How War Shaped Human Evolution - David Geary - #1172

Why is the human mind so unique or interesting? Yeah, great question. We are a highly unusual species in many, many ways in terms of overall brain size, in terms of the ability to learn novel things like reading, writing, inventing, mathematics. Self-awareness is probably much more highly developed in us than in any other species. So there's a whole variety of cognitive ability, social competencies that far outstrip anything else that we see in the natural world. Why? Why did humans become so much smarter than every other species? Yeah, that's a great question. That's the topic of one of my earlier books, The Origin of Mind. Which I'm now writing a second edition of and so re-reviewing all of the literature on brain expansion and a variety of other things. I started about four or five million years ago with what are called the Australopithecines. So that would include Lucy there and looking at their brain size, which was a little bit bigger than chimpanzees. And they were around for, several million years. And we see kind of a gradual increase in brain volume during that time. So, you know, not a lot going on, probably a little bit more sophisticated than chimps, as I said. What was interesting is that a lot of these Australopithecine species emerged and there's a sister genus, Paranthropus, that emerged as well. So there's a lot of things going on there, probably all living in somewhat different ecologies, and that's important because, you know, the more variety you have, the better chances that one of them is going to break from the pack and evolve into something different. And that happened probably a little over two million years ago, maybe two and a half million years ago or so, with the emergence of the genus Homo, with Homo habilis. Habilis, the tool maker, sort of, individual. So we saw a jump in brain volume there. Some indication of some reorganization of parts of the brain called the parietal cortex involved in things like working memory and tool construction and so forth. I think the real important jump emerged about 1.8, 1.9 million years ago or so forth with the emergence of Homo erectus. And there we see, larger body size. We see more brain expansion, more expansion of these areas involved in tool construction and a variety of other things. We also saw that these species, these individuals, these species were beginning to expand in Africa. Expansion follows from, you know, you got the tools, you got a better ability to extract resources, from the ecology, you're better at hunting, cooking emerged, you know, along the way with later members of these species. All of this increases the amount of calories, resources available to the group, which decreases mortality rates and increases population size. You get population expansions with these technological advances. And that creates, you know, a conflict dynamic. You know, you get bigger populations, you get fewer resources per capita. You get within group competition. One way to deal with that is to expand into the territory of other groups, which appears to be what happened with H. erectus. And so they're moving into other groups. Archeological data suggests increased conflict during that time between group conflict and violence. In fact, when we see, look at extinction probabilities in Homo species, I should set aside, there's at least eight of them at one point. The more species, Homo species that were around in an area, the higher the probability that one or several of them would go extinct. So I think we have the technological advances, the population expansion with increase within group competition, increase between groups, between group competition, and the elimination of competitor species, the slow elimination of competitor species. - I think the term is fucking chaos. That's what it sounds like. - Yeah. - It sounds like shit. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Sounds like a lot of chaos. - Yeah, it was a shit show. How's that? - Yeah. - Yeah, it was violent. And I'll get to that. That they eventually expanded. Actually, quite a while ago, about 1.8 million years ago, into out of Africa, and then eventually Asia, then Europe. So they really expanded around probably displacing a lot of other primate species in the process. Eventually we get to humans and they are, I'm skipping a few points here, get to humans and they, they had a couple of attempts to expand out of Africa, but didn't quite make it. Probably the Neanderthals put them in check. And eventually they moved into Eurasia about 60,000 years ago. Eventually displaced Neanderthals, I think replaced Neanderthals. There's some interbreeding and stuff, but the archeological record suggests that there was a lot of violence. There was a lot of violence. There was a lot of conflict. There was a lot of conflict in Africa. Male kin-based coalitions was the start of it in humans and chimpanzees, bonobos, and apparently our ancestors, men stayed in the birth group, women migrated out to avoid inbreeding. When you have the one sex that stays in the birth group, they have an increased chance of forming coalitions, integrating into coordinated social groups for collective actions. So we see that with the males. So I think that was, the males were pushing the expansions. And then you add the technological changes with the tools, tool construction driven by males as well. A lot of these tools, some of them for hunting or doing things related to agriculture, but a lot of them were just weapons. They were organized to expand their territory. And we see that evidence in the archeological data. We see it in the population genetic data, where we look at the number of individuals who were our male ancestors and our female ancestors. You can do that by looking at the Y chromosome, for example, which is just passed down from male to male, or the mitochondrial DNA, which is involved in intracellular energy production. It goes from female to female lineages. So you can track female lineages and male lineages. And the process that almost certainly began with Homo erectus continued up through human prehistory and continues well beyond that. So around, oh, 7,000 years ago or so, after the early emergence of agriculture, we began to see population expansions, agricultural communities moving into hunter-gatherer areas. At one point, we had 17 female relatives for every one male relative. Yeah, there was this massive drop off in male diversity, lineage diversity, like 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. What happened? That was a massive drop. There was a massive drop off on that, where most male lineages disappeared throughout the world in various places. That data suggests that it was, and it has to be because it's a Y chromosome, it has to be male kin groups that are driving that. Otherwise, you'd have more variation in the Y chromosome. Can you simplify that a little bit? Explain what you mean there. Yeah. So if you have an organized male kin group with technology, weapons, and