How War Shaped Human Evolution - David Geary

Why is the human mind so unique or interesting yeah great great question we are. Highly unusual species in many many ways in terms of overall brain size in terms of the ability to learn novel things like reading writing inventing mathematics self awareness is probably much more highly developed than us than any other species so there's a whole variety of cognitive ability social competencies that far outstrip. Anything else that we see in the natural world why not why why did humans become so much smarter than every other species. Yeah that's a great question that's the topic of one of my earlier books the origin of mind which i'm now writing a second edition of and so we reviewing all of the literature on. Brain expansion and a variety of other things i start about four or five million years ago with what are called the australopithecines so that would be i would include lucy there and looking at their brain size which was a little bit bigger than chimpanzees. And they were around for several million years and we see kind of a gradual increase in brain volume during that time so. No not a lot going on probably a little bit more sophisticated than chimps as i said was interesting is that a lot of these australopithecines species emerged. And there is a sister janice parenthropis that emerged as well so a lot of things going on there probably all living in somewhat different ecologies. That's important because you know the more variety you have the better chances that one of them is gonna break from the pack and evolve into something different. And that happened a little over two million years ago maybe two and a half million years ago or so with the emergence of the janice homo with homo habilis. I'm having the tool tool maker sort of individual so we saw a jump in brain volume there some indication of some reorganization of parts of the brain. Call the parietal cortex involved in things like working memory and tool construction so forth i think the real important jump emerged about now one point eight one point nine million years ago or so forth with the emergence of homo erectus. And there we see larger body size we see more brain expansion more expansion of these areas involved in tool construction and a variety of other things. We also saw that these species these individuals these species were beginning to expand in africa. Expansion follows from you know you got the tools you got a better ability to extract resources from the college you're better hunting cooking emerged. Along the way with with later members of the species all of this increases the amount of calories resources available to the group. Which decreases mortality rates and increases population size your population expansions with these technological advances. And that creates a conflict dynamic you know you get bigger populations you get fewer resources per capita you got within group competition. What way to deal with that is to expand into the territory of other groups which appears to be what happened with age age erectus and so they're moving into other groups archaeological data suggests increased conflict during that time between group conflict and violence. In fact when we see look at extinction probabilities and homo species. I should say aside there's at least eight of them at one point. The more species homo species that were around in an area the higher the probability that one or several of them would go extinct. So i think we have the technological advances the population expansion with increase within group competition increase between group competition and with the elimination of competitor species the slow elimination of competitors i think i think the term is fucking chaos that's what it sounds like yeah. Yeah it was a shit show how's that yeah it was it was violent and i'll get to that did they eventually expanded actually quite a while ago about one point eight million years ago into. Out of africa and then eventually you're a asia then europe so they really expanded around probably displacing a lot of other primate species in the process eventually we get to humans and they are i'm skipping a few points here get to humans and they had a couple of attempts to expand out of africa but. Didn't quite make it probably the neanderthals put them in check and eventually they moved into your asia about 60,000 years ago eventually displaced neanderthals i think replaced neanderthals or some interbreeding and stuff but the archaeological record suggests that there was a lot of violence as well. So we have a couple of things here one is organized coalitional competition i'm arguing in the book and in my i got a couple of pieces on this in my sub stack that this was driven by men by males. Mail can base coalitions with the start of it and. Humans and chimpanzees bonobos and apparently our ancestors men stayed in the birth group women migrated out to avoid inbreeding when you have. The one sex it stays in the birth group they have an increased chance of forming coalitions integrating into coordinated social groups for collective action so we see that with the mail so i think that was the males were pushing the expansions and then you add the technological. Changes with the tools tool construction driven by males as well a lot of these tools someone for hunting or doing you know things related to agriculture but a lot of them are just weapons they were organized to expand their territory. And we see that evidence you in the archaeological data we see it in the population genetic data where we look at the number of. Individuals who were our male ancestors and our female ancestors you can do that by looking at the Y chromosome for example which is just passed down from male to male or the mitochondrial DNA which is involved in intracellular energy production is just. Goes from female to female lineages so you can track female lineages and male lineages and the process that almost certainly began with homo erectus continued up to up through human prehistory and continues beyond well beyond that. So around seven thousand years ago or so with after the early emergence of agriculture we began to see population expansions agricultural communities moving into a hunter gatherer. Areas. At one point we had. 17 female relatives for everyone male relative. Yeah there was this this massive drop off in male diversity lineage diversity like five to seven thousand years ago what happened. There was a massive drop off on that where most male lineages disappeared throughout the world you know in various places. And that data suggests that it was in and it has to be because it's a white chromosome it has to be male kin groups that are driving that otherwise it'd be more