Why is the human mind so unique or interesting? >> Yeah, great great question. Um, we are highly unusual species in many many ways. um in terms of overall brain size, in terms of the ability to uh learn novel things like reading, writing, inventing mathematics um self-awareness is probably much more highly developed in us than in any other species. So there's a whole variety of um cognitive ability, social competencies that uh far outstrip anything else that uh we see in the natural world. >> Why like why
why why did humans become so much smarter than every other species? >> Yeah, that's a great question. That's the um topic of uh one of my earlier books, The Origin of Mind, which I'm now writing a second edition of and so re-reing all of the literature on um uh brain expansion and a variety of other things. Um I started about four or five million years ago with what are called the oropithesines. So that that would be uh 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 uh during that time. So you know not a lot going on probably a little bit more sophisticated than chimps as I said. Um what was interesting is that a lot of these oustrolopiththesine species emerged and there's a sister genus um paranthropus that uh 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 uh 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 Homohabilis. Um Havalis, the tool toolmaker sort of individual. So we saw a jump in brain volume there. Some indication of um some reorganization of parts of the brain
called the parietal cortex involved in things like working memory and uh tool construction so forth. Uh I think the real important jump emerged about 1.8 8 1.9 million years ago or so forth with the emergence of Homo erectus and there we see larger body size we see more uh brain expansion more expansion of these areas involved in uh tool construction and a variety of other things. Um, we also saw that these species, these individuals of these species were beginning to expand in Africa. Um, 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. Uh, cooking emerged, uh, you know, along the way with with later members of these species. All of this increases the amount of calories resources available to the group which decreases mortality rates um and inreases population size. You get population expansions with these technological advances um and that creates um a conflict dynamic. you know, you you get uh bigger populations, you get fewer resources per capita,
you got within group competition. Um, one way to deal with that is to expand into the territory of other groups, which appears to be what happened with HH erectus. And so they're moving into other groups. Uh, archaeological data suggests um increased conflict during that time between group conflict and violence. uh and in fact when we see uh look at extinction probabilities and homo species um I I should set aside there's at least eight of them at one point the more species homo species that were around
in an area the higher the probability that one or several of them would go extinct so I think we have the technological advances the uh population expansion with increase within group competition increase between group competition and the elimination of competitor species. The slow elimination of competitor species. >> I think I think the term is [ __ ] chaos. That's what it sounds like. Sounds like >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] >> Yeah. It it it was a [ __ ] show. How's that? [laughter] >> Yeah. >>
Yeah. It it it was um it it it was violent and and I'll I'll get to that. that they eventually expanded um actually quite a while ago about 1.8 million years ago into uh out of Africa and then eventually Eura uh Asia then Europe. So they really expanded around probably displacing a lot of other um primate species in the process. Uh eventually we get to uh humans and they are I'm skipping a few points here. Um get to humans and they had a couple of attempts
to expand out of Africa but didn't quite make it. Probably the Neanderthalss put them in check. Um and eventually they moved into uh Eurasia about 60,000 uh years ago. uh eventually displaced uh Neanderthalss, I think replaced Neanderthalss. There's some interbreeding and stuff, but the archaeological record suggests that there was a lot of violence as well. So, we have um a couple of things here. One is organized coalitional competition. Uh I'm arguing in the book and in my uh I got a couple pieces on this in
my Substack that uh this was driven by men by males uh male kinbased coalitions was the start of it. In um humans and chimpanzees, bonobos and apparently uh our ancestors uh 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. So we see that with the males. So I think that was uh the males were pushing the
expansions and then you add the technological um changes with the uh tools tool construction driven by males as well. A lot of these tools some of them for hunting or doing you know uh things related to agriculture but a lot of them are just weapons. They were organized to expand their territory. Um and we see that uh evidence you know in the uh archaeological data. We see it in the population genetic data where we look at the number of um individuals who were uh 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 um goes from female to female lineages. So you can track female lineages and male lineages and the process that almost certainly began with homoctus continued up to up through human prehistory and continues beyond uh well beyond that. So around oh 7,000 years ago or so with after the early
