How War Shaped Human Evolution - David Geary - #1172

0:00

Why is the human mind so unique or interesting? Yeah, 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 in us than in any other species. So there's a whole variety of cognitive abilities, social competencies that far outstrip anything else that we see in the natural world.

0:44

Why? Why did humans become so much smarter than every other species? Yeah, that's a great question. That's the topic of one of my earlier books, The Origin of Mind, which I'm now writing a second edition of. And so re -reviewing all of the literature on brain expansion and a variety of other things. I started about four or five million years ago with what are called the osteopithecines.

1:14

So that would include Lucy there and looking at their brain size, which was a little bit bigger than chimpanzees. And they were around for several million years. And we see kind of a gradual increase in brain volume during that time. So, you know, not a lot going on. Probably a little bit more sophisticated than chimps, as I said. What was interesting is that a lot of these osteopithecine species emerged.

1:45

And there's a sister genus, Paranthropus, that emerged as well. So there's a lot of things going on there, probably all living in somewhat different ecologies. That's important because, you know, the more variety you have, the better chances that one of them is going to break from the pack and evolve into something different. And that happened probably a little over two million years ago, maybe two and a half million years ago or so, with the emergence of the genus Homo, with Homo habilis.

2:22

Habilis, the tool maker sort of individual. So we saw a jump in brain volume there. Some indication of some reorganization of parts of the brain called the parietal cortex involved in things like working memory and tool construction and so forth. I think the real important jump emerged about 1 .8, 1 .9 million years ago or so forth, with the emergence of Homo erectus.

2:54

In 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.

3:09

We also saw that these species, these individuals, these species, were beginning to expand in Africa.

3:20

Expansion follows from, you know, you got the tools, you got a better ability to extract resources from the ecology, you're better at hunting, cooking emerged, you know, along the way with later members of these species. All of this increases the amount of calories, resources available to the group, which decreases mortality rates and increases population size.

3:48

You get 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 get within group competition. One way to deal with that is to expand into the territory of other groups, which appears to be what happened with H. Aurectus. And so they're moving into other groups.

4:18

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,

4:32

I should set it 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 the elimination of competitor species, the slow elimination of competitor species.

5:03

I think the term is fucking chaos. That's what it sounds like. Yeah. Sounds like shit. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like a lot of chaos. Yeah. It was a shit show. How's that? Yeah. Yeah. It was violent. And I'll get to that. They eventually expanded, actually quite a while ago, about 1 .8 million years ago, into out of Africa, and then eventually Asia, then Europe.

5:36

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 Eurasia about 60 ,000 years ago.

6:13

Eventually displaced Neanderthals, I think replaced Neanderthals. There's 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've got a couple of pieces on this in my substack, that this was driven by men, by males.

6:49

Male, kin -based coalitions was the start of it. In humans, and chimpanzees, bonobos, and apparently our ancestors, men stayed in the birth group, women migrated out to avoid inbreeding. When you have the one sex that stays in the birth group, they have an increased chance of forming coalitions, integrating into coordinated social groups for collective action.

7:19

So, we see that with the males. So, I think that was, the males were pushing the expansions. And then you add the technological

7:29

changes with the tools, tool construction driven by males as well. A lot of these tools, some of them for hunting or doing, you know, things related to agriculture, but a lot of them were just weapons. They were organized to expand their territory. and we see that evidence, you know, 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.

8:07

You can do that by looking at the Y chromosome, for example, which is just passed down from male to male, or the mitochondrial DNA, which is involved in intracellular energy production. It 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 through human prehistory and continues well beyond that.

8:40

So around 7 ,000 years ago or so after the early emergence of agriculture, we began to see population expansions, agricultural communities moving into hunter -gatherer areas. At one point, we had 17 female relatives for every one male relative. Yeah, there was this massive drop -off in male diversity, lineage diversity, like 5 ,000 to 7 ,000 years ago.

9:15

What happened? That was a massive drop -off on that where most male lineages disappeared throughout the world in various places. So, and that data suggests that it was, and it has to be, because it's a Y chromosome, it has to be male kin groups that are driving that. Otherwise, you'd have more variation in the Y chromosome. Can you simplify that a little bit? Explain what you mean by that.

