Frans de Waal || Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

Research Center. Chipan Zee Politics, The Age of Empathy, The Bnobo and the Atheist, and Mama's Last Hug are among his most popular books that have been translated over twenty languages. His most recent book in the topic of our conversation today is called Different Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist. In this episode, I talked to Franz d Wall about a very emotionally charged topic among humans, sex and gender.

As a primatologist, he shares his youth unique perspective and research findings on the biological differences between male and female primates. Doctor Franz de Wal clears up what alpha male really means and debunks the natural order of male supremacy. We also touch on the topics of socialization, power, altruism, reproduction, and equality. Personally, I found this a really interesting and

fascinating conversation with a really nuanced, thoughtful, reflective scientist. What I really like about his perspective is he doesn't take any of these extreme stances that you tend to see today on Twitter, for instance, and instead he really tries to think through what we can all learn from looking at other animals about how to treat humans or fell humans.

I found it really interesting, for instance, that despite obvious distinctions between masculine and feminine behavior and great apes, they have no trouble accepting non gender conforming individuals. It's not the Great Ape that needs to change, but it's the other great apes that show tolerance to who the Great Ape already is. I wish we saw a lot more of that kind of acceptance among you humans, let me tell you, I also wish we saw a lot more of the kind of complexity of thinking that doctor do

Wall shows. What I really like about him is that he really values the science and takes what the biological influence on behavior very seriously. But he also believes in equality and he argues that these things are not at odds with each other, and I could agree with him more so. Now I bring you doctor Franz do Wall. That remind me. Has your book officially come out yet? Yep, it's a congratulations. How are you feeling about the reception

of it so far? Well, everyone who reads it, and it hasn't reached a ton of people yet, but everyone who reads it is positive. I just saw today if any positive review in the TLS, what is the Times Literary Supplement? So that was good. Good. Yeah. I mean it brings together lots and lots of ideas that you've had throughout your course of your career, and it really has a lot of pertinence to the cultural wars going on right now and lots of discussions that are the

foremost front of the world. It must be interesting as a primatige is to watch all this going on and you're like, oh, humans, yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff going on as well, you know, absolutely absolutely. Now let's start off by can you just just define to our audience what a primatologist is. A primatologist is a student of primate behavior and ecology and sometimes neuroscience and physiology. So it was a very broad definition related to non

human primates. But most of us when we say I'm a primatologist, they mean behavior and cognition, that kind of a it's some more the psychology actually and the evolution of primates. But you're interested as well in comparisons to humans, right, I mean you must have really interesting conversations with like evolutionary biologists in your department, and right, yeah, I'm very

interested in humans. I consider humans also primates of course, so I look at humans in that light, and I think that compareson I'm a biologist by training, and so I'm interested in all sorts of animals. But obviously there is the primates to comparison. It's much more easy to make I think, yeah, you see that. Promatologists don't worry about the desired ability of behavior, but rather try to

describe it best we can. And then you say, I sincerely believe that the best way to achieve greater equality will be to learn more about our biology instead of trying to sweep it under the rug. There are a lot of attempts to sweep biology under the rug, and the science that's very well meaning attempts at equality. But you are in your book in various ways that they actually are misguided in some ways. Is that right? Yeah, I don't think you can get around human biology. If

people try to do that, it always backfire us. I think. In the gender debate, of course, what we see is that people embrace biology when it comes to gender identity and homosexuality because they use biology as an argument and against those who say you have to change and your behavior is not acceptable, and they argue from biology saying that we are born that way. You know, this is a biological thing. But as soon as we get to gender of the large population, then gender has become a

biology has become sort of bad word to use. Like if you see females are different from males in their behavior, naturally, that's really not very well accepted. And so biology is used in the ideological debate dependent on whether it's useful or not useful. And I as a biologist, feeling you need to use it in all domains and we need to have a science that tells us what the sexual

differences are and go with that. And the interesting thing for me in writing this book was that there are some differences that are assumed that I think are nonsense.

So there are some biological differences that people propose, like let's say men are more hierarchical than womens, things like that, which I don't believe in at all, that they propose these things, and then at other times they deny differences that are pretty obvious, like, for example, in the play behavior of the young primates, we see differences that are very similar to the play behavior that we see in boys and girls. And I don't see why would you

deny that kind of differences that we see. Yeah, you're making really excellent points. A lot of it does seem to be the arguments for made based on ideological lines, not the actual facts of the matter. You know, very very hot button topic is transgenderism, right, and you talk in your book about Well, let me ask you, you know, how can our findings about our understanding of biology and from a primatology perspective, how do you view transgenderism? Well,

transgender persons usually this starts very early in life. That's why I don't think it's just sort of fashion because people sometimes resented low like that is that it's a sort of wim that arises during puberty or something. No, it often starts far before puberty in most cases, and it is irreversible, which already hints at a deeper cause

than just cultural indoctrination or something like that. And then we have evidence from brain studies that the brain is involved and that a certain area in the brain which is different in trans women than in cis gender women. So that argues for biology. That doesn't mean that culture cannot have an effect on it, or the expression of it, or the need to transition. All of that is probably

culturally influenced, and culture has an influence on everything. But as in transgender persons, we should should respect them, just as we did with homosexuality. For a long time, we have argued, of course in society that homosexual behavior could be changed, and now we realize that that's not really