emergence of uh agriculture we began to see population expansions agricultural communities moving into uh hunter gatherer uh areas. At one point we had um 17 female relatives for every one male relative. >> Yeah. there was this this massive drop off in male diversity, lineage diversity like 5 to 7,000 years ago. What what happened >> that that was a ma yeah massive drop drop off on that um where most male lineages disappeared um throughout the world you know in various uh places. So, and that data suggests
that it was and and it has to be because it's a Y chromosome, it has to be male kin groups that are driving that. Otherwise, it'd be you'd have more variation in >> Can you explain that a little bit? Explain what you mean. >> Yeah. So, if you have an organized uh malekin group with technology, weapons, and so forth that is expanding out, they're all going to have the same or very similar, you know, 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 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 it it just depends. It the archaeological stuff is is variable. If you're going to get rid of anybody, it's the men. So, you take care you take out the men. Their wide lineage is is
gone. I mean, it's erased from history. And the only way you could get the pattern of the 17 to1 ratio is is um 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 17 times fewer people overall. But it's not. It's 17 times fewer men than there are women. >> That's right. So, um, you know, the
other possibility for population crashes is disease, famine, so forth. >> But it would be disease and famine that only affected men like >> Right. Right. Yeah. If it if it was disease and famine, the women would have been severely affected as well. Probably as affected as men. So whatever happened it was specific to men and um you know and what when that happens it's other men killing >> what uh so you know for almost all of human history and ancestral evolutionary history we've had relatively stable
numbers of male female split and then you have this incredibly novel sex ratio change. What do you think that caused to because that has to have some cultural sociological repercussions that stick about for a good while, but it's not going to be easy to rebalance that. It's going to very much put the power reproductively into the hands of the few men that are still around, >> right? Yeah. And and that's exactly what happened. So we we can step back a little bit and look at malemale
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 than less dominant males. And so you get their Y chromosome you know increasing in frequency across generations >> and that that occurs in you know chimpanzees, mandrels a lot of other primates almost certainly occurs does occur in hunter gather societies. It's kind of people talk about equality there and often
there's equality of material resources because nobody has much but there's inequality in terms of uh hunting competencies um 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 [clears throat] been there for millions and millions of years. Uh for sure if we look at the orolopithesines the males are 50% to 100% bigger than the females indicating [clears throat] very intense malemale 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 uh coalitionalbased coalition male kinbased competition aided by um technology weapons and better social organization. >> Right. So is the suggestion that there would have been some groups of uh some tribes, some groups of males who accessed coordination, skill tactics weapons um at a rate that basically gave them uh an unfair advantage on the battlefield. And these groups of men were able to move across the
planet pretty quickly and wipe out other potentially competitive males. So previously when we think about uh chimps, yeah, sometimes there are intergroup conflicts, but a lot of the time it's intraroup conflicts. It's the alpha currently being taken down by number two, three, and four. And this is a roving bands of males, kinshipbased 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 Genghask Khan, >> right? Right. Uh it it's an evolutionary arms race driven by male coalitional competition and technological advantages. So on on my Substack um cases and it will be in the book, it more elaborated in my book when it eventually gets done. Uh I talk about the Yamna uh expansion from >> What is that? >> Yeah, it's just a um nomadic group, pastoralist group that was um you know around in the 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's 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 replace one
group of men replacing another group of men. >> Yeah, that's interesting. So I'm I'm kind of fascinated by whether malemale 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. In huntergather societies, the variation or reproductive skew, however you want to talk about it, among men is about three times higher than it is about among women. So meaning that they're 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 three-fold variation in reproductive skew was amplified to about a 100fold difference when we move into early empires. Um so uh you know in China, India, Eurasia and so forth. So the dominant men in their coalition
uh had many many wives killed off competitors or >> what sort of what sort of time time zone are we talking about? What years of this? >> Well, so probably you know the the crash of all the um Y lineage the the male lineages 5 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 EM empire building we're looking about four 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 Genghask Khan who had >> 800 kids or so. How much of modern male ambition do you think is a legacy of this asymmetry of reproductive uh lottery? >> Yeah, I I think most of it is uh if not all of it. There's studies of uh you know we have the the population genetic data showing that you know some males reproduce much more than others.