so forth that is expanding out, they're all going to have the same or very similar. you know, fathers, sons, uncles, and so forth. They're all going to have very similar Y chromosomes or identical Y chromosomes. They expand into another group, wipe that group out, that other group's Y chromosome. Do you mean wipe the other group of men out, not wipe the entire other tribe out, presumably keep the women? Usually keep the women. Sometimes you get rid of them too. It just depends. The archaeological stuff is variable. If you're going to get rid of anybody, it's the men. So you take out the men, their Y lineage is gone. I mean, it's erased from history. And the only way you could get the pattern of the 17 to 1 ratio is intense, organized violence. That's just what must have happened. The violence must have discriminated to victimize men, particularly though, right? Or else you wouldn't be able to do that. You would have just had a total population that would have dropped down and it would have been 17 times fewer people overall, but it's not. It's 17 times fewer men than there are women. That's right. So, you know, the other possibility for population crashes is disease, famine, so forth. It would be a disease and famine that only affected men. Right, right. Yeah. If it was disease and famine, the women would have been severely affected as well, probably. As affected as men. So whatever happened, it was specific to men. And, you know, and when that happens, it's other men killing. What a, so, you know, for almost all of human history and ancestral evolutionary history, we've had relatively stable numbers of male-female split. And then you have this incredibly novel sex ratio change. What do you think that caused to, because that has to have some cultural sociological repercussions that stick about for a good while, but it's not going to be easy to rebalance that. It's going to very much put the power reproductively into the hands of the few men that are still around. Right. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened. So we can step back a little bit and look at male-male competition among primates. And when males are high, they're really competitive among primates. Males are bigger than females. They're more aggressive than females. And there's more reproductive skew. So the more dominant males reproduce disproportionately, you know, to their numbers than less dominant males. And so you get their Y chromosome, you know, increasing in frequency across generations. And that, that you know, chimpanzees, mandrills, a lot of other primates almost certainly occurs, does occur in hunter-gatherer societies. It's kind of, people talk about equality there. And often there's equality of material resources because nobody has much, but there's inequality in terms of hunting competencies, you know, physical skills, being a warrior, whatever, variation is there, especially among men, where the top 10, 20% disproportionally reproduce. So the basic pattern has been there for millions and millions of years, for sure. If we look at the australopithecines, the males are 50%, 100% bigger than the females, indicating very intense male-male competition and reproductive skew. So what we're talking about here with the elimination of all these male limits, we're talking about the elimination of all these male limits, and we're talking about the elimination of all these male limits, and we're talking about the elimination of all these male limits, and we're talking about the elimination of all these male limits, and we're talking about the elimination of all these male limits, and we're talking about the elimination of all these male limits, and we're talking about the elimination of all these male limits, and we're who accessed coordination, skill, tactics, weapons at a rate that basically gave them an unfair advantage on the battlefield. And these groups of men were able to move across the planet pretty quickly and wipe out other potentially competitive males. So previously, when we think about chimps, yes, sometimes there are inter-group conflicts, but a lot of the time it's intra-group conflicts. It's the alpha currently being taken down by number two, three, and four. And this is a roving bands of males, kinship-based males with better tactics than their competitors, and then consistently just leveling up over and over again, the better tactics, the better weapons, meeting poorer tactics, poorer weapons, wipe them out, keep the women, mate with the women, consistently. Just rinse and repeat. It's like a proto-Genghis Khan. Right, right. It's an evolutionary arms race driven by male coalitional competition and technological advantages. So on my substack cases, and it will be in the book, it will be more elaborated in my book when it eventually gets done, I talk about the Yamnaya expansion from- What is that? Yeah, it's just a nomadic group, pastoralist group that was, you know, around in the caucuses. They had wagons, horses, and other, a lot of weapons, technological advantages, and they moved into Central and then eventually Northern Europe and displaced all the hunter-gatherer groups. And there's some evidence that they did reproduce with some of the women. Yeah, there's some evidence there. So some interbreeding, but a lot of displacement as well. And if we look at ancient history, and we look at ancient DNA, which is now available, there's a mix of interbreeding and just outright population replacement. One group just replace, one group of men replacing another group of men. Yeah, that's interesting. So I'm, I'm kind of fascinated by whether male-male competition is much more zero-sum because historically some men reproduced enormously while others sort of didn't reproduce at all. The difference between male competition and female competition ancestrally. Yeah, yeah. That's absolutely critical. And hunter-gatherer societies, the variation or reproductive skew, however you want to talk about it, among men is about three times higher than it is about among women. So meaning that there are more men, there are more women, there are more men who have a lot of kids and a lot of men who don't reproduce at all. Most women will have babies and, but some are more successful at keeping them alive or they have one or two more or whatever. So there's some variation among women, but much more among men. Now that three-fold variation in reproductive skew was amplified to about a hundred-fold difference when we move into early empires. Um, so, uh, you know, in China, India, Eurasia, and so forth. So the dominant men in their coalition, uh, had many, many wives killed off competitors or what sort of, what sort of time time zone are we talking about? What years of this? Well, so probably, you know, the, the crash of all the, um, why lineage that the male lineage is five, 7,000 years ago around then was probably that pattern, but we don't have an historical record of that. But then when we move into, um, the, you know, the M empire building, we're looking about 4 million years ago or 