9:46

Yeah. So if you have an organized male kin group with technology, weapons, and so forth that is expanding out, they're all going to have the same or very similar, you know, fathers, sons, uncles, and so forth. They're all going to have very similar Y chromosomes or identical Y chromosomes. They expand into another group, wipe that group out, that other group's Y chromosome signature.

10:16

You mean wipe the other group of men out, not wipe the entire other tribe out, presumably keep the women? Usually keep the women. Sometimes you get rid of them too. It just depends. The archaeological stuff is variable. If you're going to get rid of anybody, it's the men. So you take out the men, their Y lineage is gone. I mean, it's erased from history.

10:38

And the only way you could get the pattern of the 17 to 1 ratio is intense, organized violence. That's just what must have happened. The violence must have discriminated to victimized men, particularly though, right? Or else you would have just had a total population that would have dropped down and it would have been 17 times fewer people overall, but it's not.

11:06

It's 17 times fewer men than there are women. That's right. So, you know, the other possibility for population crashes is disease, famine, so forth. It would be disease and famine that only affected men. Right. Right. Yeah. If it was disease and famine, the women would have been severely affected as well, probably as affected as men. So whatever happened, it was specific to men.

11:32

And, you know, and when that happens, it's other men killing. What a... So, you know, for almost all of human history and ancestral evolutionary history, we've had relatively stable numbers of male -female split. And then you have this incredibly novel sex ratio change. What do you think that caused to... Because that has to have some cultural, sociological repercussions that stick about for a good while, but it's not going to be easy to rebalance that.

12:11

It's going to very much put the power reproductively into the hands of the few men that are still around. Right. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened. So we can step back a little bit and look at male -male competition among primates. And when males are highly competitive among primates, males are bigger than females. They're more aggressive than females.

12:35

And there's more reproductive skew. So the more dominant males reproduce disproportionately, you know, to their numbers than less dominant males. And so you get their Y chromosome, you know, increasing in frequency across generations. And that occurs in, you know, chimpanzees, mandrels, a lot of other primates. Almost certainly occurs, does occur in hunter -gatherer societies.

13:06

It's kind of, people talk about equality there. And often there's equality of material resources because nobody has much. But there's inequality in terms of hunting competencies,

13:22

you know, physical skills, being a warrior, whatever. Reproductive variation is there, especially among men where the top 10, 20% disproportionately reproduce. So the basic pattern has been there for millions and millions of years, for sure. If we look at the australopithecines, australopithecines, the males are 50% to 100% bigger than the females.

13:47

Indicating very intense male -male competition and reproductive skew. So what we're talking about here with the elimination of all these male lineages is just a continuation of the same pattern but amplified in intensity through coalitional -based, male -kin -based competition aided by technology, weapons, and better social organization. Right.

14:17

So is the suggestion that there would have been some groups of, some tribes, some groups of males who accessed coordination, skill, tactics, weapons at a rate that basically gave them an unfair advantage on the battlefield and these groups of men were able to move across the planet pretty quickly and wipe out other potentially competitive males.

14:50

So previously when we think about chimps, yeah, sometimes there are inter -group conflicts, but a lot of the time it's intra -group conflicts. It's the alpha currently being taken down by number two, three, and four and this is a roving bands of males, kinship -based males with better tactics than their competitors and then consistently just leveling up over and over again, the better tactics, the better weapons, meeting poorer tactics, poorer weapons, wipe them out, keep the women, mate with the women, continue, just rinse and repeat.

15:23

It's like a proto -Genghis Khan. Right, right. It's an evolutionary arms race driven by male coalitional competition and technological advantages. So, on my sub -stack

15:40

cases, and it will be in the book, it will be more elaborated in my book when it eventually gets done, I talk about the Yemnaya expansion from What is that? Yeah, it's just a nomadic group, pastoralist group that was, you know, around in the Caucasus. They had wagons, horses, and a lot of weapons, technological advantages. And they moved into Central and then eventually Northern Europe and displaced all the hunter -gatherer groups.

