Richard Wrangham: Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #229

The following is a conversation with Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard specializing in the study of primates and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture, and other aspects of ape and human behavior at the individual and societal level. He began his career over four decades ago working with Jane Goodall in studying the behavior of chimps, and since then has done a lot of seminal work on human evolution and has proposed several theories for the roles of fire and violence in the evolution of us hairless apes, otherwise known as Homo sapiens. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now here's my conversation with Richard Wrangham. You've said that we are much less violent than our close living relatives, the chimps. Can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are and how violent our evolutionary relatives are?

Well, I haven't said exactly that we're less violent than chimps. What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence. One stems from proactive aggression and the other stems from reactive aggression. Proactive aggression is planned aggression. Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive. It's reactive because it takes place in seconds after the threat. And the thing that is really striking about humans compared to our close relatives is the great reduction in the degree of reactive aggression. So we are far less violent than chimps when prompted by some relatively minor threat within our own society. And the way I judge that is with not super satisfactory data. But the study which is particularly striking is one of people living as hunter gatherers in a really upsetting kind of environment, namely people in Australia living in a place where they got a lot of alcohol abuse, there's a lot of domestic violence. It's all a society that is as bad from the point of view of violence as an ordinary society can get. There's excellent data on the frequency with which people actually have physical violence and hit each other. And we can compare that to data from several different sites comparing. We're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence, and the difference is between two and three orders of magnitude. The frequency with which chimps and bonobos hit each other, chase each other, charge each other, physically engage is sometime between 500 and 1,000 times higher than in humans. So there's something just amazing about us, and this has been recognized for centuries. Aristotle drew attention to the fact that we behave in many ways like domesticated animals because we're so unviolent. But, you know, people say, well, what about, you know, the hideous engagements of this 20th century, the first and Second World War and much else besides. And that is all proactive violence. You know, all of that is gangs of people making deliberate decisions to go off and attack in circumstances which ideally the attackers are going to be able to make their kills and then get out of there. In other words, not face confrontation. That's the ordinary way that armies try and work there. It turns out that humans and chimpanzees are in a very similar kind of state. That is to say, if you look at the rate of death from chimpanzees conducting proactive coalitionary violence, it's very similar in many ways to what you see in humans. So we're not down regulated with proactive violence. It's just this reactive violence that is strikingly reduced in humans.

So chimpanzees also practice kind of tribal warfare.

Indeed they do, yeah. So this was discovered first in 1974. It was observed first 1974, which was about the time that the first major study of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall had been going for something like five years of the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went. Until then, they'd been observed at a feeding station where Jane was luring them in to be observed by seeing bananas, which is great. She learned a lot, but she didn't learn what was happening at the edges of their ranges. So five years later, it became very obvious that there was hostile relationships between groups. And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form of the kind of hostile relationships that you see in many animals, which is a bunch of chimps, in this case, shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders. But dramatically, in addition to that, there is a second kind of interaction, and that is when a party of chimpanzees makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory silently, and then search for members of neighboring groups. And what they're searching for is a lone individual. So I've been with chimps, when they've heard a lone individual under these circumstances, or what they think is a lone one, and they touch each other and look at each other and then charge forward, very excited. And then while they're charging, all of a sudden the place where they heard a lone call erupts with a volley of calls. It was just one calling out of a larger party. And our chimps put on the brakes and scoot back for safety into their own territory. But if in fact they do find a lone individual and they. They can sneak up to them, then they make a deliberate attack. They're hunting they're stalking and hunting, and then they impose terrible damage, which typically ends in a kill straight away, but it might end up with the victim so damaged that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later. So that was a very dramatic discovery because it really made people realize for the first time that Conrad Lorenz had been wrong when in the 1960s, in his famous book on aggression, he said, warfare is restricted to humans. Animals do not deliberately kill each other. Well, now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals that deliberately kill each other, and they always do so under essentially the same circumstances, which is when they feel safe, they doing it. So humans feel safe doing it when they've got a weapon. Animals feel safe when they have a coalition, a coalition that has overwhelming power compared to the victim. And so wolves will do that, and lions will do that, and hyenas will do that, and chimpanzees will do it, and humans do it, too.

Can they pull themselves into something that looks more like a symmetric war as opposed to an asymmetric one? So. So accidentally engaging on the lone individual and then getting themselves into trouble, or are they more aggressive in avoiding these kinds of battles?

No, they're very, very keen to avoid those kinds of battles, but occasionally they can make a mistake. But so far there have been no observations of anything like a battle in which both sides maintain themselves. And I think you can very confidently say that overwhelmingly what happens is that if they discover that there's several individuals on the other side, then both sides retreat. Nobody wants to get hurt. What they want to do is to hurt others.

Yes. So you mentioned Jane Goodall. You've worked with her. What was it like working with her? What have you learned from her?