variation. Can you simplify that a little bit explain what you mean. Yeah so if you have an organized male can group. With technology weapons and so forth that is expanding out they're all gonna have. The same or very similar you know you know father sons uncles and so forth are gonna have very similar white chromosomes or identical white chromosomes. They expand into another group white that group out that other groups white chromosome. Why the other group of men out not wipe the entire other tribe out presumably keep the women. Usually keep the women sometimes you get rid of them to it it just depends if the archaeological stuff is variable gonna get rid of anybody to the men. So you take care of you take out the men there white lineage is is gone i need to race from history. Add the only way you could get the pattern of the seventeen to one ratio is is. Intense organized violence that's just what must have happened the violence must have discriminated to victimize men. Particularly though right or else you would have just had a total population that would have dropped down and it would have been seventeen times fewer people overall but it's not it's seven times fewer men than there are women. That's right so um you know the other possibility for population crashes is disease famine so for it would be a disease and famine the only affected men. Right right yeah if it was if it was disease and famine the women would have been. Severely affected as well probably as affected it's mad so whatever happened it was specific to men and um. You know and what when that happens it's other men killing what. So you know for almost all of human history and ancestral evolutionary history without relatively stable numbers of male female split and then you have this. Incredibly novel sex ratio change what do you think. That cause to get that has to have some cultural sociological repercussions that stick about for a good while but it's not gonna be easy to rebalance that is gonna very much put the power reproductively into the hands of the few men that is still around. Yeah and that's exactly what happened so we can step back a little bit and look at male male competition among primates. And when males are highly competitive among primates males are bigger than females they're more aggressive than females and there's more reproductive skew so the more dominant males. Reproduce disproportionately you know to their numbers and less dominant males and so you get there why chromosome increasing in frequency across. Generations and that that occurs in your chimpanzees mandrills a lot of other primates almost certainly occurs. Does occur in hunter gatherer societies it's kind of people talk about equality there and often there's equality of material resources because nobody has much. But there's any quality in terms of hunting competencies you know physical skills being warrior whatever reproductive. Variation is there especially among men where the top ten twenty percent disproportionately reproduce so the basic pattern has been there for millions and millions of years. For sure if we look at the australopithecines the males are fifty percent to a hundred percent bigger than the females. Indicating very intense male male competition and reproductive skew so what we're talking about here with the elimination of all these male limit lineages is just a continuation of the same pattern but amplified. In intensity through a coalition based. Coalitional mail can based competition by technology weapons and better social organization right so. Is the suggestion that there would have been some groups of some tribes some groups of males who. Access coordination skill tactics weapons i don't rate that basically gave them an unfair advantage on the battlefield. And these groups of men were able to move across the planet pretty quickly and wipe out other potentially competitive mail so previously when we think about. Chimps yes sometimes there are into group conflicts but a lot of the time it's intro group conflicts it's the. Alpha currently being taken down by number two, three, and four. And this is a roving bands of males, kinship based males with better tactics than their competitors. And then consistently just leveling up over and over again, the better tactics, the better weapons meeting, poorer tactics, poorer weapons, wipe them out, keep the women mate with the women continue just rinse and repeat. It's like a proto, uh, Genghis Khan. Right. Right. Uh, it, it's an evolutionary arms race driven by male coalitional competition and technological advantages. So on, on my sub stack, um, cases, and it will be in the book more elaborated in my book when it eventually gets done, uh, I talked about the Yamnaya, uh, expansion from, yeah, it's just a, um, uh, nomadic group, pastoralist group that was, um, you know, around in the caucuses, they had wagons, horses, and, uh, other, a lot of weapons, technological advantages, and they moved into central and then eventually Northern Europe and displaced all the hunter gatherer groups. And there are some evidence that they did reproduce with some of the women. Uh, there, so some interbreeding, but a lot of displacement as well. And if we look at ancient history and we look at ancient, um, DNA, which is now available, there's a mix of interbreeding and just outright population, um, replacement, one group, just replay one group of men replacing another group of men. Yeah, that's interesting. So I'm, I'm kind of fascinated by whether male male competition is much more zero sum because historically some men reproduced enormously while others sort of didn't reproduce at all. The difference between male competition and female competition ancestrally. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's absolutely critical. And hunter gatherer societies, the variation or reproductive skew, however we want to talk about it among men is about three times higher than it is about among women. So meaning that there are more men who have a lot of kids and a lot of men who don't reproduce at all. Most women will have babies and, but some are more successful at keeping them alive or they have one or two more, whatever. So there's some variation among women, but much more among men. Now that threefold variation in reproductive skew was amplified to about a hundred fold difference when we move into early empires. Um, so, uh, you know, in China, India, Eurasia, and so forth. So the dominant men in their coalition, uh, had many, many wives killed off competitors or what sort of time, time zone are we talking about? Yeah. What years of this? Well, so probably, you know, the, the crash of all the, um, why lineage that the male lineage is five, 7,000 years ago around then was