The Origins of evolutionary psychology with Martin Daly

David, this is evolutionary psychology of the podcast. - Actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. - Boom. - Did it. - David, today we have a guest who needs no introduction, Martin Daly. - Martin Daly, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology as we know it, though he might quibble with the term evolutionary psychology, he was there. At the forefront of the origins of this way of thinking this interdisciplinary scholarship that emerged, expert on homicide, conflict, inequality and its effects on conflict, we covered it all. - Kinga Roo rats and it was a lovely conversation. - Talking about where the field came from, where it's going, one of the wonderful things about the evolutionary behavioral sciences is that people like Martin and Margot Wilson, who unfortunately passed away too soon. And people like John Chubie, Lita Cosmides and also John Pasoet, these wonderful foundational people are just such incredible thinkers. And what I loved about this conversation, in addition to sort of hearing the history, is we also just get a sense of, Martin Daly is just such a sharp mind and we get a sample of that thinking even in this conversation. - Yeah, absolutely. It was a really fun conversation for me to just take part in and I'm sure you'll enjoy listening to it as well, particularly if you're interested in the origins of evolutionary behavioral science and the history of it all. - Without further ado, here is Martin and David at tonight, talking about evolutionary psychology. (upbeat music) - Well Martin, thank you so much for being here. It's a real honor and pleasure. We have not had the, really any of the founders of evolutionary psychology yet on. - It's true. - It is. - I'm surprised. - I know, yes. - I mean Darwin has been dead for quite a while. - No, I know, it's been hard to book Darwin. It's, yeah, he's, (laughs) despite David's best attempts. - I know. - But yeah, David would love to talk to Darwin. We talked about that recently. So Martin, thank you so much for being here. There's a lot to talk about, but for me at least, I get to selfishly ask you a question I've always wanted to ask, which is, I was a student of leaders in Johns and there was always a lore of the origins of evolutionary psychology. And I appreciate the fact that saying that there's even an origin to evolutionary psychology is somewhat problematic because of course, the idea is, right? - The aggression of the emotions and man and animals is always my start point. - There you go. Yeah, exactly. So can you, I mean, I don't know if you've ever gotten this question if you get it a lot, but the simple question just put simply is, from my perspective, you are one of the important people that were there when evolutionary psychology started. Many of our listeners are younger people, like David and I, our generation are even younger, who may have only indirectly heard what that backstory was. If you had a chance to tell these academic grandchildren and great grandchildren in essence, the story is you see what is important for them to know. What would you tell them? - Well, I guess first of all, I'd say, I like to think of the study of evolution in human behavior as a very interdisciplinary field. The human behavior in evolution society was initially dominated by anthropologists and biologists with a very, with a minority smattering of psychologists. The anthropologists were often the best psychologists. I mean, that's been true for a long time. You think of Gollum and Fessler who edited the journal are both anthropologists, you think of Clark Barrett and Ed Hagen and Elizabeth Cashton, who've all been presidents of the society. They're all anthropologists, they're all very psychological. So I never like to talk about evolutionary psychology as if it's a branch of psychology when it's been a much more interdisciplinary agenda. I became a keen Darwinian, I guess. More as a postdoc than younger. I was an animal behavior guy, non-human animal behavior, studying small mammals. And as a postdoc, I joined a research group in the UK, John Crooks research group, if anybody's ever heard of John, John was the founder of what was then called social ecology, the business of trying to study a group of related species and attribute their social differences to something ecological, which usually meant to the distribution of their food and their predators and whether females would aggregate because of the distribution of their food and predators. And that sort of thing. And there were people working on birds, there were people working on ungulates. I went there in 1971 after I finished my PhD with intent to become a field worker and do this kind of work on rodents. I did for decades, although on a way, it was a very stupid decision because I mean, you can't really watch rodents doing anything in the wild. They're mostly not eternal, they mostly live in burrows. So like observational studies of these animals was a mistake, but in any case, it was a great research group. And crook was in the psych department. You've probably heard of some of the people who were postdocs there at the same time. I was Richard Rangham was Robin Dunbar. I guess was a graduate student there, did his PhD work on gelato baboons and the Ethiopian highlands. And that was sort of the point of which I became a rabid Darwinian. Then after I came back to North America and got attached to Margot Wilson, my late spousan partner, we were running a seminar on the subject of sociobiology right after Ed Wilson's book came out in 1976, I guess we were running this seminar. And a couple of graduate students kind of raising questions about homo sapiens, which we knew nothing about and cared less about kind of moved us into the human research area. I'm trying to think when I first met John Olita, I think it was 1979, I think, I gave a research talk at Harvard and I think were they still graduate students? That's them maybe. Because I don't think they were, I was at the 1976 AAA meetings, American Anthropological Association meetings. And in some ways that's an interesting starting point because although it's an anthropology meeting, there were two human sociobiology sessions at that meeting. And the reason is because Ervita Borat Harvard and Napoleon Shagnon and Bill Iardons from Michigan and Northwestern had separately proposed a set of talks by mostly their students in human sociobiology. And then when the program committee saw this, they put them in touch with each other and the two were sort of amalgamated. And that was an event that brought together a lot of, I mean, I first met Sarah Hardy there, I first met Shagnon and Irons there, I first met Dick Alexander there, I first met Bob Tripper's there I think. Yeah, so although it was an anthropology meeting, there were a lot of biologists there, there were some psychologists there on me anyway. And it was kind of a foundational event for what I think of as this field. 1976 why then? - Why did this happen then? - Yeah, and he guessed, yeah. - Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there were two centers in the US where something was crystallizing in anthropology. One was Harvard, I mean, Ervita Borat had been a baboon researcher and then he'd become involved in the Calahari Sun research and several of the people who I think were his students or affiliates anyway, Mel Connor, Pat Tripper, Nadine Peacock, a whole bunch of these people have been going there and doing behavior research least cashed him for that matter. And we're. bringing a kind of evolution, well, bringing a strongly evolution, a mind of perspective, to bear on their observations there. And at the same time, Shagnon, who had got his PhD at Michigan, I think, and then moved to Penn State briefly, and then to Northwestern, there was a little circle revolving around Dick Alexander at Michigan. And Alexander wrote this paper on the evolution of social behavior. I don't know if you've read it. It was the annual review of ecology and systematic in 1974. So it appeared the year before Ed Wilson's book. And what's nice about it, it was not mostly about people. It was mostly about, well, Dickson was the curator of insects at the University of Michigan. It was more about insects than any other animal group. But he had a bunch of thoughts towards the end of the boat. Cousin marriage and asymmetry and cousin relations and human beings that he sort of laid out. And he was kind of a focal person for the graduate students in anthropology, who's worked with Shagnon and others who got interested in evolution. Mark Flynn, Paul Turk, Camila, Betzig, several other people whose names should come to mind, but don't. They all kind of congealed around Alexander. And we'd have these annual meetings. Margot and I were part of this for reasons that actually sort of escaped me. No, I do remember now, but I won't go into it. But anyway, we had these little annual meetings from 1981 until the foundation of HBES in '89. And we'd have the meeting either Anne Arbor or Evan Stinnell and Ola for the-- where Northwestern wasn't more Bill and Nap, but both established themselves. And there were a lot of student papers, but one thing that really made it work and made it come together was right from where one we had the support and enthusiastic participation, even a Bill Hamilton and George Williams. And Alexander, who were sort of-- in many people's minds, the three leading theoretical biologists, certainly Hamilton and Williams, anyway, thinking about evolution of behavior. And they were wholeheartedly in favor of taking this to homo sapiens and coming to the meetings and being there and interacting with the graduate students and telling them what they thought they should also do next time they went to the field. And it really made everybody feel like this was a legitimate enterprise. You know, Leda reminds me-- we've been exchanging emails recently, she wants to remind me of how much flack the evolution and human behavior approach used to get and the hostility of the Goulds on Lillandton's and so on. And that's true, but I always felt like there was a big support of environment in evolutionary biology that was in our corner as well. And yeah, another guy, Ms. John Alcock, actually, wrote the leading textbook in animal behavior that went through like eight additions. It was the best-selling textbook in animal behavior for addition after addition for addition for decades. And he always had a bit of human stuff in there and was always supportive to all though he wasn't somebody who came to those meetings. So, you know, I never felt like we were that besieged. I felt much more like it was a supported enterprise. Now, in a way, none of this is terribly psychological. Marco and I were the only psychologist, I think, on the founding committee of the human behavior and evolution society or whatever steering committee is. It was called originally. And we're both crappy psychologists in some way. I mean, Marco was a behavioral endocrinologist who'd castrated monkeys. And I was a guy who followed rodents with little micro transmitters in the around the desert. So neither of us was a very good psychologist. We got involved in human research anyway, obviously. But it wasn't very psychological initially, but it's the same feel to my mind. It's still the same feel to my mind. I know I piss off some anthropologists when I say that, you know, it's the same feel because, oh no, we do human behaviorally ecology and that's different. And it's like, come on, you know, if