16:17

And there's some evidence that they did reproduce with some of the women there. So some interbreeding, but a lot of displacement as well. And if we look at ancient history and we look at ancient DNA, which is now available, there's a mix of interbreeding and just outright population replacement. One group of men replacing another group of men.

16:44

Yeah, that's interesting. So I'm kind of fascinated by whether male -male competition is much more zero -sum because historically some men reproduced enormously while others sort of didn't reproduce at all. The difference between male competition and female competition ancestrally. Yeah, yeah. That's absolutely critical. In hunter -gatherer societies, the variation or reproductive skew, however you want to talk about it among men, is about three times higher than it is among women.

17:18

So meaning that there are more men who have a lot of men who have a lot of men who have a lot of men who don't reproduce at all. Most women will have babies, but some are more successful at keeping them alive or they have one or two more or whatever. So there's some variation among women, but much more among men. Now that three -fold variation in reproductive skew was amplified to about a hundredfold difference when we move into early empires.

17:52

So, you know, in China, India, Eurasia, and so forth. So the dominant men in their coalition had many, many wives killed off competitors. What sort of time zone are we talking about? What years are this? Well, so probably, you know, the crash of all the Y lineage, the male lineage is 5 ,000, 7 ,000 years ago around then, was probably part of that pattern.

18:21

But we don't have a historical record of that. But then when we move into 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 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 lottery? Yeah, I think most of it is, if not all of it.

19:04

There are studies of, 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 traditional hunter -gatherer pastoral societies today, and even modern societies, there is a consistent relation between men's cultural success, being good at whatever is important in that culture, and their marriage prospects, number of children, and so forth.

19:34

It's a very, very consistent relation is clear that men who are status -driven, focused, and are successful in those endeavors reproduce more than other men. Yeah, 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 is what it is.

19:58

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, and they don't do well in male status therapies. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it.

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21:20

But how does female competition and male competition differ? Yeah, yeah, great question. They're definitely not passive actors. So the model I'm building is that basically male coalitional violence, initially kin -based and then kind of expanding out to, say, a shared language. Everybody that speaks language X kind of will form together under periods of stress.

21:49

And then ideological stuff like religion or whatever ideology it is as a way of creating larger and larger groups. These male coalitions with technological advances, which is driven by conflict. So if you look at the Ukrainian war now, all sorts of advances in drone use of drones, robots, and so forth in combat, it's all driven by competition.

22:19

So the same thing, the organization, the technological changes as 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 to compete. And men are building these institutions, coalitions of men and societies.

22:49

Women are embedded within these 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 extract resources, basically, from the group. And that would be from the husband or other folks that they're connected to. So they're very good at working individual relationships, knowing who's friends with who, who is a coalitional partner with this other person, who's in a conflict or whatever, using all of this information to kind of manipulate and improve their own status within the group.

23:42

And also promote the well -being and status of their children. So in one of my sub -stacks, I talk about the manipulations and all of the drama, I guess, that happens in like settings where you have 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.

24:18

It's all very subtle, typically, called relational aggression. But it is active, for sure, and has consequences. The women who are good at that sort of thing typically have 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.

24:46

Why was it not female -female coalitions roving around and attacking other groups? Yeah, and that's a great question because if we look at primates, old -world primate species, kind of Africa, Asia, there are actually more primate species where females stay in their birth group and males take off. And so you have more opportunity for female coalitions to emerge because it's easier among kin.

25:14

And in fact, in a lot of these species, there are female coalitions. They do organize along mothers, aunts, grandmas, and all that to protect important food sources like fruit trees or whatever the case might be. So we definitely do see coalitional competition among females. One of the differences is that, as you mentioned before, male -male competition is more of a zero -sum game.

25:42

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 cost -benefit trade -offs are different. If you are female and you're pregnant and you get into a massive fight, you're risking an abortion or injury or death or whatever.

26:11

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 trade -offs are, as you said and I said, much more zero -sum for male, particularly when you get a polygynous system. How much do you think we can attribute to war, the building of civilization? I think war was the primary driver of the building of civilizations.

