers sharing food, but during the day you're often in smaller work parties as a

00:27:38.470 --> 00:27:43.910
solitary forager, a solitary hunter, or with a with a few other individuals creating the

00:27:43.910 --> 00:27:46.630
opportunity for fission fusion.

00:27:46.790 --> 00:27:51.510
But it hasn't been um you know, a lot of the work is sort of like speculative.

00:27:51.670 --> 00:27:53.430
Was this important in human evolution?

00:27:53.590 --> 00:27:56.230
How deep was it important in human evolution?

00:27:56.520 --> 00:28:01.720
If we, you know, have a model say similar to like savannah baboons, as many people think

00:28:01.720 --> 00:28:07.640
the Australopis would have been, then maybe there's not a good model for vision and

00:28:07.640 --> 00:28:08.040
fusion.

00:28:08.120 --> 00:28:13.080
So maybe we didn't actually have vision and fusion for an important part of our

00:28:13.080 --> 00:28:14.280
evolutionary history.

00:28:14.440 --> 00:28:19.400
So so a lot of it is sort of speculative and there hasn't been as many sort of clean tests

00:28:19.640 --> 00:28:20.680
as you would like.

00:28:21.170 --> 00:28:21.410
Yeah.

00:28:21.570 --> 00:28:25.570
But just just so so that we're I'm being clear, fission fusion.

00:28:25.730 --> 00:28:30.850
The idea is like cows just sort of intuitively don't need to fission fusion because the

00:28:30.850 --> 00:28:34.370
distribution of how they make their living, it's just all sort of there.

00:28:34.530 --> 00:28:36.210
So ungulates, for example, there's a lot of different things.

00:28:36.370 --> 00:28:42.370
Yeah, or or if they do fission fusion, that there's not a motivation or benefit,

00:28:42.530 --> 00:28:46.130
there's not a real benefit to attacking members of other groups.

00:28:46.290 --> 00:28:50.820
Because you can imagine like many herd species may have some sort of, you know, I don't

00:28:50.820 --> 00:28:55.940
know that you would call it fission fusion times where they're more due to breeding, you

00:28:55.940 --> 00:28:57.220
know, during breeding season.

00:28:57.460 --> 00:29:01.860
Yeah, you know, during breeding season or something, but there's not a real benefit from

00:29:01.860 --> 00:29:05.140
group and maybe that's because they're not group living in the same way that we think

00:29:05.940 --> 00:29:09.780
members of one group attacking and killing members of other groups.

00:29:10.020 --> 00:29:14.820
If they if they do and you know, I imagine imagine some of them do have lethal violence,

00:29:14.900 --> 00:29:18.490
you know, when they're headbutting each other, but then it's gonna be between dyads.

00:29:18.570 --> 00:29:24.250
It's not gonna be coalitionary, which is what's really unusual is you know, many mammalian

00:29:24.250 --> 00:29:28.490
species have, you know, violence where they kill members of their same species.

00:29:28.570 --> 00:29:33.610
But what's unusual is that it's a group killing members of the same species.

00:29:33.850 --> 00:29:34.010
Yeah.

00:29:34.090 --> 00:29:39.060
And so is is the the idea that we we don't see this in in say herbivores that that eat

00:29:39.060 --> 00:29:43.620
grass, it's it's because the distribution of resources is not very lopsided.

00:29:43.700 --> 00:29:48.740
You know, like there's no real benefit to like a herd of cattle attacking a rival herd

00:29:48.740 --> 00:29:52.820
because there's plenty of grass everywhere and there's not going to be a real payoff to

00:29:52.820 --> 00:29:53.460
that kind of behavior.

00:29:53.540 --> 00:29:54.020
Is that the idea?

00:29:54.340 --> 00:29:59.380
Yeah, it would also say they're not they're not a group living species in the way primates

00:29:59.380 --> 00:29:59.540
are.

00:29:59.780 --> 00:29:59.940
Okay.

00:30:00.580 --> 00:30:05.620
They they you know, they're living with others, but there's no clear in group out group

00:30:05.780 --> 00:30:06.420
boundaries.

00:30:06.830 --> 00:30:07.150
Right.

00:30:07.470 --> 00:30:11.230
It's it's so interesting because I mean, on the one hand, uh what I love about an

00:30:11.230 --> 00:30:14.990
evolutionary approach is that even something like are we fusion fission, and we were

00:30:14.990 --> 00:30:20.830
talking about that because we're talking about, you know, groups and like conflict, but we

00:30:20.830 --> 00:30:24.510
can talk about fission fusion as a consequence, right?

00:30:24.590 --> 00:30:27.470
It's coming back to this point of we take nothing for granted.

00:30:27.550 --> 00:30:30.910
It's a consequence of like just the ecology or what the environment is like.

00:30:31.070 --> 00:30:35.470
Does it do you need to fusion, fusion, fission, fusion um, or not?

00:30:35.640 --> 00:30:39.720
So I think that that's really cool, but it does add this complication of on one hand,

00:30:39.800 --> 00:30:44.120
you're talking about like the group psychology or like, because groups in some sense are

00:30:44.120 --> 00:30:49.480
like caused by the mental representation, which then causes the behavior.

00:30:49.640 --> 00:30:51.640
Um, so it becomes this complicated thing.

00:30:51.800 --> 00:30:55.800
Like, unsurprisingly, groups are complicated, which is we both have to deal with like the

00:30:55.800 --> 00:31:00.470
ecology to think about, like, well, why would there even be selection for conflict?

00:31:00.630 --> 00:31:05.350
But then at the same time, you're it's this thing of many species don't have the requisite

00:31:05.350 --> 00:31:08.870
psychology to do produce the behavior either.

00:31:09.030 --> 00:31:10.630
So how do we explain that too?

00:31:10.710 --> 00:31:10.950
Yeah.

00:31:11.350 --> 00:31:14.630
Yeah, it's really fun to think about because you can think about, you know, savannah

00:31:14.630 --> 00:31:19.270
baboons, they live in these sort of large groups, but they're eating, you know, seeds from

00:31:19.270 --> 00:31:19.910
the grasses.

00:31:20.070 --> 00:31:24.600
So they don't really have this sort of, as far as I understand, a like distinct in-group,

00:31:24.760 --> 00:31:29.880
out-group psychology where, you know, access to territory really matters for reproduction.

00:31:30.040 --> 00:31:35.080
But then you think about chimpanzees, where, you know, they're they like to eat, you know,

00:31:35.240 --> 00:31:37.000
figs from fig trees.

00:31:37.160 --> 00:31:42.120
So if if it's time where they're all, you know, where there's abundant figs, they're going

00:31:42.120 --> 00:31:43.560
to spend most of their days together.

00:31:43.720 --> 00:31:47.240
But then in a season where it's not quite as abundant, you know, there's not nearly as much

00:31:47.240 --> 00:31:47.560
food.

00:31:47.640 --> 00:31:49.890
They're in much smaller party.

00:31:49.970 --> 00:31:54.050
So they're both vulnerable, but they may have a reason if they're in a larger party than to

00:31:54.050 --> 00:31:57.010
predate on their neighbors.

00:31:57.650 --> 00:32:01.570
I'm working on a a paper sort of like laying out some ideas about the evolution of war.

00:32:01.650 --> 00:32:06.050
And one of the sessions is like, you know, why don't zeb off of Sapolskys, why don't zebras

00:32:06.130 --> 00:32:08.850
get ulcers is why don't like zebras wage war?

00:32:09.250 --> 00:32:09.810
Great question, yeah.

00:32:09.970 --> 00:32:12.290
You know, is that, you know, or rabbits or whatever.

00:32:12.610 --> 00:32:15.090
Why don't why don't squirrels wage war?

00:32:15.250 --> 00:32:19.340
You know, squirrels have violence, they're super aggressive, but you know, why don't they

00:32:19.340 --> 00:32:20.220
wage war?

00:32:20.300 --> 00:32:25.820
And some of the aspects to in order to wage war, you have to have a psychology to you to

00:32:25.820 --> 00:32:29.100
engage in coalitionary aggression, use it strategically.

00:32:29.340 --> 00:32:33.420
So that requires certain evolutionary preconditions to be met.

00:32:33.820 --> 00:32:34.060
Right.

00:32:34.460 --> 00:32:38.220
Do you do you think that carnivory might be one such precondition?

00:32:38.300 --> 00:32:43.030
And that if you have the cognitive machinery necessary to coordinate with other members of

00:32:43.030 --> 00:32:47.350
your group to aggressively attack a prey animal, that those types of abilities could be

00:32:47.350 --> 00:32:50.870
parlayed into a context of intergroup violence.

00:32:51.030 --> 00:32:55.670
Whereas if you don't have any kind of predation uh instincts or abilities, then it's going

00:32:55.670 --> 00:33:00.710
to be harder to evolve the kinds of coordination abilities and socio cognitive abilities

00:33:00.710 --> 00:33:05.190
necessary to get together in a group and count on the fact that you can all act in

00:33:05.190 --> 00:33:10.540
synchrono and synchrony and and uh cooperate with one another and and be confident that you

00:33:10.540 --> 00:33:13.820
know each member of the group is gonna have your back in in some sense.

00:33:14.060 --> 00:33:16.140
Um no, I don't think it's necessary.

00:33:16.300 --> 00:33:20.540
I think you know, I think there is something appealing sort of about you know hunting as a

00:33:20.540 --> 00:33:21.580
pathway to war.

00:33:21.740 --> 00:33:26.860
And I think this is one of the major sort of uh hypotheses that the imbalance of power sort

00:33:26.870 --> 00:33:32.150
of overturned, because you have many species that, you know, are carnivores to a more or

00:33:32.150 --> 00:33:33.910
lesser extent that don't have anything like it.

00:33:33.990 --> 00:33:39.430
And then you can think about some species that maybe aren't heavily

00:33:39.430 --> 00:33:45.430
carnivores, like some species of chimpanzees or potentially bonobos, if we end up finding

00:33:45.430 --> 00:33:50.550
that they do have rating, which some people, some people suspect that aren't carnivores, or

00:33:50.550 --> 00:33:51.830
gorillas, for instance.

00:33:51.910 --> 00:33:57.600
You know, there's been several cases of gorilla coalitionary violence against a lone

00:33:57.760 --> 00:33:59.120
outgroup individual.

00:33:59.280 --> 00:34:05.200
So it's it's less a case of like where the larger group goes and looks

00:34:05.200 --> 00:34:10.240
for like a patrol for individuals to take over the territory, and more like a larger group

00:34:10.240 --> 00:34:16.240
is being followed by a lone individual, and then they pile on and beat that individual to

00:34:16.240 --> 00:34:18.160
nearly to death or to death.

00:34:18.320 --> 00:34:23.870
Um, you know, and they're not, you know, not carnivores by any stretch of the imagination.

00:34:24.270 --> 00:34:26.110
Is it is it territory then?

00:34:26.270 --> 00:34:31.150
Is it the is it the exclusivity of like why don't squirrels go to war?

00:34:31.470 --> 00:34:35.470
Um well I don't think they're group living in the same in the same way.

00:34:35.870 --> 00:34:36.270
Right.

00:34:36.510 --> 00:34:38.110
And this is the problem, right?

00:34:38.190 --> 00:34:41.150
It's like a chicken and egg thing because it's like, well why aren't they group living?

00:34:41.310 --> 00:34:45.960
And does it come back to then is it the um the distribution of resources?

00:34:46.600 --> 00:34:51.160
But you know, they control territories in the sense that they have a you know, you have a

00:34:51.160 --> 00:34:57.080
nice uh oak in your in your in your yard and you have uh you know one or

00:34:57.080 --> 00:34:59.480
two squirrel nests in it that they want to control.

00:34:59.720 --> 00:35:04.840
So they'll, you know, chase away squirrels from other you know, squirrels that are trying

00:35:04.840 --> 00:35:09.670
to encroach on their territory, but you don't have the opportunity for, you know, four

00:35:09.670 --> 00:35:15.510
nests from these three, you know, these three to gang up with each other and chase away and

00:35:15.510 --> 00:35:16.630
kill some other squirrel.

00:35:16.790 --> 00:35:22.470
Now we it may be, you know, if you when I started my PhD research in 2009, you know, many

00:35:22.470 --> 00:35:27.110
of the species that have lethal intergroup aggression now we didn't actually know about it

00:35:27.110 --> 00:35:28.630
at the time or wasn't well documented.

00:35:28.950 --> 00:35:33.510
So it may be the case in 20 years we find out that you know some sort of like

00:35:34.160 --> 00:35:38.240
hyper-social population of squirrels somewhere, you know, does.

00:35:38.400 --> 00:35:39.760
So it may look different.

00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:44.720
But um, you know, but for the most part, I think the way we understand that why the vast

00:35:44.720 --> 00:35:49.920
majority of species, although they kill each other or why many mammalian species kill each

00:35:49.920 --> 00:35:52.480
other, don't do it as parts of coalitions.

00:35:52.560 --> 00:35:56.800
It's just the fact that you have to be social and typically territorial.

00:35:57.150 --> 00:35:57.310
Right.

00:35:57.390 --> 00:36:02.110
And the reason you're territorial is because territory is associated with access to

00:36:02.110 --> 00:36:04.430
resources that you can convert into reproduction.

00:36:04.830 --> 00:36:04.990
Right.

00:36:05.070 --> 00:36:10.510
So this is the Harcourt-Dewall classic sort of coalitions in humans and

00:36:10.510 --> 00:36:11.390
non-humans.

00:36:11.550 --> 00:36:13.390
This was sort of in the 80s and 90s.

00:36:13.470 --> 00:36:19.220
There was just this like social brain hypothesis of really multi-agent

00:36:19.220 --> 00:36:20.580
conflict is really difficult.

00:36:20.740 --> 00:36:22.420
It's really zoologically rare.

00:36:22.580 --> 00:36:27.460
There's many situations where you look at something like classically, elephant seals, like

00:36:27.540 --> 00:36:32.260
it's very um male reproductive success is extremely skewed.

00:36:32.340 --> 00:36:37.860
There's a whole beach full of female elephant seals, and one male elephant seal is fights

00:36:37.860 --> 00:36:40.100
all the other males and gets access to all of them.

00:36:40.260 --> 00:36:46.110
And from a coalitional species perspective, it's insane because two or three, you know, uh

00:36:46.110 --> 00:36:51.390
beta and whatever, um, could could just gang up on that man, but they don't because they

00:36:51.390 --> 00:36:52.510
just cannot do it.

00:36:52.670 --> 00:36:54.190
And it's so weird.

00:36:54.350 --> 00:37:00.190
Um so this idea that there's sort of like it's hard computationally to do this is

00:37:00.270 --> 00:37:02.510
I think was a really important idea.

00:37:03.070 --> 00:37:04.670
Has that been part of your thinking?

00:37:04.750 --> 00:37:05.790
And is that outdated now?

00:37:05.870 --> 00:37:06.350
Or how do you think that's it?

00:37:06.510 --> 00:37:11.700
Yeah, no, well, you know, I I think it's certainly true the, you know, the vast majority of

00:37:11.700 --> 00:37:15.860
lethal aggression you're going to see is, you know, all those, you know, exciting examples

00:37:15.860 --> 00:37:20.980
of two elephant seals, two horses going at it, you know, two lions, two deer.

00:37:21.460 --> 00:37:24.260
It's typically, uh, you know, it's typically dyadic.

00:37:24.500 --> 00:37:29.460
But I'm not sure that computation's really the limiting factor because presumably if the

00:37:29.460 --> 00:37:34.580
environment is such that it favors the prerequisites for it and there's sufficient payoff,

00:37:34.660 --> 00:37:38.810
then you are gonna involve the computational machinery.

00:37:39.050 --> 00:37:39.370
Yeah.

00:37:39.610 --> 00:37:43.770
You know, so you may you may have to have other things necessarily like, you know, the

00:37:43.770 --> 00:37:48.010
conditions for which there to sort of be stable groups or stable coalitions.

00:37:48.170 --> 00:37:48.330
Right.

00:37:48.490 --> 00:37:50.650
You know, within it, how do you not get betrayed?

00:37:50.730 --> 00:37:55.050
You know, if a group of if beta is joined together to overthrow the alpha seal, how does

00:37:55.050 --> 00:37:56.650
one of them not get betrayed?

00:37:56.810 --> 00:38:02.580
So I think that if you know if the evolutionary payoffs are there over enough time that we

00:38:02.660 --> 00:38:07.940
we do see this paper or this behavior evolve and you know, distant taxa.

00:38:08.020 --> 00:38:11.220
So I think it's not like a, you know, an insurmountably high barrier.