4,000 years ago or so, so fairly recent continuing into the bronze age and, um, iron age. And then of course you get Genghis Khan who had 800 kids or so. How much of modern male ambition do you think is a legacy of this asymmetry of reproductive, uh, lottery? Yeah, I, I think most of it is, uh, if not all of it, there are studies of, uh, you know, we have the, the population genetic data showing that, you know, some males reproduce much more than others. So obviously there's intense competition there. If you look at a traditional hunter gatherer, pastoral societies today, and even modern societies, there is a consistent relation between men's cultural success being good at whatever's important in that culture and their marriage prospects, number of children, um, and so forth. It's a very, very consistent relation issue is clear that men who are status-driven focused and are successful in those endeavors reproduce more than other men. Yeah. It's, uh, it's kind of fascinating to think that men's obsession, I mean, with status and achievement and influence can just ultimately be traced back to reproductive competition, right? Right. That, that is what it is. And that is what it is in these other primates. you get a lot of intense male male competition the slackers just aren't attractive to females generally um and they don't do well in male uh male status therapies a quick aside you probably heard me talk about element before and that's because i've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now which is a cold glass of water with elements in it element is an electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't it's a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients it reduces muscle cramps and fatigue supports brain function and helps to regulate your appetite throughout the day i genuinely notice the difference when i take it versus when i don't which is why i don't shut up about it and also why it's used by everyone from dr andrew huberman to olympic athletes and fbi sniper teams the good sniper teams not the bad ones also they have a no questions asked refund policy so if you don't like it for any reason they'll just give you your money back plus they offer free shipping in the u.s right now you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom that's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom what's fundamentally different about female female competition because it's not just like they're passive actors when it comes to uh what's happening ancestrally but how does female competition and male competition differ yeah yeah great question they're definitely not passive actors so what uh what the the model i'm building is that basically male uh coalitional violence initially kin-based and then kind of expanding out to say a shared language everybody that speaks you know language x kind of will form together under periods of stress and then then ideological stuff like religion or whatever ideology um it is as a way of um creating larger and larger groups these uh male coalitions with technological advances which is driven by conflict so if you look at the ukrainian war now all sorts of advances in drone uh use of drones robots and so forth in combat it's all driven by competition so the same thing the organization the technological changes as um uh societies expand you get different cultural niches in there you get a political class military class an ideological class and then an entrepreneurial class in there generally so you get different niches uh to compete and men are building these institutions coalitions of men and societies um women are embedded within these uh institutions and their evolved strategy is to create kind of a social network within these groups that provides them social support and allows them to um extract resources basically from from the group that would be from the husband or other other folks um that they're they're connected to so they're very good at working with each other and they're very good at working with each other working individual relationships knowing all of you know who's friends with who who is um you know a coalitional partner with this other person who's in a conflict or whatever using all of this information to kind of manipulate and um improve their own status within the group and also promote the well-being and status of their um children so so in in one of my sub stacks i uh talk about the uh manipulations and all of the drama i guess that happens in uh like harem settings where you have a an emperor that has multiple wives or concubines or whatever lots of drama going on behind the scenes trying to move their sons into positions where they they'll become emperor or high official or whatever it's all very subtle typically called relational aggression uh but it is active for sure and has consequences the the women who are good at that sort of thing typically um had healthier kids and are more likely to move their kids into positions that would allow them to be successful in adulthood so it's not building institutions it is working the dynamics within them why was it not female female coalitions roving around and attacking other groups um yeah and and and that's a great question because if we look at primates old world primate species kind of africa asia there are actually more primate species where females stay in their birth group and males take off and so you have more opportunity for female coalitions to emerge because it's easier among kin and in fact in a lot of these species there are female coalitions they do organize along you know mothers and aunts grandmas and all that uh to protect important food sources like you know fruit trees or whatever uh the case might be so we definitely do see coalitional competition among females one of the differences is that uh as you mentioned before male male competition is more of a zero sum game female female competition is there but it's lower intensity they don't kill each other and they can't really escalate it if they have you know if they're breastfeeding or they're pregnant or whatever and the um the cost benefit trade-offs are are different if you are female and you're pregnant and you get into a massive fight you get you're risking an abortion or injury or death or whatever um but for a guy he's a low status guy middle status guy if he doesn't really push the envelope he's a low status guy he's a middle status guy if he doesn't really push the envelope as much as he can he's out of the gene pool and so the the trade-offs are as you said and i said uh much more zero sum for male particularly when you get a polygonist system how much do you think war we can attribute to war the building of civilization um i think uh war was the primary driver of the building of civilizations um other people have uh said that as well that you know you get these coalitions that when you get the between group stuff you get advantages to larger and larger groups there so nomadic raiders invading agricultural communities was a common dynamic before