Well, she's a wonderfully independent, courageous person, you know who she famously began her studies not as a qualified person in terms of education, but qualified only by enthusiasm and considerable experience, even in her early 20s with nature. So she's courageous in the sense of being able to take on challenges. The thing that is very impressive about her is her total fidelity to the observations. Very unwilling to extend beyond the observations. Waiting until they mount up. And you've really got a confident picture and tremendous attention to individuals. So that was an interesting problem from her point of view, because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombe, this particular community of casa kela, about 60 individuals. So Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika. She was there initially with her mother and then alone for two or three years of really intense observation and then slowly joined by other people. What she discovered was that there were obvious differences in individual personality. And the difficulty about that was that when she reported this to the larger scientific world, initially her advisors at Cambridge, they said, well, we don't know how to handle that because you've got to treat all these animals as the same, basically, because there is no research tradition of thinking about personalities. Well, now, whatever it is, 60 years later, the study of personalities is a very rich part of the study of animal behavior. At any rate, the important point in terms of what was she like is that she stuck to her guns and she absolutely insisted that we have to show, describe in great detail the differences in personality among these individuals, and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologist to think about what it means.

So what is the process of observation like this, like observing the personality, but also observing in a way that's not projecting your beliefs about human nature or animal nature onto chimps, which is probably really tempting to project. So your understanding of the way the human world works, projecting that onto the chimp world?

Yes, I mean, it's particularly difficult with chimps because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior that it's very easy to make those projections. As you say, the process involves making very clear definitions of what a behavior is. Aggression can be defined in terms of a forceful hit, a bite, and so on, and writing down every time these things happen and then slowly totting up the numbers of times that they happen from individual A towards individuals B, C, D and E, so that you build up a very concrete picture rather than interpreting at any point and stopping and saying, well, you know, they seem to be rather aggressive. So the sort of formal system is that you build up a pattern of the relationships based on a description of the different types of interactions, the aggressive and the friendly interactions, and all of these are defined in concrete. And so from that you extract a pattern of relationships. And the relationships can be defined as relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive, based on the frequency of these types of interactions. And so one can talk in terms of individuals having a relationship, which on the scores of friendliness is two standard deviations outside the mean. I mean, it's.

In which direction? Sorry, both directions?

Well, I mean, there would be, obviously the friendly ones would be the ones who have exceptionally high rates of spending time close to each other, of touching each other in a gentle way, of grooming each other, and by the way, finding that those things are correlated with each other. So it's possible to define a friendship with a Capital F in a very systematic way. And to compare that between individuals, but also between communities of chimpanzees and between different species, so that we can say that in some species individuals have friends and others they don't at all.

What about just because there's different personalities and because they're so fascinating? What about sort of falling in love or forming friendships with chimps? You know, like really, you know, connecting with them as an observer, what. What role does that play? Because you're tracking these individuals that are full of life and intelligence for. For long periods of time, plus as a human, especially in those days, for Jane, she's alone observing it. It gets lonely as a human. I mean, probably deeply lonely as a human being. Observe these other intelligent species.

It's a very reasonable question. And of course, Jane, in those early years, I think she's willing now to talk about the fact that she regrets to some extent how close she became. And the problem is not just from the humans, the problem is from the chimpanzees as well, because they do things that are extremely affectionate, if you like, you know. At one point, Jane offered a ripe fruit to a chimpanzee called David Greybeard. David Graybeard took it and squeezed her hand as if to say thank you. And then I think you gave it back, if I remember rightly.

No, thank you.

Right.

Oh, it's almost like thank you and returning the affection by giving the fruit.

If they did something, it was a gentle squeeze. I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard. As occasionally has happened, some chimps are aggressive to people and others are friendly. And the ones that are friendly tend to be rather sympathetic characters because they might be ones who are having problems in their own society. So Jomio in Gombe used to come and sit next to me quite often, and he was having a hard time making it in that society, which I can describe to you in terms of the number of aggressive interactions, if you want, just to be informed about it. So all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted. And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda for the last 30 years, we try extremely hard to impress on all of the research students who come with us that it is absolutely vital that you do not fall into that temptation. Now, you know, we heard a story of one person who did reach out and touch one of our chimps. It's a very, very bad idea, not because the chimp is going to do anything violent at the time, but because if they learn that humans are as weak physically as we are compared to them, then they can take advantage of us. And that's what happened in Gombe. So after Jane had done the very obvious thing when you're first engaged in this game of allowing the infants to approach her and then tickling them and playing with them, some of those infants had the personality of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later. And so, you know, you had an individual, Frodo, who was violent on a regular basis towards humans when he was an adult and he was quite dangerous. I mean, he could easily have killed someone. In fact, he did kill on one person. He killed a baby that he took from a mother, a human baby that he took off her hip when he met her on the path. So it's a reminder that we're dealing with a species that are rather human like in the range of emotions they have, in the capacities they have and even in the strength they have, they are, are in many ways stronger than humans. So you've got to be careful in.