00:38:11.460 --> 00:38:11.780
I see.

00:38:11.860 --> 00:38:17.140
So it's sort of like it's a it's obviously like a a a a maximum if in this possibility

00:38:17.140 --> 00:38:22.990
space of like phenotypes, It's hard to get to, and not every species gets to it, but

00:38:22.990 --> 00:38:26.830
it's not a thing of there's any simple like one factor to why they don't.

00:38:27.070 --> 00:38:32.190
It's just you need sort of the right constellation of either the environment is such that

00:38:32.270 --> 00:38:37.710
like free riders get selected out automatically, or there's enough sort of

00:38:37.710 --> 00:38:43.550
cognitive complexity in the species for other reasons that might be even historical, that

00:38:43.550 --> 00:38:48.510
keeping track of sort of reciprocity or free riders is already sort of there enough.

00:38:48.720 --> 00:38:53.440
It's it's all sort of not, there's no sort of clear magic bullet per se.

00:38:54.240 --> 00:38:56.960
Yeah, I think that that's I think that that's fair.

00:38:57.120 --> 00:39:02.000
I also just want to say at this point, I feel like our our theorizing on the evolution of

00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:07.840
coalitionary violence, lethal coalitionary violence, it's not as refined as it should be in

00:39:07.840 --> 00:39:11.280
the in the wake of just a lot of other data on species coming out.

00:39:11.440 --> 00:39:15.440
I feel like that this is a chance, you know, this is this is a time for us to really sort

00:39:15.440 --> 00:39:17.650
of do more theory building.

00:39:18.050 --> 00:39:23.890
You know, the imbalance of power is like dominant and beautiful, it's elegant, it

00:39:23.890 --> 00:39:27.570
explains so much, but I'm not sure it explains everything we're seeing right now.

00:39:27.730 --> 00:39:32.770
Or even if it even if it does answers questions at these other levels that you're asking,

00:39:32.930 --> 00:39:35.730
well, why don't some species develop it?

00:39:35.810 --> 00:39:40.420
So it's a um, so I don't think we have all the answers theoretically at Right, because it

00:39:40.420 --> 00:39:43.540
seems like the question the question that Dave was getting at is a is a separate question,

00:39:43.620 --> 00:39:44.580
but very related.

00:39:44.740 --> 00:39:49.780
So we're originally talking about violence between groups where a coalition from one group

00:39:49.780 --> 00:39:53.140
will will gang up on uh a number of individuals from the other group.

00:39:53.300 --> 00:39:55.940
But there's also the question of coalitional violence within a group.

00:39:56.020 --> 00:40:00.900
So why don't the betas in a and a troop of elephant seals get together and overthrow the

00:40:00.900 --> 00:40:01.380
alpha?

00:40:01.540 --> 00:40:05.140
It would presumably be in their reproductive interests to do that.

00:40:05.300 --> 00:40:06.020
Why don't they?

00:40:06.180 --> 00:40:12.170
Why don't we see uh coalitions uh within a group uh uh you know fighting fighting

00:40:12.170 --> 00:40:13.290
with other members of the group.

00:40:13.370 --> 00:40:17.290
Uh and it seems to me that that is a related question and and and perhaps um they're

00:40:17.290 --> 00:40:17.850
correlated.

00:40:17.930 --> 00:40:21.450
You know, if you have coalitional violence within a group, you also are more likely to see

00:40:21.450 --> 00:40:23.290
coalitional violence between a group.

00:40:23.370 --> 00:40:27.450
I know, you know, in chimpanzees for example, th they form alliances and they often can

00:40:27.450 --> 00:40:29.290
gang up on on the male within a group.

00:40:29.450 --> 00:40:34.340
Well if they have that ability, why not, you know, parlay that to between group violence as

00:40:34.340 --> 00:40:34.500
well?

00:40:35.060 --> 00:40:37.300
Is that uh is that a five factor?

00:40:37.540 --> 00:40:40.340
I love that example because this is actually one of the things I think about in trying to

00:40:40.340 --> 00:40:45.700
explain why don't bonobos have uh sort of the lethal rating that you see in chimpanzees.

00:40:45.780 --> 00:40:50.100
So the one is just that they have um, you know, they don't have as much imbalance of power,

00:40:50.180 --> 00:40:54.900
but another hypothesis is that they don't have as many male coalition or they don't have as

00:40:54.900 --> 00:40:58.340
strong of male coalitions as you see in chimpanzees.

00:40:58.420 --> 00:41:03.430
And maybe that's due to, you know, some other feature, but also they have, you know, it's

00:41:03.430 --> 00:41:07.430
been reported to me, I'm not a bonobo researcher at all, but you know, bonobo females are

00:41:07.430 --> 00:41:12.310
very dominant and will often sort of like beat up and break up nascent coalitions.

00:41:12.390 --> 00:41:16.390
So it may just be that some of the proximate circumstances aren't there.

00:41:16.550 --> 00:41:21.830
Perhaps if you took away all the bonobo females, then you would have rating surge, but

00:41:21.830 --> 00:41:26.600
without, you know, with with the strong females that are breaking male coalitions.

00:41:26.760 --> 00:41:32.680
Maybe you just don't have the right sort of group coalis that then, you know, has

00:41:32.680 --> 00:41:37.880
enough sort of alignment of interests and stability to go out on a raid against another

00:41:37.880 --> 00:41:39.560
bonobo group.

00:41:39.880 --> 00:41:45.320
So I think this is a time that r really we should be doing some more theory refinement.

00:41:45.470 --> 00:41:49.710
that you know, we I thought we had most of the these sort of like big picture issues

00:41:49.710 --> 00:41:51.070
settled 15 years ago.

00:41:51.150 --> 00:41:54.590
And it's turning out that, you know, new data leads to new theory.

00:41:54.670 --> 00:41:57.390
So it's a really exciting time to be working in this area.

00:41:57.710 --> 00:41:58.270
Yeah, that's cool.

00:41:58.350 --> 00:41:58.510
Yeah.

00:41:58.590 --> 00:42:02.270
I mean, uh inner group conflict seems like it's such a straightforward selection pressure

00:42:02.270 --> 00:42:04.830
thing, you know, like foraging or mating.

00:42:04.910 --> 00:42:07.150
And it's obviously studying the lots of animals.

00:42:07.230 --> 00:42:08.430
It's pretty easy to observe.

00:42:08.590 --> 00:42:14.580
I mean, I say that not being in the forest being next to conflict, but but it's relatively

00:42:14.580 --> 00:42:15.620
easy to observe.

00:42:15.780 --> 00:42:19.700
Um, and so yeah, it's amazing that we still don't really have great theories.

00:42:19.940 --> 00:42:22.260
And you mean theories sort of at every level, right?

00:42:22.340 --> 00:42:26.180
Like in the sense of, I mean, obviously we don't have very good theories psychologically

00:42:26.180 --> 00:42:30.660
about the mental software in any species, but you even mean just sort of like the of all

00:42:30.740 --> 00:42:34.580
prerequisites like we're talking about, or even what the function or even ecological

00:42:34.580 --> 00:42:35.460
correlates, right?

00:42:35.700 --> 00:42:35.940
Yeah.

00:42:36.550 --> 00:42:41.670
Like when do you would you have predicted that bandit mongeese have this agreement?

00:42:41.830 --> 00:42:44.630
If you didn't know anything about their behavior, do you have a model that's going to

00:42:44.630 --> 00:42:45.590
predict why they have it?

00:42:45.670 --> 00:42:48.950
But let's say other species of mongoose don't have it.

00:42:49.190 --> 00:42:49.830
Right, right.

00:42:50.310 --> 00:42:52.310
You want a theory that does that.

00:42:52.870 --> 00:42:55.110
And I don't I don't know that we have that right now.

00:42:55.350 --> 00:42:57.270
Yeah, that's that's fantastic.

00:42:57.510 --> 00:43:02.710
Um, where where does the evolution of peace then come into uh

00:43:03.270 --> 00:43:04.230
come into this?

00:43:05.080 --> 00:43:11.080
So so I really started thinking about it um I mean just like in the first week or several

00:43:11.080 --> 00:43:12.360
weeks of my field work.

00:43:12.600 --> 00:43:15.240
And you know, I wanted to study decentralized war.

00:43:15.320 --> 00:43:19.080
So that if you want to study human war, you know, most people do it through like

00:43:19.080 --> 00:43:20.600
experiments or something like that.

00:43:20.680 --> 00:43:25.880
Or you'll work with chimpanzees and do sort of armchair theorizing about humans.

00:43:26.040 --> 00:43:31.910
But I wanted to work, I wanted to actually try to do field studies in a context that

00:43:31.910 --> 00:43:36.550
was as close as possible as we could get to like, you know, so-called ancestral conditions.

00:43:36.710 --> 00:43:41.110
So it means, you know, war outside of states, out of militaries, outside of, you know,

00:43:41.350 --> 00:43:45.350
formal institutions, hierarchy, generals, anything like that.

00:43:45.510 --> 00:43:51.240
Um, so I ended up working in in East Africa, right at the border of South Sudan and

00:43:51.240 --> 00:43:56.040
Kenya and Ethiopia in a region called the Alemi Triangle with a group called the Nangatom.

00:43:56.280 --> 00:44:00.120
And you know, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna like you know collect lots of data on like the cause

00:44:00.120 --> 00:44:00.440
of war.

00:44:00.600 --> 00:44:03.480
I'm gonna test what hypotheses are out there, it's gonna be amazing.

00:44:03.640 --> 00:44:09.290
And then like several weeks in, there was um, you know, you're do I was doing daily

00:44:09.290 --> 00:44:13.130
labor, just digging a water hole, and you start hearing, you know, all this cheering and

00:44:13.130 --> 00:44:16.810
clapping, the sort of stuff you may hear like in your campus office if you hear like a

00:44:16.810 --> 00:44:18.970
student parade outside or something.

00:44:19.130 --> 00:44:21.690
So I climb up out of the water hole, what's going on?

00:44:21.850 --> 00:44:26.490
And you can hear people firing AK 47, sort of then excitement.

00:44:26.570 --> 00:44:31.450
It's got a different pattern than an actual like, you know, in defense of a raid.

00:44:31.610 --> 00:44:34.250
And it was like, you know, oh, a group of raiders is coming back.

00:44:34.330 --> 00:44:37.400
They're coming back with a bunch of cattle that they stole from the Turcana.

00:44:37.720 --> 00:44:41.800
You know, so everybody that afternoon, people are just jubilant, they're so excited, gather

00:44:41.800 --> 00:44:43.560
under a big shade tree.

00:44:43.720 --> 00:44:44.600
You know, everyone's hanging out.

00:44:44.680 --> 00:44:45.800
It's really like a party.

00:44:46.040 --> 00:44:50.840
Um, and you know, they slaughter one of the cows, and everyone's like, oh, pastoralas must

00:44:50.920 --> 00:44:53.320
be meat all the time because that's what they live off.

00:44:53.400 --> 00:44:55.800
But actually, pastoras do not eat meat that often.

00:44:55.880 --> 00:44:59.910
You know, they tend to, you'll consume a lot of dairy products or grain that they're

00:44:59.910 --> 00:45:03.670
growing or trade for and typically save their livestock.

00:45:03.990 --> 00:45:09.110
So everyone's eating just tons of cow, you know, fresh beef roasted on the fire.

00:45:09.270 --> 00:45:10.230
Everybody's happy.

00:45:10.310 --> 00:45:11.830
It's a big party.

00:45:12.150 --> 00:45:17.350
And, you know, it was really because struck me then at the point was, you know, in the in

00:45:17.350 --> 00:45:22.620
the people who had successfully captured these cattle, everyone's singing to them, like all

00:45:22.620 --> 00:45:28.220
the all the women are singing and praising them, all the guys are sort of honoring them.

00:45:28.300 --> 00:45:31.420
The elders are giving speeches, like, ah, this is the future.

00:45:31.580 --> 00:45:35.580
You know, these are these are our warriors, like they're bringing glory to us.

00:45:35.740 --> 00:45:39.980
You know, and if you're successful in killing somebody, you get honorific scars, you get

00:45:39.980 --> 00:45:43.900
status, you go through all these rituals, you become a a new person essentially.

00:45:43.980 --> 00:45:45.340
You get a you get a new name.

00:45:45.500 --> 00:45:49.590
And it really struck me as the question is like in in these particular conditions, like

00:45:49.750 --> 00:45:53.910
actually the challenge is not to explain why there's conflict.

00:45:54.070 --> 00:45:55.270
I want people to go out and raid.

00:45:55.350 --> 00:45:57.270
I like fresh cow if I'm hungry.

00:45:57.350 --> 00:45:59.510
So I want those people to go raid.

00:45:59.590 --> 00:46:03.590
I want our cows to be fatter because they chase away the enemy and get access to grazing

00:46:03.590 --> 00:46:03.990
lands.

00:46:04.230 --> 00:46:08.630
The real challenge in these conditions is how do you get so once you're in this sort of

00:46:08.630 --> 00:46:12.070
like situation, how do you get groups to stop fighting?

00:46:12.230 --> 00:46:15.360
How do you change the costs and benefits.

00:46:15.440 --> 00:46:18.640
How do you change the incentives so people stop fighting?

00:46:18.800 --> 00:46:23.600
And that was, you know, uh uh when I give a talk on this, I like open with a passage from

00:46:23.600 --> 00:46:27.600
my journal where I'm like puzzling over this, realizing, oh my gosh, the really difficult

00:46:27.600 --> 00:46:30.000
question isn't why do humans have war?

00:46:30.160 --> 00:46:34.240
It's obvious there's many path ways to make war pay.

00:46:34.480 --> 00:46:38.640
You know, if you're you know, so like war isn't the really hard question in humans.

00:46:38.720 --> 00:46:41.040
The really hard question is how do you get rid of it?

00:46:41.990 --> 00:46:42.630
Interesting.

00:46:42.790 --> 00:46:43.030
Yeah.

00:46:43.190 --> 00:46:48.470
So again, so just to be really clear, from a cost-benefit perspective, and this is

00:46:48.470 --> 00:46:51.910
recapitulates what we were just talking about, is from an evolutionary perspective,

00:46:51.990 --> 00:46:57.750
everything ultimately translates into there's got to be some benefit or minimization of

00:46:57.750 --> 00:47:01.750
cost for some software or phenotype to get selected for.

00:47:01.910 --> 00:47:06.060
And in the context of conflict, we just spent a bunch of time talking about, well, you

00:47:06.060 --> 00:47:11.740
know, it might be this or that that gets ultimately this level of complexity of the

00:47:11.740 --> 00:47:16.940
software for conflict, but it's all for maximizing benefits, minimizing costs in the

00:47:16.940 --> 00:47:18.620
context of conflict, right?

00:47:18.860 --> 00:47:23.900
And and then this question of sort of well, how when there's obvious benefits to conflict,

00:47:24.060 --> 00:47:25.500
do you get peace?

00:47:25.660 --> 00:47:26.860
That's the question.

00:47:27.150 --> 00:47:31.630
Yeah, that's the question that you know, if you think about why did our species evolve some

00:47:31.630 --> 00:47:37.390
particular trait, um, then then you look at costs and benefits over

00:47:38.030 --> 00:47:40.030
uh over evolutionary timescales.

00:47:40.270 --> 00:47:42.430
And you know, war in humans is pretty simple.

00:47:42.590 --> 00:47:48.270
You can think that it it just requires the capacity to form coalitions, to use aggression

00:47:48.270 --> 00:47:53.200
strategically, and then you get yourself in a situation where there's clear benefits from

00:47:53.200 --> 00:47:53.840
doing so.

00:47:54.000 --> 00:47:58.480
You know, so you have cultural institutions, but you may also capture, and it's common in

00:47:58.480 --> 00:48:03.440
many societies, including hunter gatherers, things of value, weapons, physical trophies,

00:48:03.760 --> 00:48:09.600
captives, you know, that and and humans aren't morons like chimpanzees or most

00:48:09.600 --> 00:48:10.160
other species.

00:48:10.320 --> 00:48:14.960
We do so when the costs are typically pretty low through imbalances of power.

00:48:15.120 --> 00:48:20.270
You know, so the most common type of attack across the ethnographic literature and

00:48:20.270 --> 00:48:25.950
decentralized conflict is the raid, where you know, anywhere from four to fifteen

00:48:25.950 --> 00:48:31.710
individuals, typically young males, um, in almost all cases, go out and use

00:48:31.710 --> 00:48:36.270
ambush and stealth to kill one or two individuals from another group.

00:48:36.510 --> 00:48:39.870
And, you know, the at very, very low risk to themselves.