probably part of that pattern, but we don't have an historical record of that. But then when we move into, um, the, you know, the empire building, we're looking about 4 million years ago or 4,000 years ago or so, so fairly recent continuing into the bronze age and, um, iron age, and then of course you get Genghis Khan who had 800 kids or so. How much of modern male ambition do you think is a legacy of this asymmetry of reproductive, uh, lottery? Yeah, I think most of it is, uh, if not all of it, there are studies of, uh, you know, we have the population genetic data showing that, you know, some males reproduce much more than others. So obviously there's intense competition there. If you look at a traditional hunter-gatherer pastoral societies today, and even modern societies, there is a consistent relation between men's cultural success, being good at whatever's important in that culture, and their marriage prospects, number of children, um, and so forth. It's a very, very consistent relation issue. It is clear that men who are status driven focused and are successful in those endeavors reproduce more than other men. Yeah. It's, uh, it's kind of fascinating to think that men's obsession with status and achievement and influence can just ultimately be traced back to reproductive competition. Right, right. That, that is what it is. And that is what it is in these other primates where you get a lot of intense male-male competition. The slackers just aren't attractive to females generally. Um, and they don't do well in male, uh, male status hierarchies. A quick aside. 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Plus they offer free shipping in the U S right now, you can get a free sample pack developments, most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. Heading to drink lmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drink lmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What's fundamentally different about female, female competition, because it's not just like they're passive actors when it comes to what's happening ancestrally, but how does female competition and male competition differ? Yeah. Yeah. Great question. They're definitely not passive actors. So when, uh, one of the, the model I'm building is that basically male, uh, coalitional violence, initially kin based, and then kind of expanding out to say a shared language, everybody that speaks, you know, language X kind of will form together under periods of stress. And then, then ideological stuff like religion or whatever ideology, um, it is as a way of, um, creating larger and larger groups, these, uh, male. Coalition's with technological advances, which is driven by conflict. So if you look at the Ukrainian war now, all sorts of advances in drone, uh, use of drones, robots, and so forth in combat, it's all driven by competition. So the same thing, the organization, the technological changes as, um, uh, societies expand, you get different cultural niches in there, you get a political class, military class, an ideological class, and then an entrepreneurial class in there generally. So you get different niches, uh, to compete. And men are building these institutions, coalitions of men and societies. Um, women are embedded within these, uh, institutions and their evolved strategy is to create kind of a social network within these groups that provides them social support and allows them to, um, extract resources basically from, from the group. That would be from the husband or other, other folks, um, that they're, they're connected to. So they're very good at working individual relationships, knowing all of, you know, who's friends with who, who is, um, you know, a coalitional partner with this other person who's in a conflict or whatever, using all of this information to kind of manipulate and, um, improve their own status within the group and also promote the wellbeing and status of their, um, children. So in, in one of my sub stacks, I, uh, talk about the, uh, manipulations and all of the drama, I guess that happens in, uh, like harem settings where you have a, uh, an emperor that has multiple wives or concubines or whatever, lots of drama going on behind the scenes, trying to move their sons into positions where they'll become emperor or high official or whatever. It's all very subtle, typically called relational aggression. Uh, but it is active for sure and has consequences. The women who are good at that sort of thing typically, um, had healthier kids and are more likely to move their kids into positions that would allow them to be successful in adulthood. So it's not building institutions. It is working the dynamics within them. Why was it not female, female coalitions roving around and attacking other groups? Yeah. And, and, and that's a great question because if we look at primates, old primate species, kind of Africa, Asia, they're actually more primate species where females stay in their birth group and males take off. And so you have more opportunity for female coalitions to emerge because it's easier among kin. And in fact, in a lot of these species, there are female coalitions. They do organize along, you know, mothers, aunts, grandmas, and all that, uh, to protect important food sources like, you know, fruit trees or whatever, uh, the case might be. So we definitely do see coalitional competition among females. One of the differences is that, uh, as you mentioned before, male, male competition is more of a zero sum game. Female, female competition is there, but it's lower intensity. They don't kill each other and they can't really escalate it if they have, you know, if they're breastfeeding or they're pregnant or whatever. And the, um, the cost benefit trade-offs are different. If you are female and you're pregnant and you get into a massive fight, you got, you're risking an abortion or injury or death or whatever. Um, but for a guy, he's a low status guy, middle status guy. If he doesn't really push the envelope as much as he can, he's out of the gene pool. And so the, the trade-offs are, as you said, and I said, uh, much more zero sum for male, particularly when you get a plug in the system. How much do you think, well, we can attribute to war, the building of civilization. Um, I think, uh, war was the primary driver of the building of civilizations. Um, other people have said that as well, that, you know, that you get these coalitions that, you know, when you get the between group stuff, you get advantages to larger and larger groups there. So nomadic raiders invading, um, agricultural communities was a common dynamic before the emergence of, um, empires. And then, so the agricultural communities unite, maybe you start building defensive structures and so forth. The nomads