The full range of friendliness and violence, the capacity for these very human things.

Yes, I mean it's very obvious with violence as we talked about, that they will kill, they will kill not just strangers, they can kill other adults within their own group. They can kill babies that are strangers, they can kill babies in their own group. This is a long lived individual. Obviously these killings can't have very often because otherwise they'd all be dead. And we're now finding that they can live to 50 or 60 years in the wild at relatively low population density because they're big animals eating a rather specialized kind of food, the ripe fruits. So it doesn't happen all the time with friendliness. They are very strong to support each other. They very, very much depend on their close friendships which they express through physical contact and particularly through grooming. So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another. I might present for grooming a very common way of starting turning their back or presenting an arm or something like that and the other does a riffles their fingers through the hair. And that's partly just soothing and it's partly looking for parasites, but mostly it's just soothing. And the point about this is it can go on for half an hour, it can go on for sometimes even an hour. So this is amazing, a major expression of interest in somebody else.

When did your interest in this one particular aspect of chimp come to be, which is violence? When did the study of violence in chimps become something you're deeply interested in?

Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s, I was in Gombe with Jane Goodall and was studying feeding behavior. But during that time we were seeing, and I say we because there were half a dozen research students all in her camp, we were discovering that chimps had this capacity for violence. The first kill happened during that time, which was of an infant in a neighboring group. And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions. And this was the start of my interest because it was such chilling evidence of an extraordinary similarity between chimps and humans. Now, at that time, we didn't know very much about how chimpanzees and humans were related. Chimps, gorillas, bonobos, are all three big, black, hairy things that live in the African forests and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits, walk on their knuckles, and they all look rather similar to each other. So they seem as though those three species, chimps and gorillas and bonobos should all be each other's closest relatives. And humans are something rather separate. And so any of them would be of interest to us. Subsequently, we learn that actually that's not true and that there's a special relationship between humans and chimpanzees. But at the time, even without knowing that, it was obvious that there was something very odd about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered they were making tools. She had seen that they were hunting meat. She had seen that they were sharing the meat among each other. She has seen that the. The societies were dominated politically by males, coalitions of males. All of these things, of course, resonate so closely with humans. And then it turns out that in contrast to conventional wisdom at the time, the chimpanzees were capable of hunting and killing members of neighboring groups. Well, at that point, the similarities between chimps and humans in become less a matter of sort of sheer intellectual fascination than something that has a really deep meaning about our understanding of ourselves. I mean, until then, you can cheerfully think of humans as a species apart from the rest of nature because we are so peculiar. But when it turns out that, as it turns out, one of our two closest relatives has got these features that we share, and that one of the features is something that is the most horrendous as well as fascinating aspect of human behavior, then how can you resist just trying to find out what's going on?

So I have to say this. I'm not sure if you're familiar with a man, but. But fans of this podcast are. So we're talking about chimps, we're talking about violence. My now friend, Mr. Joe Rogan is a big fan of those things. I'm a big fan of these topics. I think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics. So, as you're saying, why do we find the exploration of violence and the relations between chimps so interesting? What can they teach us about ourselves?

Until we had this information about chimpanzees, it was possible to believe that the psychology behind warfare was totally the result of some kind of cultural, recent cultural innovation that had nothing to do with our biology, or, if you like, that it's got something to do with sin and God and the devil and that sort of thing. But what the chimps tell us, after we think carefully about it, is that it seems undoubtedly the case that our evolutionary psychology has given us the same kind of attitude towards violence as has occurred in chimpanzees. And in both species, it has evolved because of its evolutionary significance. In other words, because it's been helpful to the individuals who have practiced it. And now we know that, as I mentioned, other species do this as well. In fact, wolves, which this is really kind of ironical observation. Conrad Lorenz, who I mentioned, had been the person who thought that human aggression in the form of killing members of our own species was unique to our species. He was a great fan of wolves. He studied wolves and in captivity. He noted that wolves are very unlikely to harm each other in spats among members of the same group. What happens is that one of them will roll over and present their neck, much as you see in a dog park nowadays, and the other might put their jaws on the neck but will not bite. Okay, so now it turns out that if you studied wolves in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting for each other. They are in fierce competition, and as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves is due to being killed by other wolves. Adult mortality.

Wow.

So it's a really serious business. Chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern of understanding animals in which you don't have an instinct for violence. What you have is an instinct, if you like, to use violence adaptively, and if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive. If the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be. So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent than others because of things like the frequency with which a large party of males is likely to meet a lone victim. And that's going to depend on the local ecology. So the overall answer to the question of what do chimps teach us is that we have to take very Seriously, the notion that in humans the tendency to make war is a consequence of a long term evolutionary adaptation and not just a military ideology or some local patriarchal phenomenon. And of course, a reading of history, a judicious reading of history, fits that very easily. Because war is so commonplace.