00:48:39.950 --> 00:48:44.820
And we don't have good like quantitative studies from many societies at all, but the few

00:48:44.820 --> 00:48:48.020
that we do suggest the risk is typically negligible.

00:48:48.340 --> 00:48:53.220
Shagnon, and I think it was just sort of an armchair estimation, said it was probably like

00:48:53.220 --> 00:48:54.100
less than 5%.

00:48:54.820 --> 00:48:59.940
Steve Beckerman's data among the Warani, which is like one of the most, you know, had the

00:48:59.940 --> 00:49:02.260
highest rates of homicide.

00:49:02.420 --> 00:49:04.740
You know, it's more feuding than war at that point.

00:49:04.820 --> 00:49:10.260
He he he says that there's no record, nobody can recount, an offensive reader

00:49:10.390 --> 00:49:12.470
getting attacked or killed.

00:49:13.030 --> 00:49:15.670
And my data from the Nangatom, it's very, very rare.

00:49:15.750 --> 00:49:21.750
People are more likely to die of thirst, you know, so it's semi-arid than they are to be

00:49:21.750 --> 00:49:22.790
killed in the raid.

00:49:23.270 --> 00:49:28.870
In the couple of cases, it's um typically like friendly fire or something like that.

00:49:29.110 --> 00:49:33.640
So, you know, and it's because people are trying to minimize the danger to themselves.

00:49:33.720 --> 00:49:39.400
So the costs are pretty low with this pattern of conflict that we think of as ancestral.

00:49:39.800 --> 00:49:43.880
You know, it's very similar to what you see in many other species, including chimpanzees.

00:49:44.200 --> 00:49:49.160
And the benefits in humans can be more proximate and tangible than, say, in chimpanzees,

00:49:49.240 --> 00:49:54.040
and maybe this really delayed mechanism of chimpanzees, where after 10 years they take over

00:49:54.040 --> 00:49:58.920
the territory and they get access to new fruiting trees, which allows them to re reduce

00:49:58.920 --> 00:50:03.390
their interbirth interval and have higher offspring survival.

00:50:03.630 --> 00:50:07.470
In humans, it may be much more like very direct.

00:50:07.630 --> 00:50:11.150
Like we steal your weapons, we have cultural mechanisms, you know.

00:50:11.310 --> 00:50:17.150
So you kill someone, you get a new name, you get honorary tokens of your

00:50:17.310 --> 00:50:22.430
of your status, or you capture a human, you know, a human child or a human wife.

00:50:22.590 --> 00:50:28.510
Um, and then among pastoralists, you also get livestock, that, you know, really tasty

00:50:28.510 --> 00:50:30.190
meat we were talking about.

00:50:30.590 --> 00:50:31.070
Right.

00:50:31.310 --> 00:50:37.200
Yeah, And that and that cow is uh uh slaughterable and eatable and

00:50:37.200 --> 00:50:39.520
doesn't require it's not like the land, right?

00:50:39.600 --> 00:50:45.280
Like classically, pastoralists are like shepherds or whatever else uh you're

00:50:45.440 --> 00:50:50.720
you're grazing or your your the it's the it's the exclusivity and uh

00:50:50.880 --> 00:50:51.760
stealability.

00:50:51.840 --> 00:50:56.320
I'm using the wrong words, but basically how rival the goods are and how portable and

00:50:56.320 --> 00:50:56.880
packageable.

00:50:56.960 --> 00:51:01.290
I mean it's the same reason why like money and diamonds, Um, you know, people try to steal

00:51:01.290 --> 00:51:03.130
them, but you don't try to steal like a whole building.

00:51:03.210 --> 00:51:03.610
You can't.

00:51:03.690 --> 00:51:05.370
Like you can't, you know, you have to maintain it.

00:51:05.450 --> 00:51:09.610
It's the same with like a cropland versus the the results of the crops.

00:51:09.690 --> 00:51:09.850
Yeah.

00:51:09.930 --> 00:51:15.210
Like the cow is the result of a lot of labor and resources, right?

00:51:15.530 --> 00:51:15.770
Yeah.

00:51:15.930 --> 00:51:16.090
Yeah.

00:51:16.170 --> 00:51:20.730
It's one of the reasons I find what what you're alluding to there sort of competition

00:51:21.370 --> 00:51:26.800
competition for land, things that, you know, are really a collective good

00:51:27.040 --> 00:51:30.400
less satisfying for you know explanations of human war.

00:51:30.480 --> 00:51:35.520
It's not always clear, especially like in human conflict where you can have these long,

00:51:35.680 --> 00:51:38.640
long periods of just like back and forth, tit for tat.

00:51:38.720 --> 00:51:43.840
And we don't have a lot of really good records of say one, you know, mobile

00:51:43.840 --> 00:51:49.470
hunter-gatherer group taking over the territory of another mobile hunter-gatherer group.

00:51:49.550 --> 00:51:50.990
That's sort of the hypothesis.

00:51:51.150 --> 00:51:56.990
But as someone who's in the literature, I I don't see as many of accounts of it as as I

00:51:56.990 --> 00:51:57.630
would like to.

00:51:57.710 --> 00:52:03.070
And instead what I typically see are just sort of like back and forth, you know, tit for

00:52:03.230 --> 00:52:09.160
tat rating for, you know, for long periods of time without, you know, concrete

00:52:09.160 --> 00:52:15.000
access to like we have taken over this land, and now over 10 years, you know, we're gonna

00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:16.600
have higher reproductive systems.

00:52:16.760 --> 00:52:17.400
Oh, I see.

00:52:17.480 --> 00:52:17.720
Okay.

00:52:17.880 --> 00:52:23.240
You know, so um so does that mean so like because typically like war, as like I think a lot

00:52:23.240 --> 00:52:26.760
of people, I mean, like in Luke, I just want to say like we went to a conference many years

00:52:26.760 --> 00:52:31.570
ago about the evolution of war and your pictures, you know, it was like, wow, this Luke is

00:52:31.570 --> 00:52:32.130
very brave.

00:52:32.210 --> 00:52:37.250
Like there's people with AK 47s or Krishnikovs like running around shooting them.

00:52:37.410 --> 00:52:42.130
Like, but it it's uh it's in this context of there's sort of two versions.

00:52:42.210 --> 00:52:43.730
One is the monkeys thing, right?

00:52:43.810 --> 00:52:48.290
Where it's sort of lots of group lot of people together and it's in this asymmetric war of

00:52:48.290 --> 00:52:53.010
attrition or it's just sort of sussing out who's who which side will win.

00:52:53.090 --> 00:52:58.980
And even a lot of like mechanized war, you know, like the the Great Wars, even, a lot of

00:52:58.980 --> 00:52:59.940
it was that, right?

00:53:00.020 --> 00:53:02.100
It was just sort of for territory.

00:53:02.740 --> 00:53:07.540
But but it sounds like what you're saying is that that's not really the mu the model you're

00:53:07.540 --> 00:53:08.020
seeing.

00:53:08.260 --> 00:53:13.540
Um I would say I don't think that they're great models for thinking about the evolution of

00:53:13.540 --> 00:53:15.540
war in the human species.

00:53:15.700 --> 00:53:21.370
You know, even monkeys, it shows that there can be a different path to coalitionary

00:53:21.370 --> 00:53:25.450
killing, but where you think about just like, you know, small parties operating.

00:53:25.610 --> 00:53:30.170
So if you just survey hunter-gatherer relationships, you know, sort of as close to

00:53:30.170 --> 00:53:35.290
pre-contact as you can get, you find the most potter common pattern of intergroup killing

00:53:35.290 --> 00:53:39.460
is what we're describing, the raid, which is somewhat the chimpanzee patrol, you know,

00:53:39.620 --> 00:53:43.860
small group of individuals goes out at less at low cost to themselves.

00:53:44.100 --> 00:53:48.900
So I take that as sort of the baseline thing that we're trying to understand.

00:53:48.980 --> 00:53:51.620
And then culture and humans can put it in all different types of ways.

00:53:51.700 --> 00:53:55.540
Among the Nangatom, there are things like battles, among the Turkana, things like battles,

00:53:55.620 --> 00:54:00.430
but I don't think that those are the real sort of like the window into our evolution.

00:54:00.590 --> 00:54:05.470
I think those are the product of new social technologies which allow us to have larger

00:54:05.470 --> 00:54:11.150
population densities, uh more explicit or more uh established

00:54:11.150 --> 00:54:16.910
methods of incentivizing individuals, um, you know, either through rewards or

00:54:16.910 --> 00:54:17.710
coercion.

00:54:17.950 --> 00:54:21.630
But if we're trying to understand the evolution of our species, I think I think what we

00:54:21.630 --> 00:54:24.600
really have to do is understand the small, the pattern of small raids.

00:54:24.920 --> 00:54:25.160
Right.

00:54:25.240 --> 00:54:29.880
Like the the the Civil War soldier who does who just walks through the field getting shot

00:54:29.880 --> 00:54:35.160
at because the officer behind him will shoot him if he does is that that's not a good lit

00:54:35.400 --> 00:54:39.240
that's not a good like intuition pump for how people ordinarily behave in common.

00:54:39.640 --> 00:54:43.080
No, and no one of the biggest things when I when I talk on the evolution war, everybody

00:54:43.080 --> 00:54:48.280
thinks as rightfully so, you imagine what we think of as war, you know, hierarchies and

00:54:48.280 --> 00:54:53.550
formless and and coordination and some larger strategy, but there often no strategy.

00:54:53.630 --> 00:54:59.230
The strategy is there's tactics to that particular day, like surround the village, kill

00:54:59.230 --> 00:55:01.070
everybody, shoot them like dogs.

00:55:01.230 --> 00:55:04.270
There's no overarching strategy at all.

00:55:04.430 --> 00:55:07.950
Like, okay, you know, we're gradually going to beat them back in this area, and then

00:55:07.950 --> 00:55:11.150
they're gonna migrate here, and we're gonna have guys from that side come over.

00:55:11.230 --> 00:55:16.420
There's there's nothing really that I've ever personally seen like that, or really an

00:55:16.580 --> 00:55:20.340
ethnography of decentralized small-scale society.

00:55:20.420 --> 00:55:22.500
So like below the level of a chiefdom.

00:55:22.660 --> 00:55:22.900
Yeah.

00:55:23.220 --> 00:55:27.620
So once societies start getting sort of formal leaders, you know, they start transitioning

00:55:27.620 --> 00:55:32.980
to be a chiefdom, you do see, you know, things that like proto-militaries come up, and that

00:55:32.980 --> 00:55:36.260
resembles modern conflict or contemporary conflict much more.

00:55:36.970 --> 00:55:41.050
So a lot of Hollywoodification, maybe is like uh wait, I don't know.

00:55:41.130 --> 00:55:45.290
When you talk to people and you study war, do people have like weird thoughts about how it

00:55:45.290 --> 00:55:45.530
works?

00:55:45.610 --> 00:55:50.650
Or well often they're really surprised when they they I when I tell them they have AK 47s

00:55:50.890 --> 00:55:54.890
because I think that is things like, oh, they're gonna have spears and you know bows and

00:55:54.890 --> 00:56:00.740
arrows and you know in you know t in the twenty first century that's that's really

00:56:01.060 --> 00:56:06.180
very very rare but and then so there's a question I often faces how much did that sort of

00:56:06.180 --> 00:56:11.860
change the the patterns of like indigenous war and it um

00:56:12.500 --> 00:56:15.620
it's sort of unresolvable because we don't have enough data.

00:56:15.780 --> 00:56:21.670
The earliest accounts show you know similar small scale raids that you have now, sort

00:56:21.670 --> 00:56:23.990
of similar large scale battles.

00:56:24.070 --> 00:56:29.350
And by large scale, they're not large compared to us, but they're large for the level of

00:56:29.350 --> 00:56:31.270
social organization and population size.

00:56:31.350 --> 00:56:35.910
So they may involve two to three hundred people on the side coming together on a given day

00:56:35.990 --> 00:56:39.030
and just sort of attacking by overwhelming force.

00:56:39.190 --> 00:56:45.060
But if anything, I think in this part of the world, it's made more the small scale raids

00:56:45.060 --> 00:56:49.860
probably more common and more dangerous than they used to be, in the sense that like four

00:56:49.860 --> 00:56:55.780
guys can go out with you know four AK forty sevens and not be nearly as afraid as

00:56:55.780 --> 00:56:57.860
like four guys with four spears.

00:56:58.180 --> 00:56:58.740
Right, right.

00:56:59.060 --> 00:57:04.450
You know, if the goal is just to find a lone individual in the bush and shoot the kill.

00:57:04.850 --> 00:57:05.970
Yeah, you don't have to get as close.

00:57:06.050 --> 00:57:07.170
You don't have to, you don't risk.

00:57:07.250 --> 00:57:07.490
Yeah.

00:57:07.650 --> 00:57:12.690
I did did I hear you say too that also cell phones maybe even have more of a greater effect

00:57:12.690 --> 00:57:14.130
than than the weapons.

00:57:14.530 --> 00:57:15.010
Now, yeah.

00:57:15.090 --> 00:57:19.890
So cell phones are now becoming, you know, common all over the globe.

00:57:19.970 --> 00:57:22.210
And I mean they're both good for conflict resolution.

00:57:22.290 --> 00:57:23.410
Now they're they're used.

00:57:23.490 --> 00:57:28.290
So you'll, you know, NGOs and governments everywhere will put like conflict monitors who

00:57:28.290 --> 00:57:32.760
will call in, like we see the, you know, we see them there slaughtering bulls, which is

00:57:32.760 --> 00:57:36.040
often something that pastoralists would do before when they're trying to motivate young men

00:57:36.040 --> 00:57:36.680
to go to a raid.

00:57:36.760 --> 00:57:41.720
They may kill a couple of bulls and like, oh, we see them slaughtering bulls like red bulls

00:57:41.800 --> 00:57:42.200
or something.

00:57:42.360 --> 00:57:47.000
You know, a bull that's like uh ritualistically associated with going to raid.

00:57:47.080 --> 00:57:52.190
So they may put out and call other groups, you know, like have everybody be on heightened

00:57:52.190 --> 00:57:56.190
alert, have them sleep in the village, you know, don't have people out in small herding

00:57:56.190 --> 00:57:56.670
parties.

00:57:56.750 --> 00:58:00.190
Um, but then also reportedly, this isn't the case in the Nangatom at all.

00:58:00.270 --> 00:58:05.230
But so I've heard about, you know, in in Kenya, you know, using it for the same, using it

00:58:05.230 --> 00:58:09.630
to share information about, say, where herds are that then you could rage.

00:58:09.710 --> 00:58:13.310
So when people are mobile and you're from one group, let's say you're from the Nangatom and

00:58:13.310 --> 00:58:17.100
you want to raid the Turkana, You don't really know necessarily where the villages are

00:58:17.260 --> 00:58:20.620
because people move around or where the herds are because they're mobile.

00:58:20.860 --> 00:58:22.140
So you'll send out scouts.

00:58:22.300 --> 00:58:26.700
Big raiding parties are often preceded with scouts who will go out for several days, sort

00:58:26.700 --> 00:58:30.620
of living off the land and come back and be like, okay, over by these mountains, you know,

00:58:30.700 --> 00:58:32.380
I found fresh poop and some villages.

00:58:32.620 --> 00:58:33.900
They're probably going to be over there.

00:58:34.140 --> 00:58:38.380
But um, if you can do that then with cell phones, it's even more efficacious.

00:58:38.770 --> 00:58:38.850
Right.

00:58:39.010 --> 00:58:40.930
So cell phones are just coordination devices.

00:58:41.090 --> 00:58:43.410
So either for peace or or conflict.

00:58:44.530 --> 00:58:45.250
Yeah, exactly.

00:58:45.410 --> 00:58:45.810
Yeah.

00:58:46.290 --> 00:58:46.930
Interesting.

00:58:47.650 --> 00:58:52.690
So it seems like there's a pretty big disconnect between, you know, the types of intergroup

00:58:52.690 --> 00:58:57.410
violence that say the imbalance of power hypothesis would explain, and the types of

00:58:57.410 --> 00:59:02.530
large-scale warfare that we see in the historical record where like, you know, France and

00:59:02.530 --> 00:59:05.090
England will go to war and they'll have huge armies.

00:59:05.170 --> 00:59:10.280
And that's very different from the types of small-scale raids that you might see in the

00:59:10.280 --> 00:59:16.200
Turkana, where like a group of male young men will try to gang up on a on a smaller number

00:59:16.200 --> 00:59:18.440
of people from another village.