the emergence of um empires and then so the agricultural communities unite maybe start building defensive structures and so forth that the nomads need to uh unite better organized to get larger groups to be competitive and you have this this uh arms race situation where both sides are ramping up and developing new technologies and so forth and as you expand um societies you know not all of the guys can be in the military you need um weapons makers you need uh people to do the harvest you need entrepreneurs you know for markets you you you have a you know a economic diversification of society but but the stressor for the building of these large groups to begin with was between group competition yeah i think you say that intense cooperation and intense conflict are sort of two sides of the same coin what do you mean by that right so yeah a lot of uh social scientists don't like to hear that we're a violent species they just it's kind of like off the table for them which means they'll never fully understand our evolution um and they focus on the the ultra cooperative side of people people are intensely cooperative i mean we live in large cities a lot of this large societies multiple layers of organization you can drive down the street and you know nobody's going to do anything to you go to a shopping center you're safe and so forth and different people are doing different things amazingly cooperative amongst non-relatives and most other species of cooperation is is typically among kin uh and the question is so how do we get there and my argument is well what are the benefits to cooperation in large groups and the primary benefit is um defensive or offensive in terms of competing with other groups now that the competition doesn't need to be violent it could eventually merge into trade wars or other ways of competing across groups but i think violence was the driver the initial driver it's the other side more more violence more push for large-scale cooperation yeah well i'm trying to work out why civility is a thing at all if competition and prestige are our main human drivers i don't understand why social hierarchies and monarchies would form why isn't it just chaos all the time right right yeah in in yeah there's an interesting pattern pattern there with the formation of um you know early polities like like nation state you know states and then um you know larger empires a lot of conflict in the beginning when a hierarchy is um established finally a group of males and their kin and their supporters and so forth have kind of taken control of society and organize that they then um develop systems for suppressing in-group competition and of course suppressing people who want to displace them so you have a lot of violence at first and then suppression of that once the the hierarchy is established you know and eventually people get tired of that and there's revolts and so forth or externally displaced or whatever but the formation of a hierarchy does suppress in-group violence if conflict helped to produce intelligence and and cooperation technological progress and stuff what happens when humans become substantially more peaceful what happens um i think they get they get bored and they start um attacking each other on social media um you got cancel culture so a lot of the aggression and manipulation um and then you have a lot of the aggression and manipulation and then you have a lot of the social status driving is still there it's just digital or a lot of the violence part of it is stripped out but the motivation to be right and to have social influence and and move up whatever hierarchy is important to you is is still there it's just expressed in a different way why do you think humans evolved such a extraordinary capacity to imagine the future right so part of the process of this between group competition and also kind of the within group um stuff we see uh the evolutionary elaboration of a number of brain systems so we can look at that by looking at um uh macaque brains and chimp brains and human brains and then look at the organization of some of these large-scale brain networks um two critical ones uh one is the default mode network now there's the frontal parietal network and in both of these they're there in you know the monkeys apes and people but for people they're much more um integrated with other systems and the white matter tracks of connectivity from the front of the brain to the back of the brain where some of the work goes on um is much more elaborated in monkey than in chimpanzee brain systems so i think that's a very important part of the example and much more elaborated in humans than in chimpanzees and some of these areas are evolutionary hot spots meaning there's been a lot of genetic changes in them so so the default mode network is the ability to um generate uh you know a mental simulation of something going on in the world so if you just kick back you know it's saturday you're relaxing not thinking about anything intense your default mode network is going to kick in and you've got some daydreaming sort of things there usually self-referential images and thinking about stuff that is important to you so that's kind of the mental model um kind of aspect telling you what's important to you what's important in human evolution since we have these better connections between the front and the back we can take that system and generate images ourselves instead of just reliving past stuff we can take that system and generate a future state so it's like where do we want to be five years from now so in my classes i talk about the system and when people fantasize about things you know you could fantasize well i'm homeless yeah i don't have any rent to pay i don't have to worry about you know paying the gas bill or those sorts of things but people don't do that they fantasize about being higher status having a better job having a bigger house whatever it is having luxury food living in a you know high status you know cool environment and so forth they're thinking about things that would enhance their social status and historically gaining those things would have reduced their mortality risks and reduce the mortality risk of their children so we get these models of you know this is where i want to be in x number of years or months or whatever and this is where i am now and now we kick in the rational problem solving uh frontal parietal system can now think about okay what can i do to reduce the gap between these you know i go to school for four years and get an engineering degree get a good job or something like that so you're thinking ahead and problem solving and um you know trying to figure out how to get where you want to be system also works with you know more intimate dynamics it's like okay i want to get person a to do this for me and i know this person pretty well and i know that if i try strategy one he or she is going to reject it's not going to happen strategy two might work sometimes and this is how i would do it so you rehearse the whole thing in