a good possibility. Very interesting. Yeah, So for me, you know, I'm from the Netherlands and debate about homosexuality I've never understood because homosexual love was legal in the Netherlands for more than two centuries, and so when it came to the US and noticed that there are so many objections to it, I had trouble understanding that. But we went through the same debate there. I think that we're now

going through with tomsender people. Well, there's something, you know, humans, there is something about our consciousness and our ability to even cognitively represent identity that is different from rangutangs. Right, So like I mean, when you look at other species, I feel like it is very cut and dry. What's

a male, what's a female? I don't feel like there are debates within the ranguetang community of you know, I don't feel like, you know, rangu tanks are disagreeing in the nuance with each other about what which is the male and which is the female of the species. Right, But humans are very completed. But the apes do have

exceptions to the rule. So that's quiet. So even though they may not be debating them and they may not be putting labels on them, which I think is something that humans are so strong at, you know, making labels. I describe in my book a female chimpanzee named Donna, who is born as a female, is clearly a female, but from a very young age she acted like a

little male, and she liked to wrestle with males. She liked to invite the alpha male to wrestle with which, you know, the adult males don't usually play with young females. That's something they do with young males, but not so much with young females. And so she was from the very beginning different and then she grew when she reached the adolescence, you know, twelve thirteen years old, she grew into robust males. She had bigger shoulders, she had more hairs,

she had a bigger head, bigger hands. She grew into a male like character, and she associated with males. He acted like the males, he associated with them, and from a distance, if you didn't know better, you would say she was a male. Of course, I cannot ask her her gender identity, and I don't think that's an issue that we can discuss about the primates. But she she was clearly an individual who didn't fit the binary so nicely.

And so with for example, of his gender as opposed to sex, I usually like to make the division between masculine and feminine. For sex, I'm okay with a distinction male and female, and we do that in biology, of course, but for a gender, I prefer masculine feminine, and clearly that female Donna, she was more on the masculine end of things. Wow. Yeah, no, it's a great point, and her name is Donna. Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, maybe I see his name was Donna. If we could actually

ask him, he maybe would give us him pronoun. But this is so interesting because even taking the gender identity out of the equation, there seems to be sets of behaviors that seem to go in one direction or the other in terms of how they are perceived by others. Right, And so there's just deep implications for your research, and it's just so fascinating what we see when we see other species having similar behaviors but without the cognitive representation

of identity that they obviously are missing. Yeah. So one of the things we humans do is we label. So we say you're a man, you're a woman, you're hit orsexual, you're homosexual, and you need to fit in these boxes, and if you don't fit in the boxes, you're sort of out of look. In our society, we're not very tolerant in that regard. And the difference with the other primates is that they don't do the labeling, they don't

have the boxes, and they're not intolerant. They for example, Donna was extremely well integrated in my group, so no problem at all, even though she acted quite differently from other females. I've also known males who don't act like the typical male. For example, they may be big males, but they are not interested in the macho games of who's going to be dominant and stuff like that. They

stay out of all of that. They're sort of sidelined in that regard by themselves, and they're also perfectly well accepted. So the intolerance in humans sometimes I wonder where that comes from. There's almost individual variability, and in biology we're very used to that, So you don't need a gender concept to talk about variability. Because you look at two trees in the forest of the same species and they're going to be different from each other. We are very

used to that in biology. So individibal variability is everywhere, But in human society there is not a high level of tolerance for that. Yeah, excellent point. You break down a lot of misconceptions in your book, and I just want to go through them. One of them is that male supremacy is the natural order. Some humans might hold that belief. What would you say to someone who says that, you know, how would you set them straight? Yeah? So

there are several ways of doing that. Since in my book I compare as with Bernova's and chimpanzees, which are our two closest relatives, and they're exactly equally close to us in DNA terms, I have it there's a very easy argument to Banovo is female dominated and the chimpanzee is male dominated. So already in our closest relatives, the

picture is not that clear, you know. But even if I would go to chimpanzees alone, where the males are dominant physically dominant, I know many high ranking females who were very powerful. So my previous book, Mama's Last Heard was about a female champ named Mama who was for forty years. He was the alpha female in the colony of chimpanzees, so she was not physically dominant over the males. She could not beat up a male, so to speak,

but she had more power than the males. So each male who wanted to be the other would have to court Mama because that female ran the female show. And if all the females put their weight behind a male, he could become alpha male. And so she was instrumental also in the male politics. So in a group where the males are physically dominant, I always make a distinction between dominance and power. You may have individuals who are physically dominant but don't have the power. Someone else has

the power. And in humans, of course sometimes people are surprised by that. But in humans we're very used to that. You walk into a business in New York, and let's say you want to speak to the boss. You don't walk up to the biggest fellow in the store and saying that must be the boss. That's not your assumption. Your assumption is the boss could be someone else, could be an older man or a woman. All of that is possible. And in a chimpanzee society or banavo society,

the same thing. You cannot tell from just from a distance, who's going to be the boss. It's not a physical feature necessarily, And and power is such the same power as the thing that is hard to measure. It's harder to measure than physical dominance. But there are lots of females who have a lot of power, and so all the primate and this also applies to monkey groups. You know, all the primate groups have an alpha female and as female politics too, and as female leadership to so interesting

in the psychological literature. Jessica Tracy and her colleagues make make the distinctwe authentic and hebiristic pride and have argued that they evolved on different paths like and they also make there's researchers like chang it All who make the distinction between dominance and prestige as two roots to social status. Sounds like you see the same two roots to social status in other species as well. Is that what you're