It's not an accident, so it's not a construction of human civilization. It's deeply within us. Violence. So what's the difference between violence on the individual level versus group? It seems like with chimps and with wolves, there's something about the dynamic of multiple chimps together that increase the chance of violence. Or is violence still fundamentally part of the individual? Like, would an individual be as violent as they might be as part of a group?

If we're talking about killing, killing, then violence in the sense of killing is very much associated with a group. And the reason is that individuals don't benefit by getting into a fight in which they risk being hurt themselves. So it's only when you have overwhelming power that the temptation to try and kill another victim rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it. The average number of chimpanzee males that attack a single male in something like 50 observations that have accumulated in the last 50 years from various different study sites is 8, 8 to 1. Now, sometimes it can go as low as 3 to 1, but that's getting risky. But if you have 8, you can see what can happen. I mean, basically you have one male on one foot, another male on another foot, another male on an arm, another male, another arm. Now you have an immobilized victim with four individuals capable of just doing the damage. And so they can then move in and tear out his thorax and tear off his testicles and twist an arm until it breaks and do this appalling damage with no weapons.

What is the way in which they prefer to commit the violence? Is there something to be said about the actual process of it? Is there an artistry to it? So if you look at human warfare, there's different parts in history prefer different kind of approaches to violence. It had more to do with tools, I think, on the human side, but just the nature of violence itself, Sorry, the practice, the strategy of violence is basically the same. You improvise, you immobilize the victim, and they just rip off different parts of their body kind of thing.

Yeah, you have to understand that these things are happening at high speed in thick vegetation mostly, so that the, they have not been filmed carefully. You know, we have a few little glimpses of them from one or two people like David Watts, who's got some great video, but we don't know enough to be able to say that. It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles that vary between communities, you know, cultural styles, but it is possible. And one thing that is striking is that the number of times that an individual victim has been killed immediately has been higher in Kibali Forest in Uganda than in Gombe national park in Tanzania. It's conceivable that's just chance. We don't have real numbers now, but what is this? I can't remember exact numbers, but, you know, 10 versus 15 or something. So maybe they damage to the point of expecting a death in one place and they just finish it off in the other. But most likely that sort of difference will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.

You know, human beings are able to conceive of the philosophical notion of death, of mortality. Is there any of that for chimps when they're thinking about violence? Is violence like, what, what is the nature of their conception of violence, do you think? Do they, do they realize they're taking another conscious being's life? Or is it some kind of, like, optimization over the use of resources or something like that?

I, I, I can't think of any way to get an answer to the question of what they know about that. I think that the way to think about the motivation is rather like the motivation in sex. So when males are interested in having sex with a female, whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans, they don't think about the fact that what this is going to do is to lead to a baby.

Mostly you're right.

Mostly what they're thinking about is I want to get my end away. And I think that it's a similar kind of process with the chimps. What they are thinking about is, I want to kill this individual. And it's hard to imagine that taking the other individual's perspective and thinking about what it means for them to die is going to be an important part of that. In fact, there's reasons to think it should not be an important part of it because it might inhibit them and they don't want to be inhibited. The more efficient they are in doing this, the better. But I think it's interesting to think about this whole motivational question because it does produce this rather haunting thought that there has been selection in favor of enthusiasm about killing. And in our relatively gentle and deliberately moral society that we have today, it's very difficult for us to face the Thought that in all of us there might have been residue and a more than that sort of an active potential for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else. But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously by thinking of circumstances in which it would be true that the ordinary human male would be delighted to be part of a group that was killing someone. What you've got to do is to be in a position where you're regarding the victim as dangerous and thoroughly hostile.

But the pure enjoyment of violence, there's. I don't know if you know this historian, Dan Carlin. He has a podcast. He has an episode, three, four hour episode that I recommend to others. It's quite haunting. But he takes us through an entire history. It's called painful tainment. The. The history of humans enjoying the murder of others in a large group. So, like, public executions were part of long part of human history. And there's something that for some reason, humans seem to have been drawn to just watching others die. And he ventures to say that that may still be part of us. For example, he said if it was possible to televise, to stream online, for example, the execution and the murder of somebody or even the torture of somebody, that a very large fraction of the population on Earth would not be able to look away. They'd be drawn to that somehow as a very dark thought that we were drawn to that. So you think that's part of us in there somewhere, that selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing and the enjoyment of observing those in our tribe doing the killing?

Yes. I mean, and that word you produced at the end is critical, I think, because it would be a little bit weird, I think, to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people in your own tribe being killed. I don't think we're interested in violence for violence's sake that much. It's when you get these social boundaries set up. And in today's world, happily, we kind of are already one world. You have to dehumanize someone to get to the point where they are really outside our recognition of a tribe at some level, which is the whole human species. But in ancient times, that would not have been true, because in ancient times, there are lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers in which the appearance of a stranger would lead to an immediate response of shooting on sight. Because what was human was the people that were in your society and the other things that actually looked like us and were human in that sense, were. Were not regarded as human. So there was a kind of automatic dehumanization of everybody that didn't speak our language or hadn't already somehow become recognized as sufficiently like us to escape the dehumanization context.