26:47

Other people have said that as well, that, you know, you get these coalitions, that when you get the between -groups stuff, you get advantages to larger and larger groups. There, so nomadic raiders invading agricultural communities was a common dynamic before the emergence of empires. And then, so the agricultural communities unite, maybe start building defensive structures and so forth.

27:17

The nomads need to unite, better organize to get larger groups to be competitive. And you have this arms race situation where both sides are ramping up and developing new technologies and so forth. And as you expand societies, you know, not all of the guys can be in the military. You need weapons makers. You need people to do the harvest.

27:48

You need entrepreneurs, you know, for markets. You have, you know, economic diversification of society. But the stressor for the building of these large groups to begin with was between -group competition. Mm -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? Right.

28:15

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.

28:29

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.

28:55

Amazingly cooperative. Amongst non -relatives. And most other species of cooperation is typically among kin. 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 defensive or offensive in terms of competing with other groups. Now, the competition doesn't need to be violent.

29:25

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 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.

29:51

Why isn't it just chaos all the time? Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. In, yeah, there's an interesting pattern there with the formation of, you know, early polities like nation state, you know, states and then, you know, larger empires. A lot of conflict in the beginning when a hierarchy is established. Finally, a group of males and their kin and their supporters and so forth have kind of taken control of society and organized that.

30:23

They then 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.

30:49

But the formation of a hierarchy does suppress in -group violence.

30:58

If conflict helped to produce intelligence and cooperation, technological progress and stuff, what happens when humans become substantially more peaceful? What happens? Yeah. I think they get bored and they start attacking each other on social media. You got cancel culture. So a lot of the aggression and manipulation and social status driving is still there.

31:24

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 move up whatever hierarchy is important to you is still there. It's just expressed in a different way. Why do you think humans evolved such an extraordinary capacity to imagine the future? Right. So part of the process of this between -group competition and also kind of the within -group stuff, we see the evolutionary elaboration of a number of brain systems.

32:06

So we can look at that by looking at macaque brains and chimp brains and human brains, and then look at the organization of some of these large scale brain networks. Two critical ones, one is the default mode network, and the other is the frontal parietal network. And in both of these, they're there in the monkeys, apes, and people. But for people, they're much more integrated with other systems, and the white matter tracks of connectivity from the front of the brain to the back of the brain where some of the work goes on is much more elaborated in chimpanzees and macaques, for example, and much more elaborated in humans than in chimpanzees.

32:58

And some of these areas are evolutionary hotspots, meaning there's been a lot of genetic changes in them. So the default mode network is the ability to generate 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 Usually self -referential images and thinking about stuff that is important to you.

33:36

So that's kind of the mental model kind of aspect, telling you what's important to you. So 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.

34:02

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 could fantasize, well, I'm homeless. Yeah, I don't have any rent to pay. I don't have to worry about 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.

34:32

Having luxury food, living in a high status, 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 reduced the mortality risks 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.

35:01

And this is where I am now. And now we kick in the rational problem solving, 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 and get a good job or something like that. So you're thinking ahead and problem solving and, you know, trying to figure out how to get where you want to be.

35:27

System also works with, you know, more intimate dynamics. It's like, okay, I want to get person A to do this for me. And I know this person pretty well. And I know that if I try strategy one, he or she is going to reject it. 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 try it out in the real world.

35:59

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.

36:12

And you can all do that without, you know, kind of imagine scenarios before they happen and mentally try out things 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 too far into the future. Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older.

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37:40

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 their dog and it just seems so content. If you were able to find a common currency of happiness between us and other animals, do you think that the animals would sort of win in terms of moment -to -moment fulfillment and happiness? Yeah.

38:08

Yeah. Yeah. It probably depends on the animal. You know, if you're a good gazelle and a pack of lions as parallel walking with you, probably you're not too happy. But, yeah, I think, you know, your dog and cat, they're not going to have the same self -awareness as you're going to have. They're not going to be evaluating themselves relative to other dogs and cats.

38:31

And, you know, in a good context, 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.

38:59

And so, yeah, I think that that does occupy people more than it would, say, a dog. Yeah. So when it comes to childhoods and sort of how human babies came about, I've listened to some really interesting stuff around how fathers saved the human civilization because babies' 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.