you're interested in human decision processes, we could call that psychology. You know, don't get bent out of shape. Again, it's all one field to me. And it was sort of coming together in the late '70s and then throughout the '80s. Well, another seminal event actually was, again, Dick Alexander in 1978. He and Don Tinkall at Michigan hosted a meeting on the evolution of behavior that drew a big crowd. Marco and I had just written the book, Sex Evolution and Behavior and it landed on Dick's desk. And I was told by one of his students later that Alexander's reaction to it. Although I had met him in '76, I don't think you remembered his reaction to it was allegedly. Who the hell are these people? And how did they get a hold of my color snows? Because it was so much the same alley as the way he was thinking about a lot of things. But anyway, so he phoned me up and invited me to this meeting. So I had me and Marco to this meeting. And so we gave a talk there. Melder Dijkamon, whose name you may or may not know, gave a talk there. She was an anthropologist at Sonoma State University who had written some cool stuff on HyperGyny, an upward marriage in India and China, especially in India. And sort of what people were trying to do in marrying their kids up. And who else? There was another human talk. There were just three or four human talks and a whole bunch of non-human talks, all at the same meeting with 600 people in the audience, including Hamilton and Williams and a lot of the top people in animal behavior. And only got a good reception there. I mean, it didn't run to anybody saying it's preposterous. We're taking this approach with homo sapiens, the cultural and thoughtful animal or some stupid thing. Nobody said that. Do you think anything has changed since the founding of the field? I mean, you mentioned that it had the support of luminaries in biological theory like Hamilton and Trivers and Williams. Do you think that we continue to have that support or has a dwindled? It's an interesting question. I mean, Hamilton's death was a painful blow. George Williams, this was another. I don't think we need this support of luminous neurologists in the same way. I mean, certain people lead an in John among them, David Bus, Doug Ken, and Rick fought the good fight of submitting evolution to the mind of papers to the goddamn psychological journals until they took them. There were years and years and years where evolution mind in this was beyond the pale and the journal of personality and social psychology. And then it wasn't anymore. And every issue at least contains a paper or two by somebody who's thinking evolutionarily, usually reasonably sophisticated at least. So yeah, things have changed in that regard. I think most psychologists have wrapped their mind around the idea that sure evolution must have something to do with the psyche. I mean, maybe I don't see why it's relevant to my particular interest in some whatever. But that it has legitimate relevance to psychology, I think, is pretty widely accepted. I think I hope maybe I don't travel or not. Definitely more so. There's definitely a pro-- I'd like to see more acceptance and integration of evolutionary perspectives. But yeah, there's definitely-- it's become more accepted, more mainstream, more-- less controversial. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, psychology-- well, there are whole fields of psychology that all of us don't pay any attention to. But I mean, scientific psychology was never our problem. I mean, the battles are harder for the cultural anthropologists or have been-- there's the more outright antipathy. the biology there. But, you know, she's still to this day. I marvel at the fact that there were and are people like, no longer are in the case of Stephen J. Goode, but, you know, biologists who, you know, the minute you talk about homo sapiens, you're obviously some kind of fascist or some, you know, evil person. I can't figure out what's going on between their ear first, what their problem is. So, in, so we're at 1978, is the, oh, sorry, Martin, go ahead. Oh, you're okay, great. So, we're at 1978. What is the, what, where, so each human behavior ecology, HBE, and evolutionary psychology, for my generation, which is a generation after Clark, you know, I grew up in the aftermath of sort of Rob Boyd and John Tubi being at loggerheads. And we said of joke about that amongst the my generation of students of theirs, you know, Christina Moyanna, I joke about that. That's a, that's my way of expressing, I grew up in a, a world where evolutionary psychology and human behavior, all ecology were, were slightly pitted against each other. But I realize as you're saying, they're the same field. And I think my generation sort of feels the same way. Good. 1978. What was, what was, was there the beginning of attention between those two or where did that come from? Yeah, that's, that's a really interesting question. If there was, I wasn't picking up on it. But there may have been, you know, the, the earliest glimmers I can sort of remember was when Margo and I were editing the journal, evolution and human behavior, which didn't, which was only beginning in 1996, I think, to 2006. We, we did the editing and then other people took over. At that time, it was certainly on the table. Like I remember going to H best meetings and a number of anthropologists were sort of this, this society is becoming dominated by psychologists. We need a different society. We don't want any part of this. And the ones who were sticking around were sometimes just as critical and difficult. I mean, we would every year we would have to try to the editors report from the past year of what? What's the missions we've had? What the acceptance rates were and stuff? And you had to fight this prejudice that, oh, you know, it's, the journal is full of psych because it's got psychological editors. And you say, well, you know, actually the acceptance rate is higher for papers from anthropologists than from psychologists than it always was. And I mean, for year after year after year after it wasn't. I don't think it's because we were biased in favor of the anthropologists. I think it's because you got more small quick and dirty stuff from psychologists. Yeah, because of doing psychological research or much lower than doing fewer. Yeah, a lot of people thought, man, I can dash off a paper from, you know, what I farted last week. You know, and then those would get rejected. But in any case, you know, we had this business of like how many times do I have to tell Ruth Mace that the editorial board is not discriminating against anthropologists? And here are the data. And that would come up a lot. And yeah, so certainly by the nine, by the mid 90s, late 90s, that was becoming visible to me. I don't think I was aware of it much earlier. A lot of the, a lot of the young anthropologists who are involved at the time that HBES was founded had trouble getting jobs in the field. You know, and there's different, there's, there's different periods of freeze of availability of positions in different disciplines a bit. But, you know, so, so the people who were enthusiasts in the first few years of of HBES, the anthropological enthusiasts mostly didn't get jobs. Laura Bettson never got a job. Paul Turk didn't get a job and went back to medical school and became a pediatrician. Nancy Barette didn't get a job. There were lots of good, there were lots of Mark Flynn did and that was like a big deal. So that may have fueled some sense of resentment. I don't know. But I still always sort of think of, you know, most of the anthropologists I knew, well, or the other event that's interesting in this regard is because the most anthropologists I knew were quite favorable to psychology. But maybe that's because that's why I knew them maybe in that, you know, I think of Don Simon's in particular. And Don made a number of enemies within anthropology by criticizing what he called Darwinian anthropology. And what he was really after was he was criticizing primarily the notion that the acid test of an evolution minus hypothesis is to count reproductive output. And, you know, that that's the way you had to test things. And he was highly critical of that. And some people were highly critical of him. Not all of the anthropologists, Dick Alexander was really pissed off at him for that. Not so much because he disagreed is because he thought it was unfair that Don tried to out people like Laura Bettsig who were looking for jobs as prime examples of this fallacy, this malicious approach. But, you know, pick on someone your own size was sort of his complaint. But, yeah, there was that kind of tension. But I didn't see it as the human behavior ecology. We do human behavior likeology and we are different from psychologists. And we are insulted by you calling us psychologists and see it until later. In terms of what your Margo and I wrote a paper in animal behavior that was a sort of review paper and invited paper. Human behavior as animal behavior we call it. And, which is sort of bringing the same approach to bear on homo sapiens as you do on other critters. And, the same conceptual approach and to some extent the same methodological approach. And, in that we made some illusion to evolutionary psychology and we said, you know, which is a term for present purposes we are going to use more broadly than is often done to include anything that involves addressing psychological questions from an evolutionary perspective regardless of discipline. Like if you are interested in foraging decisions and you are taking an evolution minded approach, then you are doing evolutionary psychology as we are defining it here. And, Kim Hill and Manique Borgherhoff, Molder and who else somebody else got really bento to say, oh Eric Alden, Smith of all people, that's really bento to shape about this. And, you know, we are not doing evolutionary psychology, we are doing something different to human behavior ecology. And, maybe that was 1990 and that was maybe the first quimmer I had that, that, you know, there was a problem here that there was some antipathy, some hostility within what I thought of as one feel. Yeah, there's a bit of a tension, what I'm hearing is that I imagine the people that were not taking an evolutionary approach or even a biological approach to psychology, my understanding of that literature was it was not ecological at all. Right, it was not bringing the ecology in and, you know, with the ethylogists that was starting, but then, you know, the World War II happened, but it sounds like, you know, the kind of education you were getting and the ecology came back and you were now applying ecology to human thinking in a way that, yeah. I guess so, I mean, there was, there was a field, I forget what the hell they did, ecological psychology. Yeah, it's a gas room. I mean, I actually tried to read some of it, but it's gone. Yeah, no, my mind. I tried to as well, it couldn't really make a child. It comes, I feel like that comes and goes and brings like that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm not quite sure what they meant by ecological, but they meant something about context and environment. Right. Anyway, no, I mean as I say, I've got, I got as a postdoc involved in a group of so-called socio-ecologists and that was largely a minority thing within animal behavior. I mean, the animal behavior society was my annual meeting. I've never been to a psych meeting. I've been to about three ever in my life. You know, I'm assuming that the human behavior in