00:59:19.160 --> 00:59:24.520
So we have that disconnect between presumably what what the evolved psychology is is

00:59:24.520 --> 00:59:30.450
designed for, which is, you know, uh low cost, low-risk, you know, uh uh raids

00:59:30.610 --> 00:59:32.210
where the benefit is really high.

00:59:32.370 --> 00:59:36.130
And then you have this totally different thing that happens once you get agriculture and

00:59:36.130 --> 00:59:40.210
civilization and armies and kings and and what have you.

00:59:40.450 --> 00:59:46.370
Um is there a similar part of that analogy with with regard to

00:59:46.370 --> 00:59:46.690
peace?

00:59:46.850 --> 00:59:52.280
So, in the same way that we have you know large-scale armies um and and civilizations and

00:59:52.280 --> 00:59:52.680
kings.

00:59:52.840 --> 00:59:57.080
Do we we we also have large scale you know peace treaties and uh international

00:59:57.400 --> 01:00:00.680
organizations that try to regulate interstate conflict.

01:00:00.840 --> 01:00:06.200
So we have that you know large scale element of of of peace and negotiation and diplomacy.

01:00:06.360 --> 01:00:11.320
Do is there a small scale version of that uh as well that's that's analogous to the small

01:00:11.400 --> 01:00:12.920
scale rating that we see?

01:00:13.400 --> 01:00:15.160
Oh yeah that's a that's a great question.

01:00:15.240 --> 01:00:16.120
I love that question.

01:00:16.360 --> 01:00:21.950
Um yeah so just to sort of recapitulate, first I agree with you that the sort of like

01:00:21.950 --> 01:00:27.950
centralized conflict is really sort of discontinuous with the sort of small-scale

01:00:27.950 --> 01:00:29.470
evolutionary raids.

01:00:29.550 --> 01:00:33.710
It uses some of the same psychological mechanisms, but it also uses things that are like

01:00:33.710 --> 01:00:38.590
really pretty novel, the ability of second lieutenants to stand at the back of a line and

01:00:38.750 --> 01:00:40.910
shoot would-be deserters.

01:00:41.180 --> 01:00:46.460
Um, but then with then with peace, do you have that same sort of

01:00:46.460 --> 01:00:47.580
discontinuity?

01:00:47.900 --> 01:00:53.020
And I I think actually less so, because I think peace is I sort of conceptualize it, where

01:00:53.020 --> 01:00:58.380
relationships are not negotiated individually, but sort of at the at the group level.

01:00:58.540 --> 01:01:02.060
I don't have to like sort of tentatively hang around with you and figure out if you're

01:01:02.060 --> 01:01:04.060
gonna try to murder me in my sleep.

01:01:04.300 --> 01:01:08.060
I think they're really pretty novel in our ep species history.

01:01:08.140 --> 01:01:13.690
I think they depended on us first culturally evolving technologies that

01:01:13.690 --> 01:01:19.690
allow us to like enforce norms at the group level and then coordinate our behavior

01:01:19.770 --> 01:01:24.650
and make those norms known both within and between and between groups.

01:01:24.810 --> 01:01:30.010
So some of those things are, and then once you do have peace, the ability to try to make it

01:01:30.090 --> 01:01:32.170
so nobody from your side breaks the peace.

01:01:32.250 --> 01:01:37.290
And I just recently read The Guns of August, like a really famous sort of popular book

01:01:37.290 --> 01:01:42.540
about World War I, and I was struck by one of the things the author said is that right

01:01:42.540 --> 01:01:48.460
before the German invasion of Belgium and then France, France pulled its armies like

01:01:48.460 --> 01:01:53.180
10 miles back, all their soldiers 10 miles back from the border because they were so

01:01:53.180 --> 01:01:58.700
concerned that one of their soldiers didn't sort of like strike the blow that set it off.

01:01:58.860 --> 01:02:02.620
That they wanted to be able to say it wasn't us, it was Germany.

01:02:03.020 --> 01:02:07.020
And that struck me is the reason it struck me is like, wow, that's a real sort of challenge

01:02:07.020 --> 01:02:10.290
that every society that wants to have peace has.

01:02:10.450 --> 01:02:14.610
It's like, you know, let's say we're, you know, three, you know, three males among the

01:02:14.610 --> 01:02:19.490
Nangatom or hunter-gatherers, and like, you know, I just want to live a good life, have my

01:02:19.490 --> 01:02:19.890
family.

01:02:20.210 --> 01:02:24.690
David P uh pins off wants to live a good, I realize you both have the same initial aspect.

01:02:24.850 --> 01:02:26.130
Yeah, we go, David, yeah.

01:02:26.370 --> 01:02:29.650
Also wants to live a good life and, you know, just raise his family.

01:02:29.810 --> 01:02:34.370
But then, you know, Santa Barbara Dave, you know, he's the sort of like, you know, Ferris

01:02:34.610 --> 01:02:40.020
one who's just like unsatisfied with his lot in life, what's to stop him from going out,

01:02:40.420 --> 01:02:41.940
raiding the other group?

01:02:42.180 --> 01:02:46.260
He doesn't even have to tell anybody but his closest friends from doing it, and then

01:02:46.260 --> 01:02:50.500
reinitiating us in this sort of cycle of violence.

01:02:50.580 --> 01:02:54.580
You know, so the other group that's got raided isn't going to know, oh, it's just David P.

01:02:54.980 --> 01:02:57.700
He's, you know, sort of um, you know, a misanthrope.

01:02:57.780 --> 01:03:00.770
He what he's doing doesn't really reflect anybody on that.

01:03:00.930 --> 01:03:03.570
All they see is like, hey, we had a state of peace and we got rated.

01:03:04.050 --> 01:03:09.890
So the the central challenge for any society that's gonna any human society that's

01:03:09.890 --> 01:03:15.490
gonna have peace is how do we align our incentives enough so the sort of

01:03:15.490 --> 01:03:20.210
psychopaths or the people with impulse disorders or the people whose costs and benefits are

01:03:20.210 --> 01:03:24.720
just a little, you know, the cost and benefit calculus is either inaccurate or just doesn't

01:03:24.720 --> 01:03:30.640
favor peace, how do you keep them from initiating offensive aggression, you know, at low

01:03:30.640 --> 01:03:36.240
cost to themselves when they may when there may be very clear, tangible benefits.

01:03:37.280 --> 01:03:42.640
So and this requires a level of centralization and cultural technologies that I think were

01:03:42.720 --> 01:03:46.720
pretty rare in for most of human history.

01:03:46.880 --> 01:03:52.670
So you need to be able to have norms at the group level saying, hey, this is not

01:03:52.670 --> 01:03:55.790
how we act to those to people of this particular group.

01:03:55.950 --> 01:03:58.670
And if we do, there's some sort of sanction for that.

01:03:58.830 --> 01:04:04.190
But it's difficult to get any type of sanctions like that among most mobile hunter-gatherer

01:04:04.190 --> 01:04:04.750
groups.

01:04:05.470 --> 01:04:06.830
It seems like it's it's interesting.

01:04:06.910 --> 01:04:12.100
It's almost uh like we need some kind of decomposition or de uh

01:04:12.340 --> 01:04:18.340
homogenizing, I don't know if that's a word or not, but to dehomogenize the group such

01:04:18.340 --> 01:04:24.100
that um one member of the group is not a stand-in for everyone else within that group.

01:04:24.340 --> 01:04:28.180
Because if that were the case, if one psychopath from that group came and did some damage

01:04:28.180 --> 01:04:32.180
or attacked us, then we would automatically infer that that person is representative of

01:04:32.180 --> 01:04:35.700
everyone else in that group, and we would retaliate not against that psychopath, but

01:04:35.700 --> 01:04:38.030
against the group itself as a singular entity.

01:04:38.190 --> 01:04:43.310
But in order to avoid that, we need some way of decomposing the group away from this

01:04:43.310 --> 01:04:47.070
monolithic concept and toward a collection of parts.

01:04:47.230 --> 01:04:52.990
And we might represent the fact that this part is not a stand-in for the

01:04:52.990 --> 01:04:53.310
whole.

01:04:53.790 --> 01:04:57.310
Do you think that that uh way of conceptualizing group is is part of this?

01:04:57.790 --> 01:05:03.780
The the decomposition isn't really something that often like happens in tribal societies,

01:05:03.860 --> 01:05:08.340
you know, where you're you're, you know, any action by any part of your group, the the

01:05:08.340 --> 01:05:10.740
blame falls on all of the group.

01:05:10.900 --> 01:05:14.500
So the way this is often resolved is turning over the killer.

01:05:14.740 --> 01:05:19.220
So uh Santa Barbara Dave, you know, turning you over for the other group to dispatch

01:05:19.220 --> 01:05:24.100
justice, or what's more common is us killing uh members of our in group

01:05:24.420 --> 01:05:30.410
killing the offender to show that that individual does not represent, you know, a norm,

01:05:30.890 --> 01:05:35.210
that they're not representing the will of the group or the new, the new norm.

01:05:35.370 --> 01:05:38.250
This is why peace is really, really difficult in tribal.

01:05:38.330 --> 01:05:42.490
So it's sustained peace, not just like periods of intergroup conflict, but you know,

01:05:42.650 --> 01:05:48.170
sustained, iterated, you know, durable, harmonious relationships, because it really breaks

01:05:48.170 --> 01:05:48.970
down very easily.

01:05:49.050 --> 01:05:54.820
And then, and further, that many, many small-scale groups have the cosmology where not just

01:05:54.820 --> 01:05:59.300
like Santa Barbara Dave goes out and attacks somebody from the other group, but somebody

01:05:59.300 --> 01:06:04.500
from the other group falls ill after Dave having made eye contact with them, and that you

01:06:04.500 --> 01:06:10.180
know it's it's it's war by mystical means or by witchcraft, you know,

01:06:10.420 --> 01:06:15.060
or just you know, somebody's visiting from the other group Dave's village and falls sick

01:06:15.060 --> 01:06:16.580
and gets malaria and dies.

01:06:16.900 --> 01:06:22.770
How do you reassure the other group that it wasn't due to um you know it

01:06:22.770 --> 01:06:27.650
wasn't due to malevolent behavior by day and this is something like in my own field work I

01:06:27.650 --> 01:06:33.170
saw I just saw a ton like a Nangatom guy was like up trading in Mercy and I guess he was

01:06:33.170 --> 01:06:38.290
old Mercy's one of the rival groups uh they long hostilities with and he died and there was

01:06:38.290 --> 01:06:42.770
just endless discussions over the days over like trying to figure out what the cause of

01:06:42.770 --> 01:06:45.970
death was and whether there would be retaliation or not.

01:06:46.130 --> 01:06:51.680
And and similarly um in the one sort of market town in Nangatam at that time, Kangaton,

01:06:51.760 --> 01:06:57.360
where there was a small health clinic, a a woman from Turkana who had family in Nangatom.

01:06:57.440 --> 01:07:01.520
You know, she some of her family married came in and she was dying of HIV, came to the

01:07:01.520 --> 01:07:05.520
clinic to get treatment, and she ended up dying when she was there.

01:07:05.680 --> 01:07:08.320
I was like helping take her to the clinic and stuff.

01:07:08.480 --> 01:07:10.480
And there was just massive war.

01:07:10.720 --> 01:07:14.810
Like in the town, there was going to be retaliation by Kenya.

01:07:14.890 --> 01:07:19.050
So like I think the government, like the local government, sends somebody over to the you

01:07:19.050 --> 01:07:23.530
know to the Kenya side to be like, you know, she died at the clinic of, you know, you know,

01:07:23.770 --> 01:07:27.050
dehydration or whatever at the clinic, it wasn't the fairest.

01:07:27.130 --> 01:07:33.050
So these are real, real problems that limit the ability of of decentralized

01:07:33.050 --> 01:07:34.410
societies to make peace.

01:07:34.900 --> 01:07:39.540
Is that is that because so, David, what was the verb you used to decompose?

01:07:39.940 --> 01:07:40.820
De dehomogenize.

01:07:41.060 --> 01:07:41.780
Dehomogenize.

01:07:41.860 --> 01:07:42.180
I like that.

01:07:42.260 --> 01:07:42.420
Yeah.

01:07:42.580 --> 01:07:44.660
So to dehomogenize the groups.

01:07:44.740 --> 01:07:46.740
Luca, do you have an idea of why that is?

01:07:46.900 --> 01:07:51.140
So I mean, you know, if you took like modern day France or Germany, if you like lived in

01:07:51.140 --> 01:07:56.660
France and your relative died in Germany currently, you know, you wouldn't think, well, the

01:07:56.820 --> 01:08:01.860
Germany killed my French relative and I have to retaliate against Germany currently, right?

01:08:01.940 --> 01:08:02.980
You wouldn't think that.

01:08:03.810 --> 01:08:05.490
you you might have 200 years ago.

01:08:06.050 --> 01:08:07.330
Yeah, but do we have a psychology?

01:08:07.490 --> 01:08:10.370
I mean, you would know both of you would know better because you're psychologists, but

01:08:10.370 --> 01:08:14.930
don't we have a psychology where we sort of want to blame every individual of a group, you

01:08:14.930 --> 01:08:17.570
know, attribute them some essence and blame them.

01:08:17.730 --> 01:08:22.530
I feel like this is sort of a fundamental thing feature of human psychology.

01:08:23.250 --> 01:08:23.970
It it is.

01:08:24.050 --> 01:08:28.800
I mean my my answer to that would be though that that sort of comes back then to what group

01:08:28.880 --> 01:08:29.200
though?

01:08:29.360 --> 01:08:35.360
And this is for me at least the thing that really breaks all of this open is our ability to

01:08:35.360 --> 01:08:37.520
generate new group identities.

01:08:37.760 --> 01:08:38.000
Yeah.

01:08:38.240 --> 01:08:38.400
Right.

01:08:38.480 --> 01:08:43.280
Like if you're I mean, and this is kind of what I was wondering is like if you're stuck,

01:08:43.360 --> 01:08:48.400
like a good analogy would be like we're in like battleships and we're like really stuck in

01:08:48.400 --> 01:08:48.640
them.

01:08:48.800 --> 01:08:51.360
We can't switch back and forth between them.

01:08:51.520 --> 01:08:56.090
And we can't even really like individuate the people within.

01:08:56.330 --> 01:09:01.850
So if, like, you know, if a if a missile comes over to us, you know, it's sort of like

01:09:02.010 --> 01:09:07.930
there's no rational reason for me to individuate who did that because I can't

01:09:07.930 --> 01:09:09.850
do anything about it, you know.

01:09:10.250 --> 01:09:16.170
Um, and that's a very different situation than uh if I'm in a room

01:09:16.170 --> 01:09:21.560
full of people and we just have different color t shirts on, and I'm a red t-shirted

01:09:21.640 --> 01:09:27.560
person, somebody's got a blue shirt on, and another red-shirted person gets punched

01:09:27.560 --> 01:09:29.080
by a blue-shirt person.

01:09:29.240 --> 01:09:35.080
We can choose like either it's reds versus blues, or we can sit down that red or that blue

01:09:35.240 --> 01:09:37.080
and not have a brawl, right?

01:09:37.400 --> 01:09:43.150
Because we're all sort of spatially together and we don't want to have to

01:09:43.150 --> 01:09:46.190
deal with like the escalation of conflict.

01:09:46.270 --> 01:09:50.910
But in the battleship condition, we really don't have a choice if we're going to respond at

01:09:50.910 --> 01:09:51.070
all.

01:09:51.230 --> 01:09:55.070
We're just sort of stuck because there's no chance of coordination.

01:09:55.150 --> 01:10:00.990
There's no value to uh there's no possibility of coordination with the other side, right?

01:10:01.070 --> 01:10:01.630
Or cooperation.

01:10:01.870 --> 01:10:05.950
Yeah, I think that that's a better model for sort of decentralized tribal societies.

01:10:06.030 --> 01:10:09.070
Is I mean, there is the possibility of coordination, it's just a lot harder.

01:10:09.230 --> 01:10:12.240
So you really know everybody's on foot.

01:10:12.400 --> 01:10:15.680
You know, you may span your side may span a five days walk.

01:10:15.760 --> 01:10:20.080
So what does it actually take to even share information across your group?

01:10:20.240 --> 01:10:23.200
Much less, you know, develop a norm for behavior.

01:10:23.360 --> 01:10:29.280
I think it's there's there's real coordination problems in a way that we don't have in

01:10:29.280 --> 01:10:31.280
in contemporary society.

01:10:31.600 --> 01:10:37.510
Plus, you know it's you know, often there's really different moral norms towards

01:10:37.510 --> 01:10:38.630
people outside the society.