So obviously there's intense competition there. If you look at uh traditional huntergather 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 um and so forth. 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 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, 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 5
years now, which is a cold glass of water with Elements in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a sciencebacked electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue, supports brain function, and helps to regulate your appetite throughout the day. I genuinely notice the difference when I take it versus when I don't. Which is why I don't shut up about it, and also why it's
used by everyone from Dr. Andrew Humeman to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams. The good sniper teams, not the bad ones. Also, they have a no questions asked refund policy, so if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklnt.com/modern wisdom. That's drinklnt.com/ modern wisdom.
What's fundamentally different about female female competition? Because it's not just like they're passive actors when it comes to uh what's happening ancestrally, but how does female competition and male competition differ? >> Yeah. Yeah. a great question. They're definitely not passive actors. So, what I'm what the the model I'm building is that basically male uh coalitional violence initially kinbased 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 [clears throat] >> these uh male coalitions with technological advances which is driven by conflict. So if you look at the Ukrainian war now, all sorts of advances in drone uh use of drones, robots and so forth and 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. And they're 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 so 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 coalition partner with this other person, who's in a conflict or whatever. using all of this information to kind of manipulate and um improve their own status within the group and also promote the well-being and status of their um children. Mhm. So, >> so in in one of my substacks, I uh talk about the uh manipulations and all of the drama I guess that
happens in uh like herum settings where you have a an emperor that has multiple wives or concubines or whatever. Lots of drama going on behind the scenes trying to move their sons into positions where they they'll become emperor or high official or whatever. It's all very subtle typically called relational aggression. Uh but it is active for sure and has consequences. the the women who are good at that sort of thing typically um had healthier kids and are more likely to move their kids into positions that
would allow them to be successful in adulthood. So it's not building institutions it is working the dynamics within them. >> Why was it not female female coalitions roving around and attacking other groups? Yeah. And and and and that's a great question because if we we look at primates, old world 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. [snorts] And the um the costbenefit tradeoffs are 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, m 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 tradeoffs are,
as you said, and I said, uh, much more zero sum for male, particularly when you got a pluginist system. How much do you think we can attribute to war, the building of civilization? Um I think uh war was the primary driver of the building of civilizations. Um other people have uh said that as well that you know you get these coalitions that when you get the between group stuff you get advantages to larger and larger groups there. So, nomadic raiders invading um agricultural communities was a
common dynamic before the emergence of um empires. And then so the agricultural communities unite, maybe start building defensive structures and so forth. The nomads need to uh unite better organize to get larger groups to be competitive. Then you have this this uh arms race situation where both sides are ramping up and developing new technologies and so forth. And as you expand um societies, you know, not all of the guys can be in the military, you need um weapons makers, you need uh people to do the
harvest, you need entrepreneurs, you know, for markets. you you you have a you know a economic diversification of society but but the stressor for the building of these large groups to begin with was between group competition. >> Mhm. Yeah. I think you say that intense cooperation and intense conflict are sort of two sides of the same coin. What do you mean by that? >> Right. So yeah, a lot of uh social scientists don't like to hear that we're a violent species. They just it's kind of
like off the table for them, which means they'll never fully understand our evolution. >> Um and they focus on the the ultra cooperative side of people. People are intensely cooperative. I mean, we live in large cities, a lot of 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. In most other species,
the cooperation is is typically among kin. Uh, and the question is, so how do we get there? And my argument is well what are the benefits to cooperation in large groups and the primary benefit is um defensive or offensive in terms of competing with other groups. Now the the competition doesn't need to be violent. It can eventually emerge into trade wars or other ways of competing across groups. But I think violence was the driver the initial driver. It's the other side. More more violence, more push
for large scale cooperation. >> Yeah. Well, I'm trying to work out why civility is a thing at all. If competition and prestige are our main human drivers, I 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 p pattern there with the formation of um you know early polities like like nation state you know states and then um you know larger empires a lot of conflict in the