need to, uh, unite, better organized to get larger groups to be competitive, and you have this, this, uh, arms race situation where both sides are ramping up and developing new technologies and so forth. And as you expand, um, societies, you know, not all of the guys, um, all of the guys can be in the military. You need, um, weapons makers. You need, uh, people to do the harvest. You need entrepreneurs, you know, for markets, you, you, you have a, you know, a economic diversification of society, but, but the stressor for the building of these large groups to begin with was between group competition. Hmm. Yeah. I think you say that intense cooperation and intense conflict are sort of two sides of the same coin. What do you mean by that? So yeah, a lot of social scientists don't like to hear that we're a violent species. They just, it's kind of like off the table for them, which means they'll never fully understand our evolution. Um, and they focus on the ultra cooperative side of people. People are intensely cooperative. I mean, we live in large cities, a lot of us, large societies, multiple layers of organization. You can drive down the street and you know, nobody's going to do anything to you. Go to a shopping center, you're safe and so forth, and different people are doing different things. Amazingly cooperative amongst non-relatives and most other species of cooperation is, is typically among kin. Um, and the question is, so how do we get there? And my argument is, well, what are the benefits to cooperation in large groups? And the primary benefit is, um, defensive or offensive in terms of competing with other groups. Now that the competition doesn't need to be violent, it could eventually merge into trade wars or other ways of competing across groups. But I think violence was the driver, the initial driver. It's the other side, more, more violence, more push for large scale cooperation. Yeah. I'm trying to work out why civility is a thing at all. If competition and prestige are our main human drivers, I don't understand why social hierarchies and monarchies would form. Why isn't it just chaos all the time? Right, right. Yeah. In, in, yeah, there, there's an interesting pattern pattern there with the format. of, um, you know, early polities, like, like nation state, you know, states and then, um, you know, larger empires, a lot of conflict in the beginning. When a hierarchy is, um, established, finally a group of males and their kin and their supporters and so forth have kind of taken control of society and organize that. They then, um, develop systems for suppressing in-group competition and of course, suppressing people who want to displace them. So you have a lot of violence at first and then suppression of that. Once the hierarchy is established, you know, and eventually people get tired of that and there's revolts and so forth or externally displaced or whatever. But the formation of a hierarchy does suppress in-group violence. If conflict helped to produce intelligence and cooperation, technological progress and stuff, what happens when humans become substantially more peaceful? What happens? Um, I think they get, they get bored and they start, um, attacking each other on social media. Um, you got cancel culture. So a lot of the aggression and manipulation and social status driving is still there. It's just digital or a lot of the violence part of it is stripped out. But the motivation to be right and to have social influence and, and move up whatever hierarchy is important to you is, is still there. It's just expressed in a different way. Why do you think humans evolved such a extraordinary capacity to imagine the future? Right. So part of the process of this between group competition and also kind of the within group, um, stuff we see, uh, the evolutionary elaboration of a number of brain systems, so we can look at that by looking at, um, uh, macaque brains and chimp brains and human brains, and then look at the organization of some of these large scale brain networks. Um, two critical ones. Uh, one is the default mode network. Now there's the frontal parietal network. And in both of these, they're there in, you know, the monkeys, apes and people, but for people, they're much more, um, integrated with other systems and the. White matter tracks, a connectivity from the front of the brain to the back of the brain where some of the work goes on, um, is much more elaborated in monkey than in chimpanzees and, uh, macaques, for example, and much more elaborated as humans than in chimpanzees and some of these areas are evolutionary hotspots, meaning there's been a lot of genetic changes in them. So, so the default mode network is the ability to, um, generate, uh, you know, a mental simulation of something going on in the world. So if you just kick back, you know, it's Saturday, you're relaxing, not thinking about anything intense, your default mode network is going to kick in and you've got some daydreaming sort of things there, usually self-referential images and thinking about stuff that is important to you. So that's kind of the mental model, um, kind of aspect telling you what's important to you. What's important in human evolution, since we have these better connections between the front and the back, we can take that system and generate images ourself instead of just reliving past stuff, we can take that system and generate a future state. So it's like, where do we want to be five years from now? So in my classes, I talk about the system and when people fantasize about things, you know, you could fantasize, well, I'm homeless. Yeah. I don't have any rent to pay. I don't have to worry about, you know, paying the gas bill or those sorts of things, but people don't do that. They fantasize about being higher status, having a better job, having a bigger house, whatever it is, having luxury food, living in a high status, you know, cool environment and so forth. They're thinking about things that would enhance their social status and historically gaining those things would have reduced their mortality risks and reduce the mortality risk of their children. So we get these models of, you know, this is where I want to be in X number of years or months or whatever, and this is where I am now, and now we kick in the rational problem solving, uh, frontal parietal system can now think about, okay, what can I do to reduce the gap between these, you know, I go to school for four years and get an engineering degree, get a good job or something like that. So you're thinking ahead and problem solving and, um, you know, trying to figure out how to get where you want to be. System also works with, um, you know, more intimate dynamics. It's like, okay, I want to get person A to do this for me. And I know this person pretty well. And I know that if I try strategy one, he or she is going to reject. It's not going to happen. Strategy two might work sometimes, and this is how I would do it. So you rehearse the whole thing in your head and tweak it before you actually, um, try it out in the real world. And so you're able to create various scenarios of the future, figure out different approaches to make the future happen the way you want it to happen. Um, and you can all do that without, um, you know, kind of imagined scenarios before they happen and mentally try out things, uh, to get people, other people to do what you want. And I would think anybody who has good abilities in that area are going to have a real advantage over folks that really can't think, uh, too far into the future. Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. 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And right now you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom, using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. At checkout. Do you think that the ability to imagine a better life and how the future might unfold also limits our capacity to enjoy the life that we have, I think about, you know, you see a dog and people always look at that dog and it just seems so content if you were able to find a common currency of happiness between us and other animals, do you think that the animals would sort of win in terms of moment to moment fulfillment and happiness? Yeah. Um, yeah, it probably depends on the animal. You know, if you're a good gazelle and a pack of lions is parallel walking with you, probably you're not too happy, but, um, yeah, I, I think, you know, your dog and cat, they're not going to have the same self-awareness as you, as you're going to have, they're not going to be evaluating themselves relative to other dogs and cats and, you know, in a, in a good context that they don't really need to think about moving up in the status hierarchy or maintaining their position in the status hierarchy. So, you know, in a large dynamic social system, there's always movement going on. You always have to, you know, try to move up or maintain or, you know, anticipate potential conflicts or whatever. And so, yeah, I think that that does occupy, uh, people more than it would say a dog. Um, Yeah. Uh, so when it comes to childhoods and, and sort of how human babies came about, I've done, I've listened to some really interesting stuff around how, uh, fathers saved the human civilization because baby's heads were getting so big. There was this sort of battle between brain size and mother's hip width and how much they can locomote throughout their lives and stuff, which I think is kind of endlessly fascinating. Also had a conversation recently about if humans become Martians, if humans move to Mars, bone density is going to be way lower, which means that women's hips are not going to be able to deal with natural births in the way that they could. So almost all children are going to be born through C-section. If we move into space, lower bone density, higher risk of, of, uh, tearing and, and, and horrible fractures and stuff during pregnancy or giving, through giving birth. But then as soon as you go to C-section, you no longer have the constraint on baby's heads anymore. So now we've maybe had this brief window in human history, hominin history, heads get bigger, brains get bigger, heads get bigger, brains get bigger, heads stay the same size. They actually got probably a bit too big for a while. A lot of women died in childbirth. We pull it back. Those ones aren't going to continue. We keep it the same. We keep it the same. And then we move to Mars and then it's just off to the races again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If, if, if the same competitive dynamics that initially kind of pushed the expansion of brain size continued on Mars, then yeah, that's what would happen. What's unique about human children and the way that we develop as babies and infants? Yeah. So a number of things there, um, and I can circle in with dads. So, uh, Mark Flynn and I argued, uh, 25 years ago now that our australopithecine ancestors are more like gorillas. Uh, single male harems, a few females and the offspring where males and females form long-term relationships. The males are, uh, at least hang around and play with the offspring. And most importantly, they protect them. So you have the, the, the germ of a human family there and human paternal investment from that perspective that goes back 5 million years or more. Excuse me. Um, you get a human gather group when the males start coordinating together, then you have multiple of these kind of, uh, male centered families, uh, in the group. But, uh, moving forward, you know, as brain size increased, as humans got better at tool construction, hunting, extracting resources from the environment. Uh, there was, you know, part of the brain expansion was due to that type of thing. And so of course the, you know, the birth canal needs to be larger for one. Um, the other thing is that, uh, you know, kids are born premature. So if you were to take digestation time, uh, for a human baby and say, well, we're going to stretch that out until the infant's brain is just as mature as say a chimpanzee infant's brain. The gestation period would have to be almost two years. And nobody's wants to birth a two year old. Um, so yeah, so they're born premature in a sense. And so they're much more dependent on, uh, care. They have a longer, uh, growth period for brain and other things. But as humans got better at getting stuff out of the ecology, this also, uh, meant that kids had to learn how to make tools, how to hunt, how to forage and so forth. And studies of hunter gatherer groups suggests that it takes a long time to become a skilled hunter or skilled at foraging or whatever needs to be done in a traditional group or some early farming types of things. So some, for some things they may not be experts until they're 30 or so. So you need this delayed period of basically learning how to be successful in whatever cultural niche, uh, that you're in. Yeah. Yeah, I am. I'm kind of fascinated by how many of the adaptations that we see among humans are done in an attempt to compensate for how neotenous and useless we are as children, what, looking sort of across this entire history, what is the part of modern human behavior that makes the least sense until you understand our history, in your opinion? That makes the least sense. Yeah. What's this, what's the thing that an ancestral perspective, intergroup conflict and the pressures and stuff, what does that explain best in the way that people behave in the modern world? Yeah. So the, um, well