39:34

I also had a conversation recently about if humans become Martians, if humans move to Mars, bone density is going to be way lower, which means that women's hips are not going to be able to deal with natural births in the way that they could. So almost all children are going to be born through C -section if we move into space. Lower bone density, higher risk of tearing and horrible fractures and stuff during pregnancy or through giving birth.

39:58

But then as soon as you go to C -section, you no longer have the constraint on babies' 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.

40:18

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. Yeah. 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.

40:44

So a number of things there. And I can circle in with dads. So Mark Flynn and I argued 25 years ago now that our Australopithecine ancestors were more like gorillas. Single male harems, a few females and the offspring where males and females form long -term relationships. The males are at least hang around and play with the offspring. And most importantly, they protect them.

41:15

So you have the germ of a human family there and human paternal investment from that perspective that goes back 5 million years or more. Excuse me. So get a human gatherer group when the males start coordinating together. Then you have multiple of these male -centered families in the group. But moving forward, as brain size increased, as humans got better at tool construction, hunting, extracting resources from the environment, part of the brain expansion was due to that type of thing.

42:00

And so, of course, the birth canal needs to be larger for one. The other thing is that kids are born premature. So if you were to take gestation time 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.

42:33

And nobody wants to birth a two -year -old. So, yeah, so they're born premature in a sense. And so they're much more dependent on care. They have a longer growth period for brain and other things. But as humans got better at getting stuff out of the ecology, this also meant that kids had to learn how to make tools, how to hunt, how to forage, and so forth.

43:03

And studies of hunter -gatherer groups suggest that it takes a long time to become a skilled hunter or skilled at foraging or whatever needs to be done in a traditional group or some early farming types of things. So 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 that you're in.

43:33

Yeah. Yeah, 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.

43:51

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 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.

44:19

So the, well, the patriarchy, I guess. We hear a lot about that and a lot of debate about it. But basically, my argument is that, well, yeah, it's real. The male kin -based coalitions came together, you know, fought for probably since Ereptus emerged, you know, 1 .7, 1 .8 million years ago. So this has been going on for a long time. They build institutions.

44:46

They build cultures. And therefore, we would expect that males will dominate in these institutions and be motivated to dominate in these institutions. And also have the capacities, predisposition, capability 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.

45:26

You can see that militarily, obviously, but also any corporation, any other, you know, 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, you know, the confines or so forth of these institutions.

45:59

It involved developing more intimate network of relationships that provide social support. A lot of these networks are focused on consensus,

46:14

you know, agreement, support, and so forth. And not, they're not hierarchical. Hierarchical is frowned upon in these female networks. So they try to level out each other. And they're focused on the dynamics within it rather than coordinating together to compete against another group. So then when you take bunches of females, when they begin to dominate, this has been talked about recently, social media and elsewhere, move into these male systems that are hierarchical, organized for outgroup competition, they don't function as well.

46:57

Because the female default is to focus on in -group dynamics, not coordinating in -group behavior, so that their collective actions will make them all better at outdoing this other group. And so there's a lot of confusion and consternation, arguments and so forth over that dynamic right now. But I think it's real and explains a lot of current social issues.

47:30

Why is that unpalatable for a lot of people?

47:34

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. So women generally don't like that type of social dynamic and system. And so they, you know, they do something else. But it creates problems because a subset of women are work -focused and status -focused, about 15% or so.

48:17

And they're directly competing against men in these hierarchies. And a lot of them aren't doing as well as they think they should do. And so they're looking at the status differentials between the most successful men and the most successful women. And there's still gaps there. And so they come up with post -hoc explanations like bias, systematic sexism, and so forth.

48:42

But the differences are really men are more focused on status. They're willing to trade off friends, health, and so forth to move with status. And they more easily join together collectively to finish common goals and projects or whatever. Female groups are less efficient at that. What about the desire for control? I never really thought about this as a fundamental human motivation, but you seem to think that it is.