saying prestise is interesting because prestise is conferred by the outside. Yeah, that's true. It's not like I can I can physically coerce you in to in my prestige, so to speak. That's not a possibility. The prestige comes from the outside who admires me for example. Admiration is part of that. The celebrities have prestige, for example. So we did one time an experiment with chimpanzees where we looked at would

they imitate an individual based on their status. So we had a high ranking female who would show how to do a certain thing to get food and a low ranking female who would demonstrate how to get food, and they demonstrated equal amounts of times and equally visible to everybody and so on, and the mass of the colony followed the high ranking female. They ignored what the low

ranking was doing, even though that was equally successful. They followed the high ranking female, and so prestige effects in the sense of following the example of which is often what that is can be found in the other pyramids. I mean, there's there's applications here for a lot of ways of thinking about meeting in among humans. Right, notion of the alpha male, Right, maybe we can talk about what is the alpha male and other species? Is it what?

Because a lot of people think of it through the dominance angle, like only like big muscles, right, and aggression and brute force. But there's there's multiple paths ways to meeting, right, Please tell me, Please tell me there is. Yeah. So, the word alpha male actually became popular after I wrote Chimpanzee Politics, and Chimpanzee Politics was introduced to Washington by

Nude Genwich of all people. After that, the term alpha male, since I had used it repeatedly in the book, became more and more used, and then it ended the business literature. And in the business literature, alpha male means the guy who beats up everybody and lets them know every day who's bosson has the biggest office and the biggest parking spot, and that's macho macho, alpha male. And I think it's extremely unfortunate because for me, that's not necessarily the alpha male.

Each group of primates has one alpha male and one alpha female. It's not a personality type, it's just the top position, and that position is associated with some responsibilities. We do have bullies sometimes also in chimpanzees, for example, we may have an alpha male bully who terrorizes everybody. That occurs, and those individuals don't always end well, I

must say. Sometimes there's a revolt against their behavior. But most of the time, most of the alpha males that I have known are individuals who keep the peace, so they break up fights in the group. They protect the underdog. They protect a juvenile against an adult, or a female against the male. They protect the underdog. They show empathy for others, They reassure others who are distressed, and as a result, a good alpha male can become an extremely

popular character, so he's groomed by everybody. Everybody loves that male, and if he's ever challenged by a younger male, the group will put their weight behind him because they want to keep a male like that. So I've known very popular alpha males, and so that idea that the alpha male must be feared rather than respected, you know, as Machiavelli would say, that is a wrong idea, and so

it's a simplistic idea. And then with alpha females, alpha females like Mama, who also keep the peace in their way. They don't step in when a conflict is going on because that's a dangerous enterprise and that's better done by a male. But they step in afterwards. They come in afterwards. If individuals have had to fight and they're not reconciling, the alpha female may come in and pull out her arm and make them move to the other and bring them together and wait till they groom each other. And

when they groom each other, she walks away. And so she sort of has a healing role in the group. Ah, and the male, the alpha male, can have a healing role in the group too, Yeah, both of them. If you have a group was a good alpha male and alpha female, they become a team very often. Well, then that's why all the power is at that moment. Yeah, you've seen power couples among orangutangs. You're like, Wow, that's

the power couple right there. Well, orangutangs are pretty solitary animals, so they are not as social as the Bnova's in the chimps, the chimps. Yeah, I don't know why all my examples keep coming around to orangu tanks. I think I just like the word of rangutang. Yeah, it's a nice word. It's a good word. You say, we cannot just go around the animal kingdom and pick and choose

which species we like the best. I thought this was a good one too, because some people will be like, oh, we're more like bonobos than ship because we want we want to see ourselves in a positive light, you know, and we also can denegrate like chimps. And so I really liked that quote for that reason. Well, there is

there is wishful thinking. And so if I described bonobos and say that our female dominated, the females are collectively dominant in the BOVA because I have a sisterhood and they support the female support itsel are very strongly, and I describe all the sexual behavior of the bonobos, then people say I'm more like a banobo or why aren't

we more like bonobos? And there's many men, of course who don't like banovos for that reason, and they would rather be a chimpanzee, I think, And I've had reactions like that. One time I gave a lecture about bernobos for a German audience and then all the professor male professor stood up and said, what's wrong with those males? And so he clearly felt that the males were not doing their job in the pernobo society. So people associate

like that. But for me, they're both fascinating animals and I like both of them very much, and I'm not making a choice between them. Yeah, I wonder if any bonobos, if they could talk, they would identify as chimps, you know, you know that the male female thing. It's just it's really there's so many complexities to the issue, because you are also arguing there is there are real biological differences

between males and females. You know, you said, you say, I've never heard anyone say, you know, I followed male and female ranguetanks so the forest and find their behavior to be so strikingly similar. So you do clearly see differences if you just reduce sext of gentles, right like, you still see striking differences, is that right? Yeah, there's plenty of differences. One of the biggest ones is violence level.

So the level of violence in all human societies. You look at the homicide statistics of any nation, it's more men than women physical violence, and in all primates it's more males than females. So it's very hard to argue in that case that that that's not a biological saying so, and the same is true for the play behavior. I describe the play behavior of young males and young females.