01:10:38.710 --> 01:10:44.150
You know, many, many traditional societies, sort of the moral boundaries stop at your

01:10:44.150 --> 01:10:47.030
group, however your group is defined.

01:10:47.110 --> 01:10:52.150
And the things that you do against members of other groups don't have the same moral

01:10:52.150 --> 01:10:52.710
valence.

01:10:52.790 --> 01:10:57.460
Like it's, you know, taking their property may not be called stealing in the way, you know,

01:10:57.540 --> 01:11:01.780
with the word that you would use to describe it against an in-group member or killing

01:11:01.780 --> 01:11:06.100
somebody, for instance, among the Nangatom during the time of field work, you know, you you

01:11:06.180 --> 01:11:08.500
you know, if you killed another Nangatom, that's murder.

01:11:08.660 --> 01:11:13.140
You kill a Turkana, that's you know, that's war, that's just life.

01:11:13.220 --> 01:11:18.100
It's actually morally laudable in most conditions.

01:11:18.580 --> 01:11:21.790
So I think I straight a little bit away from from uh your question.

01:11:22.030 --> 01:11:22.510
No, no, no.

01:11:22.590 --> 01:11:22.830
That's great.

01:11:22.910 --> 01:11:26.430
And I mean, yeah, no, even your example of you're working in the water pit or you're

01:11:26.430 --> 01:11:27.390
digging a hole, right?

01:11:27.470 --> 01:11:28.510
And they're like excited.

01:11:28.670 --> 01:11:32.590
I mean, that's even like I experienced that where, you know, they were talking about, oh,

01:11:32.670 --> 01:11:34.590
we got this cow, that's wonderful.

01:11:34.750 --> 01:11:37.070
And I was like, you guys, they're gonna retaliate again.

01:11:37.150 --> 01:11:40.990
Like, you know, like and that's the different, that's the different setting on our evolved

01:11:41.070 --> 01:11:41.790
psychology, right?

01:11:41.870 --> 01:11:47.470
Of like, um, you and it's this thing of like this battleship metaphor where it's sort of

01:11:47.470 --> 01:11:50.660
like, well, I'm never gonna interact with somebody in the out group.

01:11:50.900 --> 01:11:54.020
There's no benefit to me to quelling them.

01:11:54.180 --> 01:11:59.220
They're just like a resource, they're just like a fruit tree to be, you know, like there's

01:11:59.220 --> 01:12:02.580
no, there's no future possibility of interaction.

01:12:02.820 --> 01:12:07.860
Um Yeah, this is why I think about you know, peace is the solution to a collective action

01:12:07.860 --> 01:12:12.390
problem, to a really hard collective action problem, because you you have people like young

01:12:12.390 --> 01:12:15.670
men who say, Oh, there's no possibility, I have no interest in cooperating with the

01:12:15.670 --> 01:12:16.310
Turkana.

01:12:16.470 --> 01:12:17.990
I just want cows, I want fame.

01:12:18.070 --> 01:12:23.270
I'm 16, I'm stuck watching these cows, and I want to be a famous warrior.

01:12:23.430 --> 01:12:27.270
But then you have people who have really seen a lot and they realize exactly what you

01:12:27.270 --> 01:12:31.030
thought is like, hey, if you did this to them, they're just gonna do it to us, and we're

01:12:31.030 --> 01:12:35.980
gonna be locked into this just like cycle that's you know really difficult to break free.

01:12:36.060 --> 01:12:40.780
So you have these internal tensions within society and even within the same individual.

01:12:40.940 --> 01:12:42.860
Like does that person want peace or not?

01:12:43.020 --> 01:12:48.140
Well it may depend on the particular time of them, you know, for them, like you know, the

01:12:48.140 --> 01:12:54.060
day of the week or even potentially their mood um shaped on like shaped by

01:12:54.060 --> 01:12:55.260
more recent events.

01:12:55.500 --> 01:13:01.170
So society has to figure out a a way to solve these things and come to a consensus and then

01:13:01.170 --> 01:13:05.650
to generate a norm and then the ability to enforce that norm, make sure everybody has

01:13:05.650 --> 01:13:08.130
knowledge of the norm, including the other side.

01:13:09.010 --> 01:13:10.050
So it's common knowledge.

01:13:11.330 --> 01:13:11.650
Yeah.

01:13:12.210 --> 01:13:14.290
And also time horizon, I would expect.

01:13:14.370 --> 01:13:19.090
You know, more future-oriented members of the society might be more in favor of peace, more

01:13:19.090 --> 01:13:23.000
present-oriented members of the society, like young men who are trying to impress a girl,

01:13:23.160 --> 01:13:26.600
like they're they're very present-oriented and and they what want what's best for them

01:13:26.600 --> 01:13:26.920
right now.

01:13:27.080 --> 01:13:29.800
They're not thinking about, you know, twenty years into the future.

01:13:29.960 --> 01:13:35.640
Um and so the the degree to which the the the society is is inclined to

01:13:35.640 --> 01:13:40.360
conceptualize those future costs that might not happen now, but you know, in a decade or

01:13:40.360 --> 01:13:44.760
two decades or three decades, that ability pr is probably also a variable, I would imagine.

01:13:44.920 --> 01:13:46.050
Um yeah.

01:13:46.130 --> 01:13:50.450
So you'll have like, you know, when peace is starting to to come about through being built,

01:13:50.610 --> 01:13:54.690
you'll often have like prominent leaders berating the young men.

01:13:54.850 --> 01:13:55.890
Don't go on a raid.

01:13:56.050 --> 01:13:56.770
Absolutely not.

01:13:56.930 --> 01:13:57.890
You're gonna break the peace.

01:13:57.970 --> 01:13:59.010
It's gonna be horrible.

01:13:59.170 --> 01:14:04.450
You'll have, you know, sort of shaman or religious or ritual specialists not bless the men.

01:14:04.530 --> 01:14:08.480
You know, typically you may get a blessing before you go on a raid, you know.

01:14:08.640 --> 01:14:11.040
So they they'll they'll agree at a peace meeting.

01:14:11.120 --> 01:14:14.160
Let's say we're not gonna bless the young men who want to raid.

01:14:14.400 --> 01:14:19.280
In some cases in the ethnography, you find, um, and I haven't seen this, I've just read it,

01:14:19.440 --> 01:14:22.720
where they'll if they detect young men going on a raid.

01:14:22.800 --> 01:14:26.480
So Santa Barbara Dave decides, oh, he doesn't care, he doesn't need blessings, he's still

01:14:26.480 --> 01:14:27.120
gonna go to raid.

01:14:27.200 --> 01:14:27.840
Sorry to pick on you, Dave.

01:14:28.160 --> 01:14:28.640
No, it's great.

01:14:28.720 --> 01:14:31.920
Um you know, he's gonna he's just gonna go a raid, he's gonna get his best friends, they're

01:14:31.920 --> 01:14:33.490
not gonna tell anyone, they're gonna sneak off.

01:14:33.570 --> 01:14:37.730
So we arrange, okay, you know, meet me down at the at the at the ocean, you know, in in

01:14:37.730 --> 01:14:38.290
three hours.

01:14:38.370 --> 01:14:42.610
And they they find Dave and his friends, and they actually physically beat him to get him

01:14:42.610 --> 01:14:46.610
withdraw his plans of going on a raid.

01:14:46.690 --> 01:14:51.570
So there can be really you know complicated social dynamics that have to be solved to you

01:14:51.570 --> 01:14:55.410
know get everybody's incentives to align.

01:14:55.810 --> 01:14:56.850
Yeah, interesting.

01:14:57.460 --> 01:15:02.420
I wanna I wanna pick your brain about a topic that is very interesting to me, I think also

01:15:02.420 --> 01:15:08.180
interesting to Dave, which is the role of uh moralization, pretext,

01:15:08.500 --> 01:15:13.220
ideology, uh narrative, whatever you there are lots of words we might use for this.

01:15:13.380 --> 01:15:17.620
Um you you mentioned that you know it's not seen as immoral to kill or steal from an

01:15:17.620 --> 01:15:21.690
outgroup member, but it is to kill or steal from an in-group member.

01:15:21.930 --> 01:15:25.930
You mentioned how sometimes intergroup conflicts are precipitated by accusations of

01:15:25.930 --> 01:15:26.490
witchcraft.

01:15:26.570 --> 01:15:31.370
If someone falls ill, they might blame it on, you know, sorcery from members of a rival

01:15:31.370 --> 01:15:35.690
group, and that might in some cases precipitate or justify the conflict.

01:15:36.170 --> 01:15:41.690
Have you thought much about the role of justification or moralization or even demonization

01:15:41.690 --> 01:15:46.020
of the of the rival group as a way to coordinate intergroup violence.

01:15:46.180 --> 01:15:49.860
What what is what are the role of these these ideas, these beliefs, these these narratives,

01:15:49.940 --> 01:15:50.980
these pretexts?

01:15:51.140 --> 01:15:55.060
Um do you think that they are they play an instrumental role, or do you think they're

01:15:55.140 --> 01:15:57.060
they're more of a of a modern phenomenon?

01:15:58.500 --> 01:16:01.780
So I don't think they're I don't think they're a mod modern phenomena, but I think the

01:16:01.780 --> 01:16:03.460
question is whether they're causal.

01:16:03.780 --> 01:16:07.140
So there's certainly, you know, dehumanization language.

01:16:07.300 --> 01:16:11.860
They're, you know, they're savages, they're like animals, you know, they're horrible.

01:16:12.020 --> 01:16:14.500
Remember all the time, you know, we just did the victim complex.

01:16:14.610 --> 01:16:18.930
Remember all the times they did this, this, and this and this, um, you know, without

01:16:18.930 --> 01:16:22.690
remembering the times you did that, that, that, and then to them.

01:16:22.770 --> 01:16:27.810
You know, there's all sorts of you know, slurs that are used, just like, you know, in in

01:16:27.810 --> 01:16:28.690
our society.

01:16:28.850 --> 01:16:33.730
Um, so those certainly appear, you know, they certainly are very present.

01:16:33.890 --> 01:16:38.050
I think there's probably something present across, you know, almost all human societies, or

01:16:38.050 --> 01:16:41.810
at least small scale societies that are engaging in intergroup conflict.

01:16:41.970 --> 01:16:47.080
Um, and they certainly seem to be associated with people getting aroused, with people, you

01:16:47.080 --> 01:16:51.800
know, having a a feeling of, you know, that there was a grievance against them.

01:16:51.960 --> 01:16:56.440
I just don't know whether they're necessary, like how much causal work they do.

01:16:56.600 --> 01:17:02.040
You can certainly have high rates of lethal violence in say chimpanzees

01:17:02.200 --> 01:17:03.960
without anything like that.

01:17:04.280 --> 01:17:07.400
Um you know, so maybe they're sort of an epiphenomena.

01:17:08.070 --> 01:17:08.790
Yeah, I don't know.

01:17:09.350 --> 01:17:14.630
That would be something for the lab to like more sort of engagement experimentally.

01:17:15.190 --> 01:17:15.350
Yeah.

01:17:15.510 --> 01:17:21.110
I mean, I would expect my current thinking is that it it it may well play a strong causal

01:17:21.110 --> 01:17:24.230
role in the sense that, you know, chimpanzees may not need it because they don't have the

01:17:24.230 --> 01:17:27.830
same kind of social marketplace and reputation management that humans do.

01:17:27.990 --> 01:17:33.940
And among among humans, we have very strong um social norms and moral norms to be

01:17:34.260 --> 01:17:38.260
peaceful and friendly and generous with members of the group.

01:17:38.420 --> 01:17:44.100
And insofar as one is bloodthirsty and vengeful toward outgroups,

01:17:44.260 --> 01:17:48.420
that could license a variety of interest uh inferences about that person's character.

01:17:48.820 --> 01:17:54.670
And if we're all um acting in a way that is um you know uh activating

01:17:54.670 --> 01:18:00.670
those inferences in one another's, there could be reputational costs to trying

01:18:00.670 --> 01:18:05.710
to mobilize outgroup aggression in the absence of any kind of moral justification or in the

01:18:05.710 --> 01:18:06.990
absence of any kind of pretext.

01:18:07.070 --> 01:18:13.070
And it may make it easier to coordinate uh out uh and um and

01:18:13.070 --> 01:18:17.230
punish free riders and defectors from the collective action if we have a common narrative

01:18:17.230 --> 01:18:20.190
that justifies the collective action versus if we don't.

01:18:21.020 --> 01:18:23.100
Yeah, I mean it it sounds plausible.

01:18:23.180 --> 01:18:29.180
I just don't know how much you actually need that in universes where your moral

01:18:29.180 --> 01:18:32.780
boundaries really do stop at at your people.

01:18:32.860 --> 01:18:38.380
I mean I just think the ethnographies are just you know replete with examples of strangers

01:18:38.380 --> 01:18:42.140
being killed on site, women and children being killed.

01:18:42.220 --> 01:18:47.190
You know, it it in during my field work, there was a kid in my village who was killed and

01:18:47.190 --> 01:18:48.070
mostly beheaded.

01:18:48.150 --> 01:18:53.750
And like I had no doubt that the other group was absolutely celebrating, just as

01:18:54.390 --> 01:19:00.150
people in my group would have been doing in the same circumstances were reversed.

01:19:00.390 --> 01:19:05.350
Or, you know, there was a case where, you know, a raiding party encountered a young kid of

01:19:05.350 --> 01:19:07.160
the other group and they wanted to kill.

01:19:07.240 --> 01:19:10.760
And there's discussion now that it's moralized, and they decided to bring him back as a

01:19:10.760 --> 01:19:11.160
captive.

01:19:11.240 --> 01:19:15.320
And one of them was like, you know, just so upset because it was his chance to get scars,

01:19:15.400 --> 01:19:20.680
you know, honorific scars, or um it

01:19:21.960 --> 01:19:25.240
I had another example I was gonna tell, but I can't remember.

01:19:25.480 --> 01:19:30.830
Um, you know, like your your moral universe really does is often

01:19:30.830 --> 01:19:34.030
limited to just people of your own group.

01:19:34.190 --> 01:19:36.990
You know, and it's not always even that you acknowledge them as less than human.

01:19:37.150 --> 01:19:38.190
You may think they're fully human.

01:19:38.270 --> 01:19:38.750
You invite them.

01:19:38.830 --> 01:19:42.590
So think of the treacherous feast that, you know, Shagnan writes so much about.

01:19:42.670 --> 01:19:47.550
Like you recognize them as fully human, motivated by the same things you're motivated by,

01:19:47.710 --> 01:19:53.070
you know, that you you want to come hang out and have a party and you know, get drunk and

01:19:53.150 --> 01:19:59.060
you know, uh meet prospective mates and you know this about you know this enough about your

01:19:59.300 --> 01:20:04.980
enemy that you you know you know you construct this elaborate ruse to invite them over um

01:20:06.100 --> 01:20:10.100
so it sounds plausible i just don't know how much it applies in in this universe and it was

01:20:10.100 --> 01:20:14.420
one of the things that sort of as an anthropologist was like the most difficult to wrap my

01:20:14.420 --> 01:20:20.310
head around is that you know it I never worried about any Nangatom doing anything to me,

01:20:20.390 --> 01:20:25.750
but I worried say if I wanted a guy from the Hammer, a different ethnic group who's often

01:20:25.750 --> 01:20:28.470
enemies in the Nangatom to come visit me in my village.

01:20:28.630 --> 01:20:28.870
Yeah.

01:20:29.030 --> 01:20:31.110
You know, how to what extent would he be safe?

01:20:31.270 --> 01:20:35.430
You know, and I knew okay, he'd often be totally safe when he's with me, but what about if

01:20:35.430 --> 01:20:39.430
he goes out to use the bathroom, you know, and and encounters somebody who doesn't know him

01:20:39.590 --> 01:20:44.900
or somebody who's just really upset at, you know, you know, and wants the

01:20:44.900 --> 01:20:47.220
insignia that comes from killing somebody.

01:20:47.620 --> 01:20:47.860
Yeah.

01:20:48.500 --> 01:20:48.660
Yeah.

01:20:48.740 --> 01:20:54.740
I mean I'm I'm wondering if if the boundedness of the moral universe

01:20:54.740 --> 01:20:58.580
is um actually an example of the type of thing I'm talking about.

01:20:58.660 --> 01:21:03.220
That y that actually requires work and coordination to create that boundedness.

01:21:03.380 --> 01:21:08.500
And we need to uh perpetuate the idea that there is the a a distinction there that, you

01:21:08.500 --> 01:21:12.510
know, uh you know, morality uh applies to our group but not to the other group.