And so, hopefully, the story of human history is that tribalism fades away, that our dehumanization, the natural desire to dehumanize or a tendency to dehumanize groups that are not within this tribe, decreases over time. And so then the desire for violence decreases over time.

Yeah, I mean, that's the optimistic perspective. And the great sort of concern, of course, is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts, and then dehumanization happens, and then violence is released. As Hannah Arendt says, you know, there currently is no known alternative to war as a means of settling really important conflicts.

So if we look at the big picture, what role has violence, or do you think violence has played in the evolution of Homo sapiens? So we are quite an intelligent, quite a beautiful particular little branch on the evolutionary tree. What part of that was played by our tendency to be violent?

Well, I think that violence was responsible for creating your Homo sapiens. And that raises the question of what Homo sapiens is.

Yes. Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, nowadays, people begin.

The.

Concept of what Homo sapiens is by thinking about features that are very obviously different from all of the other species of Homo. And our large brain, our very rounded cranium, relatively small face. These are characteristics which are developed in a relatively modern way by about 170,000 years ago. Say, you know, that's one of the earliest skulls in Africa that really captures that. But it has been argued that that is an episode in a process that has been started substantially earlier. And there's no doubt that that's true. Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there, and it goes back to 300,000 years ago. 315, literally, is the time, the best estimate of a date, for a series of bones from Morocco that have been dated three or four years ago at that time, and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens. Now, at that point, they are only beginning the trend of sapienization. And that trend consists basically of gracilization, of making our ancestors less robust. Shorter faces, smaller teeth, a smaller brow ridge, narrower face, thinner cranium, all these things that are associated with reduced violence. Okay, so that's saying that's Homo sapiens beginning. So it began sometime three to 400,000 years ago, because by 315,000 years ago, you've already got something recognizable.

So you're more on that side of things that there was this gradual process. It's not 150, 170,000 years ago. It's. It started like 400,000 years ago. And it's just.

It started three to 400,000 years ago. And if you look 170, it's got even more like us. And then if you look at 100, it's got more like us again. And if you look at 50, it's more like us again. It's all the way. It's just getting more and more like the moderns. So the question is, what happened between three and 400,000 years ago to produce Homo sapiens? And I think we have a pretty good answer. Now, the answer comes from violence. And the story begins by focusing on this question. Why is it that in the human species, we are unique among all primates in not having an alpha male in any group in the sense that what we don't have is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male? And the answer that has been portrayed most richly by Christopher Boehm and whose work I've elaborated on, is that only in humans do you have a system by which any male who tries to bully others and become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha bonobo or an alpha baboon or anything like that, Any male who tries to do that in humans gets taken down by a coalition of beta males. That coalition.

Yes. That's a really good picture of human society. Yes, I like it.

Okay. And that's the way all our societies work now. Yes. Because individuals try and be alpha and then they get taken out.

Yeah, I mean, we don't usually think of ourselves as beta males, but. Yes, I. I suppose. I suppose that's what democracy is.

Exactly. Yes, exactly. Okay, so, well, so at some point, alpha males get taken out. Well, what alpha males are are males who respond with high reactive violence to any challenge to their status. You see it all the time in. In primates, some Peter male thinks he's getting strong and maturing in wisdom and so on, and he refuses to kowtow to the alpha male. And the alpha male comes straight in and charges at him. Or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes and then take an opportunity to attack him. All of these primates have got a high tendency for reactive aggression, and that enables the possibility alpha males. We don't. We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier, and the question is, when did that reduction happen? Well, cut to the famous experiments by the Russian Biologist Dmitry Belyaev, who tried domesticating wild animals. When you domesticate wild animals, what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression. You are selecting those individuals to breed who are most willing to be approached by a human or by another member of their own species and are least likely to erupt in a reactive aggression. And you only have to do that for a few generations to discover that there are changes in the skull. And those changes consist of shorter face, smaller teeth, reduced maleness. The males become increasingly female like, and reduced brain size. Well, the changes that are characteristic of domesticated animals in general compared to wild animals are all found in Homo sapiens compared to our early ancestors. So it's a very strong signal that when we first see Homo sapiens, what we're seeing is evidence of a reduction in reactive aggression. And that suggests that what's happening with Homo sapiens is that that is the point at which there is selection against the alpha males. And therefore, the way in which the selection happened would have been the way it happens today. The beta males take them out. So I think that Homo sapiens is a species characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression as a kind of incidental consequence of the suppression of the alpha male. And the story of our species is the story of how the beta males took charge and have been responsible for. For the generation of a new kind of human, and incidentally, for imposing on the society a new set of values. Because when those beta males discovered that they could take out the previous alpha male and continue to do so, because in every generation, there'll always be some male who says, maybe I'll become the alpha male. And they. So they just keep chopping them down in discovering that, they also obviously discovered that they could kill anybody in the group, females, young males, anybody who didn't follow their values. And so this story is one in which the males of our species, and these would be the breeding males who have been able to impose their values on everybody else. And there is two kind of values. There's one kind of value is things that are good for the group, like thou shalt not murder. And the other kind of value is things that are good for the males, such as, hey, guess what? When good food comes in, males get it first.