Young females very infant oriented. They love to put their hands on the infants of newborns or models, and later, if they are more skilled, they become the babysitters for those infants, you know. And if you give them dolls, they like to carry dolls and hold them and put them on their back and things like that. In the wild, they pick up wooden logs and rocks and carry them

like dolls. So there's an enormous fascination with infants in the young females, which makes sense given that the rest of their life they will be caring for offspring and there's an enormous fascination with young males for mock fighting and rough housing and what we call rough and tumble play, and that has also been found all over the world to be done more by boys than by girls, and certainly in all the primates, the young males do more

of it than the young females, and it explains also somewhat, I think the sex segregation that we see in play behavior. Mostly it's young males who play with males and young females who play with females. It's because the females don't like this rough play that the males are doing, so it's too rough for them, and some exceptional females like Donna who I described, who would like to be in that mix. But I think it explains to a large degree the sexual segregation that we see on the playgrounds

in humans too. So interesting, So do you think that there's benefit in among humans if you are biologically male in terms of metal, medical sex, you know, and you feel psychologically you are the other gender, you think there's benefit in in Is there benefit in calling yourself the other gender as opposed to saying, well, I'm just male with female characteristics Mentally and psychologically, I think that's the crux of the debate, right, Yeah, I think the gender

identity arises very early, long before puberty, and so it's not really hormonally driven. I think it results often in what I call self socialization. So the typical self socialization in children and in young crimates is that you look

up at adults of your own sex. So young males look at adult young male chimpanzees look at the adult males around, and the mimic their behavior, and the young females usually mimic the behavior of their mom, which is the adult female around, and transgender children are set to identify more with individuals of the adults of the opposite sex,

and they mimic their behavior, so they self socialized. I think self socialization is an underestimated feature of because we always think of socialization as a one way streat The adults socialize the young ones. But I think the young ones socialize themselves by mimicking the behavior, mimicking the example, and modeling themselves on adults mostly of the same sex, but sometimes like in the Tom's gender, children of opposite sex and in the primates. We have evidence for that

as well. So you want a orangutank, example, like they do and orangutanks. Recently, a study demonstrated that the young females they eat exactly what their mother eats. You know, in the forest of orangutanks, there are thousands of plants, some of which you should not eat, some of which are the best to eat, and fruits, and the young females they copy exactly the diet that their mom has. Young males have a different diet, and that's because they

watch adult males who come through. They don't live with them, but they come through on occasion and they watch very closely. But these guys are eating and so and we have other evidence, we have evidence of tool use in the primates, where young females copy what their mom is doing and the young males don't. And so I think self socialization is a powerful concept and it applies equally to the

primates as to us. And to a large degree, I think primates and that's why I use the wordgenda for them as well, they learned their sexuals also from watching adults. So it's not just that they are born with certain behavior, as people often assume that the other primates must be, you know, they have innate behaviors. I think there's a

very strange assumption. A chimpanzee is adult when he's sixteen, so of course he has an enormous learning period, and he is just as much influenced by the environment, I would say, as a human child. And so the gender

concept can be applied there as well. Okay, so you could see a case in which do you think if Donna could speak and could self identify, do you think her wife would be made easier and her well being would be improved if she could say I am a male and my pronouns are him, you know, like I mean, I think that's just the crux the question among humans, and I'm wondering a primatology perspective on that, you know, because there's different pasathways one can take when they're have

such a great mismatch between mind and body. One pathway is to just say I'm female, but I really am very masculine in lots of ways. Another way is to do complete gender surgery right reconstruction. There are different pathways. Can we glean any insights at all from looking at other animals? I find that very difficult. The point to

make about Donna is that she was extremely well integrated already. Yes, in human society, maybe because of the awkwardness or intolerance that occurs, you know, but she had no problems at

all in her life with that issue. I think, and I think, if you ask me which kind of individuals would primates ostracize or exclude, I would say probably only trouble makers, individuals who cause trouble and upset everybody with aggressive behavior, for example, where I could see an exclusion, but for other reasons I find it hard to imagine. So I also use the example in my book of

racial intolerance. So in humans, because we label everybody black, white, whatever we do, I think that doesn't help in our case. But there is a species of spider monkey, which is called a variegated spider monkey, where you have individuals from almost white to almost black. You have all the color variations in between, and in captivity. I know that these individuals get along fine. They do perfectly fine if you

mix them together. But I asked recently a field worker who works with them in Columbia in the field, and he says, in the wild too, these color variations are all over the place, and they're all mixed together, and he's never noticed that it makes any difference to them.

And so the level of tolerance in private societies is actually a bit higher, I would say, than in human societ and that's we are conformists and we insist on rules and we label and I think some of some of that is related to our linguistic capacities, which are of course wonderful and give us a lot of benefits, but they also under minus a few things in society, I would say, Yeah, like our psychological categorization ability is evolved. Yeah. Wow,

that is really really mind blowing. It's almost like humans are even the opposite, Like we extall the troublemakers and they're the ones that trend on Twitter, you know, they're the ones that get the attention, whereas in tall you know, the intolerant people you know, can even be elected into political offices for instance. So wow, this is so so so interesting. I really appreciate your answer, by the way.