beginning when a hierarchy is um established finally a group of males and their kin and their supporters and so forth have kind of taken control of society and organized that they then um develop systems for suppressing in-group competition and of course suppressing people who want to displace them. So you have a lot of violence at first and then suppression of that once the the hierarchy is established you know and eventually people get tired of that and there's revolts and so forth or externally displaced or whatever
but the formation of a hierarchy does suppress inroup violence. M if conflict helped to produce intelligence and and cooperation, technological progress and stuff, what happens when humans become substantially more peaceful? >> What happens? Um I think they get they get bored and they start um attacking each other on social media. Um you got cancel culture. So a lot of the aggression and manipulation 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 macac
brains and chimp brains and human brains and then look at the organization of some of these largecale brain networks. um two critical ones uh one is the default mode network there's the frontal parietal network and in both of these they're there in you know the monkeys apes and people but for people they're much more um integrated with other systems and the white matter tracks of connectivity from the front of the brain to the back of the brain where some of the work goes on um is
much more elaborated ated in monkey than in chimpanzees and macaks for example and much more elaborated in 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 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-reerential 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 I talk about the system. And when people fantasize about things, you know, you could fantasize, well, I'm homeless. Yeah, I don't have any rent to pay. I don't have to worry about, you know, paying the gas bill or those sorts of things. But people don't do that. They fantasize about being higher status, having a better job, having a bigger house, whatever it is, having luxury food, living in a, you know, high status, you know, cool
environment and so forth. They're thinking about things that would enhance their social status. And historically gaining those things would have reduced their mortality risks and reduced 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 is like okay I want to 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 be and tweak it before you actually um try it out in the real world. And so you're able to create various scenarios of the future, figure out different approaches to make the future happen the way you want it to happen. Um, and you can all do that without um, you know, kind of imagine scenarios before they
happen and mentally try out things uh, to get 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. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves. timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks along with improvements in their overall energy. I've been using it for over 2 years since
my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with Timeline. And eat your heart out Martin Schrelli cuz they've just dropped the price and it now starts at $99. Best of all, there is a 30-day money back guarantee, plus free shipping in the US. Plus, they ship internationally. And right now, you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below by heading to timeline.com/modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com/modernwisdism 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 their dog and it just seems so content. >> If you were able to find a common common currency of happiness between us and other animals, do you think that the animals would sort of win in terms of momentto moment fulfillment and happiness? >> Yeah. Um,
yeah, it probably depends on the animal. You know, if you're gazelle and a pack of lions is parallel walking with you, probably you're not too happy. But, um, yeah, I I think you know, your dog and cat, they're not going to have the same self-awareness as you as you're going to have. They're not going to be evaluating themselves relative to other dogs and cats. And, you know, in a in a good context, they don't really need to think about moving up in the status hierarchy or
maintaining their position in the the status hierarchy. So, you know, in a large dynamic social system, there's always movement going on. You always have to, you know, try to move up or maintain or, you know, anticipate potential conflicts or whatever. And 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 ch 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. 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 childirth. 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 a number of things there. Um, and [clears throat] I I can circle in with dads. So, uh, Mark Flynn and I argued, uh, 25 years ago now [clears throat] that our oralopithesine ancestors are more like gorillas, uh, single male herums, 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 chimpanzeee infant's brain. the gestation period would have to be almost two years and nobody's wants to birth the 2-year-old. Um, [snorts] 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 as humans got better at getting stuff out of the ecology, this also uh meant that kids had to learn how to make tools, how to hunt, how to forage, and so forth. And studies of hunter gatherer groups suggest that 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 um 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 neotonous and useless we are as children. What AC 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 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 kinbased coalitions came together you know fought for probably since erectus emerged you know 1.7 1.8 8 million years ago. So it's been going on for a long time. They build institutions. They build cult the cultures. Um and therefore we would expect that males will dominate in these institutions and be motivated to dominate in these institutions in >> and also have the capacities, predisposition capability um to dominate as well. >> Right. And and domination