01:21:12.590 --> 01:21:16.510
Uh, and if you aggress against the outgroup, then we're not going to negatively judge you.

01:21:16.590 --> 01:21:20.750
And I think there may well need to be a kind of cultural coordination about that fact

01:21:20.750 --> 01:21:23.870
itself that enables um the violence to occur.

01:21:23.950 --> 01:21:28.750
If if there wasn't any coordination to that effect, where there would be um doubts about

01:21:28.750 --> 01:21:32.990
whether I might be doing something morally wrong by attacking a member of their group, then

01:21:32.990 --> 01:21:37.620
I think that could very well destroy the ability of the group uh to engage in collective

01:21:37.620 --> 01:21:37.940
action.

01:21:38.100 --> 01:21:41.620
So it may be that that boundedness is itself part of the thing I'm talking about that

01:21:41.620 --> 01:21:43.940
enables um the the violence to take place.

01:21:44.420 --> 01:21:47.780
It may not be a given or an automatic or something that just you know automatically

01:21:47.780 --> 01:21:48.100
applies.

01:21:48.180 --> 01:21:52.580
It may itself require work to maintain yeah I guess what I'm trying trying to understand a

01:21:52.740 --> 01:21:57.220
lost to is why do you need this extra thing to do violence?

01:21:57.380 --> 01:22:03.380
Like why you know we like is the idea that we're just like innately inhibited

01:22:03.380 --> 01:22:05.290
from killing others.

01:22:05.450 --> 01:22:11.290
Is that uh not that we're innately inhibited, um that we're uh innately

01:22:11.290 --> 01:22:15.610
inclined to draw inferences about each other's character based on their behaviors and their

01:22:15.610 --> 01:22:17.050
words and deeds.

01:22:17.290 --> 01:22:22.810
Um and uh wanton violence it uh may feed into those inference systems such that we're

01:22:22.810 --> 01:22:26.820
inclined to judge someone who is wantonly violent as a cruel person.

01:22:27.220 --> 01:22:31.940
And therefore, we're going to be less willing to partner up with that person, cooperate

01:22:31.940 --> 01:22:32.420
with them.

01:22:32.820 --> 01:22:35.300
We might be more afraid of that person, et cetera, et cetera.

01:22:35.460 --> 01:22:39.060
So what I'm talking about is the type of inferences that we're inclined to draw about one

01:22:39.060 --> 01:22:40.580
another based on their behavior.

01:22:40.980 --> 01:22:46.580
And oftentimes, when we engage in a violent outgroup attack, we can't turn off that

01:22:46.580 --> 01:22:47.140
machinery.

01:22:47.220 --> 01:22:50.340
We're going to be making inferences about everyone who's involved in that collective

01:22:50.340 --> 01:22:50.580
action.

01:22:50.660 --> 01:22:53.940
We're going to be making inferences about the people who propose it, the leaders who lead

01:22:53.990 --> 01:22:57.910
it, uh the people who are most bloodthirsty uh uh within it.

01:22:58.070 --> 01:23:03.830
Um and the only way to uh deactivate those inferences is to replace them with a different

01:23:03.830 --> 01:23:08.070
set of inferences, that instead of the person being bloodthirsty and cruel, they're brave

01:23:08.230 --> 01:23:09.750
um and and valiant.

01:23:09.830 --> 01:23:13.510
Uh instead of the person being exploitative toward the outgroup, they're they're helping

01:23:13.510 --> 01:23:14.150
the in-group.

01:23:14.390 --> 01:23:18.230
Instead of someone, you know, uh attacking an outgroup member for no reason, they're

01:23:18.230 --> 01:23:21.800
retaliating against all the evil things that group did to us in the past.

01:23:21.960 --> 01:23:26.680
And if we change those inferences, then it actually changes the incentives to engage in the

01:23:26.680 --> 01:23:30.360
in the collective violence because not only are you getting the material benefits of say

01:23:30.520 --> 01:23:34.760
cattle or or resources or territory or whatever, you're also gaining social benefits and

01:23:34.760 --> 01:23:35.960
reputational benefits.

01:23:36.280 --> 01:23:41.000
And those social benefits might be instrumental to to the collective action itself.

01:23:41.160 --> 01:23:44.920
And without those social benefits, there might not be enough of an impetus to engage in it.

01:23:45.000 --> 01:23:47.000
And at least that that's that's how I'm I'm currently thinking of it.

01:23:47.240 --> 01:23:49.800
I might be wrong, but I think there there might be something to it.

01:23:50.190 --> 01:23:50.430
Yeah.

01:23:50.750 --> 01:23:52.030
Can I mediate this?

01:23:52.110 --> 01:23:53.870
Cause I think I agree with both of you.

01:23:54.430 --> 01:23:55.630
Um, and I think so.

01:23:55.710 --> 01:23:56.670
Let me try to okay.

01:23:56.830 --> 01:24:01.390
So I think for Luke, Luke, and both of you tell me if I'm wrong.

01:24:01.470 --> 01:24:06.350
So I think Luke, Luke is coming in this from the perspective of like, if you look across

01:24:06.350 --> 01:24:12.340
the animal kingdom, basically, like conflict, you know, to be just kind of glib about it,

01:24:12.420 --> 01:24:13.540
is everywhere.

01:24:13.780 --> 01:24:18.820
And as long as you're not hurting me, David, if you hurt some other guy that I'm not really

01:24:18.820 --> 01:24:24.660
interested in and doesn't, isn't my best friend, and especially if I don't even

01:24:24.660 --> 01:24:27.940
know him, like more power to you, whatever, right?

01:24:28.420 --> 01:24:34.310
Like, so as soon as there's sort of like any uh anonymity, and we're not a super

01:24:34.310 --> 01:24:37.190
cooperative species, then like whatever, yeah, go for it.

01:24:37.350 --> 01:24:38.070
He's a resource.

01:24:38.150 --> 01:24:40.150
And if you're in you're a cooperator with me.

01:24:40.230 --> 01:24:43.910
So like I don't care if you're belligerent, more or less, right?

01:24:44.230 --> 01:24:49.590
And I think from Luke's perspective, then thinking about uh this

01:24:49.590 --> 01:24:55.430
scaled up is that if we have sort of these pockets of coordination or cooperation where

01:24:55.430 --> 01:25:00.320
we're sort of all in these ships or these small scale social worlds, it's really not

01:25:00.320 --> 01:25:06.320
surprising that, like, where the boundaries of this coordination exist, then

01:25:06.800 --> 01:25:12.480
any member outside this group is just sort of not seen as in the moral sphere, right?

01:25:12.560 --> 01:25:14.400
Like just as Luke's talking about.

01:25:14.640 --> 01:25:19.200
Now, and so what you need to explain then is how do you get out of that?

01:25:19.360 --> 01:25:24.640
Now, David, what I think you're explaining, I completely also agree with, is that

01:25:24.960 --> 01:25:30.430
once you already take the perspective of uh human

01:25:30.430 --> 01:25:36.270
psychology that's already engaged in the fact that you're already using that

01:25:36.270 --> 01:25:42.270
cultural technology, and there are people who are saying, Look, uh, if we do

01:25:42.270 --> 01:25:45.630
take the cows, they're gonna retaliate.

01:25:45.870 --> 01:25:51.760
So let's have a conversation about uh what what group identity we should all

01:25:51.760 --> 01:25:54.400
agree with or whether we should be belligerent.

01:25:54.560 --> 01:26:00.560
And especially like me as a human being who is grown up in a cultural milieu where I'm like

01:26:00.560 --> 01:26:04.560
lucky enough and privileged enough to be like the whole world is the cooperative unit,

01:26:04.720 --> 01:26:04.960
right?

01:26:05.200 --> 01:26:10.960
Like, so I totally get the intuition that like seeing somebody be belligerent is bad

01:26:11.040 --> 01:26:13.440
and like it's really short-sighted.

01:26:13.890 --> 01:26:18.290
And I and I even felt that when Luke was saying that example about like the cow, right?

01:26:18.370 --> 01:26:21.090
And people celebrating and praising the belligerent.

01:26:21.330 --> 01:26:24.130
But I think that, and I agree with that 100%.

01:26:24.690 --> 01:26:27.490
And I think that is a true readout of the evolved psychology.

01:26:27.570 --> 01:26:33.010
But I I would think that Luke would say that's a readout of the evolved psychology that's

01:26:33.010 --> 01:26:38.690
gone through this experience of the inputs

01:26:38.850 --> 01:26:44.820
of we're gonna talk about the moral boundary being more malleable

01:26:45.140 --> 01:26:50.980
and being larger, such that we're gonna sort of like have a higher prior that any kind of

01:26:50.980 --> 01:26:53.780
belligerence is sort of frowned upon.

01:26:54.260 --> 01:26:56.500
Do you guys how do you guys feel about that?

01:26:58.660 --> 01:27:00.820
Yeah, I think that's that's a good way of putting it.

01:27:00.900 --> 01:27:05.610
I mean, let me backtrack a little bit and maybe try to put forward a more a weaker version

01:27:05.610 --> 01:27:10.490
of the thesis, which is that it may be that this that you only see this um sort of thing in

01:27:10.490 --> 01:27:16.250
in modern social environments where uh the necessity of pretexts and

01:27:16.250 --> 01:27:22.250
ideologies and moralistic narratives is much higher in large anonymous

01:27:23.060 --> 01:27:27.060
um uh highly uh you know sedentary societies.

01:27:27.220 --> 01:27:32.740
Uh and I'm I'm thinking of the work of Joshua Jackson showing that um we're more inclined

01:27:32.740 --> 01:27:37.300
to draw uh a sweeping variety of inferences about someone's character based on a single

01:27:37.300 --> 01:27:38.420
action that they perform.

01:27:38.580 --> 01:27:42.740
Um I forget what what the term he uses for this, but we're more we're uh we basically

01:27:44.550 --> 01:27:46.390
view morality as like a singular dimension.

01:27:46.470 --> 01:27:49.190
And if you do one bad thing, then you're bad across the board.

01:27:49.350 --> 01:27:53.350
You know, if you happen to lie, then you're also probably a bad spouse, you're also

01:27:53.350 --> 01:27:58.150
probably a bad parent, you're a bad friend, uh and and and we we just view you as a bad

01:27:58.150 --> 01:27:58.870
person in general.

01:27:59.030 --> 01:28:03.270
Whereas you don't see this kind of sweeping uh inference being made in small-scale

01:28:03.270 --> 01:28:06.150
societies where, yeah, maybe you lied this one time or maybe you were mean to this one

01:28:06.150 --> 01:28:08.470
person, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person across the board.

01:28:08.640 --> 01:28:13.520
Uh and his argument is that because we have such huge social networks and the option the

01:28:13.520 --> 01:28:17.600
social options available to us are much larger, we're sort of forced to make these uh these

01:28:17.600 --> 01:28:20.080
sweeping inferences as a kind of heuristic.

01:28:20.160 --> 01:28:23.680
Um, in the same way that if we're you know, you know, uh bewildered in a in a in a shopping

01:28:23.680 --> 01:28:27.520
market full of different products, we don't have time to you know individually inspect

01:28:27.520 --> 01:28:29.600
every individual product and look at all the features.

01:28:29.680 --> 01:28:32.480
We just make inference, oh, I like this brand, I don't like this brand, it's generally a

01:28:32.480 --> 01:28:32.910
good brand.

01:28:32.990 --> 01:28:34.190
I generally don't like this.

01:28:34.350 --> 01:28:35.710
We do the same thing socially.

01:28:35.870 --> 01:28:37.310
We this is just a generally bad person.

01:28:37.550 --> 01:28:40.990
I don't really pay a lot of costs for just excluding that person because I have so many

01:28:40.990 --> 01:28:42.750
other social options in my universe.

01:28:42.990 --> 01:28:46.670
And so it might be because we're we're so inclined to make these promiscuous social

01:28:46.670 --> 01:28:51.310
inferences across people in the modern world with these large social networks that um

01:28:51.790 --> 01:28:56.670
proposing or engaging in outgroup violence uh is more likely to result in reputational

01:28:56.670 --> 01:29:01.000
damage uh in in the modern world than it might have in in a in a small-scale society.

01:29:01.080 --> 01:29:06.120
So it so I I'm willing to entertain the hypothesis that maybe this this sort of phenomenon

01:29:06.120 --> 01:29:08.920
is is unique to modern social environments.

01:29:09.160 --> 01:29:12.360
But um but yeah that that that's sort of how I'm thinking of it.

01:29:12.440 --> 01:29:14.360
I'm curious what what you think, Luke.

01:29:14.760 --> 01:29:18.760
Yeah that that sounds that sounds like something that makes a a lot of sense to me.

01:29:19.000 --> 01:29:23.400
I mean for one, as an anthropologist, the lesson that was given to me you can never make an

01:29:23.400 --> 01:29:24.600
enemy no matter what.

01:29:24.760 --> 01:29:29.730
And now I realize like in small scale societies you can never like burn a bridge or fully

01:29:29.730 --> 01:29:33.970
extract yourself from a relationship because the webs of interdependence are just so deep.

01:29:34.130 --> 01:29:37.650
Like you, even if somebody, I mean, somebody may be recognized as a psychopath.

01:29:37.890 --> 01:29:42.930
Somebody goes like crazy far in war and kills a whole bunch of people or kills cows, for

01:29:42.930 --> 01:29:47.730
instance, or something they recognize like that dude is a psychopath, but it doesn't mean

01:29:47.730 --> 01:29:50.770
it's it's moralized in the same way.

01:29:50.850 --> 01:29:55.160
But you may recognize, like, oh, we don't want to listen to that guy when our group is

01:29:55.160 --> 01:29:59.720
trying to decide what we should do in war, whether we should retaliate with a battle or

01:29:59.720 --> 01:30:01.880
whether we should migrate somewhere else.

01:30:03.720 --> 01:30:08.120
You know, but also, yeah, then I was gonna say that the time where I think it really might

01:30:08.120 --> 01:30:12.440
become a little bit more moralized is when there is peace with another group.

01:30:12.680 --> 01:30:17.430
And you can fully expect that if you go kill somebody else, you know, so there's been a

01:30:17.430 --> 01:30:18.710
peace meeting and an agreement.

01:30:18.790 --> 01:30:22.390
You know, the two parties have come together, they've broken spears, they've eaten

01:30:22.390 --> 01:30:22.710
together.

01:30:22.790 --> 01:30:26.790
It's common knowledge, you know, which essentially this resets the prisoner's dilemma.

01:30:26.950 --> 01:30:28.470
So it's common knowledge.

01:30:28.710 --> 01:30:33.670
Then and you go and kill somebody, you're that's probably going to be moralized, not

01:30:33.670 --> 01:30:38.870
necessarily because it's bad or to kill that person, but it's bad because it broke the

01:30:38.870 --> 01:30:39.270
peace.

01:30:39.510 --> 01:30:39.910
Right.

01:30:40.440 --> 01:30:45.960
Can I um so let me let me see if I can define peace as you've defined it to just make it

01:30:45.960 --> 01:30:46.440
explicit.

01:30:46.520 --> 01:30:51.560
So what I've heard you say basically it's peace is preempting like a acute

01:30:51.880 --> 01:30:57.160
predatory um conflict or just predation.

01:30:57.320 --> 01:31:03.240
Um and that's out of an interest in either minimizing costs or expanding

01:31:03.240 --> 01:31:03.960
benefits.

01:31:04.200 --> 01:31:09.750
Is that I don't think it has to be the I I define it as like a state of like relatively

01:31:09.750 --> 01:31:15.110
harmonious, durable um interactions where there's not the

01:31:15.110 --> 01:31:20.710
expectation of violence or if violence or aggression occurs, it's aberrant.

01:31:21.110 --> 01:31:21.590
Okay, good.

01:31:21.670 --> 01:31:25.910
So let me let me clarify then that I think what I wasn't doing is defining peace, but maybe

01:31:25.910 --> 01:31:30.950
the engine or what's the cost benefit logic, bringing this back full circle.

01:31:31.190 --> 01:31:36.960
What's the cost-benefit logic of the individual agents to engage in peace

01:31:37.040 --> 01:31:42.560
or for there to even be the opportunity for sort of cultural norms or for the

01:31:42.560 --> 01:31:45.440
evolution of these norms and institutions.

01:31:46.000 --> 01:31:52.000
And is it this idea that with this time horizon, as David talked about, and with this idea

01:31:52.000 --> 01:31:57.760
of we can think about the possible costs and benefits and say, look,

01:31:58.000 --> 01:32:03.610
there's more of a benefit to not being belligerent right now, on

01:32:03.610 --> 01:32:05.370
average for most of us.