It really it really opened up my mind to the way the humans are and the way the humans don't really have to be. So thank you, thank you. Okay, I'd like to talk about your disagreement with Richard Dawkins his notion of selfish genes in that we really aren't communal, cooperative species. You say, we are an ultrasocial animal with solid communal values. So can you kind of explain to me this difference in perspective between the selfish gene view

and your view. It's a bit odd because Richard Darkins is a student of NiCoT Nicotimber is a Dutch etologist, and I'm an indirect descendant too, so we are from the same school, and I understand his arguments very well, his arguments in the selfish gene and as far as the biology is concerned, I have no trouble at all as his argument of evolutionary argument about gene evolution. But when you call genes selfish, you're using a metaphor, and he says that on occasion in his book. It's a metaphor.

So they're metaphorically selfish. They cannot be really selfish because selfie is a psychological characteristic and genes are just chunks of DNA, so they cannot have that. But he uses that metaphor and then sometimes he gets carried away by his own metaphor, and this happens to his followers also, so they go from our genes are selfiesh to we

our selfies, our psychology is selfish. And that's why in his book at some point he says you shouldn't expect any kindness or altoism from the human species naturally, because that's our biology is not made that way. I don't know what the exact quote is, but that's how he says it. And this he has said repeatedly is that you shouldn't get your hopes up about human altoism because we are born selfish. And so that's where he all of a sudden falls into the trap of his own metaphor.

And I had a discussion with him when he came on time to Atlanta. I had a discussion with him about that, and saying that he should have spoken of the self promoting gene. That would have been more correct than the selfish gene, because people confuse it with human

psychology basically. And what he then he answered in that interview that we did that maybe the jeans are misfiring when you see altruistic behavior, because I described to him a few scenes among the chimpanzees where where sometimes you know,

the chimpanzee sometimes help individuals who can never help them back. So, for example, we had an old female in the chimpanzee colony who could barely walk anymore and was nearly blind, and so each time she would try to go to the water faucet to drink, younger females would run ahead of her because he were much they were much faster, run ahead of her, suck up water then returned to her and spitter than her mouth. Or if she would try to join a group of chimps grooming, they would

push her up. They would push her up into the climbing frame where these individuals were sitting because he could not get there anymore, and she was so old, and see, of course he died a couple of months later. She was so old that there was really no way she could pay them back. But that's what they were doing for her. And I described that to Richard Dawkins, and he was speaking of misfiring geness firing, which to me is I don't even know what that ore, misfiring genius.

But yeah, so that was my disagreement with him. I think his book opened the eyes of many people to evolutionary processes, but it was also misleading on the human psychology part. Thank you, I appreciate that. Stephen J. Gould called the female couturus a quote glorious accident. Is that true? Yeah, that was a discussion of maybe fifteen years ago, maybe more, where it was proposed by Elizabeth Lloyd. I believe philosopher was proposed that the clitoris was a byproduct. It's like

the human male nipple has no function. You know, all the primate males have nipples, so goilla male has nonipples too, and these nipples have no function, and the glitterus was a bit like that. The glitterus was there because males needed a penis, and that's why females got the glitteris. But it serves no purpose, so that's why gold Clock called it the glorious accident. But now we know we have actually much more knowledge of the glitters from anatomical studies.

We know that the glitterus has as many nerve endings as the penis and is served by big nerves which carry that information to the brain. And so the glitterus is not just it's not like the male nipple. The glitterus is a functional part of the female body. And

for example, Bunova females have a very large glitterus. Dolphin females have the largest glitters in the animal world, all mammals, the mouse and the elephant, All mammals have a glitterus, and so the clitterus is functional, and it relates a bit, and that's the discussion in my book. It relates to female sexuality. Female sexuality has been traditionally downplayed by the biologists,

by everyone, actually not just a biologist. But this is sort of the Victorian view of female sexuality is that the males are sexually interested and have a sex drive, the females are sort of the passive recipients of sexuality, and that view is so incorrect. It's also incorrect for birds, it's incorrect for lots of animals. But in the primates,

for example, females are sexually quite active. Now I'm not just talking about bernobos, where the females are sexually assertive, I would even say, but in many primates the females are very enterprising sexually. So the clitoriss plays a role in that, I'm sure, in that it makes sex more pleasurable. Female primates also masturbate, which they wouldn't do I'm sure if there wasn't some sort of associated feeling, was it? And so yeah, the clits was as glorious accident. That

was a discussion from long ago. But as I think we have different ideas now about female sexuality. Yeah, within the demean of the meeting game, you argue that Smith that the females are always demure, right, And I love how you brought in Abraham Maslow there, because that's one of my intellectual heroes. And I actually, oh okay, actually

revised his hiercu needs in my most recent book. And I really like, you know, how you brought his idea of talking about monkey self confidence, you know, and how it's related as human self esteem. I worked at the facility, you know, he was, I believe a student of Hey Harlow. He was, Yeah, Helow was his mentor. Yeah. So I worked at the Wisconsin Primy Center for ten years and I worked at the facility at the Wilence Park Zoo where he also watched monkeys. And so that's how I

got into the history of Maslow. And and if you read his early articles, he started out with being impressed by the dominance of monkeys and the self confidence of the alpha male monkey, and then later he developed his ideas about self esteem, and I think there's a sort of continuity between these ideas. So the self confidence of the male monkey sort of became internalized, and that that then leads to self esteem. So I find it so interesting.

And I worked on the same monkeys, and I worked on Reese's monkeys, and I described in my book the fascinating observations there that we had an old male who was the alpha male of the of the troop, a big troop, like a hundred monkeys, but he could not handle the younger males, and the younger males were faster and stronger. Probably he didn't know what to do with them.