in there means you have social skills. You have the ability to organize large numbers of other individuals, mostly men, to engage in collective action that increases the group's competitive ability. You can see that militarily obviously but also any corporation um any other you know uh football team whatever the the coordinated behavior of the individuals is what is going to influence um the outcome of the competition. Now women didn't have that same selection pressure. um their pressure was more working within the you know the confines or
so forth of of these institutions and involved developing um more intimate network of relationships that provide social support. A lot of these networks are focused on consensus um you know agreement support and so forth and not they're not hierarchical. Hierarchical is is frowned upon in these uh female networks. So they try to level out each other and they're focused on the dynamics within it rather than coordinating together to compete against another group. So then when you take bunches of females um when they begin to dominate
this has been talked about recently social media and elsewhere uh move into these male systems that are hierarchical organized for outgroup competition they don't function as well because the the the female default is to focus on in-group dynamics not coordinating in-group behavior. so that their collective actions will make them all better at outdoing this other group. And so there's a lot of confusion and constrnation, arguments and so forth um over that dynamic right now. But I I think I think it's real and explains a lot
of uh current social issues. >> Why is that unpalatable for a lot of people? Um well because uh there are a lot of women who are now competing in traditionally male hierarchies uh male professions so forth and they're designed to function you know hierarchically collective action and so forth. women generally don't like that type of social dynamic and system and so they you know they do something else but it creates problems because a subset of women are work focused and status focused about 15% or so
um and they're directly competing against men in these hierarchies and a lot of them aren't doing as well as they think they should do. And so they're looking at the status differentials between the most successful men and the most successful women. And there's still gaps there. And so they come up with post hawk explanations like bias, systematic sexism, and so forth. But the differences are really uh men are more focused on status. They're willing to trade off friends, health, and so forth, the move with status,
and they more easily join together. uh collectively to finish um common goals and projects or whatever that we >> female groups are less efficient at at that. >> What about the desire for control? I never really thought about this as a a fundamental human motivation, but you seem to think that it is. So I you use a history uh uh a uh kind of rule of thumb horistic that you know we have a fundamental motivation to control and that doesn't mean you know you're you're you
want to be Hitler or Genghaskhan or whatever but it means that you want to organize your world in ways that reproduce um the outcome comes that increased social status previously, reproductive opportunities and and so and so forth. So you so the things that help the human brain um evolve so status related competition for example, you want to recreate those conditions. So you want to move up a status hierarchy. Um or if if you're uh a woman, you want to create a network, social network that will
provide um 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 these systems. Now I 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 with their friends and networks. And then other folks, you get Hitler, the Genghask
Khan, other despots want to control the world. is 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 environment and 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 what's going on in
this network. You're going to put energy into moderating or curating those relationships so the pattern fits what's your best in your best interest. they pay pay attention to you over other women for 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 aren't quite right what do I need to change how do I need to you know
um [snorts] interact with this network in order to realign things so that it's now working best for me. >> Mhm. 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. 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, bring it down to 340 bucks. 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/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. Are humans ever truly satisfied with the amount of control that they have or will we always want more? >> Yeah. You know, unfortunately, I think uh 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 uh clear relation between social status and mortality risks of you and your kids. So moving up the status hierarchy, men and women, uh increased your chances of survival and increases the chances of your kids surviving, especially when [ __ ] hits a fan. There's a plague or uh food shortage or something like that. Uh the relation between mortality risk and status is inverse. Higher the better. And you know, when [ __ ]
hits F, it's unpredictable. You don't know when another group is going to invade typically. You don't know when uh you know the 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. It's a kind of a you know and you have this within species arms race. So you always got to move up a little bit as protection as a buffer against when the bottom falls out. And so I think