Yes, I mean, it's fascinating that that kind of set of ideals could outcompete the others. Do you have a sense of why? Or maybe you can comment on Neanderthals and all the other early humans. Why did Homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish? And all the other ones, all the Other branches of evolution died out or get mortared out.

Nowadays, when homo sapiens meet homo sapiens and we don't know each other initially, then conflict breaks out and the more militarily able group wins. We've seen that everywhere throughout the age of exploration and throughout history. So I'm rather surprised. The conventional wisdom that you see nowadays in contemporary anthropology is very reluctant to point to success in warfare as the reason why sapiens wiped out neanderthals within about 3,000 years of the sapiens coming into Europe 43,000 years ago. And people are much more inclined to say, well, the Neanderthals were at low population density, so they just couldn't survive the demographic sort of sweep or that disease came in. And maybe those things might have been important. But far and away, the most obvious possibility is that sapiens were just powerful. Everyone agrees they had larger groups, they had better weapons, they had projectile weapons, bows and arrows, to judge from the little microlith, bits of flake, which Neanderthals didn't. Nowadays there's evidence of interbreeding, quite extensive interbreeding between sapiens and Neanderthals as well as with some other groups. And sometimes people say, well, so they loved each other. They made love, not war. I think they made love and war. It wouldn't necessarily mean too loving. I mean, if you just follow through from typical ethnographies nowadays of when dominant groups meet subordinate groups, they didn't know each other then, you can imagine that Neanderthal females would essentially be captured and taken into sapiens groups.

Maybe you can comment on this cautiously and eloquently. What's the role of sexual violence in human evolution? Because you mentioned taking Neanderthal females. You've also mentioned that some of these rules are defined by the male side of the society. What's the role of sexual violence in this story?

I think you've got to distinguish between groups and within groups. And I think the world has been slowly waking up over the last several decades to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war. And that to me says that it's just another example of power corrupts. Because when frustrated, scared, elated soldiers come upon females in a group that there's been essential dehumanization of, then they get carried away by opportunity. It is not always possible to argue that this is adaptive nowadays because you get lots and lots of stories of women being abused to the point of being killed. She'll be gang raped and then killed. There's lots of terrible cases of that reported from all Sorts of different wars. But you can see that that could build on a pattern that would have been adaptive if happening under certain. Of much less extreme circumstances. The war is very extreme nowadays in the sense that you get battles in which people are sent by a military hierarchy into a war situation in which they do not feel what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt, which would have been that if we attack, we have an excellent chance of getting away with it. Nowadays you're sent in across the Somme or whatever it is, and. And there's a very high chance you will be killed. And that's totally unnatural. And a novel evolutionary experience, I think. Then there's sexual coercion within groups. And so that takes various kinds of forms. But nowadays, of course, I think people recognize increasingly that the principal form of sexual intimidation and rape occurs within relationships. It's not stranger rape. That is really statistically important. There's much more what happens behind the walls of a bedroom where people have been living for some time. And just two sort of thoughts and observations about this. One is that it may seem odd that males should think it a good idea, as it were, to impose themselves sexually on someone with whom they have a relationship. But what they're doing is intimidating someone in a relationship in which the relative power in the relationship has continuing significance for a long time. And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual. You know, it's to do with domestic relationships, it's to do with the man getting his own way, all the way.

It's power dynamics. And the sexual aggression is one of the tools to regain power, gain power, gain more power and that kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly. And in that respect, it's worth noting that although this wasn't appreciated for some time, it's emerging that in a bunch of primates you have somewhat parallel kinds of sexual intimidation where males will target particular females. Even in a group in which the norm is for females to mate with multiple males. But each male will target a particular female and the more he is aggressive towards her, then the more she conforms to his wishes when he wants to mate. So a long term pattern of sexual intimidation. So there's that aspect. The other aspect I would just note is that males get away with a lot compared to females in any kind of intersexual conflict. So the punishment, here's one example of this. The punishment for a husband killing a wife has always been much less than the punishment for a wife killing a husband. And you see similar sorts of things in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on. And I bring this up in the context of males sexually intimidating their partners, be it wives or whoever, because it's a reminder that it's basically a patriarchal world, that we have come from a patriarchal world in which male alliances tend to support males and take advantage of the fact that they have political power at the expense of females. And I would say that that all goes back to what happened three to 400,000 years ago when the beta males took charge and they started imposing their own norms on society as a whole. And they've continued to do so. And we now look at ourselves and Jordan Peterson says we are not a patriarchal society. Well, it's true that the laws try and make it even handed nowadays between males and females, but obviously we are patriarchal de facto because society still in many ways supports men better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.