But each time a younger male would challenge him, the alpha female of the troop would walk up to him and stand right next to him, and that would stop the younger males. The younger males would not there to proceed. Is the alpha female standing there because she had a whole army behind her, so to speak. And so that's another indication I'd we talked about that before, of a female who has a lot of power, you know, and

so I'm very used to that. Also in the monkeys, well, I did a quite deep analysis of Maso's own psyche, and he was quite obsessed with dominant females. Yeah, because his mother was a very dominant female. Yeah, yeah, and he wrote papers about that about he said that was a very under research topic of investigation where dominant females, and yeah, this is something that he was very, very

interested in that idea. So, what is the evidence that the sex drive of women may match that of men, Because there is this idea that men have a much, much greater sex drive and then a lot of reviews of the field of evolutionary psychology show in lots of different ways that that is the case. But you're you're saying, we may need to rethink that a bit. I think.

So I've seen that literature on the male sex drive being stronger, and one of the arguments comes from data on masturbation, which is a way of measuring sex drive, because masturbation is not constrained by the risk of getting pregnant or by finding a partner, and men do clearly more of that than women, and I think male primates do more of that than female primates, So that argument I can follow. But we also know that people lie about their sex lives, and so I don't know why

psychology keeps trusting questionnaire message. As you may have noticed, I'm not a big fan of it. So because, for example, if you ask men and women on campus, usually as students, usually you ask them how many sex partners do you have or did you have in the last couple of years, the men have many more than the women, which is really impossible. It's an impossibility in an environment like that, is that the men have many more sex partners than

the women in heterosexual interactions. But if you hook up you must know that study. If you hook up to women to a fake light detectile machine, all of a sudden, they have equal numbers of sex partners than the man. I don't recommend doing that at home. No, it's a fake machine. It's a fake light detect machine, okay. And so what that means is that people are not honest. Women especially are not honest about how many sex partners they have because there's a stigma attached in our society

to women having too many sex partners. And so I don't trust questionnaire methods. I'm so glad I work with animals who don't fill out questionnaires, and I don't ask them how much sex they have. I just measure how much sex they have and with whom and so on. So with the sex drive, I think sexual adventurism as I call it or sexual proactivity is very highly developed in the females. That whether you call that the sex

drive or not, you know, that's a different thing. I don't know what the sex drive exactly is, but by some measures, I sinking men have a greater one, and by other measures, I think it's pretty equal between the two. Even among humans, you find that women tend to be more exportive sexually and have a more varied interests in terms of different sexual things to try. There is some research on that. Yeah. So for example, in chimpanzees, it has been calculated that a female chimpanzee in the forest

will have about six thousand copulations in her lifetime. She produces about five or six children in her lifetime because because there's a long interverse interval and they have one kid at the time. So doesn't that look out of proportion? Six thousand copulations for five to six children. I think that's totally out of proportion, And so they don't have sex necessarily to make a baby, because if that was the case, they only needed to have sex like twenty times,

forty times or whatever. It is so clearly there's something else going on with female sexuality, and and there are theories about it. It would go too far maybe to go over all of them, but there are theories why females have more sex than it's necessary for their immediate reproduction. Yeah, was this a bonobo that you're referencing? There was a

female chimpo? That's for ycause I would have far more than that, yeare, And of course a Banovo would also have a ton of sex with other females, not just with males but also with atom Yeah, anything goes for bnobo's they're freaky. Wow, I'm not sure that that's freaky they For them, sex is part of their social life. It's very hard to draw a line social and sexual for the Banobo, and we should not. People often imagine, and I'm partly responsible because I've popularized the sex life

of the bonobo. People often imagine that they have sex the whole day. But you know, their sexual contacts are ten seconds, fifteen seconds the beef. You better look at them as sort of handshakes or patting someone on the back or something that's so interesting. Well, Yeah, for the record, freaky wasn't a negative connotation for me, So I just want to be cool with that was no slight against the banobos. Okay. Have you read doctor Susan Black's book

The Banobo Way? I know about it. I know about it. She loves that. She loves the bonobos and humans, you know, you know, peace on Earth that she thinks. Okay, so why have we underestimated the role of female choice? And you had a couple reasons I thought were very interesting. You said, chip and see females typically vocalize at the

quimax of intercourse, but never during a secret rendezvuew. And you also say cultural reasons females are expected to be passive in KOI, of course, yeah, I can kind of just elaborate on some of these reasons we underestimate the role of female choice. Well, I think cultural reasons, you know, the Victorian attitude that females ought to be passive. I think that's at the roots of everything. And then also we didn't have the evidence. You know, now we have

paternity testing, we can do DNA testing. So one of the first findings was with birds, you know, monogamous birds male female, they have a nest with eggs. We always assumed that all these eggs are fertilized by the male of the nest, but now we know it is paternity testing, that very often these eggs are fertilized by multiple males.