49:13

So I use a history, a kind of rule of thumb heuristic, that, you know, we have a fundamental motivation to control. And that doesn't mean, you know, you want to be Hitler or Genghis Khan or whatever. But it means that You want to organize Your world In ways that Reproduce

49:41

The outcomes That increase social status Previously, reproductive opportunities And so forth 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 A status hierarchy Or if you're A woman You want to create a network Social network That will provide

50:19

Social support for you Help with your kids Sometimes economic support Or whatever So you want to organize Your world And control it In a sense that You're recreating The same networks That led to The evolution Of these systems Now I think of it In terms of Concentric rings Some people They just want to control Their day -to -day life Their job What happens at the job What happens with their friends And networks And then other folks You get Hitler Genghis Khan Other despots Want to control the world It's just the The scope of that Which means They want to organize The world At whatever scope It is In ways That are beneficial To them So control Is I Am able to Change the

51:16

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 you're friends with You know What's going on In this network You're going to put Energy into Moderating You know Curating Those relationships So the pattern Fits What's your best In your best interest They pay attention To you Over Other women For For example When you Need it And if it doesn't Happen You get angry Or upset Or whatever Which triggers The default mode network And these other networks That kick in The problem solving It's like Okay Yeah Things aren't quite

52:08

right What do I need to change How do I need to You know Interact with this Network In order to Realign things So that It's now Working Best for me Tell me Tell me If this Sounds familiar You train Regularly You eat Reasonably Well You feel Fine But you're Just kind of Going off Vibes Most people Have absolutely No idea What's going on Inside their Body And that is Why I partnered With Function Function gives you Access to more Than 160 Advanced lab tests Spanning hormones Heart health Kidney function And even Detects early Signals Linked to more Than 50 Types of Cancer To put that In perspective Your typical Annual physical Might test 20 markers Function runs Over 160

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It's huge Best of all You test twice a year And everything Lives inside of a Simple dashboard So you track Trends over time Make sure you're Moving in the right Direction And this level of Testing would usually Cost thousands But with Function It is $365 per year Just $1 a day To actually know What's happening Inside of your body And right now You can get $25 Off bringing it Down to $340 Get the exact Same blood panels That I use And save $25 By going to the link In the description Below or heading to Functionhealth .com Slash modern wisdom That's Functionhealth .com Slash modern wisdom Are humans ever Truly satisfied With the amount Of control that they have Or will we

53:25

always Want more 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 I talk about it In the substack Sort of things That you know There is And has been A very Clear relation Between social status And mortality risks Of you And your kids So moving up The status hierarchy Men and women Increased your chances Of survival And increases And increases the chances Of your kids Surviving Especially When shit hits A fan There's a plague Or a food shortage Or something like that The relation between Mortality risk And status Is inverse Higher The better And You know When shit hits A fan It's

54:22

unpredictable You don't know When another group Is going to invade Typically You don't know When Another plague Or whatever Is going to hit You don't know What the growing season Is going to be And so forth So you can't relax It's a kind of And you get this Within species Arms race So you've always Got to move Up A little bit As protection As a buffer Against when the Bottom falls out And so I think That's why people Are so Obsessed With social comparisons A lot of social media Is Flunting Showing off And then people Are comparing themselves To others And we have The self -aware I think That drove Self -awareness To some point I know this Competency A, B, and C And these

55:14

other people Are getting them Higher up In whatever Status hierarchies 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 Yeah, it Is unfortunate It's hard for a lot Of people to Break out from that And relax Because we live Most of us live Very comfortable Lives At least in the Western world A lot of Resources Not much Relative to What we had Historically Not much Violence So in absolute Terms Things are great We should be Just kicking back Watching TV Playing video games Or whatever And some people Are able to do that But a lot

56:03

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 ancestrally That would have been Very adaptive 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's kind of surprising To me to be honest That Passive pleasure Is something That exists at all But the fact that We are able to be As partially happy In non -pursuit As some humans are