evolution society is not yet called a psychology meeting, even though to my great annoyance, if you Google the journal, it says the topic is evolutionary psychology, the topic of the journal, evolution of human behavior, evolutionary psychology, but it's just coming from outside psychology to, and in a way, I'm still a crappy psychologist. I mean, most of the research that I've done on human beings and that I've known for is more epidemiological. It's not, there's no human subjects involved. It's working from, you know, databases, demographic epidemiological kind of research rather so in a way, I mean, Margona used to go to criminology meetings and most of the other criminologists there were actually sociologists and they thought we were weird if we give them any detail at all about the sort of evolutionary rationales for some of our hypotheses, but they were interested in the same phenomena we were. So you know, you could talk and make friends and I still have some good friends who are sociologists. Whereas the number of our psychologists is more limited. I guess. Well, I mean, calling yourself crappy psychologists, but I think that, I mean, there's an argument that you are very prescient in the sense, and I think, you know, you're, well, obviously get to homicide at some point, but I mean, for me, my first exposure to you in Margot was, oh, my good, my thought was, this is a brilliant insight, which is, you foresaw the replication crisis or the triviality of experimental effects long before many other psychologists, and you were looking at and saying, look, here is, here's a phenomenon out in the world. We have good data for. There's not reporting bias. So I mean, without going fully into homicide, I would just, I would like to correct the record of you saying your crappy psychologists. Okay. Well, I'm not a mainstream psychologist. Right. Right. I've seldom been interested in the psyche. I mean, most of the, almost all the experimental work I've done has been with rodents. I've done a little bit, mostly at Margot's instigation. We did a little bit of human, human subjects research in the lab, the lab. Right. But, yeah. I would even disagree there. I mean, just reading your work, I think there's a lot of psychological sophistication in your work. It's very easy to caricature the stuff going on inside the head after looking at some of these results from homicide data. Right. It would have been very easy to say, you know, we have a drive to murder, non-related offspring or any other silly idea like that. But that, you know, you didn't take that role. You took a much more nuanced sophisticated take where, you know, these are not adaptations. We're dealing with these are byproducts of other systems in the mind that have different functions and these outcomes sometimes emerges a byproduct of the normal workings of those systems. And so I saw a lot of nuance into the psychology in your work. Well, thank you. Yeah. No, I mean, you're right. We were thinking about the mind. I mean, you know, it's just that I'm never quite sure what to do with some of the constructs that I think are actually central both to our work and to actual human minds. Like, you know, male sexual proprietaryness was one of Margot's Fave terms. Discriminative parental solicitude is another catch phrase that were known for a bit. And I guess, well, Dave has criticized the concept of modularity and I was never fond of a deal. And I could never, I get it. I believe that there are, you know, I don't know what the right word is, channels in the mind. There are things that connect that readily to other things. And that's the part for reasons that's a past selection. But I've still no very good idea of what the right language for talking about that stuff is. And I confess, I haven't paid a lot of attention to efforts to find it. You know, it's funny. John Alita and David Bus and Margot and I spent a year in 1990, 1991, I guess it was at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford. And actually, Alita and John proposed a group there. And it was those five people, them, Margot, me and David Bus and Don Simons in their proposal. But whoever runs the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, nixed Simons. I think they did so on the basis of the fact that he just didn't have that many publications, which was done. But anyway, the original fantasy when we had this thing was that we would somehow collaborate on writing a book about a sort of agenda setting book for Evesite. And then we had endless discussions where we disagreed on silly things that wouldn't get it like, Margot and I just wouldn't have the use of the word instinct or innate. We didn't like it. We come out of an animal behavior background and it's under on all this criticism for what we consider good reasons decades earlier. Why are we resonating? Why are we resurrecting this concept of innateness? We didn't like it. John Alita thought it was absolutely essential. I don't know what Bus thought. He basically just vacated himself from these conversations after all. I went to his own cubicle and wrote papers. But anyway, this never happened. On the other hand, the book, the Adaptive Mine got largely hatched during that year. So there were things accomplished and some of them were collaborative among us all. But it was funny that we couldn't get off the ground on low level concepts. Okay, so we all believe evolution is somehow central to thinking properly about psychology, but how the hell do we light this out? We never arrived at a consensual perspective on that. Yeah. People have since. Yeah. But that time was the idea that you are coming from this larger meeting of the evolutionary behavioral sciences. And you were still part of it, but you wanted to start talking to psychologists who weren't taking evolution approach. Or was it that there was dissatisfaction with that meeting in that it wasn't psychological enough? Or is that an ill-posed question? That may have been the case for Lita and John. There was a feeling that wanted to get the focus more psychological. I mean, there were quite messianic about cognitive approach in conjunction with an evolutionary approach is the way to go. And I guess, I'm more sympathetic to that now that I was at the time. It was kind of like Jesus, did we really need the cognitive revolution that seemed like a step back from behaviorism sometimes. As I felt then, as a guy who had an ill behavior and sort of understanding why the behaviorist revolution against simple minded cognitiveism had happened in the first place. Interesting. This is making sense to your audience and you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do you still harbor some of those feelings about innateness, instinct, cognitive and computational models? Are those studies with you? I feel like I'm a cognitive and computational model. I do still dislike the concept of innateness. I dislike it for. It's for its implication, at least in the minds of most people who hear it, that developmental processes are irrelevant and interesting that there is, and perhaps even that there is no actual input from anything else during development. I mean, that's what it classically meant, and it still sort of sounds that way a lot when people talk about this instinct or that instinct. It's just, you know, feed them an appropriate diet and let them grow up and there it'll be. And you see, is this helpful to leave out ontogeny? It seems to disontogeny, dismiss it as not part of what we're interested in. Yeah, I agree. It's an excellent, yeah, yeah. It's an extremely misleading folk concept that I think, you know, generates more confusion than insight. I would love to have Dave write a paper against an ate miss. I'm sure there are papers out there that criticize this concept. I think Annie wants to. I think Annie and Christina, we actually thought about having Christina Moyan in works on as they're sort of, I feel like the, and they have a great paper in behavioral processes about it. I think some of their content, contentful work. But yeah, I think the, the, the idea of an ate miss. I, Martin, I told David this that when I first encountered evolutionary psychology, I thought it was stupid because I understood it as assigning known phenomena to latent variables called instincts with no insight beyond that, right? And that was my understanding, like language instinct. Well, we know there's language. It's an instinct. I, you know, as an undergrad, that was my first exposure. Yeah. And yet actually, you know, of all Steve Baker's books, the language instinct is my favorite stuff. Yeah, me too. No, me too, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah, no. Once you read it, it's clear that that's not the approach. But yeah, no, just the word itself was, was, yes. The word itself didn't, didn't do any good. Certainly, you know, I'm just, I'm just being the animal behavior guy who was trained in the 70s. I mean, it was like, you know, we had the critiques of conrad, Valorancy, and instinct theory. And they carried the day. Right. The critiques had carried the day. And then, you know, it just felt like, geez, what are we resurrecting this concept for? What was the critique just that the phenotype is a process and contingent in that the goal of science is to articulate that complex contingency? I guess that's a, that's not a bad way to put things. Yeah, I think that's, that's largely it because the critique was kind of, um, infernist. I don't think it's unfair to say that for Laurence, at least, not for Tim Burton, but for some of the other early ethylogists, invoking instinct was saying that there is no developmental process of interest, no developmental process at all. There is a thing in the brain, there is an organ. It, you know, like I said before, you know, you just, you just feed the baby, the appropriate nutrients in the organ goes. And it was always framed in nature in terms of returns. You know, does the animal know how to do this without learning it? And if the animal knows how to do this without learning it, then, you know, it's instinct. And I still don't know how to talk about this kind of thing properly. I mean, I used to study an animal, um, sometimes referred to as the fat sandrat, um, a, desert rodent that eats the leaves of, uh, of very salty desert plants. Um, and it belongs to a family of gerbals where everybody else eats seeds or insects, and they leaves. And they are very specialized for this. And then when I got a job in California, my first academic job was at UC Riverside, um, there was a parallel radiation in kangaroo rats in, and there was one species, um, microp, stifomi's microps, who does the same thing. They eat plants of the same family. Um, they, the leaves and all other kangaroo rats. And there's like 28 other species, um, or so, um, each seeds. And I, I thought these animals were very interesting. I brought them into the lab. I studied them. And, uh, you could feed them on a diet of lettuce and seeds, and they thrive. They seem to be okay. Um, but then if you have raised one in captivity, when you handed it one of these salt bush leaves for the first time as an adult, had had never seen it before, it would drop it and come back to it and drop it and come back to it. And then suddenly pick it up and do exactly what the adults do with it, which is quite complicated. They stick out their lower jaw like an under bite and they hold the leaf in both hands and drag it down over their lower incisors, scraping off the hyper-sailing up tissue that goes flying in all directions. And then they flip it around and do the same on the other side and then they eat the interior. And, you know, you see an adult who will do this, who has never seen one of these leaves before and it's white. And you've handed it to it for the first time and it goes, what the hell is this? What's this? What's this? Here's what I do with it. It's the way you're talking about this. They have been selected to do this. This is their job. This is their, you know, etc. So okay, I get why people talk about instincts. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. I just think that, you know, as soon as you start using the term at all broadly, it becomes unhelpful. Yeah. It's very much especially. Oh, dude. Yeah. And to an organ whose very purpose is contingency, right? The whole reason it's there is to take input from the environment and respond intelligently and strategically to that input. The organ you're talking about is the brain? I think that's what I was talking about. Martin, what I am hearing you say too in terms of what you're describing is that your view, and you can correct me if this wrong, was that the evolutionary sciences and biological sciences, it was sort of taking this idea that we have a theory that can explain dynamic relationships. So if this selection pressure is true, we should see this distribution here. And even when you, something like data from homicide, you know, you can just say, look, these data should relate to these data here. So what I'm hearing you say is that you're thinking about the mind, you're triangulating on what that contingency phenotype is, but the data you're using are these things out in the real world, right? Yeah. I mean, that brings me to a whole slightly different topic, but it's, but it's, I'm probably one of the more skeptical people you'll meet about the utility of self-report data. I mean, obviously they're used and they are often valuable and all that, but I think people, it's not just that people why when you ask them questions, they also can't access their own minds very well. And you know, there's decades of research going back to a classic paper by Nisbeth Wilson in '77, showing that when you ask people to explain their preferences or their choices or their behavior in some way, they will immediately spout a sincere, convincing sounding account of why they did what was what they did. That experimentally can be demonstrated to be post-hot, bony that they, you know, you can manipulate it and shove it around in ways that they're unaware of. And often they had no explanation until the question was right, and then they, you know, form it on the spot. So I have a long history of sort of collaborating with people who are debunking self-report data in one way or another, showing that they were inconsistent, showing that, you know, people who said something at one time, apparently sincerely, two years later, or said something that contradicted their past with respect to what that had happened to them with what they'd seen previously. You know, that people who claim certain kinds of experiences a week later, they may have forgotten and claim the opposite. And so I've never liked just, you know, asking people stuff. And I've never been crazy about things like sexual orientation inventories and things like that. I get it's interesting. that you get sex differences that you get correlated with other stuff. But if you start taking them too much of face value, then you're being a bit credulous because people talk as behavior too and stuff comes spill and od people's mouths and we should study it with as much detachment as we study anything else. So I've never tried working on much on human self report data because I've always been a bit jaundice about it, I guess. And I get that sometimes all you can do. I find it funny that some human behavioral ecologists have sort of critiqued psychologists as depending on, you know, we study what people do rather than just what they say. You've probably heard that from some human behavior really colleges too. And it's like, actually look at any of your bloody studies and they depend on your say to, you know, you ask these people, if they've got any children, how many children they've got, you asked them this, you asked them that, you wrote it down, you believed it, you analyzed it. What you actually saw was seldom terribly much, you know, which is not to dis the people who have, you know, painstakingly followed a hunting group into the forest and measured what they got. But just, you know, everybody is to some degrees seducable by, or if you like, just dependent on the utterances of other human beings for their understanding of what those other human beings are up to. Unless you're, unless you're a human esophagus study of preverbal children. Right, you know, yeah, I mean, what's lovely about the data set you work with is that it is not subject to these critiques. There's a wonderful line from the mask of Zoro that I'm remembering where the bad guy tracks down Zoro. He's pretending that he's not Zoro. He has like some alter ego. And then he rips off his shirt and reveals like a bloody sleeve where he got cut. And he says, blood never lies Zoro. But I think the same is true of your data. Blood never lies. You know, you know, yeah, I'm a side was, I was actually Margot's brainwave that we should study homicide. I thought she was out of her mind at first. What was the context? Oh, yeah, yeah, we'd started doing this stuff on child mal treatment, stimulated by a graduate student at Riverside. And then you get the criticism that well, you know, there's reporting biases who detects, who detects child mal treatment, who gets reported. If you find that step parents are more likely abuse children, it's probably because they're more likely to be reported and recorded. And you know, that might be so. And then she's how do you get around that? And then we have, well, actually in these big data sets of abuse children, there's a small number who are killed. In those cases, if the step parent effect is even bigger in those cases than the others, then you say, well, gee, that doesn't sit well with the idea that it was due to reporting bias, because there should be the least reporting bias in these most extreme cases, like lethal ones. That was where we first ever did anything with homicide. And then Margot, we moved to back to Canada to southern Ontario in 1978 from California. And somewhere around then Margot says, you know, we should study homicide more generally. It's like, it should be a great window on human conflicts and human passions. And I was like, what? No? And I didn't get it. And she says, you know, well, just down the road from us is this video of Detroit. At this time, which it was true that they have more homicides in Detroit every year than they do in the whole of Canada. And there's a single police force investigates them. We should see if the Detroit police will let us in at the homicide files. And anyway, we wrote a letter to the chief of police and the chief of police was actually a sort of figurehead guy. I can't remember his name now, but he was somebody who did all the sort of PR stuff in the public meetings. But the guy who actually ran the place was the deputy chief of police. He guy named James Banner. And so they sent the deputy chief of police. The chief sent our letter to the deputy chief. The deputy chief had a PhD in sociology. He did quantitative research on police-based data himself. I mean, we were incredibly lucky. He says, well, this is interesting. Come on down top. And so he went down chat with him and he introduces the head of the homicide division. And we were shortly thereafter we're sort of sitting in the homicide division listening to them interviewing suspects at the same time as we're rummaging through their case files because they didn't have a lot of space. And after we'd rummaged through the case files a bit and sort of looked up what information is collected by the police and the interviews they do. And it's like, this stuff is a gold mine. There's a so interesting. Well, maybe we could do this. Maybe we could do that. And we got hooked on it. We got absolutely hooked on it. And to this day I think we never would have we never would have carried on with this research but hadn't been for the fact the deputy chief of police and Detroit at that time was an unusual deputy chief of police. Amazing. Yeah. I have to say the intro chapter of the homicide is I think if one were to take all of the foundational work of applying evolution to human behavior and stitch it the most eloquent and beautiful writing. And if I had new students to read I think that's one of the the patches and that quilts is that it's just beautiful and it's so logical. It's completely evergreen and timeless. It's still as perfectly appropriate today which is not always true for work for any of our work. Yeah. Well thank you. I really appreciate that. Yeah, no, I'm proud of that book. So this day I mean my god it's 38 years ago now. But yeah, no, I'm still I'm still proud of that book and it it. No, one one thing that's sort of nice to say about the Academy about the scientific enterprise broadly the social scientific enterprise broad. But is as weird as Darwinism was to most criminological researchers. That book. God is in that door too. You know we started going to criminology meetings people you know Margo and I were on the founding editorial board of the journal Homicide Studies. Would it appear a few years later? When Margo died there was some memorial issue of homicide studies to her and it's the only one they've ever done in the history of the journal. And you know people who are interested in just phenomena. Everybody's everybody's a pretty good into an evolutionary psychologist in a way they you know they get that men value status and compete with one another and that being dist is a problem to which men often react and that you know they don't actually like the alienation of their wives either and you know people and that children are cherished and that a threat to your child can make you become a much more potent and perhaps even dangerous person than you ever imagined you could. And you know people get that people live among people they almost can't help it. When you're writing that work is it that you're are you reminding everybody of what they already know in that sense in the sense of I think an evolutionary approach sort of licenses us to re-see with clarity what we might otherwise want to attribute to some highfalutin ideology it's sort of the self-report thing right like we make up a narrative that it's about this completely. certainly and also it also I mean the thing that's still Shocks, many people who have been raised with a sort of standard social science model, is the idea that there's an awful lot across cultural universality to motives and human nature and what excites and interests people. And a lot of people have been conned into believing that somehow having been raised in the particular place made them care about all the things that everybody, everywhere, cares about. And so there's an element of that. And of course, there are surprises. There are things that you just never thought through in advance, you know, you sort of say, "Well, you know, here's a rash for now for thinking that the risk to children as a function of their age at the hands of their parents would be different at the hands of the father and the mother. And we can collect the data to see if that is so, and we had an appriot at rationale for thinking it. And, you know, here it is. And there's certainly lots of stuff like that that's, you know, a little more in the realm of, you know, we don't know where he goes. Yeah. You know, subsequently, I mean, after Margot's death, I wrote one more homicide book on, well, it's much more of the alley of the things that sociologists were traditionally interested in, namely why our homicide breaks so variable between different countries or places. And I want to pin it overwhelmingly on inequitable access to resources and the ensuing competitiveness that comes from inequitable access to resources and the more unequal the worse the violence tends to be. And there are aspects of that that, well, they're still being argued. I mean, you know, there, I've had any number of people who don't want to believe, now this is partly funded by the people who are beneficiaries of extreme inequality, but they don't want to believe that inequality per se creates any problems. There are real problems come from the fact that, you know, when there's high inequality, there happen to be a bunch of poor people and being poor is bad, yeah, you know, if we give you the more money to Jeff Bezos, then no one will be poor. You know, there's that sort of mentality still out there. See, it's still fight fights with people that, you know, believe the data will come out in a different way if we do X than I suspect they will. And, you know, I think I'm winning those battles, but there are people who will fight me on that. So certainly not just, you know, well, we really everybody knows this and here it is. Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, sometimes there's no one that's not. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I don't think we would, I mean, be doing this if it wasn't a deductive logic. And that's why we, you know, for David and I, that's why we, it's helpful, right? If you're interested in something, it gives you teeth and meaningful deductive logic for predicting things or, you know, hypotheses. Yeah. Yes, science. Yes, yes. Exactly. You can't help us. You might actually test against reality. Yes, exactly. Maybe inequality is a way into this, but the most recent thing, I think people might be wondering, well, how does an organism know it's an unequal environment? No. That's a great question. And I think there's been two little work on it. I mean, no, you know, in the sense of how does inequality get under the skin? When does it get under the skin? Does, you know, inequality, I mean, one window on this kind of thing is the time lags of the effects of inequality on behavior. If you can show that inequality is predictive in like cross-national or cross-city or whatever studies of some behavior will outcome. Time lags might be informative as regards whether well-experience, any, experiencing inequality and childhood matter is experiencing recent inequality matter as the huge amount of consequences of inequality over decades matter. In a highly unequal society, are there even, you know, transmittable effects from mum, whether in her womb or from her experience? You know, I mean, those questions can be asked and there's a little bit of effort to ask them, but not enough as far as I'm concerned. You know, if you accept it at all, there's toxic effects of inequality. How does that work exactly? Is an underexplored question for sure. It's an underexplored question in the health field too. People have their hypotheses. There's some people who are strongly convinced that the health effects of inequality, the negative health effects of inequality are all mediated by stress hormones and there's some of the people who don't, but yeah, I mean, there's a crap load of great questions to be asked about. So how does that work? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes people, like you as evolutionary psychologists, with a little bit of fairness of not being interested in that, of just, you know, I can see a logic by which this variable should be predictive of that variable. And yeah, here it is. And yeah, but how does that work? And how is it mediated? Well, we're, all right. And often highly relevant to ameliorating any negative consequences. Yeah. Although in our defense, I think there's a Marvin Minsky quote, if you can't look for something till you have the idea of it. And so if somebody's criticism is, well, yeah, but how does that work? That's great. That's the next step. That's like, yes. Yeah. Yeah. No. Have you thought about you, psychologist step in? Yeah. Ideally. Yeah. Have you thought about the different dimensions of inequality? Because certainly inequality of wealth or resources is deeply intertwined with inequality in power. And certainly one leads to the other such that if some people have disproportionate access to designing the rules of the game, they will design the rules so as to privilege them and get themselves more stuff and prevent other people from taking that stuff, right? 50/50. Okay. Go the other way. Go the other way. I mean, there's an element of all to this in here. Sure. So I'm wondering, do you see this more as inequality of resources per se or whether inequality of power is more at the heart of it such that if people see that the only way to get ahead is to be connected to the right people and otherwise you're screwed, then they might be more inclined to take more of a risky, violent strategy because that's really one of the only options they have of getting ahead. If they view themselves as being shut out of an unfair system, do you view the power aspect of it as more relevant than the resource aspect? Possibly. Yeah, no, that's a fair way to put it and not just power, but there's resources and resources. You know, often all the measures you've got are economic, but the economic may not be everything that matters. There's been a little bit of a fuss about that because a couple of criminologists a number of years ago made the claim that inequality matters in modern societies, but it doesn't matter in open quotes, primitive quotes, quotes societies and with, in predicting violence. And I mean, they're basis for this argument was crap, but they didn't sort of think of inequality as being instantiated in any interesting manner other than economic inequality. It's like, you know, highly unequal system, like if one guy's got six wives and five guys are perpetrators, that's more unequal than more everybody. And maybe it's more unequal and a more fundamentally important way, even than the dollars in the pocket. And you know, there's interesting issues there. What exactly is the inequality that people are sensitive to? How you apprehend the concept of inequality of power? Like sometimes it just takes the form of, geez, a lot of people around here make it out like band that doesn't include me. You know, because often if you lack power, you also lack a great deal of knowledge of how anything works around here. Other than that, you know, other people seem to be set in the agenda. And yeah, I think that's absolutely central to why some people become highly risk prone and potentially dangerous if they have the wherewithal to do so. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, the more that resources become captured by the political process, the more resources turn into a zero sum game. is competition for political power is zero. Whereas in theory, You could have a win-win relationship where we both get richer by exchanging and creating wealth together. But if how much wealth you have depends on your connections and there are limited opportunities for win-win gains and for social mobility, then it may be that violence becomes a more rational strategy. So maybe there's something about the zero sumeness of the social context as well. - Yeah, and I think you're quite bright and it's interesting to highlight the fact that both go on that is to say there are positive sum games and zero sum games being played all around us all the time. There are the idea of gains for trade isn't just propaganda from some free trader. But it really exists. And at the same time, yeah, as you say there's only so many people can get to set the agenda for a group that you happen to belong to or maybe only one person. Yeah, unequal. I mean, how do you conceptualize power? Do you think ideally? - Yeah, I mean, it's a tricky question. I'm not sure. - Or operationalize, I guess I should say power. - Yeah. - I mean, that sort of open quotes, natural quotes, quotes, ecology where you're not talking about strong institutions and what you're just talking about differential power in social groups and social interaction and families even. - Yeah, I mean, I wish I had a good answer to the question. - I mean, I'm not kind of thinking like differential attention, structures, who has always looked to, whenever there's a behavioral decision to be made, all that kind of stuff. - Yeah, that would be a brand of buzzer and John Patton's answer. I mean, there's also I think a thing of, there's people who have power, but there's also then sort of where the rubber hits the road, where is there a conflict or are you getting screwed over? Right, so there might be a symmetries in power, but I feel like if I have a need, I have a conflict. I've got a problem, my child is sick or, you know, if it gets resolved, that's different than if the power is making it so that I can't feed my kids, or you know, my child is sick, but the other kids are fine. And it's because power is preventing that from happening. So I think like the on the ground cues of, I'm getting screwed over, is sort of, that's the kind of power that we should care about, especially in the sense of that's why, this unequal treatment of sort of feeling like you're, there's really a bad fitness, relevant situation here that is socially caused, and it's not just sort of an act of God. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is sort of what I meant by saying, you know, the mindset of some people who become dangerous, or people who carry a weapon and are ready to use it, is somebody's make it out like a bandit or a hearing and make them me, you know, that's exactly what I'm talking about. - Yeah, and then it's a social solution. Yeah, somebody is, the solution to this really bad situation is changing the social structure, yeah. - Yeah, redistribution of power, preferably in my direction. - Exactly, yeah. - And it's only this way, it makes sense. - Having a gun is the, is the sense to take a part in it. - The same social system and just put me on top. - Yeah, exactly. - Exactly. - Yes. - Yeah, usually if you're near the bottom, that is not a realistic hope. - I'm curious, with these trends you're finding between inequality and violence, is it just a violence in general? Is it within class or between class? Is it aggression from the have-nots against the haves or is it more of a generalized strategy of violence? - Yeah, no much, much more of, again, among the have-nots against the have-nots other have-nots than against the haves. And some people have, have trotted that fact. That would have kind of a criticism for the idea that it's got anything to do with inequality. It's like, well, if the people at the bottom were really, you know, upset about being at the bottom, then they'd, you know, they'd seek out and kill the top. And you say, what would actually be kind of a dumb strategy? Nothing leads to more certain negative consequences than going after someone much more powerful than yourself. I mean, if you, if hierarchy matters, the people you most have to worry about are the people just below you and the people who you most wanna inflict some