01:32:05.610 --> 01:32:07.050
So let's all agree.

01:32:07.210 --> 01:32:13.130
Let's produce common knowledge such that even when any one of us sort of pops up

01:32:13.130 --> 01:32:18.170
as the variant the the alternate where it's sort of like, no, no, I really want to kill

01:32:18.170 --> 01:32:21.850
that group, you've sort of all agreed ahead of time.

01:32:22.010 --> 01:32:24.330
And there's common knowledge we've all agreed.

01:32:24.570 --> 01:32:27.850
That on average for all of us it's we're going to be better off.

01:32:28.320 --> 01:32:34.160
yeah but then you need a you need some sort of mechanism to enforce that outlier

01:32:34.160 --> 01:32:39.520
whose cost benefit calculus is is different and this is this is why it's really I mean it's

01:32:39.520 --> 01:32:44.960
hard to get you have to have some sort of level of centralization to pull all this

01:32:44.960 --> 01:32:50.400
knowledge to come up with a norm to have the enforcement mechanism I see so it's not just

01:32:50.480 --> 01:32:55.650
it's not just seeing the prospect for it and getting everybody to agree, which are already

01:32:55.650 --> 01:32:56.610
two really hard things.

01:32:56.850 --> 01:32:57.010
Yeah.

01:32:57.410 --> 01:32:59.970
But it's also, as you just said, the enforcement mechanism.

01:33:00.210 --> 01:33:00.370
Yeah.

01:33:00.530 --> 01:33:00.690
Yeah.

01:33:00.770 --> 01:33:05.330
So people one of the things I realized early on is many people could see the benefits for

01:33:05.330 --> 01:33:05.650
peace.

01:33:05.730 --> 01:33:09.570
You know, they could see like if only we could stop fighting, like we'd all be better off.

01:33:09.730 --> 01:33:13.410
Because often what happens is you end up with say big no man's lands where everybody's

01:33:13.410 --> 01:33:18.770
scared to go in, you know, and and so underuse of resources, you lose access to potential

01:33:18.770 --> 01:33:20.930
reproductive partners, trading partners.

01:33:21.090 --> 01:33:27.040
Um, you know, it typically results in like you know net uh net

01:33:27.280 --> 01:33:32.400
costs for both sides, like at average, while you may have a few outliers

01:33:32.880 --> 01:33:33.440
benefits.

01:33:33.520 --> 01:33:39.040
So you have people realize this, but it's just a matter of like coordinating to make to

01:33:39.360 --> 01:33:43.840
sort of solve that prisoner's dilemma or solve that collective action problem.

01:33:44.400 --> 01:33:47.520
So it's you know, it's multiple layers, which is why I think it's rare.

01:33:47.680 --> 01:33:52.950
So among hunter-gatherers, you have often instances of like intergroup cooperation, but I

01:33:52.950 --> 01:33:58.390
think they typically don't rise to the level often among, you know, so this is you know as

01:33:58.390 --> 01:34:03.910
close to contact as we can get, or the records of peace, because they're frequently broken

01:34:03.910 --> 01:34:07.590
by conflict or there are relationships that sort of exist dyadically.

01:34:07.750 --> 01:34:10.710
I know you, so I interact peacefully with you.

01:34:10.790 --> 01:34:14.310
But if I meet someone else from your group, I have to negotiate that relationship

01:34:14.310 --> 01:34:15.270
individually.

01:34:15.910 --> 01:34:16.550
Right.

01:34:17.540 --> 01:34:22.020
But just the idea that we can come together as members of the group and fully expect to be

01:34:22.020 --> 01:34:28.020
treated, you know, with norms that involve nonviolence or non-aggression is it's

01:34:28.020 --> 01:34:29.220
a really high bar.

01:34:29.460 --> 01:34:29.620
Okay.

01:34:29.860 --> 01:34:33.940
But it's, I think this is one of the things that's most sort of overlooked in thinking

01:34:33.940 --> 01:34:38.100
about the evolution of our species, particular cultural evolution, because intergroup

01:34:38.100 --> 01:34:41.940
exchange is one of the engines that drives cultural evolution.

01:34:42.100 --> 01:34:46.930
So once we solve this problem, you know, we have the capacity to unlock positive sum

01:34:46.930 --> 01:34:52.610
relationships or positive sum um positive sum benefits from every potential

01:34:52.610 --> 01:34:54.450
intergroup relationship.

01:34:54.690 --> 01:34:54.930
I see.

01:34:55.330 --> 01:34:58.530
So it can fuel tons and tons of cumulative cultural evolution.

01:34:58.610 --> 01:35:02.690
That, you know, in in sense you don't, you know, the difference between us and chimpanzees

01:35:02.930 --> 01:35:08.370
partly one of them is just that we solve the problem of intergroup relationships, which

01:35:08.370 --> 01:35:13.410
allow us then to, you know, turn on the engine of cumulative cultural evolution.

01:35:13.890 --> 01:35:14.130
Right.

01:35:14.290 --> 01:35:14.610
Yeah.

01:35:15.170 --> 01:35:20.120
It reminds me of um something something you wrote in in in your uh evolution of peace paper

01:35:20.120 --> 01:35:25.240
that jumped out at me, which is that the same factors that uh lead to intergroup peace are

01:35:25.240 --> 01:35:29.880
often the same factors that lead to in the increased scale and destructiveness of conflict

01:35:29.880 --> 01:35:30.920
when it does occur.

01:35:31.080 --> 01:35:34.040
I'm w wondering if you could elaborate on on that idea.

01:35:34.520 --> 01:35:39.010
Yeah, there's this really ironic sort of tragic logic to peace that you know, we just

01:35:39.010 --> 01:35:43.650
assume peace is the absence of conflict, not realizing it's the product of cultural

01:35:43.650 --> 01:35:48.210
technologies that allow us to coordinate norms, enforce those norms.

01:35:48.290 --> 01:35:53.490
Um, but once you have that capacity, you can turn it into, instead of coordinating a norm

01:35:53.490 --> 01:35:59.090
for nonviolence and sanctioning people that, you know, preemptively use violence, you can

01:35:59.090 --> 01:36:04.680
turn it into a norm for, say, aggression against the outgroup and sanction those who don't

01:36:04.680 --> 01:36:05.240
participate.

01:36:05.400 --> 01:36:10.120
So, you know, as you have increasing socio-political complexity, you get the greater

01:36:10.120 --> 01:36:15.160
opportunity for peace, but you also get the greater opportunity for violence, you know,

01:36:15.320 --> 01:36:17.160
coordinated violence for war.

01:36:17.800 --> 01:36:18.760
Interesting.

01:36:19.160 --> 01:36:23.640
Yeah, so I think it's a new, it's a really new way of thinking about peace and human

01:36:23.640 --> 01:36:29.390
evolution as you know, both you know, a cultural technology that you know

01:36:29.550 --> 01:36:30.750
we we had to make.

01:36:30.910 --> 01:36:34.510
We made it so I I think the better way instead of the evolution is like the invention of

01:36:34.510 --> 01:36:34.750
piece.

01:36:34.910 --> 01:36:40.030
We invented it, we invented these technologies allow us to allow us to solve these

01:36:40.030 --> 01:36:41.230
coordination problems.

01:36:41.390 --> 01:36:45.470
And then when they're in place, like it really fully unlocks the full potential of our

01:36:45.470 --> 01:36:46.030
species.

01:36:46.270 --> 01:36:49.790
You know, you can have you can imagine, like, you know, we're a species where we live in

01:36:49.870 --> 01:36:54.760
thousand-member groups, but they're really sort of isolated and bounded, you know, with not

01:36:54.760 --> 01:36:56.520
a lot of trade or relationship.

01:36:56.600 --> 01:37:01.800
You know, occasionally marriage partners are exchanged, you know, you know, uh young women,

01:37:01.880 --> 01:37:05.400
but they're not bringing the full repertoire of group knowledge.

01:37:05.560 --> 01:37:11.240
You imagine cumulative cultural evolution is just much, much smaller in that scenario.

01:37:11.640 --> 01:37:15.480
So I think it's it's one of the critical aspects, us being able to solve this problem is

01:37:15.480 --> 01:37:18.440
one of the critical aspects of our species history.

01:37:18.770 --> 01:37:18.930
Right.

01:37:19.090 --> 01:37:22.290
And just to be explicit about it, because we haven't talked a ton about like the

01:37:22.290 --> 01:37:25.170
interaction between biological and cultural evolution.

01:37:25.410 --> 01:37:31.010
The idea is that if you take these evolve this evolved psychology, that's sort of like,

01:37:31.170 --> 01:37:34.930
well, I want to minimize my costs, maximize my benefits.

01:37:35.170 --> 01:37:39.170
And you might be in this culture where you look around and you're like, we'd all be better

01:37:39.170 --> 01:37:40.850
off if there was more peace, but I don't know.

01:37:40.930 --> 01:37:41.890
What am I going to do about it?

01:37:41.970 --> 01:37:42.050
Right.

01:37:42.210 --> 01:37:43.570
Like I can't do anything about it.

01:37:43.730 --> 01:37:49.440
But the idea is that all the that same feeling is felt by people everywhere.

01:37:49.760 --> 01:37:55.200
And for different reasons that are partially historic, partially accidental, partially

01:37:55.200 --> 01:38:01.200
ecological, whatever, there might be there, there's just trial and error or people

01:38:01.200 --> 01:38:03.040
trying to create institutions.

01:38:03.360 --> 01:38:09.360
And somewhere, sometime, one works a little bit better that allows people to sort

01:38:09.360 --> 01:38:14.990
of like have an agreement or create a technology to see those benefits,

01:38:15.150 --> 01:38:21.070
somehow create a social institution that creates a penalty system that everybody

01:38:21.070 --> 01:38:22.030
agrees with.

01:38:22.270 --> 01:38:25.950
And then once that happens, those people are doing better.

01:38:26.110 --> 01:38:29.310
And the people that are near those people see that and are like, oh, that looks good.

01:38:29.390 --> 01:38:30.430
I'll take that.

01:38:30.670 --> 01:38:32.590
Or they have more stuff or both.

01:38:32.830 --> 01:38:38.640
And then the evolved psychology hasn't changed, but because everybody's evolved psychology

01:38:38.640 --> 01:38:43.440
is looking at their neighbor and being like, oh, they're doing better, or maybe they take

01:38:43.440 --> 01:38:48.000
you over because they're doing better, either way, like you eventually adopt what they're

01:38:48.000 --> 01:38:48.320
doing.

01:38:48.640 --> 01:38:48.880
Yeah.

01:38:49.040 --> 01:38:50.640
So so I would say two things.

01:38:50.800 --> 01:38:52.160
One, like that's the scenario.

01:38:52.240 --> 01:38:53.920
And I didn't touch on this much in the paper.

01:38:54.000 --> 01:38:56.240
I just like ran out of space.

01:38:56.320 --> 01:39:00.240
But it's something I really want to visit is you you do have this ratchet effect is like

01:39:00.320 --> 01:39:04.000
once you've solved this problem, you're going to be more successful, meaning you're going

01:39:04.000 --> 01:39:08.130
to both outcompete those groups that don't have it, but your ideas are going to be

01:39:08.130 --> 01:39:08.610
borrowed.

01:39:08.690 --> 01:39:14.450
But at the same time, a critical mechanism of peace in this in the small-scale societies is

01:39:14.450 --> 01:39:19.890
the execution of not people who are proactively aggressive, like uh Richard

01:39:20.210 --> 01:39:24.530
has in Demonic Metals with the Self-Domestic, but people that break the peace.

01:39:24.770 --> 01:39:29.170
So this is really, really common once you get the capacity to enforce peace.

01:39:29.250 --> 01:39:34.640
So and in the same thing, it can continue to ratch up, ratchet up our above psychology, say

01:39:34.800 --> 01:39:37.840
for you know impulse control, for tolerance.

01:39:38.000 --> 01:39:42.560
So it's the same sort of mechanism he posits, but instead of against reactive aggression,

01:39:42.640 --> 01:39:46.320
it's against people who may use aggression strategically or physical violence

01:39:46.320 --> 01:39:47.120
strategically.

01:39:48.560 --> 01:39:53.920
So in that sense, yeah, yeah, like literally the execution.

01:39:54.000 --> 01:39:58.610
This is this is all over the all over the case because you need to signal to the other

01:39:58.610 --> 01:40:04.450
group that you don't endorse that the behavior, you know, is not reflective of your

01:40:04.450 --> 01:40:04.770
group.

01:40:04.850 --> 01:40:08.530
You need to reset the prisoner's dilemma.

01:40:08.770 --> 01:40:08.930
Right.

01:40:09.170 --> 01:40:11.250
So this is this is very, very common.

01:40:11.330 --> 01:40:16.210
So I think in that sense, you may have a rationing up of our actual Bov psychology as well.

01:40:16.530 --> 01:40:20.050
Once we create it, the first sort of like proto piece.

01:40:21.260 --> 01:40:27.260
Could it be that also, you know, uh the imbalance of power uh hypothesis rears

01:40:27.260 --> 01:40:30.620
its ugly head once you start creating these social technologies.

01:40:30.780 --> 01:40:35.340
So in is insofar as you create peace and networks of mutual cooperation and you grow the

01:40:35.340 --> 01:40:40.700
size and scale of your society and and the uh uh and the layers of of mutually beneficial

01:40:40.700 --> 01:40:44.700
cooperation and technology, well uh all of a sudden once you get that peace happening uh

01:40:44.850 --> 01:40:48.850
and you get a larger and more complex society, and you look and you see your neighbor is

01:40:48.850 --> 01:40:53.650
not nearly as complex or as coordinated or as large as you, well, all of a sudden you've

01:40:53.650 --> 01:40:58.610
created a really large uh spectacle of an imbalance of power.

01:40:58.850 --> 01:41:03.010
And uh you can use all of that machinery that you've that was formerly used to creating

01:41:03.010 --> 01:41:08.690
peace and unification and harness it to dominating and conquering uh the next guy in the

01:41:08.690 --> 01:41:09.570
neighboring territory.

01:41:09.730 --> 01:41:12.770
Do you buy that that is also a mechanism that that might be part of this?

01:41:13.540 --> 01:41:14.580
Yeah, I'm just trying to think.

01:41:14.660 --> 01:41:19.540
One of the things that really puzzle myself over is sometimes why why you don't see more

01:41:19.540 --> 01:41:21.460
conquest among small-scale societies.

01:41:21.540 --> 01:41:25.300
And particularly I think a puzzle that hasn't been explained is the emergence of like

01:41:25.300 --> 01:41:29.220
patron-client relationships between between groups.

01:41:36.650 --> 01:41:42.170
small groups of horticulturalists or you know forger horticulturalists surrounded by really

01:41:42.170 --> 01:41:48.090
powerful groups that do wage war and not be like immediately wiped out right or

01:41:48.170 --> 01:41:50.170
um assimilated.

01:41:50.810 --> 01:41:52.250
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:41:52.650 --> 01:41:58.490
Um so the uh did he was just saying uh patron uh yeah, well yeah patron, like

01:41:58.570 --> 01:42:00.090
patron client relationships.

01:42:00.250 --> 01:42:05.260
You have you know, ethnography's got lots of examples of sort of like small Pacific groups,

01:42:05.340 --> 01:42:09.900
you know, like forager horticulturalists that don't have much means of organizing for war,

01:42:09.980 --> 01:42:14.460
nor do they have much of a history, you know, surviving and persisting around larger, more

01:42:14.460 --> 01:42:15.660
bellicose groups.

01:42:15.820 --> 01:42:20.300
And sometimes they form patron-client relationships where they'll offer a specific type of

01:42:20.300 --> 01:42:24.300
service, such as, you know, products from the forest or big building dugout canoes.

01:42:24.380 --> 01:42:25.500
But in many cases they don't.

01:42:25.580 --> 01:42:31.510
They just seem to sort of like subsist nearby, you know, and engaging in occasional trade,

01:42:31.750 --> 01:42:37.670
or more typically the you know, provision of female marriage or partners from the

01:42:37.670 --> 01:42:42.470
sort of smaller, weaker group to the more powerful Paci group.

01:42:42.870 --> 01:42:43.750
Yeah, that's interesting.

01:42:43.830 --> 01:42:47.990
I mean, I I bet it would depend on the nature of the resources and the resource

01:42:47.990 --> 01:42:53.350
distribution and the type of resources that you know the large scale society might need to

01:42:53.400 --> 01:42:58.760
expand, you know, if it's just a matter of land or lumber or ore or whatever, and there's

01:42:58.760 --> 01:43:02.120
plenty of that in the neighboring territory, why not just kill everyone and take and take

01:43:02.120 --> 01:43:02.360
it?