your system and you're going to be able to do it and you're going to be able to do it in your head beef and tweak it before you actually um try it out in the real world and so you're able to create various scenarios of the future figure out different approaches to make the future happen the way you want it to happen um and you can all do that without um you know kind of imagine scenarios before they happen and mentally try out things uh to get you to do it in the real world get people other people to do what you want and i would think anybody who has good abilities in that area are going to have a real advantage over folks that really can't think uh too far into the future somewhere along the way low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older turns out there's a 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link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout do you think that the ability to imagine a better life and how the future might unfold also limits our capacity to enjoy the life that we have but i think about you know you see a dog and people are always look at their dog and it just seems so content if you were able to find a common currency of happiness between us and other animals do you think that the animals would sort of win in terms of moment-to-moment fulfillment and happiness yeah um yeah it probably depends on the animal you know if you're a good gazelle and a pack of lions is parallel walking with you probably you're not too happy but um yeah i i think you know your dog and cat they're not going to have the same self-awareness as you as you're going to have they're not going to be evaluating themselves relative to other dogs and cats and you know in a in a good context they don't really need to think about moving up in the status hierarchy or maintaining their position in the the status hierarchy so you know in a large dynamic social system there's always movement going on you always have to you know try to move up or maintain or you know anticipate potential conflicts or whatever and so yeah i think that that does occupy uh people more than it would say a dog um yeah uh so when it comes to childhoods and and sort of how human babies came about i've done i've listened some really interesting stuff around how uh fathers saved the human civilization because baby's heads were getting so big there was this sort of battle between brain size and mother's hip width and how much they can locomote throughout their lives and stuff which i think is kind of endlessly fascinating i also had a conversation recently about if humans become martians if humans move to mars bone density is going to be way lower which means that women's hips are not going to be able to deal with natural births in the way that they could so almost all children are going to be born through c-section if we move into space lower bone density higher risk of tearing and and horrible fractures and stuff during pregnancy or giving through giving birth but then as soon as you go to c-section you no longer have the constraint on baby's heads anymore so now we've maybe had this brief window in human history hominin history heads get bigger brains get bigger heads get bigger brains get bigger heads stay the same size they actually got probably a bit too big for a while a lot of women died in childbirth we pull it back those ones aren't going to continue we keep it the same we keep it the same and then we move to mars and then it's just off to the races again yeah yeah yeah if if if the same competitive dynamics that initially kind of pushed the expansion of brain size continued on mars then yeah that's what would happen what's unique about human children and the way that we develop as babies and infants yeah so a number of things there um and i i can circle in with dads so uh mark flynn and i argued uh 25 years ago now you a few females and the offspring where males and females form long-term relationships the males are uh at least hang around and play with the offspring and most importantly they protect them so you have the the the germ of a human family there and human paternal investment from that perspective that goes back to the early days of the early days of the early days of the early days five million years or more excuse me um you get a human gather group when the males start coordinating together then you have multiple of these kind of uh male-centered families uh in the group but uh moving forward you know as brain size increased as humans get better at tool construction hunting extracting resources from the environment uh there was you know part of the brain expansion was due to that type of thing and so of course the you know the birth canal needs to be larger for one um the other thing is that uh you know kids are born premature so if you were to take gestation time uh for a human baby and say well we're going to stretch that out until the infant's brain is just as mature as say a chimpanzee infant's brain the gestation period would have to be almost two years and nobody wants to birth a two-year-old um so yeah so they're born premature in a sense and so they're much more dependent on uh care they have a longer uh growth period for brain and other things but as humans got better at getting stuff out of the ecology this also uh meant that kids had to learn how to make tools how to hunt how to forage and so forth and studies of hunter-gatherer groups suggest that it takes a long time to become a skilled hunter or skilled at foraging or whatever needs to be done in a traditional group or some early farming types of things so some for some they may not be experts until they're 30 or so so you need this delayed period of basically learning how to be successful in whatever cultural niche uh that you're in yeah yeah i am i'm kind of fascinated by how many of the adaptations that we see among humans are done in an attempt to compensate for how neotenous and useless we are as children what looking sort of across this entire history what is the part of modern human behavior that makes the least sense until you understand our history in your opinion that makes the least sense yeah what's this what's the thing that an ancestral perspective intergroup conflict and the pressures and stuff what does that explain best in the way that people behave in the modern world yeah so the um well the patriarchy i guess you know we hear a lot about that and you know a lot of debate about it but basically my argument is that well yeah it's real um the male kin-based coalitions came together you know fought for probably since a raptus emerged you know 1.7 1.8 million years ago so it's been going on for a long time they build institutions they build culture the cultures and therefore we would expect that males will dominate in these institutions and be motivated to dominate in these institutions and also have the capacities predisposition capability um to dominate as well right and and domination in there means you have social skills you have the ability to organize large