So beta male patriarchal. If we were looking at the evolutionary history. Okay, is there maybe sticking on Jordan for a second? Is there? So he's a psychologist. Right. And what part of the picture do you think he's missing in analyzing the human relations? Like what needs. What does he need to understand about our origins in violence and the way the society has been constructed?

Oh, I don't want to go deep into his missing perspectives, but I just think that what he's doing in that particular example is focusing on the legalistic position. And that's great that you do not find formal patriarchy in the law anything like to the extent that you could find it 100 years ago and so on. Women have got the vote now. Hooray. But it took a long time for women to get the vote. And it remains the case that women suffer in various kinds of ways. A woman who has lots of sexual partners is treated much more rudely than a male who has lots of sexual partners. There are all sorts of informal ways in which it's rougher being a woman than it is a man.

And if we look at the surface layer of the law, we may miss the deeper human nature, like the origins of our human nature that still operates no matter what the law says.

Yeah. Which is human nature is awkward because it includes some unpleasant features that when we sit back and reflect about them, we would like them to go away. But it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned to try and have sex with at least one woman, and often lots of women. And so men are constantly putting pressure on women in ways that women find unpleasant. And if men sit back and reflect about it, they think we shouldn't do this, but actually it just goes on because of human nature.

So maybe looking at particular humans in history, let's talk about Genghis Khan. Is this particular human who was one of the most famous examples of large scale violence? Is he a deep representative of human nature or is he a rare exception?

Well, I think that it's easy to imagine that most men could have become Genghis Khan. It's possible that he had a particular streak of psychopathy. You know, it's striking that by the time you become immensely powerful, then your willingness to do terrible things for the interest of yourself and your group becomes very high. You know, Stalin, Mao Zedong, these sorts of people have histories in which they do not show obvious psychopathy. But by the time they are big leaders, they are really psychopathic in the sense that they do not follow the ordinary morality of considering the harm that they are doing to their victims. What kind of experiment would we need to discover whether or not anybody could fall into this position? I don't know. But Lord Acton's famous dictum was power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And then the point that people often forget is the next sentence that he said, which is, great men are almost always bad men. And that is right. It is very difficult to find a great man in history who was not responsible for terrible things.

I think there's some aspect of it that it's not just power. I think men who have been the most destructive in human history are not psychopathic completely. They have convinced themselves of an idea. It's like the idea psychopathic Stalin, for example. Hitler's a complicated one. I think he was legitimately insane, but I think Stalin has convinced himself that he's doing good. So the idea of communism is the thing that's psychopathic in his mind, like it bred. You construct a worldview in which the violence is justified, the cruelty is justified. So in that sense, first of all, you can construct experiments, unethical experiments, that could test this. But in that sense, anybody else could have been in Stalin's position. It's the idea that could overtake the mind of a human being and in so doing, justify cruel acts. And that seems to be, at least in part unique to humans is the ability to hold ideas in our minds and share those ideas and use those ideas to convince ourselves that proactive violence on a large scale is a good idea. I don't know if you have a comment.

I suppose so. But seems to me what really motivated Stalin was not so much communism as the retention of power. So once he became leader. And in the process of becoming leader, he was absolutely desperate to get rid of anybody who was a challenger. He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody even on his side who might possibly be showing a glimmerings of willingness to challenge him. So, you know, when he apparently had Kirov murdered, Kirov was a great communist, Trotsky was a great communist, you know, all his rivals and I mean when he went into the towns and murdered.

People by the tens of thousands, they were all communists.

A lot of them were communists. Were explicit communists. That's right. But what he was worried about was that they were rivals to him.

I suppose the thought is I am the best person to bring about a global sort of embrace of communism and others are not. And so we have to get rid of those others.

Well, I suspect you're being very charitable here, but I mean, maybe you're, you're, you know, enough about starting to really.

Yes, well, so the point I'm making, I do quite a bit is from my understanding and sense, of course we can't know for sure is he believed in communism, this wasn't purely a game of power. Now he got drunk with power pretty quickly, but he really believed, for I believe his whole life, that communism is good for the world and that I don't know what role that belief plays with the more natural human desire for power. I don't know. But it just seems like, as we.

Agreed, he's killing a lot of communists on his, on his journey.

But it's not that doesn't, that calculus doesn't work that way. There's humans who are communists and then there's the idea of communism. So for him, in his delusional worldview, killing a few people is worth the final result of bringing communism to the whole world.