the patriarchy, I guess, you know, we hear a lot about that and, you know, a lot of debate about it, but basically my argument is that, well, yeah, it's real. Um, the male kin based coalitions came together, you know, fought for probably since the raptors emerged, you know, 1.7, 1.8 million years ago. So this has been going on for a long time. They build institutions, they build culture, the cultures. Um, and therefore we would expect that males will dominate in these institutions and be motivated to dominate in these institutions. And also have the capacities predisposition capability to dominate as well right and domination in there means you have social skills you have the ability to. Organize large numbers of other individuals mostly men to engage in collective action that increases the group's competitive ability. You can see that militarily obviously but also any corporation any other football team whatever the coordinated behavior of the individuals is what is going to influence the outcome of the competition now. Women didn't have that same selection pressure their pressure was more working within the confines are so forth of these institutions involved developing. I'm more intimate network of relationships that provide social support a lot of these networks are focused on consensus. I'm agreement support and so forth and not. They're not hierarchical hierarchical is is frowned upon in these are female network so they try to level out. Each other and they're focused on the dynamics within it rather than coordinating together to compete against another group so then when you take bunches of females. When they begin to dominate that this has been talked about recently social media and elsewhere move into these male systems that are hierarchical organized for out group competition. They don't function as well. Because the the the female default is to focus on in group dynamics not coordinating in group behavior so that their collective actions will make them all better at how doing this other group. And so there's a lot of confusion and consternation arguments and so forth i'm over that dynamic right now but i think i think it's real and explains a lot of current social issues why is that unpalatable for a lot of people. I'm well because there are a lot of women who. Are now competing in traditionally male hierarchies. Male professions so forth and they're designed to function you know hierarchically collective action and so forth women generally don't like that type of social dynamic and system. And so they know they do something else but it creates problems because a subset of women are work focused and status focused about fifteen percent or so. And they're directly competing against men. In these hierarchies and a lot of doing as well as they think they should do. And so they're looking at the status differentials between the most successful men and the most successful women and there's still gaps there and so they come up with post hoc explanations like bias systematic sexism and so forth but the differences are really, man are more focused on status they're willing to trade off. Friends help and so forth the move with status and they more easily join together collectively to finish. Common goals and projects or whatever. Groups are less efficient at that. What about the desire for control i never really thought about this is a fundamental human motivation but you seem to think that it is so i use history. A kind of rule of thumb that. Yeah we have a fundamental motivation to control. And that doesn't mean you know you're here you want to be hitler games con or whatever but it means that. You want to organize your world in ways that reproduce. I'm the outcomes that increase social status previously reproductive opportunities and and so and so forth so you so the things that help the human brain. Evolve so status related competition for example. You want to recreate those conditions so you want to move up the status hierarchy or if you're a woman you want to create a network social network that will provide. Social support for you help with your kids sometimes economic support or whatever so you want to organize your world and control it. In a sense that you're you're recreating the same networks that led to the evolution of the systems. I think of it in terms of kind of a concentric rings. Some people they just want to control their day to day life their job what happens at the job what happens when their friends and networks and then other folks you get hitler games con other spots. Want to control the world is just the scope of that which means they want to organize the world at whatever scope it is in ways that are beneficial to them so control is i. I'm able to change the environment in the future to disproportionately benefit me versus other people. Yeah pretty pretty much it is you want to organize the world so social relationships for example who's friends with who who your friends with you know what what's going on in this network you gonna put energy into. Moderating your curating those relationships so the pattern. What's your best in your best interest they pay attention to you over other women for example when you need it and if it doesn't happy happen. You get angry or upset or whatever which triggers the default mode network and these other networks that kick in the problem solving it's like okay yeah things are quite right what do i need to change how do i need to. Interact with this network in order to realign things so that. 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Yeah you know unfortunately i think it's hard to be fully satisfied for a lot of people so i talk i'll talk about it in the book and talk about it in the substack sort of things that. You know there is and has been a very. Clear relation between social status and mortality risks of you and your kids so moving up the status hierarchy men and women, increase your chances of survival increase the chances of your kids surviving especially when she hits a fan there's a play or. Food shortage or something like that the relation between mortality risk and status is inverse higher the better and. Yeah when she hits it's unpredictable you don't know when another group is gonna invade. Typically you don't know when you know the another player or whatever is gonna hit you don't know what the growing season is going to be and so forth so you can't relax. It's a kind of a you know any of this within species arms race you always gotta move up a little bit as protection as a buffer. Against when the bottom falls out and so i think that's why people are so. Obsessed with social comparisons a lot of social media is. Wanting showing off and then people are comparing themselves to others