that's why people are so obsessed with social comparisons. A lot of social media is flaunting, showing off. And then people are comparing themselves to others and and we have the self-aware. I think that drove self-awareness to some point. I know this competency A, B, and C and these other people are getting them higher up in whatever status hierarchies is important to you. And then you need self-awareness to reflect on 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 and so yeah it 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 lot of resources not much rel relative to what we had historic torically not much violence. So in absolute terms things are great. We should be just kicking back watching TV playing video games or whatever and you know and some people are
able to do that but a lot just can't turn it off. >> And it's because of the relation between uh status and mortality risk and the unpredictability of when the population will crash again. >> And ancestrally that would have been very adaptive. We It doesn't really matter whether or not you're feeling satisfied or or at peace as you go to bed tonight. What matters is whether or not you're driven enough to keep on pushing forward. I I mean it it's kind of surprising to me to
be honest that passive pleasure is something that exists at all. Like the fact that we are able to be as partially happy in nonpursuit >> as some humans are. Mhm. >> is kind of amazing. It's like, wow, you really threaded the needle through this minefield of evolutionary pressures to if it's anything other, you know, there's like common productivity wisdom, which is, hey, um, make sure that you don't just use your rest time as a foot off the gas in service of putting your foot back on
the gas even harder tomorrow, right? you you should be going for a walk because you enjoy going for a walk and it fulfills you, not because you listen to an Andrew Humeman podcast episode that suggests that it means that you are 15% more productive tomorrow if you go for a walk this evening, something like that. >> But like if you look at the evolutionary pressures, everything should be pushing us towards survival and reproduction. Whether that's intergroup conflict or intragroup status seeking, whether it's uh resource gathering
or social game playing or skill acquisition or weapon development or whatever, everything is in service of that because we had to negotiate for almost all of human history. Really, really aggressively negotiate with an environment that was univil, univilized, out of our control. Heat could have killed us, cold could have killed us. We didn't know if there was going to be a famine. Let the fact the fact that we're able to just in small micro doses chill and just be happy kind of blows. That's the most
amazing thing of all of this. Do you not agree? >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to even when you're pushing hard, you have to recuperate. Um you need recuperation times. If you're working, you know, if you're physically doing a lot of labor, whatever, fighting, whatever, you need to pull back and recuperate to, you know, you're going to deplete resources, mental resources, physical resources, or whatever. So, you need these break periods >> for your body mentally to recuperate. And and I think that's that's what
you're getting at. We some people just have larger recuperation periods, you know, sometimes decades. They just take it slow. But but but that's true in other species as well. So with northern elephant seals for example, lot of intense malemale competition. 5 10% of the males sire most of the offspring. 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 is available. If you were to assess the successful people in the modern world, the ones that we look to and think, "Wow, they're ambition and competence has really driven them to do amazing, impressive things." >> Mhm. >> How likely do you think it would be that the traits that made that person successful in this
environment would be the same ones that would make them successful 50,000 or 100,000 years ago? >> Yeah. Yeah. Right. Great question. So yeah, so when we get larger societies, we get kind of different uh types of classes and hierarchies. The main ones that have been talked about I said before is 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, >> social complexity, communication. >> Right. Right. And then the entrepreneurial class raises up and they become wealthier and so 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 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 US, you know, it's more of a capitalistic and the entrepreneurial class is very wealthy and therefore much more influential than in other empires where um the political class kept them down. But the entrepreneurial class or the um you know entertainment class I guess that's part of the you know entrepreneurial stuff. So you know I like the Rolling Stones uh MC
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 it's a unique um it's more precise. It's more civilized. It's going to be more about uh nonviolent competition. Uh you're going to need to be much more socially aware. Complexity. What does this person want? Um interpersonal communication is going to be way more. I I get the sense that maybe even like pro-sociality and extraversion might be a little bit more
important because people can they don't need you from a resource gathering perspective quite so much. Maybe in the past you would have put up with an [ __ ] that was really great with a spear because you go 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. Yeah, it's it's really fascinating, you know, and this is >> it's mismatch. And we're talking about mismatch, evolutionary mismatch, but >> it's coming at it from a really interesting angle, which is what would have been adaptive from a group perspective and an individual competency perspective that now is repurposed or warped. There's this meme I always think about. It's a guy who is uh working in retail. Young dude, like