costs on other people just above you. I mean, I think people seem to react that way to who their conflicts are, not to, and of course, it's also largely just that they're in the same universe, neighborhood in your face. But, but yeah, no, it's, again, this, there's really interesting questions that have never been addressed. One is that's related to what you're talking about is stuff like, if, let me get, let me gather my thoughts for a second. If inequality leads to greater violence, does inequality at the top matter at all or is it all inequality at the bottom? You can partition inequality across, say, an income distribution. And you can ask, there are even measures for doing this. You can ask, it's the homicide rate heavily dependent upon inequality at the bottom, but unaffected by inequality at the top or is it somewhat affected by inequality at the top? Nobody's done it. Nobody's done the major great question because I think, that's the fact that there are billionaires, fuel resentment at the bottom or does nobody care that there are billionaires. - What is the fuel resentment? Does the fuel resentment among the millionaires? - Yeah, well that's a good question. - Yeah. - I mean, does a fuel resentment that actually turns into violence, or just like nobody cares about, there being billionaires, if they redistributed their wealth, there were a whole bunch of hundred millionaires instead of some billionaires and other millionaires. - Right. - That wouldn't matter or would it? Does knowing, does knowing that somebody's that rich have anything to do with why the poor are disgruntled? - Right, yeah. As opposed to just saying a lot, as opposed to that is also a consequence of a structure where if your kid gets cancer, you might lose your home. So like, you gotta tease these apart, right? Like if you, the two by two sell of, that's a reality versus not a reality versus, there's a millionaire with that reality versus, there's a billionaire with that reality. There's a billionaire with that not happening. Do people care the same or is it all driven by the billionaire or the cancer? - I mean, it's, and relatedly, there's the whole issue of, does knowing all this weird stuff about people you don't actually know. How much does it affect your mental models? This is really important in an internet age. - Yeah. - You think maybe the human mind is well adapted to responding reasonably appropriately to social information from a universe of known persons and encountered, not very well known persons. But in a world where everybody seems to be paying attention to people they don't know and knows a lot about a lot of them. What the hell does that do to their mental models of society and appropriate sociality and stuff? Those are interesting questions. I guess really I am actually interested in psychology. (laughing) - Turns out, yeah. - Yeah. I mean, is the model you're working with, would it make different predictions about inequality at the bottom versus the topic? 'Cause I know there's work on what's called fractal inequality, where if you look at like the guinea coefficient among rich people, it turns out that the gap between millionaires and billionaires is just as big as the gap between poor people and middle class people. If you zoom in on any part of the wealth distribution, you'll get similar gaps between rich and poor no matter which part of the distribution you zoom in on so that there is vast inequality, even among billionaires, even among millionaires. And would you predict that the inequality you see at the top would also correlate with more risky aggressive like maybe more white color crime and among the richer part of the distribution or something like that, or is the specific to the bottom end of the distribution where the stakes are much higher if you fall to the bottom? - Well, there's desperation. There is the issue of, you know, what have I got to lose? You know, you know, there's a whole line from Bob Dylan. when you got nothing you got nothing to lose. And so, you know, you wade into social circumstance. I remember Rob Boyd, you mentioned Rob Boyd saying to me that he was a keen rock climber. And when they had their first kid, suddenly it stopped seem thrilling and started seeming stupid. To free to freehand hold climb on places where you could really do yourself some damage. And you know, when you got something to lose, maybe your attitude to risk changes a lot. Yeah. In which case being rock bottom is really where the action is as regards becoming crazy dangerous. Yeah. And that, I mean, that comes out of even just, you know, risk-considered forging theory to bring it back to the evolution biology, right? It does indeed. Interesting. Zooming out a bit, as you've, you know, witnessed the story of evolutionary psychology evolve. Have you been pleased by how the field has changed over the years? Have you been displeased? Are there trends that you think have gone in a positive direction or in a negative direction? How do you view the overall story and change that you've lived through? That's interesting. I wasn't expecting this question. It takes me a second to sort of gather my thoughts on it. But, you know, there are things that are disappointments. I'm disappointed by the extent to which one group of evolutionists sometimes becomes alienated from another group of evolutionists for what seem like petty reasons. And the usual sort of problems with anything that, you know, it's sort of disappointing to the point of heartbreaking sometimes that there's insight among people who ought to be allies. I'm heartened by the breadth of acceptance of evolutionary approaches, but slightly horrified by the antipathy that still comes from a surprisingly large number of literalist religious people, not just here. They have Darwin Day in Iran. They celebrate Darwin Day in Iran, a small group in Tehran. They have a meeting every year. I spoke at it last year. I wasn't in Tehran. I spoke at it remotely. And they were a great bunch. They're mostly psychologists and philosophers actually who do Darwin Day in Tehran. And they, you know, they were, they ask good questions. It was a great session. I actually forged a collaboration with a couple of young Iranians who have been doing some, you know, Gretchen and I had in the talk we gave a little tangent about cousin marriage and the interesting fact that cousin marriage could have all sorts of unexplored effects, what we were mainly talking about, which was the Metro-Adurabias and investment investing more in your daughters' kids than your sons' kids. And some Iranians in the audience, for like, yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of cousin marriage in Iran still. There's, there's all different kinds of cousin marriage, although, although some are more common than others. And we can investigate this with questionnaire studies, which I thought was just fine. And we got what's standing my previous remarks. And so anyway, we've got a collaboration for this. Anyway, Darwin Day in Iran had to be canceled this year because of the events in Iran. I mean, Darwin Day was last week, February 12th. And they were going to celebrate this year at 2026. They were going to make the central theme of this year's meeting the 50th anniversary of Richard Dawkins' book, Selfish Jeans Publication. I guess it was pretty widely read and translated, perhaps more than most other things that we think of as seminal. And, you know, had had an influence on people in Iran and elsewhere. And that was going to be the central theme for this year's meeting, but this year's meeting had to be canceled. Now, that's not a religious crack down on Darwinists. And it's actually sort of a surprise I hadn't realized this before, but within Islam, the, the division that the Iranian clerics belong to is much more accepting of evolution than the other main division, which is Shiites, which is Sunnis. Anyway, they're the Shiites, right? Yeah. They're much more accepting of evolution than the Sunnis are apparently, but that, you know, there are religions and God help us there in the USOA too, in which, you know, evolution is evil and wrong, and some of them may even have influence over the future of educational policy in the US and the near future of educational policy in the US. That's terrifying and disappointing and crazy. We felt like, I guess I used to believe that we, the progress was more nearly when you're, or at least, you know, monotonic than it is. And some of the setbacks to the agenda of just evolutionary psychology, but science, medical research, everything. Our human can be pretty shocking. Those are things to be disappointed about in a larger scale. Epsych itself, I think, is pretty robust. I used to say, and I still sort of believe that, you know, the day we know we've succeeded is the day you just dropped the evolutionary from what you're, from the label, you know, you're doing psychology. Well, of course, if you're doing psychology, you're doing it half decently. You better know a bit about Darwinism and have thought a bit about the relevance of past selection to whatever the hell you're interested in. Of course. And, and, you know, I think we will get there. Yeah. In terms of the evolutionary biology and anthropology parts, how are those parts doing? I wish I knew. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my, my best friends among evolutionary biologists, my closest acquaintances are deceased. George Williams was a close friend. Bill Hamilton was a friend. They're one god. But the people I know, like the University of America's professor at who pursue their various biological interests, I mean, they're doing fine. The evolution-minded study of the behavior of nonhuman animals is doing fine. I think John Alcock, look, the triumph of sociobiology was not premature, actually. And it's, God knows how long ago now. But that, you know, there was the sociobiology controversy cooked up by some biologists and the sociobiological approach that is to say the evolution-minded approach to the, or the selectionist, if you like, approach to the study of behavior prevailed. And it's over. You know, and the opposition is gone. And that's good. I don't know what an anthropologist would say. I mean, certainly again, we all know a lot of evolutionary anthropologists who seem to be busy in a thriving field, but the extent to which it's a sub-field or still encounters hostility, I don't know. Yeah. One question is, and you'd talked about the friends that you had, somebody like George Williams, my understanding was that his adaptation of natural selection book was sort of righteous anger about an issue, right? And I think even like the adapted mind was also in the spirit of righteous anger. And as a student of people, a descendant of these, in Don Simon's too, right? Like I think these were people who looked at the world and they had righteous anger about something they thought didn't make sense in the, they had a mission in they wanted to do it. And I sometimes wonder as the students' generations go down, sometimes if the students lose that either that feeling or that mission or that broad perspective. And I want to ask, I guess my question is, is that a fair characterization that these were people who, yeah, is that a fair characterization? Sure, I think so. I mean, you know, your friend Lita Cosmades is certainly capable of some righteous anger. I've told Lita that myself. I said, one of the, I told, I told Lita this all the time. It's one of the reasons I love Lita. Yes, exactly. Yes, because of her righteous anger. Yes, exactly. I