When people found that for the first time, they said, well, maybe these females get raped by somebody who comes through, you know, and that's all they could think of at that moment. Now we know that female birds very often outside is called extra pair copulation. Outside of the pair, they have sex with other males, So we know now

by paternity testing, we know a lot about that. So for example, in the primates, the same monkey group that I worked with in Wisconsin was one of the first to have paternity testing, not even based on DNA, it was just bloods groups at the time, and they found you know, if you look at at a group of Riecorus monkeys, you think the alpha male does most of the copulations, so most of the kids that you see,

most of the young monkeys, they are his. That's what we always assumed, and that study showed that he had more offspring than other males, but only slightly more, meaning that the female males were arranging copulations with low ranking males behind his back, and that at night things were

happening that we scientists didn't know about. And so paternity testing has opened up a new world for us, you know, and we know a lot more about female sexuality as a result, and it's much more enterprising than people have assumed. These other animals they are sneaky. Well, you know, at timpleties they have very often a rendezvous. So the alpha male of course doesn't tolerate other males to copulate these

females in his view. So what females will do is they sneak up to a younger male who is not alpha male, and they hang around him, and then at some point they split. The male walks up in this direction and a few minutes later the females walk off in that direction, so no one notices that they are getting together at a far away point where they have a very quick copulation. I mean, this is incredible. It's

all pre arranged stuff that they do. Since gyms are good at planning and good at deception, they get away with that kind of stuff. But what is their consciousness that they're not This is still instinct, right, I mean, it's there's still a genetic sort of program there. I just it's so fascinating to me how they can communicate with each other and have all this stuff without without language, without all the things we have. Maybe I'm overplaying the

capacities of humans here. Yeah, I'm not sure why you're saying it's still instinct, because the term instinct we barely use anymore with animals because there's always learning and intelligence involved and every point good point. And so these chimps, the male and the female both know what they want and they both know how to get it, and they know that they should not draw attention to themselves, which which they have learned the hard way. So simple associative

learning right there. So it's a combination of things. But yeah, planning, we have good evidence for planning in animals nowadays, in birds and in primates, and that's what they do. They plot their escape. It's just amazing how they can do

all this without talking each other. I'm saying, like, it's like they don't say, like, hey, Mary, meet me behind, you know, underneath the bleachers at four pm and they but they somehow communicate to each other that that's where they're going to meet and when they're going to meet. It's just fast. The humans can do the same thing with a few meaningful glances, you know, and and a little shake of the head. We we can do similar things, you know. We don't need to talk for that. That's

that's a good point. That's a very good point. Another misconception that you that you clear up is the idea that female female competition doesn't exist. You say, in all primates, males compete overwhelming with males and females with females. This applies equally to us. Psychologists down play this among women. I'm a psychologist, so I'm sorry on behalf of my species of psychology. Why do we downplay female female competition? And how can how do we end up with this

bogus gendered dichotomy? Yeah, that's so surprising to me. Is you know, I'm a biologist who has lived for almost thirty years. Among psychologists, I'm a psychology professor, And so in psychology there is a very positive opinion of women and a negative one of men. For example, male friendships are not taken seriously because only women have real deep friendships and the male hierarchy is emphasized. But that females have a higherarchy no one talks about. You know, the

word pecking order comes from hence not from roosters. All female animals have hierarchies and are competitive, and of course in humans, women are competitive with each other. So they have friendships, which is wonderful, but they're also competitive with each other. So so yeah, in psychology, and for me, the fascinating the saying is that in anthropology we have exactly the opposite bias. In anthropology always emphasizes male bonding and male rituals and the men's houses and hunting together

and warfare together. So the male bonding is emphasized in the anthropology departments and the female bonding in the psychology departments. But you know, all primate females are competitive with each other, more with each other than with males, and males are more competitive with each other than the females. And yeah, that needs to be recognized, and of course people now recognize it. For example, bullying at schools and bullying on the internet at Facebook, we now know clearly that's not

limited to males. You know, that's not limited to males at all. Yeah. Yeah, in terms of competition for meeting rivals,

Derogation of rivals is a big one among humans. Males will often compete with each other in ways that the women don't even care so much about it, like you know, making fun of each other's penis size, or like or punching each other and like you know, who's the more muscular when you know, it's just like what men think what women want are the things that men are competing with each other for, when that's often not exactly what

women really want. And I find it interesting. Do you see that in other animals as well, that kind of meeting derogation of potential rivals? They don't have the language to do that. But of course the competition among males is more physical than among females, and also males develop different strategies. So, for example, chimpanzee males they have a lot of conflict, but they also reconcile quite easily. They reconcile afterwards, they kiss and embrace, then they groom. They

get over it quite easily. I think for the female chimpanzee. The data indicate the females have a lot more trouble this reconciliation, and for that reason, the female strategy is largely to avoid conflict. So if it's hard to get over them, then the best trilogy is to try to suppress them and stay away from your rivals. For example, males don't stay away from their rivals. They don't mind the conflict and they get over it. The females they

try to. I call it the females have keep peace keeping strategy and males have a peace making strategy, and we know more about it in the primates than in humans. Unfortunately, for conflict resolution, which is one of my favorite topics, we have a bigger knowledge for the primates than for humans.