really really big like jack guy. Looks like he was maybe a a football player in college or something >> with a a shirt and a tie on. Kind of a [ __ ] shirt and a tie on. Stood at the front of a bed bath and beyond >> and the the the caption above it was uh 15,000 years ago I would have been a proud warrior. And this pivot from a brainbased a broad-based to a brain-based economy, increased social, all this stuff is uh I know
it's just I 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 meg 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. >> Yeah. Well, well, yeah. Yeah. He's he he's he's in a
kind of a mix of an entrepreneurial and technological uh kind of hierarchy. So he is 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 or try to do existing technologies better. So he's, you know, the ambition, but he's also using these very complex evolved systems to try to think through better ways to do, you know, whatever ABC um he's focusing on in the
time. Now, going back 50,000 years, 100,000 years, 200,000 years, people like him would have been the ones inventing the new tools, the new weapons and stuff. maybe not on the front line, but the technological advances were are critical piece of um where we are now. It's a human coalitional formation, the between group, social competition, and the technology um the the male-based coalitional between group and the technology. 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. Find Athletic Brewing Co.'s
bestselling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you. or best option. Get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door right now. Get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbwing.com/modernwisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's athleticbwing.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Near beer terms and conditions apply. Athletic brewing company fit for all times. If you could bestow on most normal people a broad understanding or a broad lesson or
principle from your study of the human mind. What do you think would uh improve everyone's quality of life or their understanding of themselves and the world around them? >> Yeah. Yeah. I think um a lot of what people do is driven by kind of unconscious or their feelings about, you know, so and so's got more than I do and it's making me feel bad and so forth and so I need to go out and up her or up him often by spending extra money and paying
a lot of interest on it and uh you know going into debt and so forth. So that's based on this kind of this status driving uh need that we have to kind of move up the ladder before the bottom of the ladder gets cut out. >> Um but you know we live in a but it's good to understand where we live. We live in a place 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 well-being and that those are 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. Um, in traditional societies, the PTA moms did help their kids. it mattered. >> You know, in a middle school today, you're putting all this effort into it, probably a lot of drama, a lot of time and work and all that. In a long run, we know doesn't make any difference for your kid anymore. So, you you can chill a bit. >> That would be nice. David Giri, ladies and gentlemen, David, appreciate you. Where should people go to check out the Substack,
the book, everything you got going on? Yeah. So, the the Substack I I initially just had a bunch of reprints from a number of articles mostly on sex differences um that I uh published in Qulette. They gave me the permission to redo them. And now I'm redoing uh Origin of Mind, which will take another year or so to finish, but along the way I have a few um uh posts here and there. I'll have them on certain topics as I work through them on the chapters.
Chapters will be much more elaborated, more evidence and so forth. So have snippets. >> Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh just a very uh kind of innovative name, Giri Substack. So it's there. I've got dozens of uh subscribers already. So it's it's just >> philosophy. Did you also want to talk about the great divergence? Maybe some other time. Yeah, we're gonna have to do that another time. But dude, I uh I'm always super down to talk to you. So, we can we can run that back. I think
it's fascinating to have um an ancestral perspective on why human brains sort of develop the way that they did. It really helps to to explain what's going on with human behavior. What's happening with the second edition of the book? What's going on with that? >> Yeah. So, I've got through a few chapters uh there. I'm actually I'll hear from my publisher, American Psychological Association, if they're actually going to publish it or not. Um I think probably they will, but who knows? Um and so I'll move
on. Next chapter will be on um uh the development of the brain, prenatal development and kind of uh neurobiological organization to it. Basically saying, you know, there's no way it's a blank slate. you know, the only the only place you get a blank slate is academic social scientists. >> Otherwise, that's there. So, I'll present that evidence probably pair it back a little bit from the first edition. Then I'll have either that second after that chapter or basic single chapter on um uh big n uh big
brain networks like the default mode network. I'll get into some details there. 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 um domain general intelligence, which a lot of people uh wonder about 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. >> Heck yeah David I appreciate you man until next time. >> All right. Thank you. Enjoyed it. A quick note. Lots of people tell us that YouTube unsubscribes them from the channel even though they already pressed it. So just check down there and see if the subscribe button is pressed. You get access to episodes before anybody else if you do. Supports me and the show helps me to bring you bigger
and better guests and it makes me very happy. So just go and give it a tap for me. I thank you.