numbers of other individuals and you have the ability to organize mostly men to engage in collective action that increases the group's competitive ability you can see that militarily obviously but also any corporation um any other you know a football team whatever the the coordinated behavior of the individuals is what is going to influence um the outcome of the competition now women didn't have that same selection pressure um their pressure was more working within the you know the confines or so forth of these institutions it involved developing um more intimate network of relationships that provide social support a lot of these networks are focused on consensus um you know agreement support and so forth and not they're not hierarchical hierarchical is is frowned upon in these uh female networks so they try to level out each other and they're focused on the dynamics within it rather than coordinating together to compete against another group so then when you take bunches of females um when they begin to dominate this has been talked about recently social media and elsewhere uh move into these male systems that are hierarchical and they're focused on the dynamics within it rather than hierarchical organized for outgroup competition they don't function as well because the the the female default is to focus on in-group dynamics not coordinating in-group behavior so that their collective actions will make them all better at outdoing this other group and so there's a lot of confusion and consternation arguments and so forth um over that dynamic right now but i i think i think it's real and explains a lot of uh current social issues why is that unpalatable for a lot of people um well because uh there are a lot of women who are now competing in traditionally male hierarchies uh male professions so forth and they're designed to function you know hierarchically collective action and so forth women generally don't like that type of social dynamic and system and so they you know they do something else but it creates problems because a subset of women are work focused and status focused about 15 percent or so um and they're directly competing against men in these hierarchies and a lot of them aren't doing as well as they think they should do and so they're looking at the status differentials between the most successful men and the most successful women and there's still gaps there and so they come up with post-hoc explanations like bias systematic sexism and so forth but the differences are really uh men are more focused and they're more focused on the social dynamics and so forth and so forth they're more focused on status they're willing to trade off friends health and so forth to move with status and they more easily join together uh collectively to finish um common goals and projects or whatever but we're female groups are less efficient at that what about the desire for control i never really thought about this as a fundamental human motivation but you seem to think that it is so i use use a history uh a uh kind of rule of thumb heuristic that you know we have a fundamental motivation to control and that doesn't mean you know you're you're you want to be hitler or genghis khan or whatever but it means that you want to organize your world in ways that reproduce um the outcomes that increase social status previously um and so and so forth so you so the things that help the human brain um evolve so status related competition for example For example, you want to recreate those conditions. So you want to move up a status hierarchy. Or if you're a woman, you want to create a network, social network that will provide social support for you, help with your kids, sometimes economic support or whatever. So you want to organize your world and control it in a sense that you're recreating the same networks that led to the evolution of these systems. I think of it in terms of kind of concentric rings. Some people, they just want to control their day-to-day life, their job, what happens at the job, what happens with their friends and networks. And then other folks, you get Hitler, Genghis Khan, other despots, want to control the world. It's just the scope of that, which means they want to organize the world at whatever scope it is in ways that are beneficial to them. So control is, I am able to change the environment and the future to disproportionately benefit me versus other people? Yeah, pretty much. It is, you want to organize the world. So social relationships, for example, who's friends with who, who you're friends with, you know, what's going on in this network. You're going to put energy into moderating or curating those relationships so the pattern fits what's in your best interest. They pay attention to you over other women, for example. Yeah. When you. Need it. And if it doesn't happen, you get angry or upset or whatever, which triggers the default mode network and these other networks that kick in the problem solving. It's like, okay, yeah, things aren't quite right. What do I need to change? How do I need to, you know, interact with this network in order to realign things so that it's now working best for me? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly. You eat reasonably well. You feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with Function. 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Yeah, you know, unfortunately, I think it's hard to be fully satisfied for a lot of people. So I'll talk about it in the book and I talk about it in the Substack sort of things that, you know, there is and has been a very clear relation between social status and mortality risks. And I think that's what we're going to talk about in the book. So moving up the status hierarchy, men and women, increased your chances of survival and increases the chances of your kids surviving, especially when shit hits a fan. There's a plague or a food shortage or something like that. The relation between mortality risks and status is inverse. Higher, the better. And, you know, when shit hits a fan, it's unpredictable. You don't know when another group is going to invade. Typically, you don't know when, you know, another plague or whatever is going to hit. You don't know what the growing season is going to be and so forth. So you can't relax. It's a kind of a, you know, and you get this within species arms race. So you've always got to move up a little bit as protection as a buffer against when the bottom falls out. And so I think that's why people are. So obsessed with social comparisons. A lot of social media is flaunting, showing off, and then people are comparing themselves to others. And we have the self-aware. I think that drove self-awareness to some point. I know this competency, A, B, and C, and these other people are getting them higher up in whatever status hierarchies is important to you. And then you need self-awareness to reflect on yourself. skills on those same traits and think about, okay, well, how do I improve those so that I too can move up a bit? And so, yeah, it