I don't know why. In humans that's not really studied so much, but I do know that in the business literature, I noticed that they talk about how women are more affected by conflict in the corporation, so they ruminate more, they think about it more, they are more deeply affected by conflict and competition. So that may correspond a little bit with what I saw among chimpanzees. Gosh, that's so fascina. I could talk to you all day about this. It's

so interesting. Why is the term the maternal instinct misleading? Ah, the maternal instinct is used all the time. I think there's an instinctual part, which is the attraction to infants, which you see in young females and in all the attraction to infants is maybe inborn or I mean attraction to care for infants, yeah, or hold them or yeah, see them, smell them, hold them. But the care for

infants is not. No one is born miss the skills. So, for example, if you have a gorilla group at the zoo where there's a female pregnant and they have never had babies there, they know they're in trouble because that female will not do the right thing. She may even sit on the baby, who knows what she's gonna do,

but she's not gonna take care of the baby. And what a zoo will do under these circumstances is bring in a human mother who has a newborn and let her nurse in front of the gorillas, and she will do it every day and the gorillas will watch f carefully and that may help them, it's not sure, but it may help them raise their own infant. So infant care needs to be learned. It's one of the most complex skills. That is how to carry them, how to feed them, how to punish them, how to all sorts

of clean them. All sorts of things need to be learned, and the primates learned that usually when they're young by watching models around them. But if they don't have that example, they are in trouble and they're not very good at childcare. Just generalizing above to like I guess as a callback to the Dawkins disagreement, we are wired for cooperation in a lot of ways. Are we wired at all the

care for those who are in our outgroup? I think that's kind of the biggest thing in the world right now, is that when it comes to that instinct, it's usually associated with oxytocin, associated with sort of that drive to help those in our in group. We're suffering from a lot nowadays is how much if we perceive someone in our ourt group, how much we kind of don't treat

them as human anymore. We won't even agree with that, we won't even to have discussions with them, And Yeah, I just want to kind of understand how can we is there instinct at all for that for because the maternal instinct seems like something different. That's like the we call that the in group of instinct, you know, So

the maternal instinct, there's a lot of learning involved. But the in group outgroup distinction is very you know, it's very profound in all sorts of animals, not just in our species, and so to overcome that is going to be very difficult. So, for example, I've done quite a bit of research on empathy in animals, how they respond to the emotions of others and adopt the emotions of others, and there's a very big in group outgroup distinction right there.

Empathy is much more easily triggered between individuals who know each other the individuals who don't know each other. And in the primes, in group out group is defined by who you know. So it's not like your label of I am French and you are Germans. We don't have that kind of labels. In the primates, it's who do you know and who is it that you don't know? And there's only one species that I know in our immediate relatives who is not senophobic, and that's the bonobo.

The banobo females, since they have taken over and are maybe less territorial than the males, they mingle the neighboring groups. So when groups meet in the forest, they mingle, and the groom and they have sex, and they hang out together, and we now have data that they sometimes share food with each other, that females may even adopt an orphan from a neighboring group and stuff like that. So female

Banovos are not senophobic, but chimpanzees are extremely senophobic. They hate the other group and they will kill them and they do that, they do that in the wild. Oh wow, So we need to harness more our more of our innerban obo if we want to have world peace. Yeah. Maybe, okay, So let's let's just stand on this idea of how we need to move away from mind by dualism. I think that that you see that as a big problem, right,

as a thread range through lots of these misconceptions. So yeah, can you kind of tell tell me your argument a little bit along those lines. Yeah. So, the the mind body dualism is an old trope by male thinkers. Men

think that their mind is independent of their body. And that's why you have men, for example, who tried to freeze their brain and preserve it because they hope that one day their brain will be revived, at least the content will be revived, so they can imagine a life without their body, and and and and it has been used of course against women in the sense that these all these thinkers, they believe that the human mind, the male mind, is far superior to anything in the world,

including women, including animals, including everybody else. And so at some point that dualism of mind mind being dominant over the body, so to speak, that dualism was adopted by the feminist movement. And I think it's a second wave feminism and sometimes confused the different waves, but I think it's second wave feminism that emphasized how women should be become more intellectual equals to men, and the bodies were not terribly different. Only between the legs was something different.

But for the rest, the bodies were not relevant to the discussion, and so they focused on the mind. And I think that is very misleading. The mind is never independent of the body, and that men can think this is very logical because men don't have the hormonal cycles to deal with that women have, of course, and so then it's easier to think that your mind is sort of independent. But the mind is always part of the body, because the mind is in the brain and the brain

is the body. And this whole idea that you can sort of isolate your interest and your being and your identity from what your body is is for me a very strange idea, because your body is involved in everything you do and what you think, and even being hungry will enormously change your perspective on the world. And so

your body is involved in everything. And we know that, for example, in psychology, embodied cognition is a big area now, and the body is involved in everything in your psychology and your thinking, and so running away from your body is I don't think the solution to the gender debates, and we need to recognize that the human genders, they are different, and their bodies are different, their minds are different.

And what I argue in the book is of course that the difference doesn't mean that we need to accept inequality. For me, if you take the two words gender inequality, the problem is not with gender. The problem is with inequality. That injustice and the inequality. That's where the problem is. And we can be perfectly equal even though we recognize that there are certain biological differences. Yeah, yeah, we The problem is with us. The problem is the way we

treat each other. Yeah, it's becoming so clear to me after talking today about that. I'm going to end with some culture from you. You say, I would never want to live in a generalist or sexless world. It would be an incredibly boring place. It all comes down to mutual love and respect and appreciation of the fact that humans don't need to be the same to be equal.

Thank you so much for coming on my podcast, but even more big thank you to being a legend in the field of primatology and influencing us psychologists in the way that we think about this as well. It's a huge debt to you and also the field of primatology. It was a huge debt to you. So just thank you so much for your existence in this world and the work you've done. You're welcome, Thank you great, Thank you, have a great day. Thanks for listening to this episode

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