01:43:02.520 --> 01:43:06.600
But if it you know, if if the other if people in the neighboring territory uh have

01:43:06.600 --> 01:43:10.440
knowledge that is really useful, they they know how to make something, uh, then it might be

01:43:10.440 --> 01:43:13.320
cheaper just to trade with them than to you know take them over, because if you kill them,

01:43:13.400 --> 01:43:15.000
you're gonna destroy all that knowledge.

01:43:15.080 --> 01:43:19.320
Um and so I I I would imagine that ecology also plays an important role in this as well.

01:43:19.950 --> 01:43:24.030
Yeah, it's one of the things that, you know, I love being an evolutionary anthropologist,

01:43:24.110 --> 01:43:27.950
but we really need so many more tight quantitative studies.

01:43:28.110 --> 01:43:31.310
And, you know, our window to do those for these questions has really passed.

01:43:31.390 --> 01:43:36.270
You know, we can work with ethnographic documents at sort of large scale and EHREF and

01:43:36.270 --> 01:43:40.190
other other repositories, but you know, they're only so fine-grained.

01:43:40.510 --> 01:43:46.460
And there's really just like so few societies now that have sort of like, you know,

01:43:46.780 --> 01:43:51.580
non-state patterns of interaction that are, you know, truly subsistence, that I I is

01:43:51.820 --> 01:43:56.860
sometimes get a little frustrated that we really are sort of confined to most speculation,

01:43:56.940 --> 01:44:00.380
except for the stuff that we can, you know, we can build models and tests, you know,

01:44:00.620 --> 01:44:03.100
against or we can we can test in the lab.

01:44:03.180 --> 01:44:07.180
But you know, a lot of what we're talking about now is just, you know, speculation.

01:44:07.470 --> 01:44:07.950
Yeah.

01:44:08.110 --> 01:44:11.230
Um we had Zach Garfield on just recently.

01:44:11.630 --> 01:44:16.430
Uh he talked about you and he working on the Omaha Valley research project.

01:44:16.990 --> 01:44:21.710
Um he talked a lot about it and how so how you're uh actually doing all this cool stuff

01:44:21.870 --> 01:44:25.310
sponsoring students uh in education.

01:44:25.470 --> 01:44:27.390
Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

01:44:27.550 --> 01:44:33.420
Um Yeah, so um yeah, it's something I'm I'm very excited about, very proud of, because you

01:44:33.420 --> 01:44:39.340
know, as an anthropologist, my career is enabled by the generosity and kindness of the

01:44:39.340 --> 01:44:40.220
host communities.

01:44:40.300 --> 01:44:44.620
And and my research specialization was for my dissertation was war.

01:44:44.780 --> 01:44:47.820
I work much more broadly on just human sociality now.

01:44:47.980 --> 01:44:52.540
But so people often focus on that while ignoring the fact that these are like people just

01:44:52.540 --> 01:44:56.300
like you and me, you know, their their culture is vibrant, they have relationships, they

01:44:56.300 --> 01:44:59.740
fall in love, they grieve, they mourn, they have friendships.

01:44:59.900 --> 01:45:05.130
And I have friends with I'm, you know, good friends with many people from the communities I

01:45:05.130 --> 01:45:05.930
worked with.

01:45:06.250 --> 01:45:11.370
And really glad to finally reach a point in my career with Zach where we're able to start

01:45:11.370 --> 01:45:13.450
thinking about ways to give back.

01:45:13.610 --> 01:45:19.530
And we try to do so in an anthropologically minded way of trying to give them

01:45:19.530 --> 01:45:24.090
what they request and need instead of saying, oh, you know, here's a village, they need a

01:45:24.090 --> 01:45:26.170
pump, you know, and now we can be done with it.

01:45:26.490 --> 01:45:32.160
And what people commonly ask for is that, you know, the students from their

01:45:32.160 --> 01:45:36.880
communities that have made it through high school, but you know, so so in Ethiopia, unlike

01:45:36.880 --> 01:45:39.600
Kenya, there's no fees for going to elementary school or high school.

01:45:39.760 --> 01:45:44.080
And there's very, very few students from these pastoralist communities who have made it

01:45:44.080 --> 01:45:48.080
through high school, but then college is just incredibly prohibitively expensive.

01:45:48.160 --> 01:45:52.870
You know, they have to pay fees or they have to move to a city somewhere, pay for lodging,

01:45:53.030 --> 01:45:54.710
pay for transportation, pay for food.

01:45:54.870 --> 01:45:57.430
So we provide scholarships for these students.

01:45:57.590 --> 01:46:03.270
Typically, we also provide a computer for them, and we're funding something like

01:46:03.270 --> 01:46:08.470
23 students right now in scholarships, including the first doctor from the Nangatom and

01:46:08.470 --> 01:46:11.110
from the Omo Valley, who is doing his internship year.

01:46:11.190 --> 01:46:15.190
So he finished his MDE, and then after that, you do a year of like internships working on

01:46:15.190 --> 01:46:16.550
different specializations.

01:46:17.110 --> 01:46:18.550
And we have a website.

01:46:18.630 --> 01:46:24.600
And if anybody out there is interested in this project, like it's an opportunity for your

01:46:24.760 --> 01:46:29.000
money to go directly to supporting the student of a scholarship, a scholarship for a

01:46:29.000 --> 01:46:30.680
student who would not be in school otherwise.

01:46:30.840 --> 01:46:32.680
Even $10, $15 would help.

01:46:32.760 --> 01:46:35.720
Um, it's called the Omo Valley Research Project.

01:46:35.960 --> 01:46:37.160
You can check it out online.

01:46:37.320 --> 01:46:38.840
You can also send me an email.

01:46:38.920 --> 01:46:41.110
Um we'll put in the show notes.

01:46:41.430 --> 01:46:41.750
Yeah, yeah.

01:46:42.230 --> 01:46:45.510
We did a workshop this summer, Zach might have told you about, like a digital skills

01:46:45.510 --> 01:46:49.670
workshop, bringing together all of our students for a couple of days, just training them on

01:46:49.670 --> 01:46:53.830
the stuff a lot of I think my undergrads need, like how to leverage Google Suite, for

01:46:53.830 --> 01:46:58.390
instance, working on writing a resume, making a cover letter, providing feedback to each

01:46:58.390 --> 01:46:58.550
other.

01:46:58.710 --> 01:47:03.700
And um, you know, it's really amazing to be the point in my career where we can actually

01:47:03.700 --> 01:47:09.460
like provide tangible benefits to these, to these communities who have given us, and and I

01:47:09.460 --> 01:47:11.780
would say all of the anthropological community.

01:47:11.940 --> 01:47:16.900
Like if you're reading my papers and Zach's paper, you're the beneficiary of what these

01:47:16.900 --> 01:47:19.060
communities have given us.

01:47:19.380 --> 01:47:22.420
Yeah, it's it's it's so cool and so wonderful.

01:47:22.580 --> 01:47:28.270
And and I really like what you said about that it's anthropological in the sense of

01:47:28.270 --> 01:47:33.790
you have to first understand or listen to them and say here ask them what they want and not

01:47:33.790 --> 01:47:39.230
just sort of patronizingly or just sort of helicopter in and drop something off

01:47:39.390 --> 01:47:41.390
that's not at all what they need.

01:47:41.470 --> 01:47:42.110
Yeah.

01:47:42.510 --> 01:47:42.830
Yeah.

01:47:43.310 --> 01:47:43.710
Yeah.

01:47:43.950 --> 01:47:44.990
Super cool stuff.

01:47:45.310 --> 01:47:45.550
Yeah.

01:47:45.680 --> 01:47:46.880
So thanks for having me on.

01:47:46.960 --> 01:47:49.200
Um really enjoyed talking to you.

01:47:49.440 --> 01:47:49.920
Yeah, thanks.

01:47:50.080 --> 01:47:51.360
Is there anything we should have asked you?

01:47:51.440 --> 01:47:52.640
We have to ask that question.

01:47:53.280 --> 01:47:54.160
We covered a lot of ground.

01:47:54.240 --> 01:47:54.640
It went quick.

01:47:54.800 --> 01:47:54.960
Yeah.

01:47:55.120 --> 01:47:59.600
So so I feel like podcasts are often like when they end up with when they in and not that

01:47:59.600 --> 01:48:02.720
you asked me, but it was something that I think about emailing us a four-looking question.

01:48:02.800 --> 01:48:04.480
So like yeah, what are you working on now?

01:48:04.640 --> 01:48:07.920
What are the biggest questions in our field that need to be answered?

01:48:08.080 --> 01:48:11.920
What are some like methodological advances that you're really excited about?

01:48:12.160 --> 01:48:14.390
Um, you know, yeah, those are great questions.

01:48:14.470 --> 01:48:17.510
You should have uh we you got a spot anytime you want one.

01:48:18.070 --> 01:48:21.270
No, uh actually that was something that Gervin said too.

01:48:21.350 --> 01:48:26.550
And you know, we actually are thinking about having some folks on uh returners on, and so

01:48:26.630 --> 01:48:29.510
maybe yeah, but do you want to tackle one of those real quick?

01:48:30.390 --> 01:48:33.430
Oh well, so what I'm working on now is really two things.

01:48:33.590 --> 01:48:38.390
I'm I'm working on a book manuscript trying to sort of describe some of my own personal

01:48:38.440 --> 01:48:42.920
field work experiences and puzzling through these questions from going in as a sort of like

01:48:43.240 --> 01:48:49.080
more serious bio not biological determinist, but a behavioral ecological approach to war

01:48:49.080 --> 01:48:54.360
and balance of power to really sort of thinking about the cultural mechanisms that you know

01:48:54.440 --> 01:48:59.720
if that explain the vast variation you have between societies and war and peace.

01:48:59.880 --> 01:49:02.840
So that's the thing I'm really excited about right now.

01:49:03.080 --> 01:49:03.640
That's fantastic.

01:49:04.040 --> 01:49:05.080
Larger writing project.

01:49:05.470 --> 01:49:05.950
Fantastic.

01:49:06.110 --> 01:49:07.710
We'll have to have you back when when it's ready.

01:49:07.790 --> 01:49:11.070
And yeah, well, hopefully that's within the next five years.

01:49:11.790 --> 01:49:12.750
I have a title for you.

01:49:12.910 --> 01:49:13.710
I have a title for you.

01:49:13.870 --> 01:49:15.150
You should call it War and Peace.

01:49:15.230 --> 01:49:18.830
I don't think there's any book that's Yeah, that's that's a great idea.

01:49:19.230 --> 01:49:24.910
So the the tentative title actually is uh Enemy Eaters, because in among

01:49:24.910 --> 01:49:29.310
tribal societies, many times, eating is a verb that does a lot of work.

01:49:29.470 --> 01:49:30.750
It's it's so common.

01:49:30.830 --> 01:49:36.100
So and if you become a famous warrior in Nangatom, you become known as an enemy eater.

01:49:36.180 --> 01:49:37.300
Like you ate your enemies.

01:49:37.380 --> 01:49:39.300
And if you want to go to war, you're like so hungry.

01:49:39.380 --> 01:49:41.300
Like, I want to eat them, I want to devour them.

01:49:41.540 --> 01:49:43.060
So that's sort of the working title.

01:49:43.140 --> 01:49:43.940
Like you think about it.

01:49:44.180 --> 01:49:46.660
And you know, who knows what it will actually end up with.

01:49:46.820 --> 01:49:52.820
But it captures so much more about sort of like the cultural instantiation of war as a set

01:49:52.820 --> 01:49:53.540
of values.

01:49:53.860 --> 01:49:54.980
Yeah, it's fantastic.

01:49:55.140 --> 01:50:01.130
Well, well, Luke, I mean, uh, you know, you could not take a more important topic, war and

01:50:01.130 --> 01:50:01.770
peace.

01:50:02.090 --> 01:50:08.090
Um, and you know, you've done you are you are a brave person for

01:50:08.090 --> 01:50:11.850
exposing yourself to danger, going out into the field.

01:50:12.010 --> 01:50:17.210
Uh we all benefit from you going out and doing it as well, and as well as all the people

01:50:17.210 --> 01:50:18.410
that you work with.

01:50:18.570 --> 01:50:20.890
And so thank you for being that conduit.

01:50:20.970 --> 01:50:24.340
Um, we wouldn't know about all of them if it wasn't for you.

01:50:24.500 --> 01:50:27.620
So thank you for doing that work and and thanks for coming on today.

01:50:27.940 --> 01:50:29.060
Yeah, thanks so much, guys.

01:50:29.220 --> 01:50:30.900
Good talking to you and enjoy your show.

01:50:31.220 --> 01:50:31.860
Oh, thanks.

01:50:32.020 --> 01:50:32.500
Thanks, Luke.

01:50:32.580 --> 01:50:34.260
Yeah, we'll we'll have you on another time.

01:50:34.500 --> 01:50:34.820
All right.

01:50:34.980 --> 01:50:35.540
Bye-bye.

01:50:35.700 --> 01:50:36.020
All right.

01:50:39.140 --> 01:50:44.980
David, uh, what can people do to uh make the world better slash support this

01:50:44.980 --> 01:50:45.780
podcast?

01:50:46.330 --> 01:50:49.450
Well, they can say kind things about us on social media.

01:50:49.530 --> 01:50:51.290
They can leave us a kind review.

01:50:51.450 --> 01:50:53.530
They can visit us on Patreon.

01:50:53.770 --> 01:50:59.770
And they can contact us with any ideas for topics or questions or guests.

01:51:00.250 --> 01:51:00.650
Yeah.

01:51:00.890 --> 01:51:05.130
Somebody commented that I think I say um too often, which is a fair point, and I'm working

01:51:05.130 --> 01:51:05.370
on it.

01:51:05.450 --> 01:51:07.850
And if we had more time to edit them out, that would be great.

01:51:08.090 --> 01:51:12.060
If anybody wants to edit edit them Yeah, if anyone wants to go through and individually

01:51:12.060 --> 01:51:16.300
edit out every um, uh we would pay you zero dollars to do that.

01:51:16.780 --> 01:51:17.500
Exactly.

01:51:18.300 --> 01:51:24.300
Uh so I I've occasionally edited out some ums of the guest or or myself or you, David,

01:51:24.540 --> 01:51:25.660
but it's very infrequently.

01:51:25.740 --> 01:51:25.980
Yeah.

01:51:26.060 --> 01:51:26.140
Yeah.

01:51:26.540 --> 01:51:29.900
Well, I mean, that's actually a good incentive for people to support us on Patreon.

01:51:31.500 --> 01:51:33.900
Oh, we should be saying more ums and uhs than interstellar.

01:51:34.140 --> 01:51:38.810
Yeah, so if you are uh disappointed with the frequency of ums and uhs, Here's what you can

01:51:38.810 --> 01:51:39.370
do to change that.

01:51:39.690 --> 01:51:41.210
You can give us some money on Patreon.

01:51:41.450 --> 01:51:46.810
And if we raise enough money, we could hire someone to edit us and and make us sound uh

01:51:46.810 --> 01:51:47.770
smarter than we are.

01:51:48.170 --> 01:51:53.050
Yeah, I mean these are very like you you might be surprised or completely unsurprised,

01:51:53.130 --> 01:51:56.090
these episodes are often not edited at all.

01:51:56.490 --> 01:51:56.970
That's true.

01:51:57.370 --> 01:52:02.250
Um some are, but the but m the vast majority are almost not.

01:52:02.900 --> 01:52:03.300
Yes.

01:52:03.460 --> 01:52:07.140
You are getting the unfiltered truth from Dave and David.

01:52:07.700 --> 01:52:09.220
Unedited, raw.

01:52:09.540 --> 01:52:09.860
Yeah.

01:52:10.100 --> 01:52:13.700
I think everyone's like, well, this outro was definitely not edited.

01:52:13.860 --> 01:52:15.220
So um yeah.

01:52:15.380 --> 01:52:17.620
But but anyway, yes, thank you for listening.

01:52:17.700 --> 01:52:18.900
Uh please support us.

01:52:18.980 --> 01:52:23.780
And yes, if you're particularly perturbed about my um, I'm working on it, but yes, also

01:52:23.860 --> 01:52:28.980
please support us on Patreon or or reach out to guest edit.

01:52:29.540 --> 01:52:30.020
Yeah.

01:52:30.670 --> 01:52:31.230
All those things.

01:52:31.390 --> 01:52:31.550
All right.

01:52:31.790 --> 01:52:32.270
See you next week.