is unfortunate. It's hard for a lot of people to break out from that and relax because we live most of us live very comfortable lives at least in the western world a lot of resources not much relative relative to what we had historically not much violence so in absolute terms things are great we should be just kicking back watching tv playing video games or whatever and you know and some people are able to do that but a lot just can't turn it off and it's because of the relation between uh status and mortality risk and the unpredictability of when the population will crash again and ancestrally that would have been very adaptive and we it doesn't really matter whether or not you're feeling satisfied or or at peace as you go to bed tonight what matters is whether or not you're driven enough to keep on pushing forward i mean it's kind of surprising to me to be honest that passive pleasure is something that exists at all but the fact that we are able to be as partially happy in non-pursuit as some humans are is kind of amazing it's like wow you really threaded the needle through this minefield of evolutionary pressures to if it's anything other you know there's a common productivity wisdom which is hey um make sure that you don't just use your rest time as a foot off the gas in service of putting your foot back on the gas even harder tomorrow right you you should be going for a walk because you enjoy going for a walk and it fulfills you not because you listen to an andrew huberman podcast episode that suggests that it means that you are 15 more productive tomorrow if you go for a walk this evening something like that but like if you look at the evolutionary pressures everything should be pushing us towards survival and reproduction whether that's intergroup conflict or intra-group status seeking whether it's uh resource gathering or social game playing or skill acquisition or weapon development or whatever everything is in service of that because we had to negotiate for almost all of human history really really aggressively negotiate with an environment that was uncivil uncivilized out of our control heat could have killed us cold could have killed us we didn't know if there was going to be a famine but the fact the fact that we're able to just in small micro doses chill and just be happy kind of blows that's the most amazing thing of all of this do you not agree yeah yeah well i mean you have to even when you're pushing hard you have to recuperate um you need recuperation times if you're working you know if you're physically doing a lot of labor, whatever, fighting, whatever, you need to pull back and recuperate to, you know, you're going to deplete resources, mental resources, physical resources or whatever. So you need these break periods for your body mentally to recuperate. And, and I think that's, that's what you're getting at. We, some people just have larger recuperation periods, you know, sometimes decades, they just take it slow, but, but, but that's true in other species as well. So it's, Northern elephant seals, for example, a lot of intense male-male competition, 5-10% of the males sire most of the offspring. Some of the males just don't compete. They're slackers, they hang out on the beach, they live longer than the other males. But there's going to be some of those in every generation that just kind of either can't compete or don't want to put the effort into it or just want to take advantage of the here and now, whatever's available. If you were to assess the successful people in the modern world, the ones that we look to and think, wow, their ambition and competence has really driven them to do amazing, impressive things. How likely do you think it would be that the traits that made that person successful in this environment would be the same ones that would make them successful 50,000 or 100,000 years ago? Yeah, yeah, right. Great question. So, yeah, so when we get larger societies, we get kind of different types of classes and hierarchies. The main ones have been talked about, I said before, military. political entrepreneurial and ideological um certainly is the military type of of uh class and probably in cooperation with the political class that had the earlier advantages you know with rome and other early empires those are the people that dominated things as a society grows you know you get more entrepreneurial um folks ideological folks you get the roman empire kind of an empire at some point that has a lot of social influence social complexity communication right right and then the entrepreneurial class raises up and they become wealthier and so now they want to compete with the political class for social power and so forth and and you see these groups competing so in china you know as i understand it the political class kind of keeps the entrepreneurial class and even the military class in check to maintain their power here in the u.s you know it's more of a capitalistic and the entrepreneurial class is very wealthy and therefore much more influential than in other empires where um the political class kept them down but the entrepreneurial class or the um you know entertainment class i guess that's part of the you know entrepreneurial stuff so you know i like the rolling stones uh mick jagger and stuff but my guess is he wouldn't last long on a medieval battlefield yeah i get the sense too it seems like yeah it's a it's a unique um it's more precise it's more civilized it's going to be more about uh non-violent competition uh you're going to need to be much more socially aware complexity what does this person want um interpersonal communication is going to be way more i i get the sense that maybe even like pro-sociality and extroversion might be a little bit more important because people can they don't need you from a resource gathering perspective quite so much maybe in the past you would have put up with an asshole it was really great with a spear because you go oh hey wait like if we if we yeah sure he's a dick but if we piss him off too much the next time that we need some meat we're screwed or the next time that the tribe comes along we're screwed but when you outsource that to a supermarket and law enforcement you think i don't really need that in quite the same way that i used to yeah it's it's really fascinating you know and this is it's mismatch and we're talking about mismatch evolutionary mismatch but it's coming at it from a really interesting angle which is what would have been adaptive from a group perspective and an individual competency perspective that now is repurposed or warped there's this meme i always think about it's a guy who is working in retail young dude like really really big like jack guy looks like he was maybe a football player in college or something with a shirt and a tie on kind of a shit shirt and a tie on stood at the top of his hat and he's like what the hell is wrong with you you know he's like you know i don't know what the hell is wrong with you you know i don't know what the hell is wrong with you