But it was more than that again, because he really wanted power for the Soviet Union. And so surely the reason that he orchestrated the export of wheat from Ukraine and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation was because he wanted to sell it on the market in order to be able to build up the power of the Soviet Union. You know, alternative view of communism might have been, well, you know, let's just make sure everybody survives and make sure everybody has enough to eat and we'll all be mutually supportive in a communal network. But no, but he wanted the power for the country.

Well, I guess exactly. So that it's not even communism, this set of ideas or like Marxism or something like that, like that. It's the country. I guess what I'm saying Is it's not purely power for the individual, it's power for a vision for this great nation, the Soviet Union. And similar with Hitler, the guy believed that this is a great nation, Germany, and like they, It's a nation that's been wronged throughout history and needs to be righted. And there's some dance between the individual human and the tribe.

Yes, no, absolutely, yes. And so just like chimpanzees, we are fiercely tribal and the tribalism resides particularly in male psychology. And it's very scary because once you assemble a set of males who share a tribal identity, then they have power that they can exert with very little concern about what they're doing to damage other people.

Do you think this so Nietzschean will to power. We talked about the corrupting nature of power. Do you think that's a manifestation of those early origins of violence? What's the connection of this desire for power and our proclivity for violence?

You know what we're talking about is tribal power, power on behalf of a group.

Yes.

And yeah, that seems to me to go right back to a deep evolutionary origin because you see essentially the same thing in a whole bunch of animals, animals that most of the sort of cognitively complex animals live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries. So what you see in chimpanzees is echoed in almost all of the primates. The difference between us and chimpanzees and humans on the one hand and other primates on the other is that we kill and they don't. And the reason they don't is because they never meet in the context where there are massive imbalances of power. So two groups of baboons, there's 30 on this side and 50 on this side. Fine. Nobody's going to try and kill anybody else because there's serious risks involved. But nevertheless, they are tribal. So they will have fairly intense intergroup interactions in which everybody knows who is on whose side. And the long term consequences of winning those battles, non lethal battles, is that the dominance get access to larger areas of land, more safety and so on, with chances are better record of reproductive success subsequently.

Do you think this from an evolutionary perspective is a feature or a bug? Our natural sort of tendency to form tribes.

So what's a bug?

Sorry, this is a computer programming analogy. Meaning, like it would be more beneficial. Is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes from an evolutionary perspective?

Yeah, yeah, but, but, but what does.

It, what does it mean? What does a bug mean?

Yes, right.

I mean, well, yeah, like where's evolution going anyway.

It's beneficial from, you know, it's beneficial in the sense that it evolved by natural selection to be. To benefit the individuals who did it.

Yes, but if you.

If by bug you mean something that from the point of view of the species, it would be great if you could just wipe this out.

Right.

Because the species would somehow do better.

Yes.

As a result, then. Yes, but. But then, you know, males are a bug.

Come on now. It's. There's some nice things to males. Speaking as a male, I.

The fact that there are some nice things to males doesn't mean that they're not bugs. You know, maybe they're quite nice bugs, but it would be much better for the species as a whole not to have. To have males who impose this violence on the species as a whole.

Yeah. As somebody who practiced controlled violence and doing a lot of martial arts. Yeah, I'm not sure. It does seem kind of fun to have this kind of controlled violence. Also sports also. I mean, the question of conflict in general. I guess that's the deeper question. Don't you think there's some value to conflict for the improvement of society, for progress? That this tension between tribes isn't this like experiment, a continued experiment we conduct with each other and to figure out what is a better world to build? Like, you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas to go to war with each other. It's like the United states with the 50 states and it's the laboratories of ideas. Don't you think? That is, again, feature versus bug. This kind of conflict, when it doesn't get out of hand, is actually ultimately progressive, productive for a better world.

Well, what do you mean by conflict? I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of people have different ideas about the solution to a problem and so their ideas are in conflict. They can sit down on a log and chat about it and then decide, okay, you're right or I'm wrong or whatever. But if by conflict you mean great idea to build a nuclear bomb and set that off, then no, I don't see why it's a good idea to have all this violence.

Yeah, I wonder. It's not a good idea, but I wonder if human history would evolve the way it did without the violence.

Oh, I'm sure you're right. Probably humans would not have evolved in the sense that we have. But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution will continue in the way it has. So there's all sorts of indications that the importance of violence has been reduced over time and this is made famous in Steven Pinker's book but others have written about it too that the frequency of death from violence in every country you look at has been declining. That's just great. And so the amazing thing about this is that even when you take the deaths Due to the First World War and the Second World War, the 20th century appears to have been statistically meaning rates of death per individual the least violent in history. So we haven't got very far down the course to nonviolence. But I don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it. I think it's ridiculous, frankly, you know, excuse my frankness to say that violence is a good thing. I think that it would be a wonderful concept if we could evolve somehow to a world 3,000 years from now where violence is really regarded as simply appalling and that they look back on our time and can't believe what we were doing.

Yeah, but of course.