56:49

Is kind of amazing Is that Wow You really Threaded the needle Through this minefield Of evolutionary pressures To If it's Anything You know There's a common Productivity wisdom Which is Hey Make sure that you Don't just use Your rest time As a foot Off the gas In service Of putting your foot Back on the gas Even harder tomorrow Right You should be going For a walk Because you enjoy Going for a walk And it fulfills you Not because you Listen to an Andrew Huberman Podcast episode That suggests That it means That you are 15% more productive Tomorrow if you Go for a walk This evening Something like that But like If you look at The evolutionary pressures Everything be pushing

57:31

us towards survival and reproduction, whether that's intergroup conflict or intragroup status seeking, whether it's resource gathering or social game playing or skill acquisition or weapon development or whatever. Everything is in service of that because we had to negotiate for almost all of human history, really, really aggressively negotiate with an environment that was uncivil, uncivilized, out of our control.

57:57

Heat could have killed us. Cold could have killed us. We didn't know if there was going to be a famine. The fact that we're able to just in small micro doses chill and just be happy kind of blows up. That's the most amazing thing of all of this. Do you not agree? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you have to even when you're pushing hard, you have to recuperate.

58:16

Um, you need recuperation times if you're working, you know, if you're physically doing a lot of labor or whatever, fighting, whatever you need to pull back and recuperate to, you know, you're going to deplete resources, mental resources, physical resources or whatever. So you need these break periods for your body mentally to recuperate.

58:36

And I think that's, that's what you're getting at. I mean, we, some people just have larger recuperation periods, you know, sometimes decades. They just take it slow, but, but, but that's true in other species as well. So it's Northern elephant seals, for example, a lot of intense male, male competition, five, 10% of the males sire most of the offspring.

58:58

Some of the males just don't compete. They, they're slackers. They hang out on the beach. They live longer than the other males. Um, you know, they, you know, don't reap, but, but there's going to be some of those in every generation that just kind of either can't compete or don't want to put the effort into it or just want to take advantage of the here and now, whatever's available.

59:21

If you were to assess the successful people in the modern world, the ones that we look to and think, wow, their ambition and competence has really driven them to do amazing, impressive things.

59:36

How likely do you think it would be that the traits that made that person successful in this environment would be the same ones that would make them successful 50 ,000 or a hundred thousand years ago? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Great question. So yeah. Yeah. So when we get larger societies, we get kind of different, uh, types of classes and hierarchies.

59:58

The main ones that have been talked about, I said before, military, political, entrepreneurial and, and ideological, um, certainly is the military type of, of, uh, class and probably in cooperation with the political class that had the earlier advantages, you know, with, with Rome and, and other early empires. Those are the people that dominated things as a society grows, you know, you get more entrepreneurial, um, folks, ideological folks, you get the Roman empire, kind of an empire at some point that has a lot of social influence.

1:00:37

Yeah. Social complexity, communication. Right. Right. And then the entrepreneurial class raises up and they become wealthier. And so now they, now they want to compete with the political class for social power and so forth. And, and, and you see these groups competing. So in China, as I understand it, the political class kind of keeps the entrepreneurial class and even the military class in check to maintain their power here in the U S you know, it's more of a capitalistic and the entrepreneurial class is very wealthy and therefore much more influential than in other empires where, um, the political class kept them down.

1:01:19

But the entrepreneurial class or the, um, you know, entertainment class, I guess that's part of the, uh, you know, entrepreneurial stuff. So, you know, I liked the Rolling Stones, uh, Mick Jagger and stuff, but my guess is he wouldn't last long on a medieval battlefield.

1:01:38

Yeah. I get the sense too. It seems like it's a, it's a unique, um, it's more precise. It's more civilized. It's going to be more about, uh,

1:01:50

nonviolent competition. Uh, you're going to need to be much more socially aware complexity. What does this person want? Um, uh, interpersonal communication is going to be way more. I get the sense that maybe even like pro sociality and extroversion might be a little bit more important because people can, they don't need you from a resource gathering perspective quite so much.

1:02:20

Maybe in the past you would have put up with an asshole. It was really great with a spear because you go, Oh, Hey, wait, like if we, if he, 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.

1:02:40

Yeah. It's, it's really fascinating. You know, and this is, it's mismatch. And we're talking about mismatch, evolutionary mismatch, but it's coming at it from a really interesting angle, which is what would have been adaptive from a group perspective and an individual competency perspective that now is repurposed or warped. I remember this meme.