you know i would have been a proud warrior and this pivot from a brain-based a brawn-based to a brain-based economy increased social all this stuff is uh i know it's just i would love to see what happens if we could create another virtual reality just pick everybody up drop them in it and be like how does everyone get on like is elon musk that just driven and competent and and flexible and tyrannical and megalomaniacal that he is able to still win and he's able to still win and he's able to still win or does the fact that he doesn't have this capacity mean that he doesn't so much it's it's it's pretty unique yeah well well yeah yeah he's he's he's in a kind of a mix of an entrepreneurial and technological uh kind of hierarchy so he's able to mix them together and almost certainly is using a lot of the default mode in the in the um frontal parietal networks to think about things in new ways electric cars you know or do existing technologies better so he's you know the ambition but he's also using these very complex evolved systems to try to think through better ways to do you know whatever abc um he's focusing on in the time now going back 50 000 years 100 000 years 200 000 years people like him would have been the ones inventing the new tools the new weapons and stuff maybe not on the front line but the technological advances were a critical piece of um where we are now it's a human coalitional formation the between group social competition and the technology um the the male-based coalitional between group and the technology take away any of those and we're not here before we continue how many times have you found yourself hugging the toilet throwing up not because you drank too much alcohol but because the non-alcohol alcoholic beers that you drank tasted like garbage and that is why i'm such a huge fan of athletic brewing co their non-alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing and the best part there's no hangover no headaches no more ruining your daughter's dance recital i didn't want to stop enjoying tasty drinks i just wanted to stop paying for it the next day and you can too find athletic brewing co's best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you or best option get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door right now get 15 off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's athleticbrewing.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout near beer terms and conditions apply athletic brewing company fit for all times if you could bestow on most normal people a broad understanding or a broad lesson or principle from your study of the human mind what do you think would uh improve everyone's quality of life or their understanding of themselves and the world around them yeah yeah i think um a lot of what people do is driven by kind of unconscious or their feelings about you know so-and-so's got more than i do and it's making me feel bad and so forth and so i need to go out and up her or up him often by spending extra money and paying a lot of interest on it and uh you know going into debt and you know and and and and and and and so forth so that's based on this kind of the status driving uh need that we have to kind of move up the ladder before the bottom of the ladder gets cut out um but you know we live in a but it's good to understand where we live we live in a place in time where those risks are much lower than they were when that system to continuously move up was in place so i think that's a good point i think that's a good point i think that's a good point i think so understanding that and reflecting that yeah you know they have this but really what do i need for my personal well-being and those of my kids so you get these competitions for you know getting your kid super good at baseball or whatever you know unless they're going to go to pros it's really not that important or the pta moms they go in and they you know organize things in the middle school and high school and they're kids just by chance happen to get the most awards and all of that um in traditional societies the pta moms did help their kids it mattered you know in a middle school today you're putting all this effort into it probably a lot of drama a lot of time and work and all that in the long run we know it doesn't make any difference for your kid anymore so you you can chill a bit that would be nice david geary ladies and gentlemen david appreciate you where should people go to check out the substack the book everything you got going on yeah so the the substack i i initially just had a bunch of reprints from a number of articles mostly on sex differences um that i uh published in corlett they gave me permission to redo them and now i'm redoing uh origin of mind which will take another year or so to finish but along the way i have a few um uh posts here and there i'll have them on certain topics as i work through them on the chapters chapters will be much more elaborated more evidence and so forth so have snippets oh yeah yeah uh just a very uh kind of innovative name geary substack that's there i've got dozens of uh subscribers already so it's philosophy did you also want to talk about the great divergence or maybe some other time yeah we're gonna have to do that another time but dude i uh i'm always super down to talk to you so we can we can run that back i think it's fascinating to have um an ancestral perspective on why human brains sort of develop the way that they did it really helps to to explain what's going on with human behavior what's happening with the second edition of the book what's going on with that yeah so i've got through a few chapters uh there i'm actually i'll hear from my publisher american psychological association if they're actually going to publish it or not um i think probably they will but who knows um and so i'll move on Next chapter will be on the development of the brain, prenatal development and kind of neurobiological organization to it, basically saying, you know, there's no way it's a blank slate. You know, the only place you get a blank slate is academic social scientists. Otherwise, it's there. So I'll present that evidence, probably pare it back a little bit from first edition. And then I'll have either that second after that chapter or basic single chapter on big brain networks like the default load network. I'll get into some details there. I'll move in and talk about things like problem solving, self-awareness, that sort of thing. And then toward the end, I'm going to integrate all of this with domain general intelligence, which a lot of people. I wonder about the ability to easily learn novel information and the ability to draw inferences about kind of basic patterns and stuff. I'll talk about that. And then in a final chapter, the relation between domain general abilities, maybe the default mode network and others in the modern world and occupational performance, creative innovation, so forth. Heck yeah. David, I appreciate you, man. Until next time. All right. Thank you. Enjoyed it.