mean, John Tubi was much more willing to just sort of accept the fact that different people thought different stuff. And in fact, he was open every crackpot theory, you could think of, but Lita was much more damn it. There's right answers to these things in these idiots. I've got them wrong. But, yeah, no, you're right. I mean, it's funny. George Williams is a very soft spoken and gentle guy who has never liked mean to anybody. But if you've read adaptation and that for selection right at the beginning, he talks about having listened to this lecture by who was at Emerson, one of the Hally group that was an implicitly or maybe explicitly group selection as a lecturer and being just so peeved about it. And then he says he berated his wife for Doris all the way home after he said about what was wrong with the lecture as if Doris would have stood up for it, which she wouldn't. But yeah, so righteous anger indeed. I mean, it's funny because I've never seen I never saw George seeming angry. But, yeah, he was, whereas I have seen Lita being seen me angry. But anyway, yeah, is it gone? Is it gone? Is it gone? I'm old and I'm less angry than I used to be. I guess. I don't know if I'm less angry than he is actually. Is it, I don't know about young people. I know a lot of people are angry about the state of the academy for reasons that are a little bit different. They have to do more with the withdrawal of funding and the corporatization and the lesser openness of the people in charge of some major universities to curiosity based research. Yeah. Yeah, do you need deliverables and a profitability and yeah, yeah, yeah. And that bothers me too. I mean, it's bad news and it's widespread and it's just an American phenomenon. That's for sure. I've seen it in Canada. I've seen it in New Zealand and I've heard about it in Europe. So there's that to be angry about, but what do you do with that anger? You fight different battles. I mean, if you're trying to act on that anger, then you're acting on it within the setting of the academy rather than the setting of your, you know, your field of specialization. Yeah, that's not where we want the anger to be directed. I mean, ideally, it could be channeled into something that we can all appreciate, something productive, you know, a new set of ideas. Well, I mean, if, if, if, yeah, and actually begin to effectively counter the corporatization of the university, for example, then that does very much where we want it directed, but, but yeah, I take the point. I mean, within a discipline, this, this ain't doing our particular discipline, any great service, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there are angry, young evolutionary psychologists. Sorry. Are you guys supposed to lie? I mean, I feel like fear is more the emotion than anger. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's, I think every, every generation you've sort of feel, you look around and you're like, what's going on? And what do we do? And I think it's, it's always different in the superficial, but I think in the deep structure, that's always the same problem, right? And I think just, I mean, I keep thinking about what you said about George Williams being writing an adaptation of the natural selection of the state of right to sanguine. It's like, okay, here's a guy who's thoughtful and smart and says, a prevailing, scarcely examined world view is screwing with biology. Yeah. And it needs to be explicitly confronted encounter. Yeah. And maybe those kinds of opportunities are rare to, to see clearly that a prevailing view in your discipline is wrong and why it's wrong and how to go about explaining why it's wrong to everybody else. Maybe those kinds of opportunities are vanishingly rare. I don't know. Or the people an alternative idea is that they're everywhere, but the kind of people who are willing to do that and see it are rare. Maybe. Yeah, no, that's a, that's a grim thought. I don't know if they're everywhere. I mean, preventing maybe there are no prevailing ideas anymore. You were just drowning in data and, yeah, I know. And yeah, and yeah, in not exactly conflicting, but different models. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of that. A lot of that. Yeah, I've, I've got angry in the past when I think about it, but I mean, I was angry at social psychology for being the social psychology of strangers for decades. When, you know, most of what the social psyche is about is acquaintances and relatives and friends and enemies, not not strangers. You know, like, what a dumb way to investigate fundamental social processes by always doing it where it's a stranger interaction that is the model that used to drive me crazy about social psychology. There must be other things that one could seize on like that. Where you'd say, damn it. This is an outrage. Yeah, I'm outraged. Yeah. I think it's lovely that I, because I do think that, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to work with John and Lita was because it was very attractive to sort of find people who were willing to just be brave. You know, I think that it takes a certain amount of courage to, especially when it's important things like, you know, leading the conflict or violence or, or just social processes in general, to sort of say, look, come on. This thing that we're assuming or we're ignoring this thing, I mean, that takes some courage. Yeah, I guess. I mean, and that's part of what I'm bemoaning about the state of the academy, because the state of the academy nurtures or squashes courage of the sort you're talking about too. And I think it's in a little bit more of a squashing the nurturing kind of state now or at least relatively compared to how it was a couple or three decades ago. And that's disheartening. Yeah, I often hear from people who are very senior, who I very much admire, and they say this to be complimentary. And they'll say, I could have never gotten a job now. And it is complimentary to us young kids, but it's also a real criticism in the sense of, we've created a selective regime that's selecting out the rebellious subversive-minded folks. There's a lot of sort of, I think, selection for conformity to existing approaches or assumptions and playing the game as it exists. Yeah, I feel like that's probably been true for a very long time. I'm sure. Yeah. I think about, like, again, when I think about psychology and social psychology, I mean, man, if you didn't do the same experimental social psychology, you didn't think that, you know, Solomon Ash's experiments were a centerpiece of your the introductory social side course you were going to teach. And you were not a candidate, you know, you were not. And, and, you know, we've had that kind of crap for a long time. Whether, yeah, I don't know what, but best nurtures, creativity and imagination. We used to have a much better granting system in Canada than we do now, and I think actually it was good. for this purpose. Basically, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada used to award reasonably small grants to a very large proportion of its applicants. And so, when I arrived at McMaster University, I wanted to actually when I arrived, there were a few deadwood people, and they retired. Six or eight years after I arrived, they were in an apartment of 25 people. Twenty-four of them had external research grants, and the 25th taught 3,000 students in her factory, Psycha, Revere. And you know, that ceased to be possible because the success rates went down and down and down. And I used to fight that battle a bit, because keeping, in my field anyway, which was then animal behavior, keeping grants small, but giving out a lot of them, actually gave you more good research for your dollar than concentrating them in a smaller number of hands. And that was a demonstrable fact. I mean, you could analyze data and show that that was the case, both trends within countries and between countries. You know, Sweden and Canada punched way above their weight, because they didn't give big grants, but they gave grants to large proportion of the applicants. And you know, that's been the move towards, well, we've got to limit a budget. We better put most of it in the hands of a small number of people who we think are potentials, or are stars already, perhaps past it, stars already. That's where we should dump our money and then they can hire the postdocs. I think that has done some damage, and it's something that one will like to see reverse. And it's done some damage to spot new day and creativity on the part of the younger scientists. Because the idea that, you know, if you had an idea and you managed to publish a couple of papers a year, but then, hell yeah, you could have your $25,000 a year in your lab, was great. And I think it fostered more creativity than, well, let's put all the money in the hands of the senior Puba, who surely knows this field best. That's a change that I guess all guys always think things are getting worse. Speaking of inequality, right? Why did that happen, do you know? Why did the, I don't know, why did the Canadian granting agencies get NSF envy? And why did NSF do that in the first place? Why did NSF do that in the first place? But why did other people looking at them think they would have a great model when you could show, hey, we're actually getting more science per dollar, more publishable science, some more quality stuff out the door by any, by various metrics per dollar than they are by this concentration. Yeah, John, John, John, John Tubby would always joke that it was evidence that aliens were trying to prevent science from happening because his argument was it was a funding system designed to minimize the amount of science produced and maximize the amount of wasted time in this sort of difficult lottery based system where you have everybody's doing the work. And only a few people get the resources out of it. Application process. You know, it became so much more onerous over the last 30 years, more or less continuously, I think over the last 30 years. Yeah, I love that. It's a really comforting way of thinking about institutional incompetence and sclerosis to view it as designed by. Exactly. Exactly. I love John's humor. I actually wanted to ask one question, which is there is a door from John. I think Lita told me this that something about like your kangaroo rat does it like Palm Springs something some conversation about what to call this field. Do you have a memory of that we had this conversation while we were considering us at our fields? Yes, or something like this where it was literally like the you know, it was the analog of the smoking room, you know, the people sitting around the table being like, what are we going to call this field? And it was, are we going to call it Darwinian psychology, evolutionary psychology at all? Do you have a memory of this or what is the? Yeah, yeah, this happened. I'm trying, I don't remember why I like that. I always, you know, I'm a peasant. And so I, the very phrase evolutionary psychology, I didn't like it so well because I was thinking it sounds too much like you're going to reconstruct phylogeny. You know, if it's evolutionary and people say evolutionary researchers and it's like, what the hell is that? I'm just sort of a peasant and using the part of speech in the wrong place or something. So I, Don Simon's called it Darwinian psychology and I like that better. But then I think maybe John Alita sort of argued persuasibly that the trouble with the phrase Darwinian psychology was that too often people thought, well they'd say, well Darwin didn't know that or didn't believe that or wrote something contrary to that. You say, well, no, no, I don't mean whatever the hell Darwin men are thought when I say Darwinian psychology, well, I am calling it that. And then you're going to do the other with me in psychology gag. So evolutionary psychology sort of won out. But I do, I do remember those arguments. We had a lot of arguments and they, as I say, the whole notion that we were somehow going to write a seminal book together or something founder, largely on this kind of pedantic crap. That feels very human, right? Like, what are we going to call ourselves? What are the bylaws? Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah. How about the monkeys? I'm with the monkeys. I asked John once, where did Don Simon's come from? And I want to ask you that. And there's lots of ways to take that. But for me, he just sort of rang forth in the sense of being design-minded in a intellectual tradition that was maybe unfairly not, maybe this is false. But I'm just always curious. I just read Don Simon's and I think he's so design-minded. Where did he come from? Yeah. Yeah. Now that's a great question. I'm not sure the answer. I mean, his early research was on Rhesus Monkeys. Play him Rhesus Monkeys. He wrote a monograph on that, which I think was based on his PhD thesis work, I think. So he was in an animal behaviory mindset somewhere. I mean, when you read, what's it called, the evolution of human sexuality? Or whatever his 78 book? Yeah, it's a great book. It's a great book. And it's clear that he is extremely broadly read in cultural anthropology and other humanities. And so you sort of forget that, well, he did come out of an animal behavior background somehow as well. But that's a good question. I don't know his prehistory. I don't know when, with what colleagues or supervisor or whatever he did his Rhesus work, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, guess another way I'm asking you is like what? And I only I spent a little bit of time with him when I was a graduate student, UCSB. Very little though. I mean, he was sort of gone and retiring. I actually inherited part of his library. I told David this, I have a copy of the Richard Alexander, the biology of moral systems with markups of Don Simon's writing. And he sort of loves, he loves Richard Alexander Alexander. He loves him. But he'll still sort of say, this is baby counting in the margins, some places. So it's a lovely artifact of like the real time thing. But what in sort of real time or any of these people, for any of these people, for us who weren't there, you know, was Don Simon's, I mean, the cartoonish view would be sort of, it's like, you know, he wakes up in the mornings, like you're not being designed minded enough to like his colleagues, is that, is that a caricature? Is that to, you know, was he just concerned about getting evolution generally into human behavior, you know, what? I don't know. It's a great question. I mean, they didn't have enough interaction with Don. I had some. He was the main person who sort of got on our case about trying to be more explicitly psychological. You know, what is it, what is it that you're imagining are the psychological phenomena, processes, entities that underfly the things that you're thinking are good and intuitive hypotheses? He pushed that hard at me anyway. And I presume that others as well. He was a bit of a recluse though. He didn't come to to H. Best Meetings much. He came to the one we had here in Canada in Southern Ontario in 1991, which was the third meeting. And I don't know if he ever attended it another after that. If he did, it was like one. I remember him saying, when I was trying to urge him to go maybe to an open for his seas meeting or something. He said, "I live in Santa Barbara. Why would anybody ever leave Santa Barbara going?" It is a problem, yes, for sure. Yes, exactly, especially in the winter, yes, exactly. And he loved that. I mean, he loved his orchids. He was a funny guy. I hadn't seen him for a long, long time until I saw him at the Tubi Memorial. Yeah. Unfortunately, he was. Yeah. The answer that he knew at that time was terminal. And he didn't last a great deal longer. But he was seem to be in sort of good spirits and unease with it all at that time. Yeah. It was always a very mellow presence in my company. He never. I never saw him angry. Yeah. That didn't seem all that many times. (laughing) But yeah, but is there, as we're wrapping up here, you know, do you, is there anything that you would love to have people either know about any of the people who are gone or is there a funny anecdote? And maybe this is sort of too tight to ask that kind of question or just. Yeah, what would you want to tell a hungry eager grad student who's just sort of eagerly looking forward to a career in evolutionary behavioral sciences? Huh. We were. I think I said this already. We were for extremely lucky, whether we knew it or not at the time, to have the enthusiastic support of Bill Hamilton. Although Bill did say that he thought the human behavior and evolution society that we should keep it a secret society. (laughing) That's not a bad idea, actually. We can still circle back to that, actually. He was the first president of. But, you know, it had the enthusiastic support of Hamilton and George Williams, Bob Trivers, you mentioned. Yeah. Sool Wright came to a nearly pretty meeting and that was really funny because he was in his 90s already. And I don't know if he'd ever met Bill Hamilton before, but he and Hamilton were, you know, just sort of nattering away together and fall out whenever they could. But he sat in the front row for all these student presentations, asked them all good questions, had suggestions for their field work. He was wonderful. And, you know, the sense that significant figures in evolutionary biology and the people who are formulating the big general theories that weren't human specific. Thought what you were doing was worthwhile and interesting, was huge. It was absolutely huge. I don't know if there's anything quite like that available now. There must be. Yeah. Or, yeah, I wish there were more of that, of just applying theories that, you know, apply to all animals and just applying them to humans. I mean, that's the beauty of the evolutionary approach and part of what attracted me to the field is, you know, ideas like supercall, altruism, parent offspring conflict, biological markets, signaling theory, like all these ideas apply to, you know, animals across the animal kingdom and they give you the additional insight of how human beings work. Yeah. And I guess I would still say to a young person interested in this field is get the, to the lab of somebody studying some nonhuman animal and do a project with them. I think, I think having a research background in the study of nonhuman animals and to some extent actually having an anthropological background provides the same thing, which is a bit more of a comparative perspective, a bit less hazard of thinking, you know, in weirdly ethnic centric or anthropocentric ways. And, you know, some of the best, some of the best evolutionary psychologists are really on with, they called themselves psychologists or not, did come from studying other animals, surprising amount of entomology in their actual field. Yeah. And, and I always felt that that was useful. It just sort of made, made a deep comparative mindset part of, part of what they brought to the table. And that sometimes some of the most embarrassingly bad evolutionary psychology has come from people who have never given a thought to any other creature than homo sapiens. So, so that would be one little bit of advice is to become involved even just, you know, as a sort of secondary project on Root Here Masters or PhD in some sort of not human animal research, it will, it will do you good, I think. Yeah. It's great advice. Yeah, that's fantastic. I'm also hearing the advices maybe for middle or even later career folks to also encourage young students and give your support to them because that can mean a lot more to them than you might think. Yes, obviously. I mean, anybody who's a half decent teacher, Sardin, knows that, but yes, it's easy to forget though. I think, and, you know, I think I've heard people talk and even just as you said, I mean, very famous people, at least in our orbit, you know, so all right, going to students talks in a way that you, it's remarkable not in the exaggerative way, but just that it's notable, right? Going to posters, talking to students, early career students, that is a virtue. Yeah, I mean, hearing you say, yeah. Yes, yes, yes indeed. Students are enthusiastic, bunch sometimes if you, you know, if you play them properly, they seem like a bunch of blaseys, some things that are, you know, that they can raise their phones, but. Yes, exactly. It can be a surprising amount of enthusiasm from young students. That's fantastic. David, it looked like you were going to ask something. No, I think words about approaching the end, it was really wonderful talking to you, Martin. This was a fascinating and lovely conversation. Yeah, no, lovely talking to you guys and it's nice to meet you, David. As opposed to you. Yeah. (laughing) It's not easy because I met him before. Yeah, no, exactly. Yes, I think, yeah. It should be, I've asked you anything really quickly before we leave. It's our compulsory question, really of one ever. And that's that's the one. It's a hard, hard way. Yeah, that's a great answer. That's the best answer I think we must have. Undoubtedly, probably, yes, exactly. Well, Martin, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much. You really appreciate it. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. Have a pleasant day. Yeah, you too and stay warm and on your own. Yeah, evening for me. Yes, exactly. Oh, that was wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it, David. I want to remind everyone that you do the wonderful music for the podcast too. I think people don't always know that. That is true. I'm an amateur composer. I composed that little bit of music. It was awesome. You used to use a keyboard with a MIDI, can I? No, actually, I just drag the notes with my mouse. Really? Yeah, I just copy and paste notes and yeah. I think Mozart did that too. Or was it that? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I'm following in Beethoven's footsteps. Which way? I even went to one of their houses when I was living in Europe. Which one was the one that was doing stuff when they were like five? Was that Beethoven? Maybe both. Maybe I don't remember. I feel like they all have-- Which one was Amadeus? That was Mozart. That's Mozart. Yeah, Mozart is the one I'm thinking. He's the one in Austria. Yeah, that's right. OK. By the way, Amadeus' great movie, wonderful movie about-- Envy. Oh, yes. It's a psychology of Envy, huh? Yes, yes. Yeah. That's our-- this episode is sponsored by the Amadeus. Yeah, go on. It's Amadeus. Yeah, it's a great slice of human nature and beautifully acted. And there's nothing-- it's a lovely virtuosity and prejudicity. Is that a word? Prudigiousness, maybe. Judicity? Prudigiousness. I don't know. I don't know. I guess this is good as mine. We were clearly prodigious at using the word prejudice. Yeah, I don't know how we got there, but we took a journey. Yeah, but anyway, everyone, thank you for listening. Please support the podcast in the usual ways. And David, I'll-- I guess I'll see you next week. Yeah. Sounds great. OK. See you guys. [Muzie]