1:03:03

I always think about it's a guy who is working in retail, young dude, like really, really big, like Jack guy looks like he was maybe a football player in college or something with a shirt and a tie on kind of a shit shirt and a tie on stood at the front of a bed, bath and beyond. And the caption above it was 15 ,000 years ago, I would have been a proud warrior.

1:03:26

And this pivot from a brain based, a broad based to a brain based economy, increase social, all this stuff is, I know it's just, I would love to see what happens if we could create another virtual reality, just pick everybody up, drop them in it and be like, how does everyone get on like, is Elon Musk that just driven and competent and, and flexible and tyrannical and megalomaniacal that he is able to still win? Or does the fact that he doesn't have this capacity mean that he doesn't so much? It's, it's, it's pretty unique.

1:04:00

Yeah. Well, well, yeah, yeah. He's, he's, he's in a kind of a mix of an entrepreneurial and technological, uh, kind of hierarchy. So he's able to mix them together and almost certainly is using a lot of the default mode in the, in the, um, frontal parietal networks to think about things in new ways, electric cars, you know, or try to do existing technologies better.

1:04:26

So he's, you know, the ambition, but he's also using these very complex evolved systems to try to think through better ways to do, you know, whatever ABC, um, he's focusing on in the time. Now going back 50 ,000 years, a hundred thousand years, 200 ,000 years, people like him would have been the ones inventing the new tools, the new weapons and stuff.

1:04:53

Maybe not on the front line, but the technological advances were our critical piece of, um, where we are now. It's a human coalitional formation, the between group, social competition and the technology, um, the, the male based co -coalitional between group and the technology. Take away any of those. And we're not here before we continue.

1:05:17

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your door Right now Get 15% off your first online order By going to the link in the description below Or heading to athleticbrewing .com Slash modernwisdom Using the code modernwisdom at checkout That's athleticbrewing .com Slash modernwisdom And modernwisdom at checkout Near beer terms and conditions apply Athletic Brewing Co, fit for all times If you could bestow on most normal people A broad understanding or a broad lesson or principle From your study of the human mind What do you think would improve everyone's quality of life Or their understanding of themselves And the world around them Yeah Yeah, I think A lot of what people do Is driven by kind of unconscious Or

1:06:33

their feelings About, you know So -and -so's got more than I do And it's making me feel bad And so forth And so I need to go out And up her Or up him Often by spending extra money And paying a lot of interest on it And, you know Going into debt And so forth So that's based on this Kind of this status driving Need that we have to kind of move up the ladder before the bottom of the ladder gets cut out.

1:07:08

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, they have this, but really what do I need? For my personal well -being and those of my kids. So you get these competitions for getting your kid super good at baseball or whatever.

1:07:42

Unless they're going to go to pros, it's really not that important. Or the PTA moms, they go in and they 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.

1:07:59

In traditional societies, the PTA moms did help their kids. It mattered. 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.

1:08:23

David, I appreciate you. Why should people go to check out the Substack, the book, everything you've got going on? Yeah. So the Substack, 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.

1:08:47

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 Substack. That's there. I've got dozens of subscribers already. So it's a lot of me.

1:09:16

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 run that back. I think it's fascinating to have an ancestral perspective on why human brains sort of developed the way that they did. It really helps to explain what's going on with human behavior.

1:09:38

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 from my publisher, American Psychological Association, if they're actually going to publish it or not. I think probably they will, but who knows?

1:09:57

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.

1:10:26

Then I'll have either that second after that chapter or basic single chapter on big brain networks, like the default load network. I'll get into some details there. I'll move in and talk about things like problem solving, self -awareness, that sort of thing. And then toward the end, I'm going to integrate all of this with domain general intelligence, which a lot of people wonder about.

1:10:57

The ability to easily learn novel information and the ability to draw inferences about kind of basic patterns and stuff. We'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.

1:11:21

Heck yeah. David, I appreciate you, man. Until next time. All right. Thank you. Enjoyed it.