and we have the self where i think. That drove self-awareness to some point i know this competency a b and c and these other people. Are getting them higher up in whatever status hierarchy is important to you and then you need self-awareness to reflect on your own skills on those same traits and think about okay well how do i improve those so that i too. Can move up a bit and so it is unfortunate it's hard for a lot of people to. Break out from that and relax because we live most of us live very comfortable life at least in the western world lot of resources. Not much relative relative to what we had historically not much violence on absolute terms things are great we should be just kicking back watching tv playing video games or. Whatever you want some people are able to do that but a lot just can't turn it off and it's because of the relation between. Status and mortality risk and the unpredictability of when the population will crash again and. I'm sorry that would have been very adaptive and we do it doesn't really matter whether or not you're feeling satisfied or at peace as you go to bed tonight what matters is whether or not you're driven enough to keep on pushing forward i mean it is kind of surprising to me to be honest that. Passive pleasure is something that exists at all by the fact that we are able to be as. Partially happy in non pursuit some humans are. Is it kind of amazing is that wow you really threaded the needle through this minefield of evolutionary pressures. You if it's anything that you know that's a common productivity wisdom which is hey i'm make sure that you don't just use your rest time as a foot off the gas. In service of putting a foot back on the gas even harder tomorrow right you should be going for a walk because you enjoy going for a walk and it fulfills you not because you listen to an andrew human podcast episode that suggests that it means that you are fifteen percent more productive tomorrow if you go for a walk this evening something like that. What if you look at the evolutionary pressures. Everything should be pushing us towards survival and reproduction weather that's into group conflict or intra group status seeking weather it's a resource gathering or social game playing or skill acquisition or weapon development whatever. Everything is in service of that because we had to negotiate for almost all of human history really really aggressively negotiate with an environment that was uncivil uncivilized out of our control heat could have killed us cold could have killed us we didn't know if it was gonna be a famine but the fact the fact that we're able to just. In small micro doses chill and just be happy kind of blows that's the most amazing thing of all of this you agree. Yeah yeah well i mean you have to even when you push an hour you have to recuperate. You need recuperation times if you work and you have your physically doing a lot of. Labor whatever fighting whatever you need to pull back and recuperate. Do you get a deplete resources mental resources physical resources or whatever so you need these break periods. Your body mentally to recuperate and i think that's that's what you're getting at me some people just have larger recuperation period sometimes decades just. Take it slow but but but that's true and other species as well so it northern elephant seals for example. Lot of intense male male competition five ten percent of the male sire most of the offspring some of the males just don't compete there slackers hang out on the beach they live longer. Any other males you know they don't read but but there's gonna be some of those in every generation that just kind of. You can't compete or don't want to put the effort into it or just wanna take advantage of the here and now whatever is available. If you were to assess the successful people in the modern world the ones that we look to and think wow that ambition and competence is really driven them to do amazing impressive things. How likely do you think it would be that the traits that made that person successful in this environment would be the same ones that would make them successful fifty thousand or a hundred thousand years ago. Yeah yeah right great question so. Yeah so we get larger societies we get kind of different types of classes and hierarchies the main ones have been talked about i said before. very political, entrepreneurial, and ideological. Certainly is the military type of class, and probably in cooperation with the political class that had the earlier advantages with Rome and other early empires. Those are the people that dominated things. As a society grows, you get more entrepreneurial folks, ideological folks, you get the Roman Empire, kind of an empire at some point that has a lot of social influence. Yeah, social complexity, communication. Right. Then the entrepreneurial class raises up and they become wealthier, and so now they want to compete with the political class for social power and so forth. You see these groups competing. In China, as I understand it, the political class keeps the entrepreneurial class and even the military class in check to maintain their power. Here in the US, it's more of a capitalistic and the entrepreneurial class is very wealthy, and therefore, much more influential than in other empires where the political class kept them down. But the entrepreneurial class or the entertainment class, I guess that's part of the entrepreneurial stuff. I like the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger and stuff, but my guess is he wouldn't last long in a medieval battlefield. Yeah, I get the sense too. It seems like it's a unique, it's more precise, it's more civilized, it's going to be more about non-violent competition. You're going to need to be much more socially aware, complexity, what does this person want? Interpersonal communication is going to be way more. I get the sense that maybe even prosociality and extroversion might be a little bit more important, because people don't need you from a resource gathering perspective quite so much. Maybe in the past, you would have put up with an asshole, it was really great with a spear, because you go, hey, wait. Yeah, sure, he's a dick. But if we piss him off too much, the next time that we need some meat, we're screwed, or the next time that the tribe comes along, we're screwed. But when you outsource that to a supermarket and law enforcement, you think, I don't really need that in quite the same way that I used to. Yeah, it's really fascinating. It's mismatch, and we're talking about mismatch, evolutionary mismatch, but it's coming at it from a really interesting angle, which is what would have been adaptive from a group perspective and an individual competency perspective that now is repurposed or warped. There's this meme I always think about. It's a guy who is working in retail, young dude, really, really big, like Jack guy, looks like he was maybe a football player in college or something, with a shirt and a tie on, kind of a shit shirt and a tie on, stood at the front of a Bed Bath and Beyond, and the caption above it was, 15,000 years ago, I would have been a proud warrior. And this pivot from a brain-based, a brawn-based to a brain-based economy, increased social, all this stuff, I know it's just, I would love to see what happens if we could create another virtual reality, just pick everybody up, drop them in it, and be like, how does everyone get on? Is Elon Musk that just driven and competent and flexible and tyrannical and megalomaniacal that he is able to still win? Or does the fact that he doesn't have this capacity mean that he doesn't so much? It's pretty unique. Yeah, well, yeah, he's in a kind of a mix of an entrepreneurial and technological kind of hierarchy. So he's able to mix them together and almost certainly is using a lot of the default mode in the frontal parietal networks to think about things in new ways, electric cars, or try to do existing technologies better. So he's, the ambition, but he's also using these very complex evolved systems to try to think through better ways to do, whatever ABC he's focusing on in the time. Now, going back 50,000 years, 100,000 years, 200,000 years, people like him would have been the ones inventing the new tools, the new weapons and stuff. Maybe not on the front line, but the technological advances are a critical piece of where we are now. It's a human coalitional formation, the between group, social competition, and the technology, the male-based coalitional, between group and the technology. You take away any of those and we're not here. Before we continue, how many times have you found yourself hugging the toilet, throwing up? Not because you drank too much alcohol, but because the non-alcoholic beers that you drank tasted like garbage. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. Their non-alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing. And the best part, there's no hangover, no headaches, no more ruining your daughter's dance recital. I didn't want to stop enjoying tasty drinks. I just wanted to stop paying for it the next day. And you can too. 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And so I need to go out and up her or up him often by spending extra money and paying a lot of interest on it and, you know, going into debt and so forth. So that's based on this kind of the status driving need that we have to kind of move up the ladder before the bottom of the ladder gets cut out. But, you know, we live in a, but it's good to understand where we live. We live in a place and time where those risks are much lower than they were when that system to continuously move up was in place. So understanding that and reflecting that, yeah, you know, they have this, but really what do I need for my personal wellbeing and those of my kids? So you get these competitions for, you know, getting your kid super good at baseball or whatever, you know, unless they're going to go to pros, it's really not that important. Or the PTA moms, they go in and they, you know, organize things in the middle school and high school and their kids just by chance happen to get the most awards and all of that. In traditional societies, the PTA moms did help their kids. It mattered. You know, in a middle school today, you're putting all this effort into it, probably a lot of drama, a lot of time and work and all that. In the long run, we know it doesn't make any difference for your kid anymore. So you can chill a bit. That would be nice. David Geary, ladies and gentlemen. David, appreciate you. Where should people go to check out the sub stack, the book, everything you got going on? Yeah, so the sub stack, I initially just had a bunch of reprints from a number of articles, mostly on sex differences, that I published in Corlett. They gave me permission to redo them. And now I'm redoing Origin of Mind, which will take another year or so to finish. But along the way, I have a few posts here and there. I'll have them on certain topics as I work through them on the chapters. Chapters will be much more elaborated, more evidence and so forth. So I have snippets. Oh, yeah, yeah. Just a very kind of innovative name, Geary sub stack. That's there. I've got dozens of subscribers already. So it's awesome. Did you also want to talk about The Great Divergence or maybe some other time? Yeah, we're going to have to do that another time. But dude, I'm always super down to talk to you. So we can we can run that back. I think it's fascinating to have an ancestral perspective on why human brains sort of develop the way that they did. It really helps to explain what's going on with human behavior. What's happening with the second edition of the book? What's going on with that? Yeah, so I've got through a few chapters there. I'm actually here for my publisher, American Psychological Association, if they're actually going to publish it or not. I think probably they will. But who knows? And so I'll move on. Next chapter will be on the development of the brain, prenatal development and kind of neurobiological organization to it. Basically saying, you know, there's no way it's a blank slate. You know, the only place you get a blank slate is academic social scientists. Otherwise, it's there. So I'll present that evidence, probably pare it back a little bit from first edition. Then I'll have either that second after that chapter or basic single chapter on big brain networks, like the default mode network. I'll get into some details there. Then I'll move in and talk about things like problem solving, self-awareness, that sort of thing. And then toward the end, I'm going to integrate all of this with domain general intelligence, which a lot of people wonder about. The ability to easily learn novel information and the ability to draw inferences about kind of basic patterns and stuff. I'll talk about that. And then in a final chapter, the relation between domain general abilities, maybe the default mode network and others in the modern world and occupational performance, creative innovation, so forth. Heck yeah. David, I appreciate you, man. Until next time. All right. Thank you. Enjoyed it. It's getting chilly outside, but you know what that means? It's time to cozy up with Panera bread. Let's get toasty, cheesy. Oh, hello, broccoli cheddar soup in a bread bowl. How about melty? Okay, chipotle chicken avo melt. It's dipping bread in soupy goodness season. Oh yeah, we are so back. It's Panera season. Order now.